The Prophecy Overground Chapter Five

Maria was already sitting at breakfast the next day.

‘I thought we could have a bit of a spread to-day,’ she said.

Kaleem looked at the table. It made a change, he supposed. There was fresh fruit, pancakes, honey and yoghurt and natural orange juice. His mouth started watering. He was certainly hungry and he would enjoy eating this. But could they afford it?

‘We need to celebrate. Not everyone is invited to receive Golden Knowledge,’ she continued.

‘Mum, are you sure this is okay?’ asked Kaleem. ‘I mean, it’s great, but how much did it cost?’

‘Oh. I’ll just take on a few more assignments this month,’ said Maria. ‘It’ll be all right.’

He didn’t know how she was going to do that. Where would she find more time from?

‘Mind you,’ she said, waving her hand in the air as if to shoo away some flying insect, ‘I don’t hold with all this prophecy stuff. Nonsense, really. But Razjosh is right. We must keep the old languages alive. Well, they’re not really old. They’re still spoken on other planets.’

Maria was speaking quickly. It was as if she didn’t want Kaleem to say anything. At last, though, she bit into a pear.

‘Mum,’ started Kaleem. ‘Why …?’

‘Mm,’ she said quickly. ‘I’d forgotten how delicious fresh pears could be.’ She took another bite. ‘You really cannot beat fresh fruit, you know.’ She closed her eyes and breathed in. Then she opened them again and stared at Kaleem.

‘Now what was it you were saying?’ she asked. ‘What were you going to ask me?’

Something about the way that his mother was looking at him warned Kaleem he needed to be careful. She was not going to tell today.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What, then?’

This was a game she often played. That look. Then he would be the one to say it was nothing really and it didn’t matter. It could wait.

He wasn’t going to let her get away with it this time.

‘Why doesn’t everybody learn the old languages?’ he suddenly blurted out instead of the question he’d wanted to ask. He couldn’t do it. He could not get past that stare.

Maria looked at him through her eyelashes. She pursed her lips. The corner of her mouth went down a little.

‘I guess they don’t want people to find out too much,’ she said.  ‘It might make them think about what other places and people may be like. Might want to go there.’

Kaleem suddenly had an image of the view through his skylight, and then of the sun shining on the park. There was a whole world out there. Other stars, other galaxies, other planets were peopled with those who had moved from here and formed  new colonies or who had been born there in the first place. Never once had he been invited to go and see it all.

Not that he had long to dwell on these things. The communicator buzzed.

Kaleem jumped.

‘Delivery for Malkendy,’ said the electronic voice.

Kaleem looked at his mother. She raised an eyebrow. Neither of them had requested a delivery. Maria indicated with her head that Kaleem should find out more. Kaleem clicked his fingers. The house robot whirred into action. The screen in the lounge showed the view from the camera just outside the apartment. Four large boxes were piled up by the entrance.

‘Read label,’ commanded Kaleem.

The robot whirred again.

‘Delivery is from Razjosh the Elder,’ it said in its tinny voice.

Maria was frowning. ‘What’s he sending us things for?’ she muttered. ‘I hope all of this isn’t going to make us too conspicuous.’

‘Well, we can’t just leave it out there,’ said Kaleem.

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Maria.

‘Transport,’ Kaleem commanded the robot.

The machine trundled away.

‘I really don’t want to be taking gifts from people, you know,’ said Maria. ‘I mean, it’s great, really great, that you’ve been picked out for this, but I do want us to carry on managing on our own.’

Kaleem did not know what to say. It seemed like hours before the little robot returned with the large packages. They looked even bigger as they glided into the middle of the apartment.

Kaleem and Maria stared at the boxes for several minutes.

‘Read tag?’ asked the little machine.

‘Yes!’ Kaleem.

Maria had closed her eyes.

‘Go ahead,’ commanded Kaleem.

‘Dataserve Terrestra Seven,’ said the machine.

Kaleem could not believe what he had just heard. The Terrestra Seven was the latest of the higher-grade dataserves. Not even Pierre’s was as clever or as sophisticated as that one.

Maria had opened her eyes again. Even she seemed not to know what to say.

‘There is an added message,’ said the house robot.

‘Read,’ commanded Kaleem.

‘Kaleem, Maria,’ said the machine. ‘Do not be offended by this gift. Kaleem has quite a hard job to do. He needs all the help he can get. The Terrestra Seven should make his work easier. It already contains the knowledge which Kaleem needs to begin.’

Maria turned to walk out of the room. Her face was very red.

‘Mum, it’s all right, isn’t it?’ asked Kaleem.

Maria waved her arm dismissively and shaking her head, she went through the opening.

Why was she like this? Kaleem could not understand why she was so reluctant to let other people help her? Anyway, it was him that Razjosh was helping, not her.

‘Assemble?’ asked the robot.

‘Yes, I think we should,’ answered Kaleem. ‘In my room.’

The little machine pulled the boxes along. It could pull and push things, it could read data tags, but it didn’t have fingers like the more modern robots. Kaleem had to put the dataserve together himself. The machine just told him what to do. Even so, though, less than one hour later, Kaleem’s old dataserve was in the boxes and the gleaming Terrestra Seven was set up, ready for use, in his work area.

‘Well, little robo,’ said Kaleem. ‘We did good. Now let’s see what  this beauty can do. He paused for a few seconds. ‘Power on,’ he commanded.

‘Would you like to customize applications?’ asked the dataserve.

‘What’s the choice?’ asked Kaleem.

He was amazed as the dataserve began to reel off a long list of types of voices. His old machine would have probably have argued and asked him to use standard terms.  ‘Clear away debris?’ asked the house robot.

‘Yes, please,’ answered Kaleem.

The ancient machine busied itself assembling the boxes into a line and pulling them out of the room. Kaleem could have sworn it was offended, and that it turned its back huffily at him. He smiled to himself. That was ridiculous. It was just a machine.

‘A young person’s voice. Perhaps one that would sound like my twin brother,’ said Kaleem.

‘A young person’s voice. Perhaps one that would sound like my twin brother. Do you mean like this?’ said the dataserve, sounding just like Kaleem. So he could say anything to the new dataserve, and it would understand exactly what he meant.

‘Great!’ he replied. It would really be like having a brother.

‘There are some files you need to work with straight away,’ said the dataserve. It didn’t sound bossy like the old one.

‘Good,’ said Kaleem. ‘Show me, then.’

He had half hoped the machine would ignore that command, because he was speaking as if he was talking to a friend. No such luck. The Terrestra Seven knew exactly what he meant.

‘Language awareness skills and knowledge,’ announced the dataserve.

Kaleem didn’t really mind. This new machine was totally fascinating.

Kaleem didn’t stop for lunch until three o’ clock in the afternoon. And then he took a sandwich back to his room. He would have carried on without dinner as well, if Maria hadn’t come to his room and dragged him away.

‘You can’t just sit at that machine all day,’ she said. ‘You do need to get air occasionally. You do need to get some exercise. You’ve got to remember the real world. You mustn’t get stuck in machine dreams.’

He wanted to explain to her that this wasn’t like any other dataserve he had met before. It didn’t mesmerise, but it showed you the real world, made you really experience what happened. What he had seen already!

Kaleem gulped down his main course. Then he looked at the chocolate mousse in front of him. It was usually one of his favourites. Today he didn’t want to eat it, though. He wanted to get back to his machine. His head was so full of ideas.

‘Can I get back to work now?’ he asked, pushing the bowl to one side.

Maria sighed.  ‘Be careful,’ she said, ‘be very, very careful.’

She scooped up a few of the dishes which had been served for dinner, most of which were hardly touched. The house robot picked up the rest.

As soon as they had gone, Kaleem took himself back to his room.

He jumped, though, as he went in. Someone was sitting in his chair. He hadn’t heard a thing though and there was no sign of a break-in. They’d done it without making a single sound.  Kaleem’s heart started thumping.

‘Well, young man,’ said a familiar voice. ‘What do you think of the programme so far?’

‘Razjosh!’ exclaimed Kaleem. ‘But how did you get in?’

‘This is not what it seems,’ said Razjosh. ‘All you are seeing is a machine generated hologram. Though you will probably agree that the Terrestra Seven is quite good at this.’

‘Well… yes….,’ stammered Kaleem. It was hard to believe that Razjosh was not real. He looked so solid and life-like.

‘I am actually communicating with you live, though of course I am really doing it from the Elders’ Citadel,’ said Razjosh. ‘Always when I wish to speak to you, and you are in your room, I shall appear like this.

‘Well, you have already learnt a lot for one day. Your mother is right. You need to take a rest. We can control your Terrestra Seven from the Citadel. When we think you have done enough, we shall deactivate it. Now go and eat your chocolate mousse.’

Razjosh disappeared. The new dataserve switched itself off. Kaleem told it to switch back on. It remained totally dead.

‘That’s good, then,’ he moaned. Suddenly, though, the chocolate mousse seemed a good idea.

He took himself off to the kitchen. The robot was about to empty it into the waste chute.

‘Don’t,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll have that.’

He snatched it away from the machine.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Maria.

‘Yes, and I’ll go for an hour on the exerciser later,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Maria.

The chocolate teased Kaleem’s tongue and the creaminess slid smoothly down his throat. A while later, he worked on the rowing and cycling modes of the exerciser. He set the visuals to woodland. The pictures were disappointing compared with the ones that the Terrestra Seven produced. But he felt the exercise doing him good. He sensed that his body would relax well tonight.

Later, though, just as he was dropping off to sleep, he had a very uncomfortable thought. How dare the Council of Elders decide when he should use his new dataserve. Were they going to be interfering all the time, totally controlling his life from now on? At least that hadn’t been a problem with the old machine.

The exercising had obviously worked, though. He did not have too long to think about that. He was very soon fast asleep.

As soon as he woke the next morning, Kaleem got straight out of bed and commanded the dataserve to switch on. It did so immediately. So! Everything was back to normal. He was in charge again.

He was soon totally absorbed in what the machine was telling him. To-day’s lesson was something about how words didn’t translate exactly from one language to another. One word in one language meant ‘cosy and comfortable’, but also with a feeling of peacefulness. You just couldn’t put it into one word in English. And then in another language, related to that one, there was yet another word, which contained those same ideas, but also the idea of being in good company. Another language had several different words for rain. You could only give a description of  it in English. And if a word had two meanings in English, it didn’t necessarily in another language. Or if there were two different words with the same meaning, another language might only have one word for each. It was a matter of getting used to how these words were used, of getting a bit of feeling for the language. The best way was going to be mixing with the people who spoke those languages.

Fat chance of that, thought Kaleem.

Maria appeared from time to time, encouraging him to eat and to rest. Razjosh also came a couple of times as a  hologram.

‘Naturally, you won’t be able to visit the places which speak the languages you learn,’ said Razjosh. ‘Unless, of course, there occurs the type of emergency we’re training you up for. Then you’ll have to go fully competent anyway.’

Kaleem shuddered at the thought. And yet, goodness, that would really be something.

‘Well, you are understanding things quickly,’ Razjosh said.’ At this rate, you’ll be a completely trained Peace Child within three years. That’s a record. And don’t worry. It will be almost like the real thing. We have interactive hologram and artificial reality programmes  for you. You will really feel as if you’ve been there. Mind you,’ … Razjosh hesitated and frowned a little.

‘We do want you to learn to read. Fluently. So that you stop seeing the marks altogether on Wordtext files. So that you immediately get pictures in your head. Because when you do that with other languages, you can learn really quickly.’

The next day, Kaleem started on the little black marks which appeared on the white background. They gradually became more familiar. They started to make sense without him stopping to work out what the marks meant. It was hard work. His shoulders ached because his chair was not supporting his body properly. Slowly, slowly a few pictures began to form, without even becoming words first.

His back was aching and the back of his throat was beginning to irritate him. It was a little as if he were thirsty. He had been drinking plenty, though, and the diastic monitor had had nothing to say.

He felt a bit cold. He wrapped a spare tunic round his shoulders. He caught site of his face in the mirror. It was bright red. Suddenly his nose began to run. Clear sticky liquid was pouring from his nostrils.

There was a sharp stabbing at his stomach. It felt heavy and full, as if there were a lump there. Suddenly something was trying to get out. He felt burning fluid forcing its way up into his throat. His stomach jerked. The whole of his throat and chest convulsed.  Fiery liquid was in his mouth, then rushing out of it, and arching over towards the floor. This must be illness, he thought. Only we don’t have illness here.

The taste in his mouth was foul, though his stomach felt lighter now, relieved of some badness. He looked at the strange lumpy liquid on the floor. It stank so much that his stomach began to heave again. This time, though, there was nothing left to come out.

He just had time to notice his mother standing in the doorway. He registered how pale she looked, even for her. He heard her call ‘Oh no!’

Then the room began to spin and he found himself falling, falling, whirling through a dark space.

The Prophecy Overground Chapter Four

‘What did you say he wanted to talk about?’ asked Maria. ‘Who did he say he was?’

‘Razjosh, the Elder,’ Kaleem repeated. He had already told his mother this three times. ‘He didn’t say what he wanted.’

‘Razjosh … Razjosh….,’ muttered Maria. ‘Which Elder, though? Did he say?’

Kaleem looked blankly at his mother.

‘What sorts of Elders are there?’ he asked. ‘I just thought Elders were Elders.

‘They all have a different function,’ said Maria. ‘Just like the Heads of Services do. I remember when ….’

Maria stopped suddenly.

‘You remember what Mum?’ asked Kaleem. Was she going to give something away at last?

‘Well, all I know is that there are about two hundred of them and they’re just there to, well, give advice and guidance.’

‘But who are they really Mum? How do they get to be Elders?’ asked Kaleem. It seemed unfair. It was as if people just became Elders, that they didn’t do anything to deserve it.

‘I don’t know,’ Maria said, frowning slightly. ‘They’re just there. They’ve always been there. I think they might be retired Heads, or something. But they do have specialisms. Because when…’

She stopped herself just in time again.

‘Because when what, Mum?’ asked Kaleem. He was finding it difficult to keep the  irritation out of his voice. Why did she have to be so secretive about it all?

They didn’t have time to argue any longer. The communicator buzzed. He was there.

‘Show,’ commanded Maria. Razjosh’s face appeared on the porthole screen.

‘Oh my goodness,’ she said. ‘What have we done to deserve this?

Kaleem shrugged his shoulders. It hadn’t seemed that important when he had first met him. Was it such a big deal, having contact with an Elder?

‘You are welcome, Razjosh the Elder,’ Maria managed to say at last. ‘Kaleem will show you to our apartment.’

Twenty minutes later, Kaleem was showing the old man in. He was surprised at how Razjosh managed the stairs. Kaleem was now used to the two hundred steps between  the surface and their cave. He expected the old man to struggle. He didn’t. He was almost as quick as Kaleem.

‘Mmm, said Razjosh,’ as he came in. ‘These cave homes were so secure and cosy, weren’t they? A pity more people didn’t decide to stay in them. We could have kept the surface beautiful then, couldn’t we?’

‘Can I offer you something to drink?’ asked Maria.

‘Do you still have cave water?’ asked the Elder.

‘Oh yes,’ replied Maria. ‘We have a natural spring near our cave and it is still piped into the apartment.’

‘Ah, such reminders of the old days,’ said Razjosh.

Maria went to the kitchen unit and returned with a glass of water. Kaleem could not understand what was so special about cave water. It was boring to him. They drank it all the time. Maria could not afford the high-density drinks that were now so popular amongst the people in Kaleem’s social group, nor the wines and liquors so loved by their parents.

The old man sipped the water. He seemed to relish it just as others loved wine.

‘Delightful,’ he commented. ‘But now to some even more traditional things.’

Maria looked pale and was biting her lip. She stood with her arms folded across her chest.

‘Won’t you sit down, my dear?’ said Razjosh. ‘I have many things to tell you.’

Maria nodded. She sat down on the edge of one of the chairs. She was frowning slightly.

‘You see, I am here in connection with the Babel Prophecy,’ the old man began.

It was that word again. Maria gasped. Razjosh looked at her intensely for a moment. Kaleem could not decide what to make of the Elder. He looked old, certainly, but  although none of his words or movements was hurried, he was definitely not feeble or slow.

‘Of course, these days, people take little notice of prophecies. Belief in the divine went out when the poison cloud came in,’ he continued. ‘Though its disappearance was  regarded as some sort of miracle, I suppose.

‘Anyway, whether we believe in prophecies or not, part of the role of the Elders is to maintain the effects of the Prophecy.’

This was beyond Kaleem.

‘Effects of the Prophecy?’ he asked.

‘What has to be done according to what the Prophecy has predicted.’

‘But if there’s no such thing as the supernatural,’ replied Kaleem. ‘Why do we have to take any notice of the prophecies?’

‘I didn’t say there was no such thing as the supernatural,’ said Razjosh. ‘I said people had stopped believing in the divine. But that’s not so important. Prophecy is largely a matter of common sense. The clairvoyants - the genuine ones - could see the future clearly. In fact their name comes from the French. It means ‘seeing clearly’. They can see things coming better than the rest of us. ‘

‘French?’ interrupted Kaleem.

‘Another language from another time,’ replied Razjosh.

‘Language?’ asked Kaleem.

‘Which brings us nicely to the Babel Prophecy,’ said Razjosh.

‘The Tower of Babel?’ asked Maria. Her face was flushed now and her eyes were glistening. ‘The tower they built to try to reach God? And were punished by God for being so arrogant?’

‘The very same,’ replied Razjosh. He was looking intently at Maria.

She blushed even deeper. ‘What’s the matter?’ she stammered. ‘That’s not Hidden Information is it?’

‘No, far from it,’ replied Razjosh. ‘That is Golden Knowledge. I  was just curious how you had come to know that.’

Maria shrugged her shoulders. ‘I just heard about it somewhere.’

Kaleem had never heard of Golden Knowledge. There was just what everybody knew and what you weren’t allowed to know, but tried to find out, the Hidden Information.

Razjosh nodded his head and half smiled at Kaleem.

‘Confusing, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘Golden Knowledge is what we Elders know and guard. We reveal snippets of it now and then to those who need to know. Which is what I’m doing now. The Babel Prophecy says there will one day be a very special Peace Child. A Peace Child who can overcome Babel. That means, overcome the difficulties which exist because people speak different languages.  One who can act as a bridge between peoples. All Peace Children attempt to do that. A very special one will succeed.’

‘But why do we need that here?’ asked Maria.

Kaleem was surprised at how fierce she sounded. ‘Everyone on Terrestra speaks Terrestran English.’

‘But not on other planets,’ replied Razjosh.

‘We don’t have contacts with other planets,’ said Maria. Her voice had become quite shrill. She was sitting right on the edge of her chair.

‘We don’t, and we seem not to need to,’ replied Razjosh. ‘But this is a matter of “just in case” and it would seem sensible to keep alive some of the old Golden Knowledge. We have always kept a Peace Child. The current one has grown rather old. It is time to pass on the knowledge.’

‘So, who is this current Peace Child?’ asked Kaleem.

Razjosh looked at him intently, one eyebrow raised.

‘Can’t you guess?’ asked the Elder.

‘You are?’ said Kaleem.

‘Yes, and it’s time to  train up my replacement,’ replied the old man.

‘So, why have you come here?’ asked Kaleem. He knew the answer to that one before Razjosh replied.

‘I think you know,’ said Razjosh. He raised the other eyebrow. ‘So what did you think of my little messages? Have you decoded the Wordtext file yet?’ he asked.

‘Some of it,’ said Kaleem. He realised suddenly that what had been most difficult about understanding the messages had not been so much turning the little black marks on the white background into words, which had meanings he understood. It had been that the total message which did not seem to make any sense. Some of it was clearer, now, though. He understood about the tower, and about what the Peace Child had to do. ‘But I don’t get the bit about the Mother.’

‘Earth Mother. Non-stopes conceptions and all that?’ asked Razjosh.

Kaleem nodded. Maria seemed to be choking.

‘Excuse me,’ she said and dashed out of the room.

‘Yes, well,’ said Razjosh. ‘Even we Elders struggle with some parts of the prophecies. We certainly aren’t clairvoyants. But for most purposes, you can interpret prophecies any way you want. Make of that what you will. But you do agree, that it makes sense that at least one person on this isolated planet of ours keeps in touch with the old languages?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose’ said Kaleem. ‘But why me?’

‘We watch all the young people like yourself,’ said Razjosh. ‘We look for certain aptitudes and attitudes which would indicate a reason for revealing some of the Golden Knowledge. We saw that you did indeed have the right attitude for the Peace Child Project. And we like to check every Peace Child to see whether they fit with the Prophecy.’

‘How?’ asked Kaleem. What attitudes or aptitudes did he have?

‘Well,’ said Razjosh with a sigh. ‘Oh this is a big subject. But one thing which is really, really important, is that you should have an appreciation of what we call otherness. That it exists. And that you can work with it and that it doesn’t have to work against you. It’s something along the lines of the stranger being the friend that you have not met yet. You can’t ignore the strangeness. But you can find the friendship beyond it. And one of the strangest things, of course, is that the sounds which come out of the stranger’s mouth mean nothing to you until you work at learning that language, which you understand better if you understand the speakers better. And you understand them better when you understand their language better. And so it goes on in an ever decreasing circle.’

Kaleem thought of Erik Svenson and Stuart Davidson, and how they treated him because he was a bit different.

‘But I’m the one who’s different,’ he protested.

‘Exactly,’ said Razjosh. ‘And don’t you cope with ordinary people well? Look at how you get on with Pierre LaFontaine and Rozia Laurence. As well as all your teachers and other adults.’

Kaleem blushed at the mention of Rozia.

‘I guess,’ he mumbled. Did he cope with being different? He didn’t think he did.

‘The strange messages I sent to your dataserve were an aptitude test. To see whether you had the right type of learning style and thinking skills to learn the old languages. You seem to have done remarkably well.’

‘Do I?’ asked Kaleem. He had found it so hard working out what the Wordtext files meant and he’d still understood less than half of it, though he had to admit he had found it really interesting.

‘We want to put you on a special programme. You will be exempted from some of your normal schooling, though you will have to keep up with the basics. And we shall need your mother’s permission.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Maria. She was standing in the doorway. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were shining. Kaleem had never seen her look so animated.

‘That is good news,’ said Razjosh. ‘There will, of course, be some formalities. We shall be in touch shortly.’

Seconds later, he was making his way out of the cave. Kaleem offered to accompany him to the surface, but he shook his head.

‘You now need to get back to those Wordtext files as soon as possible,’ he said.

Five hours later, he had done it. His eyes were sore and his back ached. It had been tedious, matching and cross-matching the little marks from the Peace Child file and the dictionary file. But it had got easier as he went along. He had begun to remember what some of the symbols meant and some of the words. He knew a bit more of the story, from what Razjosh had told him. He now knew that the Prophecy said that there would be many Peace Children, but that one would come who would save the world. And that that Peace Child  would overcome Babel forever. There was still a lot he didn’t understand, about why the Peace Chid was called the Peace Child. But now he had a real idea about the role of a Peace Child and he found it rather exciting. In the end, he’d quite enjoyed this decoding exercise. He’d already learnt a few tricks that  would speed things up if he had to do this again.

‘Replay as voice file,’ he said to the dataserve.

‘Historical, note or storyteller mode?’ asked Tin Man.

Well, it would be good to be entertained. ‘Story-teller,’ he said.

‘Long ago, when Man had just started to live on the Earth,’ the dataserve started, ‘there were only a few people and they all spoke one language. Gradually, as children grew up and new families were made, the people moved more and more from the east to the west. They learned to build homes from baked bricks and strong mortar.

“We ought to show how clever we are,” they said, “and use our great building skills to create a great city. We shall make a great name for ourselves. People will remember us - even when we have spread out to cover the lands beyond where the sky and land meet.”

‘The masons worked hard. The tower, which seemed to lead up to Heaven, was completed. Men and women from the city began to climb up it.

‘However, God was not pleased.

‘“They are trying to be God,” he said. “Because they only have one language and they understand each other, they will be able to do anything they propose. I am the only true god. I shall have to confuse their language and make them move from this place to the four corners of the world.”

‘The people were enjoying their climb to the top of the tower. They were telling each other their news and their stories as they went up. The first began to get near to the top. Suddenly, there was an almighty rumbling. The ground began to shake. The tower began to topple. In their panic, they rushed down the steps or jumped from the tower. One person would hardly understand what another was saying. Many died.

‘Of those who survived, only a few stayed in the city near the tower. The building was never finished. The others moved away to other parts of the world, where they raised their families.

‘The languages continued to change, so that today the people who live in the west cannot understand the people who live in the east.

‘The name of the tower was Babel.’

Maybe we did all start off in one place, thought Kaleem, then spread out and filled Terrestra, just as people went from Terrestra and filled the other parts of the universe. If that was the case, we ought to speak more or less the same language, but we don’t.

The dataserve continued to blink at him.

‘Save and close,’ he commanded the machine.

‘Some story, eh?’ asked Maria. Kaleem turned to  see his mother standing in the doorway. Her cheeks were pink again and her eyes shining. He opened his mouth to ask again what she knew about the Prophecy.

‘You ought to get some sleep now,’ Maria said quickly.

More of my Glossary from Babel

Danielle Thomas

Danielle is the very young Head of Science. (See Heads of Service). She discovers that the disease that hits Terrestra is a mutation of the old Starlight Racer Fever. She accompanies Razjosh on the failed mission to Zandra.

She is very serious, and terrified of space travel.      

 

Dataserve

A dataserve in 3500 is to Terrestra what a computer is to 21^st century Earth. It is, of course, much more sophisticated and interacts with other systems. It is voice controlled and there is rarely any Wordext on them.

When Kaleem gets a new one he is able to set its voice to sound like his own.

On Zandra the dataserves are so clever that they seem to be able to read their owners’ minds.  

 

Davina Patterson

Davina Patterson was a talented artist who produced several books in the 21^st Century. Most of them were picture books about Bible stories, and myths and legends from ancient Terrestran cultures. Her books are characterised by their rich illustrations containing many shades of blue, silver and gold. The books became collectors’ items. By 3500 most of them have disappeared.    

Detran Malthus

This is the alias that Kaleem uses on Zandra.

 

Diastics

Every Terrestran household is fitted with a diastics system. Terrestrans monitor themselves on it at least every other day. They simply touch a control pad and the system is able to detect if there is any threat of illness or disease in the body. It then administers a drink that rectifies any potential problem.

An alarm sounds if someone fails to monitor themselves or if the system cannot cope with the problems.

Kaleem manages to make the alarm sound several times.

However, the system works so well that there is a real danger of overpopulation – especially as Terrestrans refuse to communicate with others. Therefore, switch-off has been brought in. 

 

Elders

Elders are elected to the Counsel and are the supreme form of government. They have the power to veto what Heads of Service decide, though they usually just rubber stamp these decisions. They are generally men and women of over 65. Often, they have had a long career as a Head of Service.

The voting system is ritualistic, a little like the way we elect the Pope. Only Heads of Service and other elders may vote for an Elder. The one exception is the Peace Child elder who may only be selected by the current Peace Child. This is because the position is onerous and requires a long apprenticeship.

Elders have access to both Hidden Information and Golden Knowledge.

 

Erik Svenson

Erik is a close friend of Stuart Davidson. They both bully Kaleem because he looks different. 

Executives

These are the ruling forces on Zandra. A Zandrian executive has more power than a Terrestran Head of Service, but less power than a Terrestran Elder. They are a little like ministers in our own government. Unlike on Terrestra, or even in our own world, there is no Upper House like our House of Lords or the Counsel of Elders on Terrestra.  Zandra also has ordinary members of its parliament, so executives are a little like our ministers.

They often have quite quirky areas of responsibility e.g. Marek Ransen is the Executive for Language and Story.

Executive Palace

This is where all the Zandrian Executives have their high-level meetings, celebrations and formal occasions. They do not live there as Terrestran elders live and work at the Citadel.    

Figurescript

Although more widely learnt than Wordtext, Figurescript is not understood by most humans. Scientists and mathematicians learn it. It is the language of maths, including the symbols that we know. Most intelligent beings understand mathematics in a visual way – e.g. fractions look like slices of cake.

   

Franck

Frank is one of the Z Zoners who finds Marijam and puts her in contact with Narisja.

   

Frazier Kennedy

Frazier Kennedy is the charismatic Head of Education. (See Heads of Service). He has a great sense of humour though is not to be trifled with; he expects the best of everybody, including his family. However, he really cares for everyone around him. He is an excellent public speaker and very conscientious about his job.

He is angry when Gabrizan disappears and devastated when his daughter Marijam also leaves a short time later. Nevertheless, he continues to be a good Head of Education.    

He is naturally delighted to welcome Kaleem back to Terrestra, both as his grandson and as the Peace Child. He and Louish are also overjoyed to be reconciled with Marijam.   

Frega juice

This is the alcoholic drink available on Zandra. Kaleem finds it much more enjoyable than Terrestra’s nectar. Both drinks are sometimes made stronger or weaker by the authorities.