Grazing The Long Acre (9 page)

“I can make tape?”

Cambridge nodded. “That’s the deal eejay. We’ll get you away from Micane. You tell the folks back home what we have here.”

He mugged amazement, let her know how thrilled he was to find this spore of civilisation outside the citadel: wondering all the while where the rest of the group was, where they’d got the starter; all sorts of questions to which he ought to get answers. But he already knew that Cambridge was going to tell him everything. He was stunned by her group’s trust, embarrassed by the power of his job-description’s reputation.

It had been obvious before the end of the twentieth century that the future of data-processing and telecoms was in photochemistry. Chlorophyll in green plants converts light-energy into the motion of molecules, without thinking twice about it. The ‘living chip’ was inevitable: compact and fast. They called the magic stuff of the semi-living processors, ‘blue clay,’ because the original protein molecules were blue-green in colour. Embedded in a liquid crystalline membrane, blue clay became a single surface of endlessly complex interconnections. Under massive magnification it looked like a coral: hence the other name, coralline. Clay? Because you can make it do anything.

So much for the technology. But then hardware networks, silicon and gallium arsenide-based, crashed in the explosion of virus infection that ended the century. Coralline wasn’t greatly superior, at that point: but it was immune to the plagues. In a deteriorating political situation—a foundering economy, wave upon wave of environmental disasters—the blue clay became political dynamite. It meant power.

Diamonds? It was a stupid cover, but good enough for the spur of the moment. Out here, a coralline plant was worth more than a truck load of gems. If the masses who lived outside the citadels could build themselves some modern data processing, they could hook up into the city networks. They’d be up and running again. And the elite who lived indoors would be running scared. The amazing thing was that more of the masses didn’t try. They accepted, with chilling calm, that a certain way of life was over. They had their own world with its own rules, and the cities were on another planet.

Johnny made tape, describing how it really was a coralline plant, and the journey he’d made to find it. He walked the aisles, the 360 cam on his headset taking in every angle. Cambridge stayed off camera. She didn’t want to wave to the public.

He finished. They faced each other: two nodes of a diffuse molecular machine, linked by the lock and key action of certain key phrases hocked out of the romance of molecular technology. The living meaning, not like the old technology, change yourself to fit what’s coming at you. Johnny was uneasy about the jargon. He had not deceived her, not actively. But she was deceived, and it was making him uncomfortable.

“You’re a union activist, aren’t you,” she said.

“Yeah,” he laughed nervously. “A cellar unionist.” 

She had been tough and worldly wise to his soft city-boy, a rough diamond. Down at the deep end, in the pallid glow of the drained pool, the balance between them was reversed.

“You came out here to find us. What can I say? I feel…found. Like a toy left out in the rain that thought the kids would never come back to look for her. I feel rescued.”  

Johnny chewed his lip. Bella wriggled and muttered. One of her knees started butting him in the ribs. She couldn’t get comfortable and she was going to wake. She weighed a ton.

“D’you ever hear about the Phylloxera beetle?” he said. “It’s a similar story…It’s a kind of bug, it spreads like a virus. Once upon a time, all the good wine came from France. They had the vines. The quality, wonderful ancient-lineaged plants. Then someone accidentally shipped over some Phylloxera beetles, and the whole of French viticulture was devastated. They had to rip the lot out and start again…with vines from North America, where the bug was endemic and the native vines had natural resistance. In a generation nobody could tell the difference. The wine-drinking public forgot it had ever happened.”

“Phylloxera proof telephones,” said Cambridge. “Knowing what’s happening in the next state. Bank credit. No more of that fucking, censored cable tv. God. I can’t believe it.”

Johnny registered something moving behind him. The lights were off at the shallow end, but the 360 showed Gustave coming down the steps. Johnny controlled himself with an enormous effort. Among these people you must not show fear.

“Micane’s guys are here,” he told her softly.

Cambridge didn’t make a fuss. She eased past Johnny and walked up between the workbenches, raising more lights on the remote in her hand. The bikers, Samuel and Ernesto, emerged into brilliance. Gustave-Donny stared around him in disbelief.

“What the fuck is this place ?”

The clerk held up her remote as if it was a weapon, and carefully tossed it down.

“What’s goin’ on, Cams?”

“Nothin. Just a little private interview with the eejay.”

This God’s rule had some tinge of humanity. In other places, behaviour as aberrant as this would have got them their heads blown away, straight off. But Gustave didn’t open fire.

“You expect me to believe that? You’re crazy.”

He jerked his shotgun for Johnny and Cambridge to go up the steps ahead. When he registered Bella, he started as if someone had dropped ice down his neck.

“Fuck!”

He pulled the headset from Johnny, carefully so as not to disturb the child. He smashed it, conclusively, against the tiled wall of the stair, and handed it back with a defiant glare.

That was bad. Out in the wasteland gun waving is endemic, male display behaviour, not so dangerous as it looks. But the engineer-journalist is sacred, his tools even more so. He’s the only link with the rest of the world. Johnny’s calm left him, fear plummeted through him…

“Fucking weirdos.”

The breakdown truck was outside. Johnny got Bella on his knees. She woke up and began to cry. Ernesto crouched on the flatbed, muzzle of his shotgun through the glassless rear window of the cab. It pressed against Johnny’s neck. Samuel’s bike roared in escort. Young Gustave drove with one hand, the other awkwardly stabbing his gun into Cambridge’s ribs. His eyes were wild with anger and humiliation: he’d been taken in completely. Worse, (Johnny read) he feared that his God had been taken in too.

“Fucking diamond mine!” he wailed. “What the fuck you growing back there Cams? Illegal drugs?”

Cambridge kept her eyes front. Through his own blank-brain panic Johnny could feel her arm and side against him, rigid with terror. But for Donny-Gustave she sneered the way she’d sneered when he was six and she was ten.

“Nah. Mutants, Donny. Cannibal mutant babies. And they’re coming for you. Not tonight, maybe not tomorrow night-“

“Fucking shut up.” His face in the driver’s mirror was a darkly crumpled rectangle of hurt. “I never would’ve believed an eejay would be into drugs…”

Bella’s loud and violent sobbing—so rare and devastating, this child’s crying—was like a wall around them both. Johnny held her tight, and vowed that he was going to get Bella out of this alive. There was no betrayal he would not gladly embrace—if only, please God, he was given the chance.

“Shut the kid up!”

Cambridge yelled back indignantly. “Are you kidding? How are we going to do that? She’s terrified!”

Her courage was like a lifeline. He dropped into character. “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong, we weren’t doing anything wrong, we wanted to be private kind of get to know each other. Would we be doing anything dirty with the kid there?” He babbled, injecting innocent panic into the real thing. He hunched himself forward, arms and head between Bella and the guns. She could feel that he was back in control—throat-chokingly, fearfully sweet the way she suddenly obeyed his shushing and went silent: her small hands clutching his collar, her wet face against his neck…

Gustave-Donny looked around with a bitter scowl.

“You and Cams was just holding hands? What about all that stuff? Looked like some kind of heroin still to me.”

The pickup bucketed, its mean yellow lights barely cutting the darkness. Cambridge ducked her head and made herself small between the men, fists burrowed in her jacket pockets, letting them fight it out. Johnny couldn’t remember his next line. Gustave, was going to crash the damn truck. He thought he was going to pass out, the situation was so consummately awful—when slam, the shotgun muzzle behind his ear suddenly dealt a numbing, stinging blow to the corner of his jaw.

He yelled, sure he was dying. There was another explosion, unbelievably close. The truck slewed. Bella whimpered. Cold outdoor air belched into the cab. Johnny lifted his ringing head. A mess of dark movement resolved itself into Cambridge, hanging onto the wheel and wrestling with something flailing and heavy at the flown open door.

“Take the wheel!” she screamed.

Johnny grabbed, and shoved Bella—dead silent—in her carrier into the well in front of the bench.

“Keep your head down, baby.”

She ducked. The top of her dark head was all his eyes could see. He grappled blindly—the dumb-animal feel of the ancient machine piling in with the heavy scuffle going on beside him, a blur of confusion…Donny’s body fell out into the night. Cambridge hauled the door shut. Johnny slid over. She drove the truck. The road was dark and empty, no sign of the second biker.

“Who shot him?”

“Who’d’you think?”

He looked over his shoulder. The second of Micane’s guys was a slumped heap.

“God. Who shot him? “

“ I didn’t go out to the plant with you alone, what did you think? Donny drove into an ambush. Don’t look so fucking shocked, eejay. Why didn’t the stupid bastard frisk me, if he wanted to stay alive?”

“Is he dead? Are they dead?”

“I hope so.” Her teeth were chattering. 

A mile or so down the road she pulled in. There were no lights, no houses visible in a strange out-doors darkness that was faintly tinged with starlight. The three of them got down. Johnny at last could tug Bella out of the sling and hug her properly. Her eyes were huge and black in her dim face. A little child sometimes seems like a machine. Switch off, switch on: no memory, each event fresh and untainted. She leaned back and stared.

“Stars!”

He hadn’t known she knew what that word meant, not clearly enough to apply it out here.

The man on the back of the truck made no sound. Somewhere on the road another two human beings lay: Gustave and Samuel. Johnny wanted to go to the man on the flatbed, but the silence of that huddled thing was intimidating. Johnny’s responses were from another planet. He didn’t know what Cambridge was thinking. Maybe simply breathing, standing there and breathing. She’d shot someone. How could Johnny imagine the afterburn of that?

He thought of the desk clerk’s life, and how her spunky intelligence had won her a place with the boys, but only on condition she played by their rules. And only til she got pregnant, or fell in love. Then she’d be one of those gap-toothed horny skinned women, ‘married’ to some junior male: property to be abused. She’d have a string of sickly kids, her whole life the struggle to keep one or two of them alive to adulthood. The bad clothes looked ethnic and interesting on the others. On Cambridge they were shameful. She was a real human person. She shouldn’t be here, she shouldn’t have a gun. She should have a future.

“I hope…” The clerk shuddered. “I hope Donny’s…I didn’t shoot to kill. Look, don’t blame yourself, eejay. You wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been sending out our own signals, well as we could. We knew we couldn’t keep what was going on from Micane much longer. We need some support. After what’s happened tonight we’ll need it more. But Micane’s on the slide. With help, we can take over…I’m real sorry about the cam.”

She looked at the child. “Is having her some kind of cover? Or do you honest to God look after her? I mean, like a woman?”

“No,” said Johnny, painfully aware of the truth. “I look after her like a man. It’s a start. I do my best.” 

He held Bella like a shield. Cambridge’s movement towards him went unfinished. She touched Bel, awkwardly patting the little girl’s head.

“Stay here. Someone will bring your car.”

When she was gone, Johnny and Bella walked around a bit admiring the stars and bumping into a few trees. She’d soiled herself. This didn’t generally happen any more at night, but he could hardly blame her. He managed to change her, Bella standing holding onto him with the crotch of her nightsuit dangling between her knees. He hugged her in a daze of gratitude. “You and me against the world, Bel,” he whispered. He gave her some dried snack fruit and she asked him when they were going home.

He hoped the desk clerk’s story was the truth. He didn’t want to blame himself for three murders. But the black man’s dominance must have been threatened for a long time, if his rivals had been able to set up a coralline plant under his nose. Since power couldn’t change hands out here without violence, it wasn’t Johnny’s fault. If it hadn’t been over the plant, it would have been something else.

He thought of setting off into this savage utter wilderness. But he didn’t have a spare diaper any more, and the prospect of hitchhiking, even in daylight, was not appealing. An hour passed. His global-mobile was in his pocket. He didn’t feel like calling anyone. No more signals…The coralline chip in its heart, like the processor in his cam, was practically sterile. But you weren’t supposed to take any chances.

He thought of the starter that Cams’ cadre had got hold of. They were no biochemists, they didn’t build it from scratch. He imagined a brother eejay dead out here, or an eejay stripped of his magic and too ashamed ever to come home…Bella, he found, was happier on his back. He walked her, holding hands over his shoulder, singing nursery rhymes. She didn’t say a thing about guns, or shooting or bad guys. Which didn’t mean this adventure hadn’t scarred her for life. He writhed to think of the debriefing he’d have to go through with Izzy.

When he heard the car he hid until he was sure it was his own, and the driver was Cambridge, and there was no one else with her. She handed over a sliver of plastic card—his keys. It was good to have that safely back in his hand.