Manalone (20 page)

Finding he had nothing
else to do, Manalone began to walk. His aimless path took him through the concourse, and then, because he needed some vague objective, he chose the roads that led back towards the sea. This was the first time in his life that he had been forced to view the world through the eyes of a penniless man in need of food and shelter, and he found this more basic perspective on the necessities of life profoundly disturbing. The high and continuing level of unemployment had created a massive human subclass which seemed to fill all the available vacancies in this particular ecological niche. Begging, borrowing or stealing were overcrowded occupations, and despite his ingenuity, Manalone resigned himself to having to go without food and to sleeping on the pavement in the shelter of some angled wall.

Because of a slight chance that he could avoid these unwelcome prospects he kept walking, hoping for an idea or an incident which might solve the problem. He toyed with the idea of contacting Blackman for another autram, but he had no cash for the autophone and no inclination to let Blackman see he was already so defeated. His own home he also dismissed as a possible haven. The watching eyes on the vidiphone had shaken him severely, and there might well be other electronic traps which could signal his presence to the police. Conversely, he knew that as his vagrancy became manifest he was certain to be picked up by a police patrol, and in view of his relationship with the MIPS, a CALF labour camp would appear to be his final destination.

‘But why should Shears bother to tell you so much, Manalone – and then force you into a situation where you can’t use what you know? Perhaps the test is designed to allow you certain information and then hand you over to CALF if you fail to make intelligent use of it. That begins to fit, because Shears said of Pierce Oman that he had too much information but no capacity to use it constructively.

‘The logical
inference is that your liberty and survival depend on solving the problem and using the answer in the right way, whatever that may be. If ever you needed an incentive to think, Manalone, this is it. And you have to do it fast. After a few days without food or shelter you won’t be in a fit shape to do much constructive thinking.’

By this time it was growing dark. The district he had entered was one he vaguely recognized as being to the northwest of the town. This meant he was nearer to known territory than he had thought. Illogically, the fact made him quicken his pace, although the fact did not offer any immediate solution to his plight.

‘The problem hinges on whatever was done to the human race – the thing which has now run off the rails. Something genetic. Exactly what could you do to Man genetically which would substantially delay an eco-crisis? There’s no obvious answer to that. You need a lot more specific information. Shears is the man who knows the answers, but you can scarcely go and ask him.

‘But he did leave you that big old book. The answers must have been in it somewhere, else there was no point in him manoeuvring it into your possession. You read through it, Manalone, but you failed to see what it said. In the light of what you now know, might it make better sense if you read it again?’

The answer was yes. Now he was certain that the change concerned people and not the world at large, he could view things with a more focused perception. Try as he might he could gain no further information from the memory of those pages, but the more he thought about it the more certain he became that the book held vital clues which he had missed. Instinctively he chose a route which would take him in the direction of the raft.

It was past midnight before he gained the seafront at a point well to the west of the town and nearer to the Selsea end of the raft. The first thing he noticed was an unusual amount of police activity, with yellow manu-drives on constant patrol along the raft edge and the introduction of a great quantity of searchlights and floodlights directed towards the strand which separated the floating town from the proper shore. The reason for this activity was not apparent, but effectively the raft had been sealed off from the mainland by a cordon of armed police.

Examining the
situation, Manalone found several checkpoints covering the high-water gangways. Nobody was attempting to pass through them, and this was not surprising. In the face of an open police check, most of the raft’s occupants would prefer to wait rather than undergo antagonistic questioning. This was a latitude not available to Manalone. He did not wish to approach the police, but neither could he afford to wait for long.

He recognized that there was no certainty that Kitten still had the book. Furthermore she might be responding to an instruction to call the MIPS if Manalone came back. However, both of these factors were outweighed by the virtual certainty of his commitment to a CALF camp if he failed to find an answer before hunger and exposure laid him on the streets. Police or no police, Manalone decided he had to gain the raft without too many hours’ delay.

His continued and unaccustomed walking, coupled with an insufficiency of food, had brought him to the point of exhaustion. After studying the disposition of the patrols and the lamps he decided it would be unwise to attempt to gain the raft by night. He considered he would stand a better chance amid the gentle confusions of daylight trading along the front. Accordingly he trudged westwards back to where the high banks of shingle rose steeply from the sea beyond the Aldwick Conurbation. Here, on a ledge of large and filthy stones, he trod the mass of accumulated litter into a rough mattress and lay down beneath the stars and slept.

His awakening was
cruel. A chill had entered his whole body, and he felt cold right through to his bones. He was also beset by pains of hunger more acute than any he had experienced before in his life. The two sensations combined to make him feel weak and frail and useless. If this was the reality of defeat, then Manalone knew he was made of the same stuff as the defeated.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet and began to move about, trying to get some warmth into his limbs and torso. Pieces of litter were stuck to his back and neck. Their filthy stickiness as he tore them off made his flesh crawl, and completed his wretchedness. He had not, he reminded himself, quite touched bottom yet. At this moment he still had the energy to climb out of the litter unaided. How many more nights of exposure, he wondered, would it take before the demands of survival were not strong enough to move his limbs.

It was still dark, though the first touch of a grey dawn marked the east. As he moved over the shoulder of shingle, Manalone could see that the cordon lights along the edge of the shore still burned. For a moment there were no patrol vehicles in sight. It was low tide, and the nearer rafts were beached and therefore accessible without having to use the high-water checkpoints. He studied the position carefully, not knowing what observers might be stationed out of sight or whether a burst of gunfire might fetch him down if he attempted to cross the illuminated beach.

A black bar crossing the foreshore to his right gave him an idea. Here, one of the many sewage outfall pipes ran broadly across the sand at a position which lay between the points of maximum illumination of two adjacent searchlights. If he took care not to expose himself in silhouette above the level of the pipe, it was conceivable that he might be able to crawl to the raft in the pipe’s shadow without being observed. However, he must do this before the dawn sky grew too light. It was an opportunity which might not be repeated, and he decided it was worth a chance.

The movement of the
large shingle beneath his feet made an uncomfortably loud noise, and he expected at any moment to be challenged as he moved down the ledge. He gained the landward end of the exposed pipe still well clear of the illuminated area, and then went flat on his stomach to worm his way along in the shelter of the iron bulk. The difficulty and noise made by attempting to move in this fashion over the shingle caused him quickly to decide that he had chosen the wrong approach. Having gained the sand, however, it became easier to crawl, and he could progress in relative silence.

Once exposed to the glare of the floodlights, he found the area more brilliantly lit than he had judged from the ledge. However he was forced to rely on the correctness of his original premise that the position was relatively dark in comparison to the bright bands of light which extended on either side. He found it necessary to make several detours in order to avoid some of the deeper pools which had formed around the supports for the pipe. Though several times he heard voices from the direction of the shore, no action was directed against him, and he became fairly certain that he had made the distance unobserved.

On reaching the raft he continued to crawl under the beached drums for a short way before climbing up through what the dim light of the dawn sky told him was a gap in the decking. On the raft itself everything was quiet. Here and there in the shacks and improvised dwellings a dim light showed through grimed glass or gleamed against canvas, but the random corridors between the dwelling-places were deserted and he was able to make his way unchallenged and hopefully unseen.

Having gained the raft at this unusual point, he now found difficulty in determining the way to Kitten’s shack. He knew that it lay seaward and rather to the left of his present position, but apart from this vague reasoning he was unable to gain a bearing. In the uncertain light his journey was more than usually precarious because of the gaps and faults in the decking. Twice he nearly fell, and once he twisted an ankle before the growing light became sufficient to enable him to choose his way more carefully.

It finally took him an
hour to reach the shack. Somehow he had gone hopelessly off course, and it was not until the daylight was more advanced that he was able to use features on the shore to correct his reckoning. Already some of the occupants of the raft were beginning to stir, and some early-risers peered at him curiously as he made his quiet way past their homes. With the police cordon separating the raft from the mainland, the raft’s inhabitants were more than usually suspicious.

He knocked cautiously on Kitten’s door. There was no reply. He knocked again, a little louder, but still gained no response. Trying the latch, he found the door would open. This was an unlikely circumstance, but he put his head inside the door and called.

‘Kitten!’

No answer.

‘Kitten, it’s me – Manalone …’

Closing the door behind him, he went inside.

The wrongness of the situation clawed instantly at his nerves. The shack was empty, bare except for one small table. There was no sign of Kitten or her children or her furnishings. Four items only remained to catch his eye: the scrubbed wooden table, a silvery candleholder, a lighted candle and the big old book. Warily he explored the rest of the shack. It had not only been cleared but scrupulously cleaned also. Not another trace remained of its former occupants.

Suspecting an MIPS trick, Manalone peered out of the windows but saw no signs of an ambush. He turned back to the table, wondering why the object he most urgently wanted to find should have been so prominently displayed.

‘You’ve been anticipated, Manalone. Not only do you want to see this book, but somebody else wants you to see it also. Perhaps it’s examination day for the “test”. Well, you’ve already lost control of your own destiny, so you might as well read on.’

The long, slim candle was one of the most expensive kind he had ever seen. The candleholder was a modest faceted orb, but from the whiteness of its polished faces Manalone guessed it was silver. The stark simplicity of the setting in which he found the book seemed curiously symbolic; though what it was a symbol of, he found difficult to define.

Carefully he
turned the pages of the book, trying to draw new information out of the paper, desperately seeking a new perspective. He found himself hampered by an appreciation of the fact that the drawings were subjective impressions, interpretations of life seen through another person’s mind. Constantly he was making allowances for the colour of the unknown artist’s thoughts. But was he compensating too much, or not enough? How much was caricature and how much artistic licence – and how many of the lines spoke the literal truth?

‘
And what would the implications be, Manalone, if you accepted the whole lot at face value?’

A few seconds later his face was ashen with a kind of terror. Before his eyes the pictures reformed themselves into a mutually consistent representation of something he had hoped could not have been true. His mind rebelled even though he had the evidence before him, and his knees complained about the weight of his body. However, a thousand previously unrelated facts crowded in to support his new-formed fears. No matter how he tried, he could not reestablish his old viewpoint. Having seen what lay beyond the holes in reality, he became totally committed to the view.

‘The bastards!’ he said.

Tears of some rageless passion made the pages swim before his eyes. The loss of vision was unimportant: the element of clarity was now within him. It tasted bitter on his tongue, and made his ears buzz and caught at his stomach with cold fingers of sick surmise. After that moment of revelation, nothing about his world could ever be quite the same again.

‘Pull
yourself together, Manalone! You’ve found an answer, but is it the right answer?’

The more he considered the proposition the more certain he became that he now could see the complete puzzle from which his isolated pieces had been drawn. As he fitted the elements back, he knew that for him at least, reality had changed irrevocably.

‘You’ve seen all this before, Manalone. One night at Cain’s, just after Paul’s death. You attributed it then to chemically-induced depression. What’s your excuse this time?’

This time he had no excuses. Although he fought it, the new perspective remained firm. He could not blame this new and bizarre view of reality on any human weakness. The nightmare itself had become a fact.