Kaleem tossed and turned. The backs of his eyes were
burning. His bedclothes became damp with sweat. He was aware now and then of Maria
coming into his room. Sometimes there were other people, people he didn’t know.
He could hear them whispering but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He
ached all over.
Maria or the house robot occasionally brought him drinks or
soup. But he could barely swallow. He was hardly awake, anyway. And when he
was, all he wanted to do was go back to sleep.
He could not understand anything his mother or any of the
others said to him. His throat felt as if it was on fire if he tried to speak.
It was an effort to move. Even allowing his eyes to follow something made his
head throb. The gentlest light seemed to cut his head into pieces. He preferred
to keep his eyes and his ears tightly shut.
Then he would sleep, though, and the dreams came. They were
starkly real dreams, vivid and brightly coloured. They were full of people he had
never met, but whom he had a sense of knowing well. Strange things happened,
which he understood as he dreamt but made no sense when he awoke.
Then he started to dream the same dream over and over again.
He was walking out of a tall, narrow building, on to a hillside covered with
grass which looked artificially green. He could see children playing, picking
daisies, and making chains with them. Then one after the other, the children
would turn round. He felt afraid as they did so. He found that he was right to
feel afraid. They were not children at all but very small adults with old
wrinkled faces. One of these small people would take him by the hand and lead
him into a tiny chapel, where a large book lay open. Candles burned at either
side. The pages of the book were plain, but they soon filled themselves with
writing. An invisible hand would tear out the page and throw it away, and then
the next page would fill with words - words he couldn’t read, despite his new
skills.
Always after this dream, he would wake up, pain searing
through the whole of his body. Sleep, dreamless sleep, would have been the best
option. But at that point, he did not want to go back to sleep. He feared
having the dream again. It wasn’t so much the content that scared him - although the ugly faces of
the old children were alarming enough, - it was more that he always had the
feeling that there was something he was not understanding, and that the dreams
would carry on until he did.
Gradually, the other dreams became less strange. Only the
one about the book and the children continued. He now knew what to expect with
that one. As he dreamt, he tried to understand. Yet each time, he became more
sure that he was missing a point and he really should know what was going on.
He slept a little less. He began to sip the drinks and
eventually one day he managed a whole bowl of soup and stayed awake for most of
the afternoon. Maria sat with him. For the first time in goodness knows how
long, he had actually felt hungry.
‘The soup was good,’ he managed to say. This time his throat
did not hurt and he was able to look around the room without the shooting pains
in his head. ‘Is there any more?’Maria beamed Well, I’m glad you still
appreciate my cooking,’ she said.
‘You really had us worried,’ she said, as he finished the
second bowl of soup. She was looking serious again. ‘Razjosh thinks that this
may have come from the outside. Or it may be some disease that has lurked
around dormant, since before the poison cloud. That’s why the diastic monitor
didn’t pick it up.’
‘Razjosh has been here?’ asked Kaleem.
‘Oh often,’ said Maria. ‘He’s very concerned about how you’re
getting behind with the Peace Child programme.’
Kaleem could not fail to hear the edge in his mother’s
voice.
‘He doesn’t seem at all concerned that here you are, struck
down by some mystery illness, on a planet that has not known illness for over
two hundred years. No, no, all he’s concerned with is whether you’ll be ready
in time. In time for what I don’t know.’
After that first day, Kaleem was awake more and more often.
The fever went away altogether, he started eating regular meals, and soon he
was out of bed and able to walk a little around the apartment. He was still
rather weak, and he certainly did not feel like working - not that Maria would
have let him anyway. Nor did he want to know anything about what was happening
in the outside world.
Then one morning he woke up, feeling completely normal.
Another part of him, which had been away for a long time, seemed to have
returned suddenly.
He jumped out of bed. It was just as if he’d never been ill
at all. He bounded into the kitchen, where Maria was already instructing the
house robot about breakfast.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You seem to be better.’
‘How long have I been ill?’ asked Kaleem.
‘Exactly seven weeks,’ replied his mother.
Seven weeks. Seven whole weeks. The time had gone so
quickly!
Things seemed to gradually go back to normal after that.
Razjosh appeared to him several times in the holograph. The Peace Child
programme was started again. Kaleem had forgotten a lot of what he had learnt
and much of it had to be repeated.
‘We need to get on,’ Razjosh said as he stood in holographic
form by Kaleem’s workstation. ‘You have to complete at least one whole unit. We
need to know that you’ll be fit if you’re needed. I’m getting older. I’ll soon
not be able or want to travel anymore. And even Elders eventually have to face
switch off.’
Kaleem could not believe what he had just heard.
‘Do you really mean I might have to leave Terrestra?’ he
asked. ‘You mean go to another planet or even another part of the universe?’
‘Oh yes, you may have to travel,’ Razjosh said to Kaleem. ‘There are people who still travel
through the galaxies from Terrestra. We have scouts who keep an eye on others.
But we go quietly. We do not want others to know of us. There would be little
point in you learning all these skills if you weren’t to put them to use,’ said
Razjosh. ‘You may have to negotiate for us one day.’
‘Have you …?’ Kaleem started.
‘Oh yes,’ said Razjosh. ‘How do you think we got rid of the
poison cloud?’
Kaleem gasped.
‘That’s right,’ continued Razjosh. ‘We let people believe it
was some sort of miracle. But it wasn’t. We got rid of it with the help of some
of our friends from another world. Not that you
should ever say anything, not even to Maria. That is classified Golden
Knowledge.’
‘Well if I did have to travel, would you come along as well?’
asked Kaleem.
‘That depends,’ said Razjosh, ‘on just how far into the
future we’re talking about. Look at me. I’m an old man.’
Kaleem could not imagine carrying on with this project
without Razjosh. He could not think what to say.
‘Just work hard, now that you’re well again,’ said Razjosh
and he disappeared.
Kaleem did work hard. He became so familiar with Wordtext
that he could read it from the screen as fast as he could speak English. It
amazed him that since he had recovered from his illness he could work better,
concentrate more. He seemed to understand everything more easily. He worked
hard on the four skills of listening. speaking, understanding information texts
and constructing information texts, in three of the foundation languages -the
ones on which all others are built. He looked at the backgrounds to those
languages, studying the people of the planets where they were spoken.
He was grappling with a Wordtext file, written in French,
which was spoken on three active planets
in his own solar system alone, when he heard a commotion coming from the main
chamber of the cave.
Maria had obviously just let someone in. He recognised
Razjosh’s voice.
‘Put on the news channel,’ Razjosh was saying. He was
actually in the lounge, this time for real, not just as a hologram. ‘Then you
will see for yourself.’
The news was dreadful. Three more boys had become victims of
the mystery illness.
‘Illness has been unheard of on Terrestra for over two
hundred years,’ the newscaster was saying. ‘Officials at the Health Ministry
are saying that it must have come from space, possibly lying dormant on our
planet since the time of the dispersal of the poison cloud. Health Department
scientists are working on producing antidotes which can be added to the diastic
systems. There is no cause for alarm.’
‘I think there is a cause for alarm,’ said Razjosh. ‘In fact
the Council of Elders is generally in agreement about that. But, of course, we’re
playing it down to the public. The Department of Information is keeping a watch
out, and much of the real story is being hidden.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ said Maria. ‘We don’t want
everyone knowing our business.’
‘Well, there is that,’ said Razjosh. ‘But the greater
concern is, where did that illness come from? And also, will people be able to
cope? We’re not used to feeling ill anymore.’
No, thought Kaleem. We’re not.
He remembered how frightening it had been. How
uncomfortable. The nearest to it he had ever experienced before was the slight
tired feeling when he had done too much work, or the fidgety feeling he had
when he’d sat still for too long. There had been easy remedies to that. A quick
burst on an exerciser, a walk outside, or a drink of coffee or of fortified
caffeine juice had soon sorted that out. But when he was ill, there had been
nothing which had relieved his discomfort. Even when he was asleep, he had felt
odd, except in that one dream which came over and over again. Then he had felt
normal. Well, disturbed, yes but more alert and more lucid than normal.
Maria was biting her lip and staring beyond him and Razjosh.
She was even paler than usual. Suddenly, she seemed to wake from her daydream.
‘Do you think it’s going to spread?’ she asked. ‘Will they
be able to stop it?’
‘Who knows?’ replied Razjosh. ‘We can only hope.’
It occurred to Kaleem that not only had he recovered from
the illness, but also it had somehow enabled him to work better.
‘Does it really matter, though?’ he asked. ‘Look, I’m all
right. And I also appreciate being well.’ He hesitated about telling Razjosh
that he thought it had improved his capacity to learn.
Razjosh laughed.
‘That is fine, and good,’ he replied. ‘But we know from the
old days that not everyone responds the same way to illness. A trivial virus,
known commonly as a cold, could kill a baby or a very old person. And some
people made complete recoveries from more serious diseases, but others didn’t.’
Suddenly Kaleem felt depressed. Okay, he had recovered well
from it, but that illness had been terrible. If that was being ill, he never
wanted it to happen again. No wonder disease was not welcome on Terrestra. That
was bad enough. But it was just his luck as well! It would be him who was the
first to catch something which threatened the way everyone on Terrestra lived.
Different again.
‘However,’ continued Razjosh, ‘we shall need to do tests on
you. To establish what the virus is and how much immunity you have developed, and
see if we can culture a vaccine and an antidote and add it to the diastic water
supplies.
It would also be useful,’ he added, turning towards Maria, ‘to
know as much as possible about the parenting of Kaleem. Do you have the Stopes
records to hand?’
Maria went very pale.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I have an urgent assignment to
finish.’ She rushed out of the room.
‘But it wouldn’t take long….’ said Razjosh.
‘She doesn’t have our Stopes records,’ said Kaleem. ‘She
won’t tell. She just won’t say anything.’
For a few hours,
Razjosh and Kaleem looked for his birth records via the dataserve and
information centre, and found nothing. There was absolutely no record of his
birth or conception.
Kaleem was hardly surprised. He had, of course, tried that
himself several times. And Maria had told him nothing.
‘It’s just an error,’ she would say, every time Kaleem asked
her about it. ‘They still happen. It’s not important. You’re a quite normal
young man, aren’t you?’
But I’m not, Kaleem
always thought. I’m so different.
At least with Razjosh present they had been able to look
further. He could access Golden Knowledge. But perhaps the secret wasn’t there.
Perhaps it was buried in the Hidden Information. Even Razjosh wasn’t allowed to
look there.
There was nothing. Nothing at all.
‘Well, it happens,’ said Razjosh. ‘Unusual these days, but
it does still happen. And a bit of a nuisance in this case. Your mother has
told you nothing?’
Kaleem shook his head.
Razjosh sent Kaleem out.
‘Give me time to talk to her without you there,’ he said. ‘Come
back in an hour.’
Kaleem walked and walked, through the park and then out into
the town, way beyond where they’d had the two school meets earlier. He was not
far from the Laguna bar and was almost tempted to go in. But he might meet
someone there and he wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He scuffed the ground
with his feet. Why did she have to be so secretive? Why wouldn’t she tell him
what he wanted to know.
The cold began to nibble at his fingers and his toes despite
the fact that he had been walking so quickly that he was almost out of breath.
He turned back towards the cave. He was calmer and tired
when he arrived home.
Razjosh was still in his room staring at his dataserve.
‘Well, have you found anything?’ asked Kaleem, hoping that
there just might be something.
The Elder shook his head. He looked straight into Kaleem’s
eyes. That piercing blue again. That feeling that he could understand
everything you were thinking just by looking at you. Kaleem shivered.
‘Nothing,’ said Razjosh. ‘I’m afraid she’ll have to be
brought in for questioning.’
Then Razjosh left.
Maria stayed in her room. Kaleem knocked on her door several
times, but she refused to answer. The door stayed firmly locked. Eventually,
late into the evening, he forced the door open and walked into her room.
She was sitting on her bed. Tears streaming down her face.
She quickly stuffed something down the side of the bed.
‘He was a wonderful man, your father,’ she said.
The next morning, Kaleem found her pottering about
in the kitchen. The kitchen robot stood lifeless in the corner. She had
obviously deactivated it. Another good breakfast was spread out on the table.
‘Mum, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble,’ he said. ‘Are we
celebrating again?’
Maria turned and faced him. She was even paler than the day
before.
Her pupils were wide open and she stared at him. She pointed
to the table.
They could not afford all of this, they really couldn’t.
Kaleem had no appetite. He wanted to know more about what
she had said the previous evening.
‘You say he was wonderful, my father,’ he said. ‘So tell me
about him.’
Maria crumpled and fell to the floor.
