The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam (2 page)

‘The Discard.’

‘Yes.’

‘Marion …’ Alan’s heart had wrenched itself free inside him and was sinking. He hurt all over. ‘I love you. I love Billy. I can’t lose you. I can’t.’

‘We love you too. But you staying here will hurt us. Even if you never put a foot wrong again, you are marked. We will be held in suspicion.’

Alan didn’t say anything.

‘For Billy,’ Marion said.

Alan knelt down and took his son in his arms again.
His little body was hot. The boy’s crying had subsided, and he looked up at his father with big blue eyes. His flushed cheeks were covered with snot. His small mouth was closed and serious. ‘You’re thinking hard, hey?’ Alan said. He didn’t know why he said that. He brought Billy up to his chest and squeezed him. Billy put his arms around Alan’s neck and his chin on Alan’s shoulder.

‘Let me put him to bed,’ Alan said.

Marion nodded. ‘Okay.’

But Billy wouldn’t settle. He kept standing up in his cot. He thought everything was okay again, and wanted to play. ‘Good morn-ning!’ he kept saying, with a big grin. Alan sat on top of his Billy’s wooden toy-box and tried to conquer the trembling of his lips in order to smile back. When he was able, he’d whisper, ‘Lie down, son,’ or ‘Close your eyes.’ And he’d pick the child up and lay him back down. Billy would pretend to sleep for a moment – loud, whistling snores – and then ‘wake up’ once more, standing up with another grin and ‘Good morn-ning!’

Marion pushed aside the drapes that hung from the archway into Billy’s room, and came in holding a soft leather satchel. ‘Here,’ she said.

‘Where Daddy going?’ Billy asked.

‘Daddy’s got to go out,’ Marion replied.

‘Daddy going to tation,’ Billy said, which was what he said on those mornings when Alan had the Daily Stationing day shift.

‘Not this time,’ Alan said. He stroked Billy’s hair.

Billy looked up at Alan and Marion for a little while. ‘I’m tired now,’ he said. ‘I want a bobble, plee.’

‘I’ll get you a bottle,’ Marion said, leaving. ‘Say night-night to Daddy.’

‘Night-night, Daddy.’

‘Night, Billy,’ Alan said. He picked up his bag, took hold of Billy’s hand, smiled briefly, then pushed through the drapes.

Marion was standing by the shining bronze door. Alan walked over and she opened her arms to him. ‘Don’t let him forget that I love him,’ Alan said. ‘And don’t forget that I love you, too.’

‘I won’t,’ Marion said. She kissed him deeply. ‘I love you, Alan. Take care of yourself.’

‘I will see you again,’ Alan said. ‘I’ll find a way back.’

Marion gazed into his eyes. ‘But not if it hurts him. Not if it hurts him. Not at that cost.’

‘Not at that cost,’ Alan repeated.

‘Now go.’

Alan went to the door, then stopped. He moved over to the corner of the room and picked up his guitar: something Eyes had chanced upon out there in the Discard, and brought to Alan years ago, when he was still a child. A ten-bug piece of shit, but even so, these things were difficult to come by. Its name was Snapper. The meetings with Eyes had grown infrequent over the years; Eyes was less and less able, and the Arbitrators were less
and less willing to turn their backs on such behaviour. So was Marion.

He put the guitar on his back and left, head down, not entirely friendless.

*

Curfew meant that if anybody saw him out, he’d be frogmarched to one of the Chutes and dumped.
Discarded
. But that didn’t matter; he had nowhere else to go anyway. In fact it would be best if the Arbitrators knew that he’d gone. He was stumbling, numb. The sense Marion had made was still percolating through him, frequently igniting into white-hot self-loathing.
Look what I did
.

He considered trying to ascend to the Upper Executive Offices and – what? Kill somebody? He’d fantasised about such a thing time and time again, but the truth was that he’d never even heard the names of any of the Executains, let alone worked out who was responsible for what. Maybe he could just kill them all.

But murder wasn’t in him, unfortunately.

And it would probably mean they’d slit his throat before Discarding him, and then he’d definitely never see Marion or Billy again.

He thought about going to Tromo, the Arb who’d saved him back in Modest Mills, but Tromo didn’t do anything unless there was something in it for him, and right now Alan didn’t have anything to offer. As it had many times before, his mind skittered around the deal made with Tromo on his behalf back when Modest Mills
was sacked, and its potential consequences. Besides, if Alan remembered correctly, Tromo was up patrolling the Astronomy and Engineering Compliance Executive Offices, and so not at all easy to reach.

He came to a window. The slope of the Pyramid meant that he could look straight up. By now the sun was down, but Satis was full, its ochre disc pocked and shadowed. Corval was half shadowed, but what could be seen of the smaller orb was more colourful – blue and green bands were still catching the sun’s light. And then there were the stars: scattered all over, but to the south was a bright, roundish cloud of them – stars gathered so thickly they looked as if they were swarming. Pyramidders referred to the star cloud as the Battle, but Alan remembered his mother calling it Green’s Eye, and it still looked like an eye to him. Various stars moved slowly around, blinking. His mother always told him they were dragons, great winged lizards that lived in space and spoke with light and flame, not words. He’d told Billy the same thing.

Billy. He had to go. If he was going to help Billy in any way, he had to escape straight away. He tore his gaze from the sky and looked out over the Discard, the expanse of mountainous ruins, the weird, twisted towers, the vast metal archways, monolithic and rusted. Huge square buildings buried beneath foliage and even forests. It was all indistinct in the dark, but here and there turrets and broken domes were silhouetted against the
sky, and in places fires burned. When Alan stood alone on a balcony or a terrace, he could hear noises: the wind through leaves, metal grinding against metal. Very occasionally he’d heard what sounded like human voices raised in anger or fear. And sometimes sounds that could have been human, but could equally have been animal: strange barks and whistles. Once there’d been a long, cold howl.

He was
from
the Discard, almost. He shouldn’t be afraid of it. Though, really, Modest Mills had been something of a halfway house; even there he’d been warned not to venture off into the wilds. To watch for snakes, crocodiles, bandits and cannibals.

His head was splitting, and sickness had settled in his gut. His feet dragged. The bag felt very heavy. He came to the nearest Chute. An innocuous branch from the main corridor led him to a round chamber lit by one of the white globes. The walls were intricately decorated with rows of overlapping symbols in inlaid brass and bronze: triangles, eyes, discs, stick figures, fish, hands. The symbols repeated in various patterns, spiralling up around the chamber until they met with the ornate globe casing.

In the centre of the floor was a round hole. Alan looked down it. It was like one of the helter-skelter-style slides at the children’s pool he’d taken Billy to the previous weekend. Damn it. Sorry, Billy. The guilt he felt was poison.

He sat on the lip of the Chute and then waited for a patrol to happen across him.

Twelve years after ingesting him, the Pyramid spat Alan back out, and Alan found that twelve years was long enough to have softened him. The Discard was not kind to newcomers, and nor did it recognise him as one of its own. And Alan did not recognise the Discard, either; he remembered only a tiny part of it – Modest Mills – which was gone. It had been a small town, the town of his birth, where he’d had parents and a home. But it had been reduced to the ash and dust that whispered softly around the base of the Pyramid and settled into deep drifts against its side. After crawling out of the Discard Chute and digging his way through these drifts, Alan was dizzy and parched. He lay amongst the ruins for a while, looking up at the sky, and the Pyramid that occupied so much of it.

Eventually he stumbled off in the direction that he’d seen Eyes go after their few clandestine meet-ups. He still felt weak after the Bleeding, and grew hungry as well as
thirsty. He was torn between wanting to meet somebody in order to ask for help, and hoping against hope that he encountered nobody. He followed a wide path that descended between abandoned buildings. He started to worry that he was too exposed, but none of the alleyway mouths or the holes in the sides of the buildings looked particularly inviting. All around were night-sounds: small movements, doors banging in the slight breeze, architecture settling. The occasional call of a nocturnal bird. There were no birds in the Pyramid, but Alan had heard their voices from the terraces on occasion. Now they sounded far too close.

That night he passed out in a great hall that housed a vast machine comprised mostly of copper tubing which had long since turned green. He was awakened by a pair of emaciated hands pawing at his legs and kicked out. His foot connected with a face and something squealed.

‘I’m sorry,’ said his new friend. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you was dead. Just a little hungry is all. Just a little hungry. But seeing as you’re not dead I won’t bother you no more. A bit of meat’s such a rare thing! The rats and lizards are too fast for a skinny wretch such as myself. So sorry.’

By the light of the bright moons Alan could see the man scuffling backwards, away from him. He was almost skeletal. His bald head was grey and spotty. Alan’s skin crawled. Why would he be carrying meat? Then he woke up properly and jumped to his feet. He couldn’t see a
weapon on the man’s person, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one, or couldn’t find one. But then why hadn’t he just tried to bludgeon Alan while he slept?

Perhaps he
was
just hungry; perhaps he genuinely didn’t want to kill anybody.

But Alan did not hang around to find out. He ran beneath the strange machine’s appendages and out of that ruined building, and he kept running.

*

The unpleasant night became an unpleasant day, and the unpleasant days and nights became hard, painful weeks. The Discard was teeming with animal and insect life, but all the creatures Alan encountered were faster than him and he had no aptitude for tracking, trapping or hunting. There was an abundance of greenery, but he did not know which plants were edible and which were poisonous. He frequently discovered colonies of mushrooms, but he was wary of consuming them for fear of making himself ill, however badly his hunger hurt him. It was an effort to resist, but resist he did, all the while fantasising about fat brown mushrooms sizzling on a metal plate over a campfire. Building campfires was something else that he was bad at. But he survived, thanks to the Discard’s apparently infinite population of snails. They couldn’t outrun him, and he was reasonably sure they weren’t poisonous: he remembered people in Modest Mills frying them with garlic and selling them at market stalls to passers-by. Alan ate them raw – shuddering at
their gritty, rubbery flesh – until he got better at building fires. After that, he toasted them on sticks. They were still gritty and rubbery, but they were not as slimy.

Without intending to, he found himself in a network of buildings and couldn’t work out where the exit was. The ground he’d stood on upon first leaving the Pyramid was now lost to him. He wandered through vast, abandoned mills, clambered down rusty metal ladders, used thick twisted vines to climb up sloping chimneys, stalked quiet, dusty corridors of pale stone, crept up on nesting pigeons and sent them cooing and squawking up into the air. He stood at windows, looking for landmarks that would help him travel with more direction, but as soon as he left any particular window he became disorientated again. It felt like whichever window he stood at – however many storeys he ascended or descended – he gazed down at yet more red-tile rooftops, either blazing in the sunlight or gleaming coldly by the light of the moons. And he gazed up at yet more buildings soaring upwards, away from him, culminating in spires and spindles or messy knots of metal pipework. The architecture looked impossible.

In another attempt to take stock of his location he tried to get to the bottom of the building he was in, but the deeper he went, the darker the interiors grew, and he became unnerved. The less light made it through the windows, the more moss and mould dampened the floors, ceilings and walls. Large, dull beetles scuttled from his footsteps. But he kept on going until, at the top
of one stairwell, he heard a strange noise echoing up from the green, dripping depths; metal scraping metal, and something like laughter. He turned and fled.

He had expected to meet more people. Once he saw somebody several rooftops away, sitting on top of a chimney pot, wearing a large, outlandish hat, smoking, and sipping from a shiny hip-flask, as if there was nothing to be afraid of. Alan almost dived from the windowsill he was leaning over, shouting ‘Hello! Hello!’ but by the time he’d lowered himself down into a small paved courtyard and then climbed up a drainpipe onto the top of the building that the stranger had been sitting on, the stranger had disappeared.

As he continued on his aimless journey, though, he saw more and more people. Just never close up. The ones he wanted to speak to all avoided him, and he ran or hid from the ones who tried to approach him. They were all grimy and skinny and desperate. Who knew what they wanted, or what weapons they carried?

Alan’s diet of snails grew tedious and, despite his best efforts, he fell sick. He put it down to drinking bad water. The little food he managed to eat went right through him, and whenever he did manage to fall sleep he was woken in short order by the urge to vomit. He considered returning to the Pyramid – but no. He wasn’t going back until he could do something good for his family. Returning now would be bad for them. He wouldn’t fuck things up for them any more.

A week or two later, he was still unable to hold any food in his belly. He was dehydrated and his head felt like it was on fire. His skin was dry in some places, greasy in others, and he stank. He was encountering many more people now, but they kept well away. Traders selling dried meat and vegetables and whisky from backpacks went past but he didn’t have the bugs. He remembered bugs – a species of iridescent beetle, their bodies varnished – from Modest Mills, but he had no idea how to lay his hands on any now.

Had he been wrong about the Discard all this time? Maybe the Pyramidders were right. Maybe it was just a hellish labyrinth, offering nothing but a variety of ways to die. If you were
born
out here, well, then maybe you had a chance, but if you were a Pyramidder …

But he
had
been born out here. He was
not
a Pyramidder. He kept going.

He almost forgot that Snapper was a musical instrument until one night he heard somebody else singing. The man was drunken and not very good, but he followed the sound of it. The air was warm. He crawled, exhausted and emaciated, to an ancient-looking archway wreathed in soft, shaggy moss. Beyond it, occupying one corner of some kind of ruined plaza, there was a large wooden shack. Golden light spilled from its windows. A gigantic hairy bull of a man stood in front of it, arms folded. A sign hung above its door, and the sign read ‘THE WAXY NUT’. The song ended, and there was a moment’s silence
before a cacophony of voices suddenly erupted – loud shouting, laughing and cheering.

Then somebody else sang a different song.

Alan approached the shack. The bouncer glanced over him. He did not look impressed, but his eyes were not cruel.

‘I was hoping to sing,’ Alan said. He spoke slowly, because he was out of practice, and he did not want to fuck this up. ‘Do you think that is a possibility?’

‘You any good?’

‘I’m usually very good. But I’m hungry and thirsty, so my voice will likely be a little rough.’

‘As rough as them dog’s arses inside?’ The bouncer laughed. ‘They’d take some beating as far as rough voices go.’

‘So I can enter?’

‘’course you can,’ the bouncer said. ‘This is a friendly pub. But they likely won’t give you nothing to eat until after you sing. It’s a contest, see. Nice big juicy snake steak for the best singer.’

Alan bowed his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

The bouncer stepped aside, and gestured to the door.

*

So Alan fell into a different kind of Discard life. He met other Pyramid exiles – The Waxy Nut catered primarily to men and women kicked out of the Pyramid for loving members of their own sex – and began drinking heavily. He drank with sad, stubbly apes in ragged dresses, old
prostitutes with rosy cheeks painted onto cracked white greasepaint, disgraced holy men, and orphans whose parents had been killed by cut-throats, fever or venom. The Nut boasted a staggeringly poor selection of whiskies, one home-brewed beer that tasted like old dishwater, and a bewildering variety of mushroom teas, with which Alan experimented liberally, despite the ugly consequences of addiction being painfully evident all around him. Intoxication provided a respite from the remorse. He and Snapper regaled the regulars almost every night – sometimes with folk songs, sometimes with his own compositions, and sometimes with long, experimental pieces brought on by the mushrooms. And almost every night he drank himself to sleep in the bar. He found that if he did not drink, he could not sleep. When he did sleep, his sleep was full of nightmares. The nightmares were many, and he would awake with the sense that his rest had been distorted and broken by their volume and their jagged shapes. If he was not drunk, or performing, he was chewing his lip to pulp and remembering the marks on Marion’s face in almost perfect detail. Sometimes he woke to find himself naked and entangled within the limbs of others; sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes groups. On these occasions he’d find a quiet place outside, alone, and whisper words of love, shame and contrition to Marion, though he knew she couldn’t hear him. It was like praying. It
was
praying. But then he’d start drinking again, straight away, in an attempt to
shut his brain down. The Nut’s cheapest whisky was called Dog Moon, and drinking it was like standing over a bucket fire and inhaling the hot smoke, and Alan had discovered a taste for it.

He found out where Eyes lived from a transient who stopped by one night. He’d made a habit of asking about his old friend. There was no other way of contacting people; in the Pyramid, they’d had a network of message chutes, but there was no such thing out in the Discard. So he left The Nut behind, promising that he’d not be long, and set out on another journey.

He played Snapper and sang songs at campfires for bugs. He bought Dog Moon, food – roasted pigeon, frog’s legs, dried apple, cured goat meat – and a couple of long knives from itinerant traders. He saw strange and terrifying things from great distances: beetles the size of dogs; a woman pushing a cart full of writhing snakes along the top of a huge metal pipe; green glowing eyes staring at him across the canyon between two rusting complexes at night; bandits stabbing a man in the stomach, and leaving him twitching beneath a ruined archway. For a long time Alan couldn’t work out how to get to that archway in order to help; by the time he did get to the man, who’d been wearing a gigantic and magnificent snail shell on his back, he was dead.

By the time he found Eyes, he had grown harder and leaner, and built something of a reputation as a singer. Eyes knew a place – a safe place – where Alan might be
able to entertain the residents in return for a roof over his head and daily hot meals.

Alan was glad of that; the nights were full of eerie voices and the days were full of colourful spiders. But even in a safe place, even with good food in his belly, even in a room with a lockable door, he found sleeping difficult, and his dreams were haunted by Marion and Billy, their bloodied bodies bearing wounds that he himself had inflicted; his waking hours, too, were twisted up by love for them, love that had nowhere to go, it seemed, somehow, and deep inside him there was a rage, the flames of which were fanned by the memories of his family’s faces, and the whisky did not dampen it at all, however much he drank. It only grew.