She thought of Rod. He was seven years old and almost angelic. He had always displayed an almost mystical air. Indeed, it was this form of self reflection that had first brought him to the notice of the psychiatrists.
'He seems to think for himself,' his teacher had said. 'He even asks questions in class on occasions.'
So he was taken to the psychiatric department for study.
And on those lonely nights without Rod, Sara had reflected much on that lie she told and had to live with for ... how long?
Seven years and nine months.
Time travel could be dangerous. There were cardinal rules. The central one was that in no way must a researcher become involved with happenings in another time. They were to be observers only, and one of the main requirements of such a traveller was the chameleon ability of disguise. But seven years and nine months ago, whilst researching the Medieval witch hunts, her disguise had failed her.
He had been a peasant farmer. He'd spied her hiding in the bushes, watching the events at the burning. He had crept up behind her and pulled her out with remarkable strength. Sara remembered his pungent aroma to this day and he had viciously raped her and walked off laughing.
And Rod was conceived.
The idea of giving birth to a child with ancestry stretching back three thousand years had fascinated her. But she knew she would never be allowed to keep the child if she told. And neither would she keep her job. She had broken the cardinal rule and participated in an event from the past.
So she lied and applied for childbirth and a week after the rape she had made a brief visit to the Bedding Department
Eleven o'clock. The Great Chamber of the Grand Council.
The elderly Councillors sat along the white, antiseptic benches. In the middle of the chamber stood Sara and Rod, reunited for the first time in three months. Rod wanted a cuddle, but Sara knew the dangers of obliging him. Tears welled in her eyes, but she sniffed them back.
There was a buzz above her head and a partition opened up in the ceiling. At that moment Sara knew that the Grand Council suspected something seriously amiss with Rod. And she knew what it was. She knew the germ of discontent was so inherent in Rod that he appeared to come from a different time.
The Truth Dome descended from the ceiling. Sara wanted to struggle away from it but knew the act was pointless. Force would be used to restrain her if she struggled.
The Dome encompassed her head, and from a great screen on the wall, mind images began to form.
The interrogation went back year after year until, suddenly, Sara saw her thought image materialise within a bush next to a Medieval burning.
The Councillors turned away in horror as the peasant farmer did his worst.
The Grand Council debated for two days. Their dilemma was great. Violence was outlawed, so Rod could not be removed from their society this way. Yet they knew that remove him they would have to do.
He was suffering from no ordinary germ of discontent. This was something far more fundamental. Part of his mind was thousands of years old, and therefore his instinctual influences were capable of overriding the indoctrination of the city society. And that germ of discontent would certainly spread.
It was already spreading to Sara - as they found out through further interrogation.
They were appalled at her thought concerning placing a flower in her room. Wasn't nothing sacrilege? Then one of the elders had the perfect solution - a solution that would no doubt be used again and again to right a wrong.
Sara was taken to the Historical Research Section, together with a Councillor trained in time travel. The equipment was activated and she felt the tachyons invading her body. Suddenly she was no longer in the laboratory, but hiding behind a bush by a burning.
A few hundred yards away, a peasant farmer was walking along a track. Suddenly, he stopped, thinking he had spied movement in a bush. He moved closer and rubbed his eyes, sure that he was seeing things. Little did he know that a Councillor from a society thousands of years in the future had pulled the woman out of his sight.
Sara was walking home from work. Why she had detoured to the park she didn't know. Something deep in her mind had compelled her.
She wondered if it had anything to do with her idea of finally having a child. She had already put in her application to the Bedding Department.
She stopped by a bed of flowers, and as she bent down to snap one of the stems, she wondered how nice it would look in her room.
SCARLAND
THE JOURNEY
It happened before I was born. We all know it happened. We know because we're here, living with the consequences. But just what it was that happened I'm not quite sure. The grown ups don't like talking about it.
We get little hints - both about what happened, AND what it was like before. I've heard the grown-ups talk about things like televisions and cars and doctors who used to cut you up to make you better. I've heard them talk about guns and drugs and airplanes that fly in the sky like the birds. But it all gets too confusing. I remember dad trying to get me to grasp this thing called an airplane that flew like the birds. But first he had to explain what a bird was. And I was lost straight away.
Then the grown-ups would give hints about what happened; what brought it all to an end. But they were vague here, too. Infact, I don't think they really knew themselves. It was just that one day there were billions of people living in big things called cities, and then there was this light, this explosion, and then there was nothing. Except the survivors. And a natural world made unnatural and out to get them rather than nurture.
'What IS a city?' I asked one day as I, Dad and my big sister Emily sat in the shack.
Dad looked at me through his knowing eyes. He had tried many times to explain it, but now that I was fifteen, I think he decided it was time I began to know things.
'Get your pack,' he said. 'We're going on a little trip.'
It was early afternoon when we left. We lived in a settlement of about three hundred survivors. The settlement had about a hundred shacks, all congregated around the Hall, and we were all led by Harrington who, we were told, used to be a soldier.
Harrington knew things about survival, so he was the natural leader and no one questioned his authority or what he told us to do. The grown-ups said it was Harrington who kept us all alive, organised the fields around the settlement, and learned people trades to keep us going.
'Be careful,' Harrington said as Dad asked if he could take me to see ...
We camped that night in a small glade with all these weird, misshapen trees around us. The camp fire held back the dark.
'Where ARE we going, Dad?' I asked.
'I'm going to show you a city,' he said. 'Maybe then you'll learn what happened, and what it was like before.'
We'd already walked miles the previous afternoon, and we walked many more miles the next day, until, about noon, we arrived on top of a hill and Dad told me to look down.
I did as I was told, and below me there were miles and miles of rubble, some in huge piles with metal, skeleton-type things stuck up to the sky.
'They were all buildings,' Dad said, 'and hundreds of thousands of people lived and worked in them.'
I was over-awed by the site. My world was a little world, with everything geared to survival. But as we walked down the hill into the innards of the city, and Dad told me about how it was like living and working there, it all seemed such an alien place.
Dad showed me all sorts of things I'd never heard of, like bars and cinemas and snooker halls, and I thought to myself: I'm lucky to be living as I do, as one with people and my world. These people who lived here didn't live. They didn't share, they didn't strive, they just did things for the experience.
And that's not living. That's existing.
At one point I said to Dad: 'I'm glad it happened.'
'Why's that, son?' he asked.
'Because I've a reason to live and it fulfils me. These people just had nothing. At least, n
othing of value.'
He smiled as we walked through the city. For several hours we walked and always I had this sense of the city bearing down on me, suffocating me. Yet even with its immediacy, I could not feel comfortable.
I suppose it was the vastness of it all - so big, yet no room for the personal. It was all too big to comprehend, and eventually I said: 'Can we go now. I don't like it here. I don't know how anyone could. I never want to come here again.'
We left the city then, and that night, sat by another camp fire, Dad asked: 'So do you understand what it was like, now?'
'Yes,' I said, 'I do. Before it happened, people didn't live. Now, we do.'
A silence descended. Eventually a look of puzzlement came to my father.
'What's wrong?' I asked.
'There's something I don't understand,' he said.
'What's that?'
'You've asked no questions about what happened. What made us live like we do now.'
'I don't need to. I know.'
'You do?'
'Yes.' I said. 'The human race got too big.'
THE STRANGER
Our settlement had survived the end of civilisation quite well, we all thought. Nestled in a valley with nature just beginning to nourish us once more, we lived fulfilled lives. Just three hundred strong, we did most things together, living as a commune.
Born after the 'happening', I had grown up here, with only three people to really influence me. First there was my older sister, Emily. She'd taken on the role of my mom, really; a woman who had died when I was born. But I still loved her as a sister. Then there was Dad. He was well respected by all - especially me. And he seemed to carry all the woes of the world on those drooping shoulders of his. And of course, the final influence was Harrington.
Harrington was our leader - an ex-soldier, we were told. And he always seemed to know what was best for us.
He'd tell us so now and again when he'd call us together, and he'd give a lecture about what it was like before:
'They used to have things called religions,' he said during one lecture, 'and they were harmful. They spoke of a life after this one, and people should praise an Idol for deliverance in that other life. So people did things in this life that were counter to society. Some preached to make people feel bad. Others went as far as killing enemies so that their Idol, or God, would send them to paradise in the other life. Religion was bad. And it argued with the authorities who wanted to make this life better for all. We must always beware of that virus called religion.'
Many of the older ones, who remembered, nodded their heads in agreement. As for us younger ones, we didn't really know what Harrington meant. But seeing he had said it, it had to be true. We knew that.
We soon forgot his lecture, however, and for many weeks we never had to think about what he said. Rather, life just went on as before, the tradesmen making things for us all, the farmers growing the food in the ever expanding fields around the settlement, and us kids ...
Well, we did what we did all too often. Play.
I knew that, at fifteen, I was too old, really, to play. But I suppose, looking back, the settlement, the simplicity of the life, allowed a naivety in us all. There was nothing to weigh us down, or destroy our sense of wonder. So even at fifteen, I enjoyed playing with the others. After work, that is, for I did a full time job myself, helping to keep the settlement clean and well maintained.
One day we were playing well beyond the fields on the outskirts of the wild country and I suppose it was my age that alerted me to the danger; made me notice the strange noises that were coming from beyond the trees.
'Watch out!' I screamed as the pack of dogs bolted out of cover, heading straight for us.
Dogs had attacked us before - wild beasts with fevered jaws and deep, dark eyes. I gathered the kids behind me and grabbed a branch, hoping to defend myself, whilst at the same time shouting like hell for help. But I knew we were too far away from the settlement to be heard.
As the first dog came, I rammed the branch into its face and it went off, yelping. But another was immediately behind it, and soon there were three, trying to surround me, bound at me, and no doubt rip out my throat.
Behind me, the other kids were going hysterical, and I knew it was maybe the end of all of us. But as one of them pounced there was this loud crack from a distance away, and the dog’s head seemed to explode in front of me.
Shocked, I watched - listened - as further cracks sounded and one by one the dogs were killed.
A silence descended then, and my eyes wandered to my left, and out of the trees came a stranger.
He was a magnificent sight - tall with long dark hair and a dark beard and a big, black coat and eyes so blue they burned.
Behind us, survivors were running to find out what was going on. Dad and Emily were at the front, and they grabbed me and hugged me, whilst others ran to the stranger and stared at the long thing in his hands. Some recognised it as a rifle. We'd heard of such things but never seen one, and it all seemed magical to us.
It was Dad who thanked the man then and asked him to stay with us.
'Thank you,' said the Stranger in a deep but quiet voice; yet it was a voice we all heard.
Harrington had arrived by now and he walked up to the Stranger. We could all see, immediately, an antagonism in his eyes, his demeanour.
'We all thank you,' Harrington said. 'You must eat with us, and then we won't delay your journey.'
A mumble erupted in the survivors at his words. Dad said: 'But Harrington, we could use a man like this.'
Harrington said: 'We have no need of him.'
Whether Harrington had been right or not, I don't know. All I know is that I loved that Stranger, and that eventually Harrington conceded, aware of the growing dissent in the ranks.
The Stranger was given a shack on the outskirts of the settlement, and over the following days he walked round us, introducing himself, and everywhere he went he seemed to make people happy. And on the seventh day of his stay he took two pieces of wood and nailed them together in a cross and nailed them on his door.
Many of the older ones recognised this sign and went into his house and knelt before him as he talked.
Harrington never went. I saw him when the cross went up, and I don't think I had ever seen him so frightened. And I remember thinking, if the Stranger could hold this power over a great man like Harrington, then maybe the rumours were true, and the Stranger really was God.
THE MATING
‘We're nothing without our children.'
Dad had said that to us loads of times. And it echoed, perfectly, the words of Harrington, the leader of our settlement. The simple fact was, civilisation had ended nearly twenty years ago and we were a group of just three hundred struggling to survive. And what was the point of that without plenty of children to allow us to grow? However, until the problem came to affect me directly, I must admit I'd never really thought about it.
It affected me by way of my big sister, Emily. A year older than me, we used to always play together. But over recent months I'd noticed she'd stopped doing so as much. And when she did, it was no longer on equal terms. Rather, it was as if she was supervising me, not playing as an equal.
I asked Dad what the problem was and he said: 'Well, son, she's sixteen.'
'So?'
He offered a wry smile. 'She has different priorities.'
I began looking for these different priorities then, and I began to notice she'd spend more time looking after her hair. Her clothes began to change, too. More smart, even though all any of us had were rags. And then there was the way she walked; sort of more pronounced. And eventually I began to notice that the older boys had realised her 'different priorities' as well.
It was a seemingly happy time for Emily, was this new found attention. But all that came to an end one day when I found her by the pond on the edge of the settlement crying.
'What's up Emily?' I asked.
Emily looked up, smiled, stro
ked my cheek. 'Oh, John,' she said, 'you're so lucky being a boy.'
I knew that. But I couldn't understand why she was crying about it. But over the next few days the answer became more obvious.
First of all, the other boys started giggling behind her back; and then one of the older ones, now categorised a man, seemed to be always near her, staring - and one of the older ones I knew Emily couldn't stand.
'Why's he always around Emily?' I asked Dad.
Dad's face dropped. A tear seemed to fill his eye. 'Because he's been chosen,' he said.
Chosen?
Harrington had spoken before about being chosen. I went to see the Stranger in the church. 'Tell me about how we bring up children?' I said.
The Stranger stroked his huge black beard - offered a wane smile. 'Children should be brought up in proper families,' he said, with a hint of anger in his voice.
'But that's not how it's going to be, is it?'
'No.'
'But I was brought up by Dad. It didn't hurt me, so why is it wrong?'
'I know Harrington's reason why it's wrong. But I don't agree.'
So the Stranger knew it was wrong. And when I went back to our shack, I got more proof that it was wrong when Emily stormed out, running and crying with that older one shouting after her, telling her it was going to happen whether she liked it or not.
I stormed over to Harrington then, in the Central Hall.
'Why are you doing this to my sister!!? I demanded.
Harrington looked at me with steely eyes. Said: 'Because we must.'
'What do you mean, we?' I asked. 'Keep me out of it.'
'But I can't,' said Harrington. 'You're part of this society, and it's for us all, including you.'
Harrington tried to explain, but I had no understanding of things from before the 'happening'. I didn't understand about gene pools, and how families limit it, whereas communal breeding, with each woman having babies by many different men enriches it, and thus enriches our future generations. All I knew was that Emily was hurting and was being pressured into something she didn't want.