The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (25 page)

“No, I don’t like girls or women. What should it
feel
like, to like someone that way?”

“It is like... were you ever
obsessed
with something? Perhaps a particular topic? Perhaps collecting some sort of object? To the extent that you feel utterly at peace with yourself and engrossed when you are engaged in it?”

“Like making Airfix models? Or looking at carnivorous plants?”

“Could be. It’s the same neurological pathways in your brain that are activated when you are addicted to a drug, or when you ‘fall in love’ with another person as people call it.”

Dana tried to think of how it would be to feel the same way she did about a person as she did when she sat down at her desk to make an Airfix model, with all the parts and her glues and paints arranged just how she liked them at her fingertips. It was ordered, secure. When she did that, she felt as though she was enclosed in a little bubble separate from reality, where things that went on in the real world couldn’t get at her. When she read seed catalogues for the exotic plants she loved, she pored over the diagrams and read over and over the complicated Latin names until she knew them by heart, and she fantasised about the
Sarracenias
she could grow in the bog garden Graeme was helping her set up, and about when she was older, she wanted to buy a house with a garden and build an enormous greenhouse and fill it with
Nepenthes
. She couldn’t imagine how or why a person could make her feel that way. “It’s all just disgusting. Puberty, and what’s happening to me and other people. I don’t want to know about other people’s private parts.”

“Is it that you would rather become a man instead of a woman?”

Dana stared uncomfortably at Jananin, the adult’s eyes as ever obscured behind the dark lenses of her spectacles. It sounded like an insult one of the children at school would use, to call a girl man-like or a boy girlish. But Jananin Blake didn’t do sarcasm and bullying games and that sort of thing; the question had to be in earnest. Dana tried to think about men and how she could fit into that. Men: Graeme and Mr Kell and Ivor, and Eric and Cale, sort of. Men grew beards that they had to shave off every day, and they liked beer and had
penises
and
testicles
and vast amounts of bodily hair stuffed inside their clothes. That didn’t sound like something she could contemplate herself turning into either. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Then by that process of elimination, you are not gay, because the definition of being gay is being attracted to persons of one own sex, and you are not a transsexual, because the definition of a transsexual is one who sees oneself as the opposite gender to the one identified at birth.”

“What am I if I’m none of those?”

“Probably asexual or agender. Possibly you simply haven’t finished maturing and an appropriate sexual and gender identity will become apparent to you at some later point.”

“But what if it
doesn’t
?”

“Then—” Jananin Blake shifted in her seat and exhaled. Perhaps it was irritation, frustration, something like that. “It is not really anything worth mourning. In many ways, it’s an advantage. That kind of thing is a bane, a distraction from the pursuit of more noble things. I lament how much more research I might have got done in my younger days had my attention not been swayed by certain of my colleagues.” As Jananin had been speaking, she had been staring at Dana’s face, apparently finding some fault with it. “Have you been outside in the sun, wearing a hat?”

“No,” said Dana. “I don’t wear hats.”

Jananin stared at Dana a few seconds longer, her eyebrows contorting behind her dark glasses. “You have what looks like UV burns, but only on the bottom of your face.”

Dana had been aware of a hot itchy sensation in her face and one forearm since she’d woken up, although it had been just one of several aches and niggles in the background, along with the ache across her entire back and hips and shoulders, soreness in the soles of her feet, and the stiff discomfort where the drip had been inserted into the vein inside her elbow. Probably it was the sun, or an allergy to something after the sweaty, itchy time she’d spent camping with Eric.

“What is this place?” When Dana had checked on GPS, she could see very well where this was, but there was nothing to identify it. According to the maps she had in her head, there wasn’t anything in this place, just empty farmland with not even the road leading off marked on it.

“It has no name as such, just the codename Site Twelve. It’s a research institution. For research funded by the Meritocracy.”

“Then what’s Torrmede?”

Jananin started, her eyes widening behind the dark lenses. “Where did you hear that name?”

Dana took her hands off the table and leaned back against her seat, disconcerted by the sudden change. “Torrmede... I think I remembered it right. It was Jane Tarrow. She said that the
Stormcaller
travels between here and Torrmede.”

“Then you had better forget it, and Jane Tarrow had better forget it as well.”

“Okay,” said Dana, thinking that now Jananin had drawn attention to it in such a way, she was unlikely to be able to forget it, whereas had she not reacted to it at all, the unfamiliar name would probably have slipped her mind by the next day. “What kinds of research get done at Site Twelve?”

“The main focus is technology that will enable this country to meet its own food and energy demands in their entirety, without it being necessary to rely on imports to any degree.” Jananin gestured to the window. “Hydroponics pyramids, fuel crops genetically tailored to gain maximum productivity from the climate here. All projects of this nature are nominated by referendum, all public knowledge, although there are some private projects by independent research groups ongoing here that are in the development stage and have not been revealed to the public yet as funding candidates for further development.”

The sky outside was lightening, the sun breaking through the clouds once more. Dana studied the distant shape of the
Stormcaller
on the mast. It looked to be shaped like a bivalve clamshell that had been taken apart at the hinge and put together back-to-front. She couldn’t make out any other features over the glare of the sun on the reflective surface of its hull.

“It’s necessary we press on with the subject I wanted to discuss with you,” Jananin said. “This
wyvern
as you call it, and how you came to find it and where you have been, and what information you may have obtained there.”

“I was in detention at the school, and—”

“I don’t mean here. I suggest we go somewhere more suitable, such as my study.”

Jananin led Dana down several corridors, until they reached a suite of offices. Jananin’s door didn’t have her name on it or any other distinguishing features, just the number 57. Perhaps there was something significant in it, such as Jananin needing privacy and secrecy because of her status as a Spokesman, or something to do with the Meritocracy’s ideal of people all being equal, but their ideas being what sets them apart.

The room inside was arranged around the desk in the middle. The far wall was taken up with bookshelves, and further shelving was also built in around the doorway. Of the remaining walls, one was taken up by a window, very modern in comparison to the aging ones in the Emerald Forge, and the other was covered with a slick surface to which various pieces of paper had been pinned with small magnets.

Jananin took her seat at the desk and pressed a button on the front of it. The computer monitor flickered on.

Dana examined the things pinned to the wall while Jananin sorted out the computer. There was one photograph near the top of Jananin receiving the Nobel Prize, and Chemistry diagrams of molecules made of Cs and Hs and Os, and there was a map of an island, rounded and more or less featureless apart from a curling quill of a peninsula pointed towards a cluster of much smaller islands. Superimposed on each upper corner of the map were the translucent heads and shoulders of two women, and between them a flag made up of the Union Jack and a shield with a sheep and a ship on it. One of the women was middle-aged with fastidiously styled hair and a prim, artificial smile. The other had short untidy hair and a friendly face.

“Wasn’t she a politician or someone?” Dana blurted out.

Jananin glanced at the map, and then at Dana with a disgusted expression. “She was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Margaret Thatcher commanded the British Armed Forces to retake them. What History do they teach you in that school of yours?”

“I dunno. Just stuff about what date Henry the 8
married someone or other, and what religion people followed then. Who’s the other woman?”

“She is Trudi Morrison, a Falklands citizen and a farmer who led the opposition during the occupation of the islands by the Argentine forces. A very courageous person who deserves to be celebrated rather more than she currently is.”

“So what’s the Falklands?”

“Do they not teach you Geography in that school of yours either?”

“It’s the Meritocracy’s school, and you’re a Spokesman.” Dana found herself laughing awkwardly. “If the school’s crap, aren’t you supposed to bring about reform to make it not crap?”

Jananin made an ironic grimace that might have been humour. “The Electorate are supposed to decide what reform must take place. The Spokesmen’s duty is merely to ensure it is carried out. However, school reform is something that has been brought up in every referendum so far, and it’s likely it will come to a head soon and some sort of action will be taken. The Electorate just needs to consider the alternatives that have been put forward and decide which one is most suitable. Anyway, the Falklands were a self-governing overseas British territory in the South Atlantic. When Great Britain declared Meritocratic rule, the Falklands elected to also, making them the southernmost province of the Meritocracy. The archipelago serves as a base for excursions into Antarctica, and the oceans around it provide sites for oil drilling.”

Jananin appeared to have finished setting up her computer now, and Dana found a chair and seated herself on the opposite side of the desk. “Why Antarctica?” She hadn’t done anything about Antarctica at school, but a precursory search of the wLAN she could detect suggested it was a frozen desert and nothing much had gone on there, other than an explorer called Scott who didn’t reach the South Pole and died out there.

“America, Europe, Russia spend their time squabbling over the Arctic, a place science predicts ten years hence will be nothing but open water every summer. The Meritocracy, however, is free to reach out to the south relatively unopposed. Our South Pole base will not only secure untold reservoirs of oil vital to the Meritocracy’s expansion, it will provide a bastion of security away from these exposed isles, and it will become our port to beyond the skies.”

Dana picked up something that looked like an Airfix model off Jananin’s desk. It was a gunmetal grey colour and looked a bit like a big fat millipede, with a segmented body and lots of bristly legs, and what looked like photovoltaic panels embedded along the top. “What’s this?”

“It’s a scale model of a machine.”

“What kind of machine?”

“A machine whose job is to travel extremely slowly, collecting rocks rich in iron oxide and convert those rocks into iron and other trace elements, and release carbon dioxide and oxygen into the atmosphere.”

Dana shrugged and put the thing back down. “It sounds like it just pollutes the atmosphere.”

“Exactly.”

“Isn’t that bad?”

“Not if the atmosphere in question is on Mars.”

Dana stared at Jananin. “Is that something the Electorate knows about?”

“The Electorate know the Meritocracy has a privately funded space exploration programme, but mostly not specific details yet.”

“Why are you telling me, then?”

Jananin interlocked her fingers on the desk before her. “Because my past experience suggests you can be discreet, and because you’re a child and it’s highly unlikely anyone would believe you even if you aren’t. To business.” She pressed something on a keyboard. “Explain to me how you encountered the wyvern.”

Explain to me how you encountered the wyvern
appeared on the computer monitor in red text.

“I was in detention at school...”

“Ignore the voice recognition programme.” Jananin had apparently noticed Dana watching the words
I was in detention at school
appearing on the screen in green.

“This boy, Eric, I thought he was following me. Actually, he was the same person who helped me in the Cerberus game. Do you remember...?”

“Naturally. Continue.”

“So I hid in the bogs until I thought everyone had gone, and as I was leaving it came
down
, from the sky. I tried to shut myself in but it broke the window and came in, and it went after me, but Eric was there as well, and he helped me.”

“Osric said it had something plugged into it, and you unplugged it and it became autonomous?”

“It stopped attacking us. I could communicate with it. It was confused, like it had just woken up, as though it didn’t know what it had been doing.”

“Possibly it was being controlled through a long-distance transmitter, or the device was a program that determined its behaviour.”

“We didn’t know where to hide it. The only person I could think of was you, and I couldn’t find where to contact you, anywhere.”

“The ANTs protect information like that. They are extraordinarily good at it.” Jananin arched one eyebrow. “Better even than you. Pilgrennon always claimed no computer would ever rival a human mind. Back before the revolution and the beginning of the Meritocracy, I would almost have agreed with him. Technology has of course advanced since then, and I think we finally have proof now that he was wrong.”

The dream from last night tugged at the back of Dana’s memory again. Jananin’s biting comment was almost an insult, not only of her personally, but against Ivor and his life’s work. The little experience she’d had with ANTs had confused her and she hadn’t been able to access them, but maybe she could work them out with a bit more practice. She could always understand anything with enough time, even Cerberus. “Can I use the ANT here?”