Futuretrack 5 (7 page)

“IDRIS?”
But still he lay, one arm outstretched to his little brass Buddha. I deliberately let the trolley run into his table, with a soft thud of shock absorbers. Idris sighed; his hand tightened round the Buddha. He was only fast asleep, breathing deep and even, cheeks healthily flushed. His face looked young, all worry and hate and rage washed away.

I smiled; it was right he should retire… getting old, deserved a rest… thirty years running Britain was quite a record.

I banged down his teacup beside the Buddha. “Wakie-wakie—rise and shine.” My worry had turned into gentle sadism. I poured tea noisily into his cup, from a great height. Little boiling-hot flecks of liquid splashed onto his sleeping hand. He moaned. Serve him right, lazy old sod!

“Char, squire!”

Snore.

“Oh, come
on,
Idris. You don’t retire till midnight.” I was suddenly tired of the game; it had been a tiring twenty-four hours…

But Idris had settled into a pattern of snoring. Loud, not quite normal. Too slow and deep. I reached over and shook him. No reaction.

I shook him really violently. Still no reaction.

I ran right round behind the table and hauled him upright by both shoulders and gave him a real spine-shaking jar.

He collapsed contentedly back to his starting position. As he did, a brown plastic bottle fell out of his white coat.

Two hundred Valium.

The bottle was empty, apart from a little dust.

Idris never took Valium. Idris never took anything.

“IDRIS!”
I pulled him upright again and slapped him harder and harder. “Idris, wake up for Christ’s sake.”

But he only grumbled far away and collapsed again, smiling.

I hovered piteously. Ringing the alarm would betray him. But not to ring…

After a few minutes, I rang.

Running feet; the swing doors crashing. Four Paramils dived in, skidding on their bellies along the polished floor, blasters held ready. I stood absolutely still; they wouldn’t waste time asking basic questions, like who’d rung the alarm. To them, alarm meant enemy. They backed me against the wall, again searching me with tiny, expert hands. Emptied my pockets and tumbled the contents pointlessly on the floor. Jabbered to each other, swift and alert, in Gurkhali. Began checking window fastenings…

“He’s taken something, you idiots!” I made the mistake of turning round. There was a searing pain up the side of my face and I was lying on the floor, my mouth filling up with warm salt-sweet blood. The Paramil looked down at me with empty eyes, pushing my upper lip back with the barrel of his blaster, to inspect what damage he had done.

Idris snored on thunderously. Surely even Paramils wouldn’t mistake that for normal … his eyelids were fluttering in a way nothing like life. Between flutters, one eye hung half-open, showing only white.

White-coats flooded into the hall. One after another, they tried to shake Idris awake. One after another, they told latecomers how they’d tried to shake him awake. Achieving
nothing.
Where were their great brains now?

I jumped up. “Get the medics—he’s taken Valium or something.”

The blaster hit me again, on the other side. My head turned into a pain sandwich. I fell down again, and the forest of legs between me and Idris got thicker and thicker.

“Get the medics,” I tried to shout. But it turned into a pool of bloody spit and a broken tooth on the floor, the spotless floor. I tried to get up, couldn’t.

Suddenly, there were medics; a long, smooth-wheeled white trolley. It took six white-coats, slipping and gasping, to lift Idris onto it, and still his huge, brogued feet hung ridiculously over the end.

They were taking him away. I tried to follow on hands and knees, but a Paramil boot pushed me over on my back again.

“Look—I only found him—he was collapsed already— / rang the alarm!” I seemed to go on saying it forever, till some white-coat took the responsibility of sending the Paramils packing. They shrugged and moved off smoothly, still the perfect team.

Two Techs actually put their arms round me, to help me up. If Techs went on touching people like this, there’d either be a mass love-in or a mass nervous breakdown…

“You should get your mouth seen to,” said one, like it was my fault. “There’s blood all over the floor. …”

“Those Paramils are incompetent bastards,” I shouted, spitting little pink spots onto his own immaculate coat.

“You’re all incompetent bastards.” Then realised with a horrible shock that what I was screaming was true.

But they just stared, till I reeled off to sick bay, keeping myself upright by sliding along the wall. Behind, I could hear their voices calling, “Why did he do it—he had everything to live for? Why? Why? Why?”

They sounded like a flock of terrified hens.

A medic in green barred my way with hairy arms.

“You can’t go in there.”

“He’s my
MATE.”

“Sit down. What have you done to your mouth?”

“Damn my mouth. I’ve got to
see
him. Is he all right?”

Inside, I heard Idris groan. Only a groan, but it was Idris.

“They’re stomach-pumping him.”

Idris made belching sounds, like after a heavy lunch on Sunday afternoon.

“He’ll be all right—we know what we’re doing. Were you with him? He took Tryptozol, didn’t he?”

“Valium. That’s what it said on the bottle.
Valium.”

“Oh—they told us Tryptozol.” He vanished inside and a muted but violent argument broke out. Then he reappeared. “You did say Valium?”

“Yes, bloody
Valium.”

“Only they told us Tryptozol.”

He vanished; the argument continued. I sat on a bench that ran round the white-tiled walls of the waiting room. Ran my fingers along the cracks to stay sane while I listened to Idris belching and retching. Someone wheeled a machine past, all tubes and dials. So it went on for an hour. People wheeling in more and more machines. Idris getting quieter and quieter. The medic voices lower. The only other thing real was my teeth. One was clean gone—a gap. Five more were wobbling badly. Every time my tongue wobbled them, my mouth filled with sweet blood. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but it helped, somehow.

Once, the medic came out and peered into my mouth. “You’ve lost one, clean. Five others a bit wobbly. Don’t let your tongue play with them or you’ll lose them for sure. …” Still, he gave me a mouthwash that eased the pain.

“How is he?”

“In hand,” said the medic. But his eyes roamed shiftily. “By the way, that bottle was Valium—we’ve got it.” He sounded quite proud. “I don’t think he’s taken Valium, though. That bottle was a trick. He’s not responding to the Valium antidote.”

Alone again, I thought,
Please God, don’t let him die.
Which God? Techs didn’t believe in God, only computers. The Est’s God? A large Union Jack, and the college padre preaching duty to one’s country? I prayed to the Est’s God, in whom no Tech believed…

Must have dozed. Wakened about four, my body cold and stiff as a rusted machine. Listened in terror; but there was still noise in the sick bay. The weary, far-off murmur of medics, the heart-machine pinging, the feathery beat of other machines, pumps and drips.

He was still alive.

But a formless questioning kept ballooning inside my head.

Only about a third of my mind was noticing the cold, the stiffness, the noises. Only about a third of me seemed to have come out of sleep.

The other two-thirds of me was aware of nothing but that formless questioning that swelled and swelled till it filled the whole, white-walled room.

Was I still dreaming? Desperately, my tongue reached for my teeth.
They
were real. They didn’t seem quite so wobbly…

But my head stayed full of that formless questioning. Well, more a
pleading.

The sounds next door sounded strangely like a bird, beating its wings against the door of its cage…

“Oh, Idris, mate,” I said aloud, “wherever you are…
go,
if you want to go.” I said it without thinking. Then listened to the noise of the heart machine, my own heart in my mouth.

It went on and on and on.

Then stopped.

A frantic flurry among the medics. Unthinkable noises of flesh and bone parting. After ten minutes, the pinging hadn’t restarted. I no longer wanted it to.

After twenty minutes, the matey medic reappeared. He didn’t have to say anything: all losers look the same. I walked past him.

Idris lay, covered to his chin with a white nylon sheet, in the midst of the biggest array of pipes and tubes I’ve ever seen. It must have been a terrible battle, but he’d won. He looked like a Roman emperor, arrogant nose still jutting in the air and that faint, sarcastic smile back on his face.

The machinery
did
look like a cage.

“He tricked you with that Valium bottle,” said the medic.

It wasn’t me he tricked,
I thought.

Be free, Idris, be free.

I turned to go, and nearly fell.

“You all right? Maybe a couple of days in bed and a jab to make you sleep?”

He meant well; but he was offering me the same cage Idris had just escaped from.

“No, thanks—it’s just these teeth. I’ll see a dentist.”

“Yeah—see a dentist.”

I walked out of the waiting room and out of the Centre, and went and sat on a little hill outside. It was man-made; little more than a mound. Idris always boasted he’d designed it, to hide the perimeter Wire. Other times he said Laura designed it, to cure claustrophobia in the staff while they were working. It had three silver-birch trees on top, and a few rabbits were allowed to breed. Laura had worked out the ideal allocation of 2.6 silver birches and 10.7 rabbits, but Idris had graciously rounded the numbers upward. Superfluous rabbits were humanely put to sleep. We called it Idris Hill. The best thing was, it gave you a chance to sneer down at the Centre. To see it as the futile scurrying antheap it was. To rise above it. Young Techs sat there a lot.

But not at four in the morning. I sat in perfect solitude, my back against a birch tree and feet in a rabbit burrow. I scuffed my toes about, making marks in the soil. The rabbit droppings had a comforting smell.

“Oh, Idris, mate!” I was nearly out of my mind. There seemed to be three Idrises now.

The cooling body in the mortuary that they’d tear apart in the morning, to find out how he’d tricked them.

But my mind sheered away from that. My mind insisted that if I just went back to Laura’s room in a couple of hours I’d find him still there, waking up cross, coughing over his first fag of the day, scratching his smelly armpit and shouting insults to Headtech down the phone. That was the ordinary day I wanted to run back to…

But there now seemed to be a third Idris, up here on the hill with me. The same ballooning thoughts that had first come to me in the sick bay. Not pleading now, but pressing down on me, terribly, terribly angry.

“Steady, old mate,” I whispered. “You’ll be okay now. You’re free. You’re super-Idris now. You must know
everything.
They can’t hurt you anymore. Go and find your
real
Laura.”

But the press of his anger grew.

“What do you want, Idris? What do you
want?”

Only a name came into my mind: Scott-Astbury.

That’s stupid,
I thought.
That’s like when you’re very tired, and a queer word like “mollycoddle” sort of gets stuck in your mind and you can’t get it out, and it keeps repeating till you get a good night’s sleep. It’s just my mind,
I thought.
My poor tired mind playing tricks.

The ballooning anger grew unbearable.

“All right, mate,” I said. “Scott-Astbury, if you insist.”

Suddenly, there was just the dawn wind and me, on the hilltop.

I looked down on the Centre; it reminded me of an egg factory we’d studied, where light burned night and day to encourage egg production. The on-shift Techs even looked like white hens, each cramped in its own cage. A broiler house for brains…

Well, they’d never broil mine. They’d never get
me
back in the Centre. Idris had been the greatest, and in the end he just wanted to die. … I got up, took off my white coat, threw it on the ground, and walked away. But when I looked back, it glimmered in the gloom, stuck up on the hill like a flag, a danger signal. In half an hour, everyone would see it. I went back and stuffed it down a rabbit hole, clipboard and all. Hard luck, rabbit; dig another burrow. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re not going anywhere. I am.

But how? I was too weary to think. My feet took me down to the hostel, already feeling naked without my white coat. I fell on my bed and went out like a light.

Up out of sleep, not wanting to come. The digital clock on the wall said 20.04. I’d slept the clock round; only most clocks in the Centre didn’t
go
round.

Sellers, my roommate, getting changed. Not a bad guy, for a Tech. Kept himself to himself, but never sneaked on you to the Top Brass.

Sellers had reached the ugly, trouserless stage; long white legs shone in the lamplight. Fair hairs on them, invisible except where the lamplight glinted. His back was turned. His jeans and jean jacket lay tossed on the bed. Unnem credits spilled out of the pockets, all over the neat green bed cover.

Sellers had been on the razzle. Most young Techs went on the razzle occasionally. Getting dressed up as Unnems, going into the Unnem estates for a day, hungry for Unnem breakouts and Unnem women. See how the other half lives… tours of the Amazon jungle, complete with
real
carnivores…

For some young Techs never returned, despite the tiny distress-bleepers they carried in their breast pocket that could summon a psychopter within minutes. Five or six a year never came back. Sometimes the Paramils returned their belongings in a neat parcel, sometimes not even that.

Headtech didn’t like it, but Headtech allowed it. Worse things had happened when young Techs weren’t allowed out at all. Five or six dead a year was an acceptable price to pay. Tech-intake figures were adjusted accordingly.

Most gave up the razzle by thirty. Got hooked on digit-bridge or computer-archaeology instead. Only a few ever married. If unmarried female Techs got pregnant, they were aborted. If they insisted on having the kid, both were sent to Unnem.