Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

She remembered a newscast she’d seen on one of the channels, years ago; a drought-stricken village in Africa, Ethiopia, or the Sudan, somewhere that had never broken the poverty and drought cycle even in the twentieth century. And by the time the new millennium arrived they never stood a chance. A place where the Warming had killed even the dreams that there could be an end to suffering.

The village had been equipped with condenser mats, sucking precious drops of moisture out of the night air. They were pinned to the roof of every hut, the way European houses wore solar panels; a donation from some grandiose Bible-belt American Church charity. The inhabitants had been dying, now the flatscreen showed her healthy children, fat cattle, vegetables growing in hydroponic troughs. It was an oasis, surrounded by dead land, soil so dry it had long since crumbled to dust; the air was completely motionless, had been for years, a decade-long doldrum zone. There were bones out there beyond the huts; cattle, goats, chickens, bleached platinum-white, half buried by the slowly building dunes, they were circled by the skeletons of vultures.

The channel crew was there because the headman had killed the Church technician who’d installed the mats. A centenarian with wrinkled leather skin, protruding bones, a ragged old loincloth; the embodiment of land wisdom. He looked directly into the camera with cloned black eyes, undaunted and contemptuous. “Why have you done this?” he asked. “First you murdered the air with your greed, now you send us machines that bring water from nothing. You have stretched our agony across time. We live on the price of your pity, coins you have cast away. Miserable beggars whose piety and distress is our only weapon. We are reduced to eternal ~ compassion victims. If you truly pity us, give us back our dependence on the weather. Bring back the rain and the wind. Then all men may be equal in our dependency again.”

She had understood what the headman had meant, how he felt. The insulting humiliation of relying on a technology he couldn’t begin to understand, sent as a gift by people he did not know, reducing him and his relatives to little more than chattels. A primitive culture preserved by godlike science, a throw-away act of charity. He’d lost every shred of dignity, his entire existence subject to whims outside his control. Whims of a culture that had wrecked his land in the pursuit of its own comfort. Unforgivable.

Primitive cultures were always assimilated into advanced cultures. Values supplanted, and finally ruined. A fundamental law of nature. And her own genetics laboratories had said the aliens were billions of years more advanced than humans.

Atomic structuring was the condenser mat all over again, and now she was a peasant villager. Greg’s Russian general had the right idea, she thought, the same one as the headman.

The Pegasus dropped smoothly on to the Hambleton peninsula’s mudfiats, finishing up at a slight angle, nose pointing up towards the Mandel farmhouse. Julia made a grab for Matthew as the belly hatch opened. “Now listen, your aunty Eleanor is pregnant, and that means you’re not going to cause the slightest trouble for her. You’ll do exactly as you’re asked, you’ll do it without complaining, and without arguing. Understood?”

His face transformed itself into a picture of hurt innocence. “Mummy!”

“Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“Really,” he said.

“All right.”

The groves were alive with activity, people and handcarts, tractors, smaller children running under the trees. Shouts and snatches of song carried down the slope to where she was climbing up the limestone chunks. Smells of cooking and cut grass mingled through the muggy air. Humidity next to the reservoir was wicked. She could see the travellers were all in hats and caps, men stripped to the waist. She was attracting quite an audience.

Oliver and Anita came down to meet them, accompanied by five other kids. Daniella and Matthew joined them, and they all took off towards the field where the cars and vans were parked; two security hardliners in casual clothes trailing along behind.

Three hardliners followed Julia up to the farmhouse, two of them carrying the children’s bags. There was a sixteen-wheel lorry parked in the farmyard. A couple of men were busy loading it with white kelpboard boxes full of oranges. They glanced briefly in her direction as she came through the gate.

Christine drove a tractor in from the groves, its trailer piled high with more white boxes. She waved at Julia, but didn’t get down. Picking was a serious business, Julia reflected. The girl started to back the tractor towards the lorry, grinding through the gears.

Julia rapped her knuckles on the kitchen’s door frame as she came in. Eleanor was sitting in the carver’s chair at the head of the long bench table, three cybofax wafers spread out before her. She glanced up. “Come in, you’re not disturbing me. Trying to get some byte shuffling done. Looks like we’ve got a good yield this year.”

“Thanks for having the children,” Julia said. “I just hated the idea of my problems ruining their holiday.”

“They’re no trouble.” Eleanor raised a glass to JUlia. “Help yourself. It’s only Perrier: if I can’t touch alcohol then you can suffer as well.”

“The odd glass of wine wouldn’t hurt.”

Eleanor’s hand fluttered irritably. “Ha, you know what Greg’s like. Bloody men. One prenatal clinic, and they’re all qualified gynaecologists.”

Julia pulled out a chair, and poured some Perrier out of the bottle. “Royan was the same. I suppose it’s excusable in his case. After I had him stitched back together he was very health conscious-exercise, diets, screening cream. The works.”

“You miss him?”

“Course I miss him.” She rolled the glass between her palms. “That’s the problem, I think. The way I treated him. I made him, Eleanor, took him out of Mucklands Wood and turned him into my ideal man. So stupid.”

“Don’t be silly, he had to leave Mucklands. You knew it, I knew it, Greg knew it. Royan did too, afterwards.”

“Yes, but I never let him go free, did I? I had it all planned out, his role in life. We were such good friends, you see, after he saved Grandpa’s NN core from the virus. It was a dream for me. I had to go out in public and be the Julia Evans, talk contracts, deal with politicians, arrange finance with banks. Dear Lord, I was only eighteen. Then when all that company work was finished for the day, I could run away into my mind, and there he’d be, waiting for me. It was like having one of those imaginary friends children invent to keep themselves company. No one else knew he was there, no one else could see him. He was all mine; and we talked, and he sympathized with me, and I felt sorry for him. What we had was precious. I thought it would be the same after Mucklands. I wanted it to be the same.”

“He did too.”

“Maybe. But he never knew there could be anything else, not at first. He really was born again. A whole new and bright world. But I kept giving him things to do, hotrod for me, father children. That was it, all along, the one thing that was always in our way: I couldn’t change, not with Event Horizon to manage. So he had to fit into my life. We could never begin together.”

Eleanor stood up, pressing her fist into her back as she straightened, and opened one of the wooden cupboards below the workbench. It was a fridge inside. She took out a bottle of white wine with a Kent label. “So he felt smothered,” she said. “Men always do around women like you.”

“Maybe. So how does Greg cope? You’re not exactly a quiet obedient little housewife.”

Eleanor poured a glass of wine and handed it to Julia, a faint smile at distant memories playing on her lips. “We worked it out. The gulf wasn’t as big as you and Royan, mind.”