Skyfall (13 page)

Lari peered through the nosedome. Since leaving the city, the darkness below had been absolute and he'd lost all perception of their height and their speed. Now though, a single long line of glowing red beacons stretched across the horizon, and as they rushed towards it Janil eased the flyer downwards.

‘Is that the Darklands?'

Janil nodded. ‘The start of them.'

‘How big are they?' Lari twisted his head to follow the line of tiny beacons out into the distance. They appeared to go on forever.

‘Huge. Thousands of times larger than the whole of Port City,' his father answered. ‘But with a population of only a few hundred. And that's declining fast, nowadays.'

They covered the distance to the wall in surprisingly short time, and when Janil began to wind back their speed, Lari's weight pulled him sharply forward against his harness. By the time they arrived above the wall, the flyer was almost stationary in the air, and Janil guided it slowly, staying a little above the antenna arrays. Then the searchlights below the nosedome burst into life.

‘What do you think?'

The wall was grey, rising up, featureless and monolithic, from the red sand. It showed no signs of weathering or decay, no wear at all.

‘What's it made of?'

‘Plascrete,' answered their father. ‘These walls were the reason plascrete was initially developed. It's impermeable, highly mouldable during production, and one hundred percent radiation-reflective. The perfect material for a barrier of this kind and, as we realised later, for making skydomes. Let's move on, Janil.'

His brother nodded, flicked the lights off, then pushed the flyer forward across the top of the wall and into the Darklands.

‘Welcome to hell,' he muttered.

‘Don't be cynical, Janil,' Dernan Mann responded.

Janil ignored his father. ‘Where do we go first?'

‘Go to the facility.'

‘You're the boss.'

Lari pressed back against his seat as the flyer accelerated.

‘Let's see if anyone's around.' Janil touched a control and a round readout appeared in the centre of the console with one tiny, glowing blip at the very edge of it.

‘Got one!' He sounded surprised.

‘Is that unusual?'

‘This close to the wall it is. Whoever that is, they're a long way from home.' Janil glanced at their father. ‘Shall we go take a look?'

Dernan Mann nodded and Janil altered course slightly. Lari watched the tiny glowing spark on the screen as they quickly closed the gap.

‘How does the scanner know someone's there?' Lari asked.

‘Body heat,' Janil replied. ‘It's not always reliable though.'

‘Why not?'

‘There are areas out here where there's still enough EMR interference to mess with the sensors. The townships are particularly bad for that. And sometimes the subjects just hide.'

‘Hide?' Lari sounded surprised. ‘Where? I thought it was all desert.'

‘Don't underestimate the subjects, Larinan,' Dernan Mann said. ‘They're cunning and resourceful. They've had to be, to survive this long.'

‘We're not certain how much the subjects know about our technology,' Janil continued, ‘but I've had them just vanish off the screen more than once, so I suspect they have at least a rudimentary understanding of how we track them. This one doesn't seem worried, though. Here …'

He pulled the flyer into a hover and switched on the lights again. They were now fifteen or twenty metres above the ground and below, shielding his eyes against the glare, stood a man wearing a long, sand-coloured robe and with an odd assortment of packages slung across his back.

‘He doesn't seem scared,' Lari observed.

‘I've seen that one before,' his brother said. ‘He's used to it. He wanders all over the place.'

‘What's he doing here?'

‘Don't know. Half the time we haven't got a clue what they're up to. I bet he was involved in that little escapade a couple of nights ago.'

‘Probably,' replied Dernan Mann. ‘But we haven't got time to hang around tonight. Let's keep moving.'

Janil nodded, flicked off the lights and resumed his original course. Lari watched the spot of light on the screen dwindle and vanish behind them. Once it fell away over the edge of the display, there was nothing else there.

‘It's so empty.' He tried to imagine what it must feel like to be that man, standing alone in the middle of all that space.

They flew on in silence, while the moon rose, bloody red, out of the horizon and the land below fell into dull perspective.

‘Coming up on the facility.'

Something loomed out of the darkness, moonlight reflecting colourless off crumbling walls. Janil trained the searchlights on the monolithic remains of a building unlike any Lari had ever seen.

‘What is it?'

‘One of the processing facilities that caused these Darklands to come into being in the first place,' his father told him. ‘As far as we know, that one is the last still standing, anywhere in the world.'

Janil played the spotlights over the cracked and fractured building, its internal structure clearly visible through some of the gaps. The difference between it and the wall they'd passed over earlier was obvious.

‘It's not plascrete.'

‘No. This was built long before plascrete. What you're looking at there, Larinan, is steel-reinforced concrete, the same as you'd find if you went and wandered around in the underworld.'

Lari's eyes followed the lights. The ancient structure exuded a sort of timelessness.

‘How old is it?'

‘This was one of the facilities affected in the Pacific Circle catastrophe, so around a thousand years, more or less.'

Lari shook his head in amazement, and Janil gave a superior chuckle.

‘I thought you weren't interested in the project, copygen.'

‘I'm not interested in subgenetics, but this …'

‘It's all related, Larinan. That's why we're here.' His father loosened his restraints and leaned forward to get a better view out of the nosedome. ‘That building was one of seven processing facilities that ended up within the borders of the Antipodean Darkland zone. Right now, you're at one of the epicentres that changed the face of human society.'

Lari laughed. ‘I've studied history, Dad. Aren't you overstating it?'

‘Not at all, Larinan.' His father nodded at the old building. ‘I want you to remember this place. Its destruction contributed to the rapid destabilisation of the human gene pool, which in turn led to the establishment of the twelve international Darklands zones and the creation of the Darklands Genetic Adaptation Program. Along with the zones in East Indonesia, the Philippines, the Korean Peninsula and Osaka, the Antipodean zone had one of the highest rates of genetic instability on the planet, and yet, compared with the other zones – San Andreas and Los Alamos, for example – this area out here also had the lowest subject mortality. And that's why the walls went up – to keep those mutations contained. To make sure that those poor unfortunates who'd been caught in the worst places, exposed to the worst of the disease and radiation, couldn't pass their crippled DNA back onto the rest of humanity.'

‘This isn't news to me, Dad. I know all this from third grade history.'

‘You know the facts, Larinan, but do you understand them? I want you to look at that building out there and really think about what it represents. What does it say about humanity? About the human condition? When it all went bad, our first response was to build those walls and lock the problem away, but when we realised containment wasn't working – that the physical and environmental changes we had wrought upon the planet were more extreme than initially anticipated – we made some of the most sweeping political and sociological shifts in human history. We dismantled governments, did away with exponential population growth and engineered our race towards equilibrium, and, perhaps most significantly, we moved into the sky. We did it all because of what happened between those crumbling walls out there almost a millennium ago, Larinan, and we've yet to pay the price for it. But we will, soon.'

‘You make it sound like some kind of divine punishment, Father.' Janil spoke without taking his eyes off the old building.

Dernan Mann was quiet for a few seconds before he replied. ‘Janil, I don't think that anyone, even you or I, has any real conception of just how bad it's going to be, or how fast it might happen.'

His words seemed to echo around the small cabin.

After a moment, Lari asked, ‘This – what you're talking about – it's all to do with that entropy thing, isn't it?'

His father nodded. ‘Everything.'

‘So are you going to explain or just leave me wondering what in the Sky we're doing out here?'

‘There's more to see, first.' He nodded at Janil. ‘Head for the nearest township.'

Janil tapped in a couple of commands and the processing facility dropped away into the night. Below, the starlit landscape rushed by.

‘Imagine what it must look like out there by daylight, Larinan.' Dernan Mann leaned forward. ‘Imagine the size of it – the colours, the brightness. Something none of us have ever really seen. Imagine being like them, being able to walk out there, across that land, beneath the sun. What would that feel like, do you think?'

‘Bloody scary,' Janil interjected.

‘Of course. But also … free.'

Lari twisted in his seat and tried to get a look at his father's face, but in the dim light from the instruments all he could make out was a dark shape.

‘Being in love with walking around out there was what got Mum killed, Lari.' Janil's voice was sharp. ‘So don't get any romantic ideas into your head about breaking field protocols, no matter what Father says. And don't fool yourself either. It's dangerous out there. The people are dangerous, the animals worse, and if something goes wrong and you get stuck, then unless you're lucky enough to find somewhere to hide you'll max out your exposure about three minutes after the sun comes up. It's not a place for us.'

‘It might well be the only place we've got left.'

Janil ignored their father. ‘Here's the township.'

An insignificant cluster of lights on the ground ahead grew rapidly larger.

‘Which one is this?' Dernan asked.

‘Woormra.'

‘Ah. Where it all began.'

‘Or ended. Depends on your point of view.'

The searchlights sliced the darkness to reveal a squalid collection of structures sprawled around a central clearing and stretching across the floor of a shallow valley. Flickering firelight showed here and there through openings in the walls, but otherwise the place seemed deserted.

‘People live there?'

‘Have done for centuries, Lari. Even before the wall went up.'

‘How do they survive?'

‘I told you earlier, they're resourceful. The Darklanders know things about this land that you or I couldn't even begin to understand.'

The wistfulness in his father's tone was so completely out of character that Lari couldn't let it pass.

‘That doesn't sound particularly scientific.'

‘There's science to it, all right. Just not the type we can understand.'

Janil snorted softly.

Lari studied the township. Against the all-encompassing darkness, it seemed so tiny, so inconsequential. It was hard to conceive that people could have existed there for so long. Almost as though reading his thoughts, Lari's father spoke again.

‘They haven't thrived, but they've survived, and that's an achievement in itself.'

‘What do you mean?'

Dernan Mann ignored the question. ‘How are we going for time, Janil?'

‘Plenty. It's not even first shift yet. We've got power for at least another four hours.'

‘All the same, you might as well take us back. I think we've seen all we have to out here.'

Lari was confused. ‘What? We've seen an old building and a falling-down town. I thought we had some important reason for being out here. You said there were answers.'

‘There are, Larinan. You just have to ask the questions first.'

The flyer rose sharply, soaring into the dark sky.

‘You're talking in circles, Dad.'

‘Not at all. You want to know why I've allocated you to DGAP—'

‘So do I, for that matter,' interrupted Janil.

‘… and this land out here is the real reason that the Darklands project manages to still exist.'

That seemed obvious.

‘What are you trying to tell me?'

‘You're not unintelligent, Larinan. You already know the answer if you think about it. What are the two functions of DGAP?'

Lari rolled his eyes. Every schoolkid knew this stuff.

‘You were just talking about it. Containment and study of those subjects isolated from the human gene pool in the Darklands quarantine zones in order to maintain ongoing stability of the human genetic code.'