Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 15

CHAPTER EIGHT

Paul sipped the dark liquid gingerly. It was hot, and very sweet. The girl had spooned a lot of sugar into it. When she had given it to him she had murmured something about it being impossible to get coffee or tea, but it tasted enough like instant coffee for him not to have known that it wasn’t. She hadn’t said anything else, yet. She was waiting for him to recover a little more fully.

He looked around the room, studying its every detail in the hope that he might see something that would touch a chord in his memory and tell him what was happening to him.

He was sitting on a single bed, still warm from the girl’s body. She was sitting on a dilapidated armchair whose brown upholstery was peeling away from its wooden frame. There was a small electric fire, whose reflector was tarnished a dull brown. It, too, seemed very old.

The carpet was brown and very dirty, but the walls had been painted in the not-too-distant past in dark blue. The curtains that covered the window were heavy, patterned in shades of green. There was a big bookcase against the wall opposite the bed, filled with tattered volumes, mostly paperback, with balls of string, pens, a comb and a great deal of miscellaneous bric-a-brac taking up the shelf margin in front of the books.

Set in the wall opposite the window there was a mantelpiece, but the fireplace had been bricked up. There were some pictures stuck to the wall, mostly cut from newspapers, others drawn in colored inks on white paper. His eye was finally drawn to the light-fitting: a none-too-bright bulb shielded by a makeshift shade.

There was nothing that seemed in the least unusual, except for the vague impression that the structural features were very old. It was not that they were dirty, just that they seemed to be in a state of barely-perceptible decay.

He looked back at the girl. She was dark-haired and dark-complexioned. Her skin was smooth. She wore no make-up and she seemed untidy, although that was only to be expected, in view of the fact that she had been dragged from her bed in the middle of a winter night. She was wearing a toweling dressing-gown two or three sizes too large for her. Her feet were tucked up on the seat of the chair, with the excess material of the gown wrapped over them to protect them from the cold. Underneath, she was wearing a thick shirt and jeans.

She met his curious gaze for a few moments, and then was embarrassed into speech. “My name’s Rebecca,” she said. “Don’t try to talk just yet. It won’t make much sense. I’ll try to explain what’s happened to you.”

Paul sipped at the sweet liquid, and was content to reply with a smile.

“You’re a time-traveler,” she said. “At some time in the past you managed to throw yourself into a state where time passed very much more slowly for you than for the world—more than that, because, in some way that nobody understands, you took yourself right out of the world, leaving a surface that reflects all radiation and is impervious to all force, as if you had become an immovable object. You probably jumped deliberately, although it does sometimes happen accidentally. No one knows just how it’s done—some people can’t seem to do it, no matter how they try. I don’t know how long ago you jumped, but most of the people waking now already knew what they were doing. The earliest ones didn’t, because no one actually came out of the stasis until 2035 or thereabouts, forty years after the first jump. This is January 2119. Do you understand all that?”

Paul wasn’t sure whether to nod or to shake his head. He understood what the words meant, but it didn’t make sense. It was a story, which hadn’t the remotest connection with the world that he knew. It had to be a dream of some kind. He tried hard to recapture a harvest of memories, and found images of himself, the performance in the stadium, Adam Wishart, the book, the people staring...and he remembered that the man in the car had said something about not telling anyone who he was.

It had to be a dream.

“It’s okay,” she said, perceiving his uncertainty. “It takes a lot of getting used to. I’ve never jumped, but Ronnie has—he lives here too. We sometimes help people like you. There aren’t too many people living in the neighborhood now; most people moved south of the river, but there are a lot of jumpers here, because of Paul Heisenberg. He’s only five or six miles away. Someone has to look after the ones that wake up: take them in, find food for them, help them readjust Lots of people do it. We get paid, a little, by the Movement. It’s illegal, but if it didn’t exist to help the awakeners, they’d have to be taken in by the police. The police do take in a lot, but they aren’t very fond of jumpers, and the Metascientists prefer to look after their own, if they can. That’s why you were brought here, to us. You’ll be safe here, until you know what’s going on and can figure things out for yourself. It’s difficult; even the ones who know exactly what they’re doing when they jump aren’t really ready for what they find. For most, it’s something of a disappointment. So many seem to expect the world to have changed much more than it has, to have got better. Can you answer some questions now?”

“I’ll try,” said Paul. His mouth felt dry despite the coffee-substitute, and his voice was hoarse.

“Did you jump during the war? That’s important, because if you jumped from the plague years, you could be ill and you’ll have to be immunized?”

“Which war?” asked Paul, his voice hardly above a whisper.

She seemed relieved when she heard that answer. “It was the late 2020s and early 2030s. There aren’t many jumpers here from those years—not many that are still in stasis, anyhow. There were a lot in the east and the south, where the nuclear strikes were, but they just die when they come out. You must have jumped before 2027, then?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember when exactly?”

Caution made him shake his head.

“What’s your name?”

This time he compromised, and said “Paul”. It didn’t cause her to jump to any conclusions. She accepted it without really taking any notice, as if his ability to remember it had only been a test.

“The world hasn’t changed all that much,” she said, “in spite of the wars. All they did was smash it up a little. Africa’s supposed to be uninhabited now, and so is Europe. It was said after the war that Russia was destroyed, but that might not be true. There are people in eastern Asia, but it’s said that they’re maintaining a low level of technology—they don’t communicate. The only other nations with whom we have any substantial trade are Argentina and Australia. They escaped most of the devastation. Practically all of North America that’s still habitable is part of the Reunion—that’s the former USA—and Argentina now includes the bits of the other South American countries that survived. There are really several more-or-less independent states within it, but they don’t correspond to the old national boundaries.”

“The only reason we’ve managed to keep things going here in much the same way that they were before the wars is that the plague depopulated the country to such an extent that we’ve been able to exploit stockpiled goods and keep enough factories going to tide us over. We have a kind of scavenger economy—but slowly, of course, things are getting worse. They say this is the last real city in the Reunion. Things are supposed to be better in Australia, but the government won’t let people emigrate, and they run all the big ships. The government say that things can get better, and that they will in time, if only we’ll devote ourselves to rebuilding, but lots of people won’t work for the government, or for anyone—they prefer to scavenge on their own behalf. They say that the government wants to conscript everyone into a kind of industrial army, but of course they can’t. People just wouldn’t do it, and it isn’t possible to police the whole country any more. There’d have to be more police than workers. The government hasn’t held an election in ten years, and when they do they only put up their own candidates, but they can’t do anything the people really don’t want them to do, because they just couldn’t enforce it.”

“What do you do?” asked Paul, feeling obliged to make some contribution to the discussion.

“I’m a student. We all are, here in the house. There are five of us. The city has the only university—the only big university, anyhow—in the Reunion. People come to it from all over.”

“What do you study?”

“Agricultural science.”

“What do you intend to do when you finish?”

She lowered her eyes. “I suppose it depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“On how things seem. You see, we don’t really know where the world is headed. No one does. We’re not quite sure what it’s for...getting things back to the way they were, even if we can. We still have trouble with things like nuclear fallout...nobody really thinks the world can be remade, and no one’s convinced that we should remake it the way that we know how...because of what happened to it before, you see. If you’d lived through the war, you’d know what I mean. It depends, I suppose, on him.”

“Who?”

“Paul Heisenberg.”

All through the dialogue he had been feeling remote from it all. He had listened, with a degree of fascination, but he had never felt that there was any real connection between what had been said and himself. Until she spoke his name, it was all a dream.

“He’s going to come back, soon,” she said. “Maybe he can tell us what to do. He’s the only one who can.”

Paul swallowed, although there was no more liquid left in the cup or in his mouth. He wanted to speak, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. He couldn’t imagine what kind of question he might reasonably ask. Instead, he held out the empty cup.

“More?” she asked.

He nodded.

She plucked it out of his hand, and turned toward the door. “I’ll only be a couple of minutes,” she said. “You’re all right...aren’t you?”

He nodded again, and then looked away, because, for some reason, he could no longer meet her gaze. She looked at him hard, studying him carefully for the first time.

“It must be about dawn,” she said, inconsequentially. Then she added: “Your name’s Paul.” Her tone was neutral.

He looked back at her.

Her voice had changed completely when she said: “Paul who?”