Dream Paris (44 page)

TICK

T
ICK.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

A moment.

A moment.

Stretch and break.

Stretch and break.

Stretch and …

I tried to raise my head, to get a better look. I couldn’t move. My eyes remained closed.

“Stay DOWN, StAy KeEp yOuR head cOverrEeEeD…”

What was wrong with Francis’s voice? It sounded like he was speaking through a vocoder. I couldn’t open my mouth. Couldn’t speak.

Then someone began to moan. Another moan, and then the eerie sound of machines crying. My eyes clicked open, one, two. I ratcheted my head upwards,
click, click, click
. Francis was looking at me.

“WhAt?” I said. “WhAt’S tHe MaTtEr?”

I licked my lips, tongue sliding out and back, out and back like a metronome.

“Is ThAt My VoIcE? Me SpEaKinG…”

I looked at the back of my hands. They were dusty, like they were covered in caster sugar. The sleeves of my jacket seemed to have melted, to have become like snake skin. I was looking at my hands, turning them back and forth, feeling the roughness on the back of the hands.

All around me the robots were crying. Not robots, children.

“WhAt WaS tHaT tHiNg? WhAt DiD tHaT pLaNe dRoP?”

Shapes were falling around us. Small black cubes, black and orange cubes, clusters of cubes, melted together like boiled sweets left in the sun.

I jerked my way to my feet. Something grabbed hold of me and I looked down into two sightless blue cubes.

“
MeS yEuX
!
MeS yEuX
!”

A child. What had happened to their eyes?

Francis stumbled into me. He had a tail, an icicle of different-sized cubes. He was struggling with his backpack, picking at the straps with fingers like threaded strings of cubed cheese.

“HeLp Me!”

I staggered in front of him, twitching and jerking, fumbled at the straps with sugared hands. I yanked at the straps, loosened them bit by bit. Francis was jerking like a robot, trying to separate himself from the pack, banging at it with his elbows, trying to shift it. I felt my way around behind him, nearly tripping on a child that was using my legs to support itself as it tried to pull itself to its feet

“SoRrY!
DéSolÉ
!”

Francis. Francis was. The wire that had followed us all the way from London had transmitted the full force of the bomb right into the pack, blowing it apart. It looked like a frozen explosion of building blocks.

“FrAnCiS, YoUr FrOnT…”

We both looked at his chest, at the irregular pattern beneath the blue striped shirt he wore. I fumbled at the buttons with fingers that didn’t seem to work properly. Feeling came in irregular bursts. The shirt opened and I saw his chest. It looked as if it were made of pink Lego.

I placed my hand on it.

“I caN’t FeEl YoUr HeArTbEaT,” I said. And then I did. One pulse. A door clicking shut.

I ran a staccato finger across his chest.

“AnNa…”

“YeS.”

“AnNa, tElL ’cHeLLE…”

“YeS…?”

And he died. I watched the light go out from his eyes, and his body knelt down in stop-frame motion. One, two, three.

“FrAnCiS!” I called. I took hold of one hand, I hugged his blocky form. “FrAnCiS!”

It was too late. Poor Francis. Poor Michelle. Poor Emily, another little girl who would grow up without her Daddy. Cube tears fell on him. I was crying.

Slowly, the background noises filtered through my anguish. Children crying, adults shouting. Everything heard through static. And then I felt the heat and the flame, I heard the explosion. I flung myself across Francis, eyes closed. Was this it? I wondered. Noise and heat. I was burning up.

But no. The heat passed and I looked up to see that my Zeppelin had turned to blocks and had fallen to earth. My lift home had crashed, destroyed by this strange explosion. This bomb.

“WhO did thIs, FranCis?” I asked. I’d forgotten he was dead. Just for one brief moment. “Who dId thiS?”

But deep in my gut I knew the answer.

That was an Integer Bomb. Who had stolen the plans for an Integer Bomb? I knew now.

But I didn’t have time to think about that. The children needed help. The two brothers, the ones I’d tried to push to safety, were staring at their hands, eyes wide, too terrified to speak. Their hands were cubes. Nothing more than cubes.

“I DoN’t KnOw wHaT tO dO!” I said. “I DoN’t KnOw wHaT tO dO!”

There were children everywhere. Children crying, silent children whose faces had turned to cubes, children who sat gazing at nothing, children who screamed and screamed.

I moved through them, touching them with hands that felt in pulses, trying to comfort, not really knowing what to do, listening to the irregular bursts of tone that filled the air. What was that noise?

And I realised. The carousel. The music from the carousel. Smoothed out, reduced to whole numbers by the Integer Bomb. There were no half-tones anymore.

And then I saw the most horrible thing of my life. The thing that haunts my dreams every night. The thing that I will never forget.

The carousel was still spinning, rotating in jerks, rotating as if it were powered by square wheels. I was looking at the lucky children at the moment. The ones who had been sheltered from the blast. The ones whose hands and feet were covered in caster sugar, whose eyes had filmed over. But the carousel jerked on and I saw the others. Those caught directly by the effect.

That’s when I was sick. Red cubes, hurled onto the pavement.

I
FOUND OUT
later that the bomb had been aimed at the
Ile de la Cité
. The bomb aimer had been told to look out for the little island in the middle of the Seine, he’d used it as a target as he’d lain on his stomach in the belly of the craft.

When I pulled myself together a little I could see the randomness of it all, the blocky head of a tree that had caught the blast and had shielded a child, the satin blue cuboids in sunlight where her sister had stood.

It was worse in the centre of the city.

The
Grande Tour
was no longer a tower, it was simply a rectangular cuboid. Three cubes sat at its base. The middle of the city was a collection of building blocks. Down there, people died in agony, died of suffocation as their blood pumped in blocks, died in agony as nerves fired incorrectly, died in nightmares as their neurons pulsed in fixed charges.

The Bastille was cubes. Madame Joubert, M Duruflé. Luc…

I walked downhill, heading towards the centre of the chaos, past a wall that had cast a shadow against the destruction. The half of the street closest to the wall remained normal, shiny cars crowded together, sunlight glinting off chrome. Past a line drawn halfway across the road, the street erupted in rising waves of grey sugar cubes.

A woman sat on a seat by a little table in a café, looking down at the place where her legs became part of the ground. She looked at me, looked back at her feet, picked up a glass of wine and drank from it.

I passed two children fused together, quite dead.

I…

I don’t know how many people died that day, but Dream Paris wasn’t the first city to be bombed in the Dream World, and it won’t be the last.

All that horror, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

No, I want to say one more thing. Dream Paris had been a living city. Some of the people still lived, but the city died that day. Something may have arisen afterwards, but it wasn’t the same place.

No. I want to say one final thing.

Have you seen a sound wave? The shape, the humps that give it its character. What do you get when you sample a wave, take out the curves, push it into blocks? You get something that’s got a noise but no character, just noise with no soul.

You get a dead note.

Dream Paris sat under a sky the colour of an unpolished euphonium, tuned to a dead note.

SIX MONTHS LATER

S
HE KNEW THAT
I was there, she was just pretending not to have noticed me. Well, I’d waited this long, I could wait a little longer. I watched as she finished reading the last piece of paper, as she picked up a silver pen and signed off with a flourish. She leaned back in her chair and took off her glasses, stretched and yawned, finished for the evening. She folded her glasses into their case and then sat up straight.

“Well, Anna. Don’t you have something to say?”

I moved from the shadowy corner in which I’d been standing, came and sat down in the chair facing her desk.

“I’m impressed you got in here. Do you mind telling me how?”

“I had help.”

I didn’t say anything else. She didn’t push it.

“How long have you been back? Mr Twelvetrees only made it here last week.”

So he lived. No surprises there. I kept my face straight.

“I hope he had a difficult journey.”

I certainly had. I don’t know if I’d have made it if I hadn’t had help.

Therese Delacroix folded her hands before herself on the desk.

“Anna, you look positively emaciated. Shall I send for some tea? Something to eat?”

“No. I just want you to read this.”

She smiled.

“Ah! The famous truth script. It will be my pleasure. It’s the least I could do for you.”

For me? You think you owe
me
, you murdering bitch?

I kept my temper in check. I held out the script, I watched as the colours danced across her face. I wanted to know what had happened. I owed this to Francis. To Michelle and their child. I owed it to the children I’d seen die on Montmartre, I owed it to Luc and Jean-Michel and to all those people she had killed in Dream Paris.

“Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”

“It was us or them,” she said, simply.

“Us or them? They were never a threat! They never had any interest in us.”

She smiled.

“Not so far, perhaps. But that wouldn’t have lasted. We had to do it, Anna. Mr Twelvetrees thought he could capture Dream Paris. I must admit, I had my doubts, but I took a chance on him. I was wrong, but there you go.”

“He never stood a chance.”

“Yes, and more’s the pity. I never expected otherwise, but one can’t help but dream… If the attack had succeeded, we wouldn’t have had to drop the Integer Bomb.”

“You
didn’t
have to drop it!”

“Oh, Anna! Like it or not, the Dream World has opened up to our world. We have to show that we mean business. If we hadn’t shown what we were capable of, we’d have every country in the Dream World attacking us by now!”

“You can’t know that!”

She didn’t say anything.

“There’s got to be a better way!”

“You name it and I’ll take it.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it again. Therese spoke in a gentle voice.

“See? You think you have all the answers, but when it comes down to it, it’s people like me who have to take the tough decisions.

“No! You’ve had years to think of this. You can’t expect me to come up with the answers in minutes.”

“You won’t come up with an answer, Anna, because there isn’t one. The only answer you’ll ever come up with is mine. Attack first, feel sorrow afterwards.”

“No!”

“Yes! Because you’re living in a dream world, Anna, and you’re dreaming; big complicated dreams of freedom and equality and brotherhood. What you don’t realise yet is that your grand dreams will always be undercut by smaller, simpler and nastier dreams. It takes less imagination to think up a bigger bomb than to work out how to feed the hungry. It’s always easier to build something that destroys than to sit down and figure out how to make things work properly. In the real world, Anna, dreamers like you will always be pushed to the side by people with quick answers.”

“There’s got to be a better way.”

“Like I said, name it and I’ll take it.”

I glared at her. I wanted to hit her. To slap her. I wanted to do something to rip her from her smug complacency.

“No! Who are you to order all those people dead, anyway?”

“I’m the elected minister responsible.”

“Elected? And do the people know what you’ve done? Did they vote on your decision? I doubt the electorate would be happy to know they were complicit in your decision to kill a city.”

“The bomb was what the people wanted.”

She spoke the words with such sincerity. She must be telling the truth, I reminded myself, she’d read the truth script. But it
couldn’t
be right.

“I doubt that,” I said. “Did you ask them? Have the people
ever
been asked before an atrocity was perpetrated?”

“You know they weren’t asked. How could we ask them? Even if we did, they don’t know everything that I know. They’d make the wrong choice. The people don’t know what they want.”

Ah! So that’s how she was doing it. Fooling the truth script by telling the truth, but not the whole truth. She read my mind.

“No, Anna, I’m not being disingenuous. Nothing can overrule a properly written truth script. No, what I have is something far more insidious. I have the politician’s talent. Whatever I say, I
believe
to be the truth.”