If Then Page 2

  On her rounds, she preferred to walk around Lewes via the twittens, the steep high-walled alleyways that ran betwixt and between the old buildings of the town. These old ways were quieter and more private; on the high street, she had a vague sense of the other Lewesians judging her and James. Under her role as schoolteacher, she was accountable to every nutty parent and she accepted that, but the feelings of other townspeople toward James was not something she liked to articulate, even to herself. She took no pleasure in it; they feared him, and pitied her. Also, there was an air of playacting on the high street, a let’s-pretend of community life that offended her truth, the moral compromise she had accepted as her lot. As if the choice to submit to the Process had not been a last resort but a way of life they had all long strived for and finally achieved.

  She knocked discreetly on the wooden gate of the Radcliffes’, and then flicked up the latch to let herself in. She had a cap for their infant son, made the previous evening out of her allocation of jersey cotton. She always put jersey cotton aside for the newborns because it was stretchy and soft, something comforting for the child to grow into. The cap was her own design and included a hand-stitched leaf with red and orange cotton, autumnal colours, so that the parents could always recall the season of his birth.

  Ruth called out to see if anyone was home, and waited in the large and overgrown garden. The house was over three storeys and had been allocated to the Radcliffes and another two couples, one young, one much older, forming an ad-hoc extended family. Clearly they had failed to negotiate who exactly – in this setup – was responsible for the garden. She was aware of a heady floral perfume, and was wondering what the source of that scent was – jasmine? Or something richer? – when the man of the house (Laurie? Larry? She never quite caught his name) came out to greet her. She showed him the baby’s cap. Could she try it on the child, to check the fit? No, she could not. He explained that the baby was with its mother. They had walked out to the Institute.

  “His stripe?” said Ruth.

  “We followed the instructions. Gave him the injection, cut his hair, and then gave it forty-eight hours for the cells to form. But it doesn’t look right. The cells are uneven in size, and they’re still growing,” said the baby’s father. He was fuzzy with sleep deprivation, unshaven and uncombed and untucked. Younger than James, his hair a crowd of contrary brown curls.

  “We’ve had a few cases of that over the years. I’m sure the Institute will be able to fix it.” She remembered the purpose of her visit. “Can I leave the cap with you?” Laurie or Larry accepted it from her, turned it over in his hand, his feelings equally reversible: on the one side, he appreciated the care she had taken in making this gift for his newborn son, and on the other, anguish at the fear and pain caused by the striping.

  “I’ll come by in a week,” she said. “And I know that when I do, your son will be fine.”

  It was not an empty reassurance. After the injection of the new cells and initial discomfort of their formation under the scalp, people were, by and large, fine. With some grooming, the stripe could be concealed, forgotten about, except in the private moments. Closing the gate behind her, she wondered what the next stop was on her rounds, and found herself touching her stripe, felt the hundreds of tiny folds and ridges under her scalp, the rough discoloured skin on the back of her neck and at the top of her spine. An odd odour came away sometimes; in the twitten, she caught a whiff of it on her fingers, a yeasty concentrate, sour and fungal. She got on her tiptoes, reached over into a neighbouring garden, and plucked bay leaves from an overhanging branch to wipe her hands clean.

  The twitten brought her into the ornamental garden of the old hotel, a sloping lawn terrace with a southward view to the Downs and the quiet lanes of the A27. It was noon or thereabouts, and on the lawn Jane Bowles was organizing the preserving and pickling of the produce grown in the allotments. Rows of jars laid out in the sun, using the natural disinfectant of strong sunlight, the best way to dry the jars after they had been scoured with hot water. Jane gave a quick wave to Ruth as she passed by, then continued instructing two men carrying hot jam pans. That was the thing with Lewes life. You bumped into people. And she bumped into Jane more than anyone, their friendship a string of chance encounters. They had organized something once – an afternoon in the bitterly cold lido – but the date did not deserve repeating: the Bowles had children, and they did not, and James was not easy to be around, if you were unaccustomed to the way his presence drifted in and out.

  She taught one of Jane’s children, blonde Agnes, precocious but polite enough. But then all the children were precocious in one way or another, one of the benefits of the stripe, and living among the kiss-kiss tree and the other natural forms made over by the Process. What had begun as a last resort had become an ongoing experiment in human potential.

  Ruth watched the two men in undyed burlap tunics pour the jam carefully into a jar: a berry jam, red and thick and translucent in the pan that, when it ran, turned amber in the sunlight.

  “I’m impressed,” Ruth said to Jane. “A very organized operation you have here.”

  “I used to be a project manager,” said Jane. “Making apps.” She shrugged, made that sigh and shrug that Ruth recognized as one particular to the people who had accepted their losses in the Seizure. “Today I make jam and pickle vegetables. Over the weekend, I organized the children into picking gangs and set them a competition as to who could bring back the most fruit.”

  “Did they go far?”

  “We let them go outside the wall. As far as Glynde. Your husband kept an eye out for them.”

  Jane admired Ruth’s homemade dress, muslin with a printed white whorling pattern that grew denser toward the hem, puffy sleeves and a frill around the neckline, matched with a black and white wired ribbon in her ponytail. Jane was wearing a pinafore dress made by the Process, thick burlap like the men’s tunics, too heavy for this weather. Jane’s stripe would register her elevated body temperature, the nagging discomfort of the dress, her irritated adjustment of the straps and this data would inform the next iteration of dresses. But, for now, too hot.

  “Were you always a teacher and a seamstress?” asked Jane.

  “Neither. I ran a library.”

  “One of the first to go then.”

  This remark annoyed Ruth.

  “Not at all. The worse things got, the more that people needed the library. And then we were Seized.”

  The emotion of that day returned to her, the fury and the sickening helplessness. Redundant, she was texted a number to call for help but the helpline was a labyrinth of misdirection, appeals and further promises, all broken, never intended to be kept. Her customers were irate; she stood with them in the forecourt of the library, locked out, and still they asked for her help. Not asked. Demanded it, shoving their mobile phones at her, failing to understand that she was one of them now. It was so primitive what was done to them, a simple exercise of brute power under the guise of necessity. They took what the administrators offered to resettle, and their landlord got somebody else in. James said the signs were there for them to see. He knew from the way the Prime Minister assured the people that their property rights would be respected, and that no one would be forced to part with their assets, that it was over. Property market falls in China. Russian aggression in the Ukraine. Flash crashes every hour on the stock market – the rumbles of an oncoming storm.

  Ruth had stood on their porch brandishing a large kitchen knife in her small hand, weeping. When you are a small woman, you rely on the rule of law to confer the authority and respect you deserve. She would not live without it.

  Jane, sensing that Ruth was on the verge of tears, offered her some bread with warm jam. It tasted good. In the first months of the Process, they had been forced to survive on the weave of proteins and gloop of carbohydrates that it assembled. The nuances of good fresh food were beyond it. The patterns for the manufacture of an apple were incomplete.

  “That’s nice,
” whispered Ruth, staying quiet, not wanting to sob.

  “I wonder what the Process makes out of our grief,” said Jane. “How does it respond to our sadness?”

  “By making us feel better.”

  “But how can it do that?”

  “We do keep bumping into each other,” said Ruth.

  “I’m sorry I upset you,” said Jane. Her smile was uncertain. There was a lingering suspicion in the town that it was unwise to upset the bailiff or his wife, as if their emotional wellbeing carried more weight than others when it came to tipping the scales of eviction. Ruth assured Jane that no harm was done, but that was not enough. Jane would worry about this slight for the rest of the day; it would nag at her at four in the morning up until the next announcement of the names of the evicted.

  It was important that they made this life work. Perhaps the Seizure would not last forever, and the rumours of a coming restoration were true. Perhaps it would even fall to the people of Lewes to lead the way in that restoration, as a model town, with their new ways of living with the Process. In which case their cooperation was vital. When she accepted the stripe, she did so not only because it represented survival at a time when survival was at stake but because James had persuaded her that if this experiment worked – and it was an experiment repeated in other modest towns across the world – then cooperation with the algorithm represented hope of sorts.

  She hefted her oilcloth bag onto her shoulder, said goodbye to Jane, and continued on her rounds. Of course Jane would not be evicted: the good mother of two healthy children. No metric of happiness could possibly benefit from the removal of someone like that.

  Ruth walked up the twitten toward the motte-and-bailey castle at the heart of the town, strong and timeless atop a raised earthwork. The main street was quiet. The air was cool under the shadow of the keep. She walked up a cobbled path toward the Bowling Green. What did the Process make of her sadness? She knew what James would say: that the sadness was merely blue data and the Process would sort out the accompanying stimuli that caused the dip in sentiment, and so find a pattern to rectify it. But he was just the bailiff, and in all likelihood merely repeating what he had been told at the Institute.

  She turned down a twitten, and here the shift in temperature from warm afternoon to bright cold evening was palpable; the surrounding hedges were overgrown, and the high branches of the trees entwined to form a dark green archway overhead. The twitten wall had crumbled back into a yard, forming a gap. The gap led into a small garden that had run to tall nettles, and contained a shed with a rusty corrugated iron roof. She felt a prickling in her stripe. There, padding slowly across the undulations of the roof, was a drone fox, sniffing left and right. Its brown pelt had not grown back where it had been striped, and its left eye was bloodshot, the eyelid swollen and half-curled in. Birdsong overhead, the distinctively arrhythmic jazzy birdsong of the Process; the sensation in her stripe changed from a pickling numbness to a fluid oozing, neither unpleasant nor unknown to her, the nodules giving up their temporary form to release their data. The drone fox shook its head as if to rid itself of an annoying fly or embarrassing memory, and then it stumbled, the legs on its left-hand side buckling under the weight of its body. Its flanks shivered, and the prickling in her stripe abated. Whatever sadness she felt had just been absorbed into the Process.

  3

  At the end of the village, the track was thick with overgrown honeysuckle bushes and hawthorn trees, with blackberry and rose bushes stripped of their fruit and hip. Hector stumbled through the branches and fell forward onto his palms. He glanced up at James, right hand grasping the rope, their gaze locked.

  James offered his open palm. “We need to push on. Not far now.”

  The soldier pulled harder at the rope, a second experiment in volition. James took out his woodsman’s hatchet, and removed the glinting edge from its leather sheath.

  “You must stop struggling.”

  The soldier’s eyes ranged around, ignoring James and the head of the axe, attending only to the equation of war in the ether. James heard it too, like a voice from a burning bush or a greeting from a strange animal. The implant partitioned his mind so that some thoughts came from outside of himself, from nature or machines. In this instance, the thoughts seemed to come from between the sun-flicked branches of an oak tree, and they concerned the mathematics of conflict, calculating the correlation between the lust for vengeance and the number of casualties or the vigour to fight against the loss of territory.

  The crimson beads threaded through the soldier smouldered and he leapt at James, grappling his waist, so that they fell together. James felt a rush of heat from the soldier’s skin; crimson beads melted to form blood, and the blood soaked through the bandages.

  The two men struggled hand-to-hand. During the Seizure, James’ only relief from redundancy had been his civil defence shifts. He knew how to subdue another man without causing unnecessary hurt. The Process fought like a roach on its back, poorly and unfairly, and could accidentally take an eye or sever an artery. James had to be careful. He hoisted the soldier up with ease, turned his face from his chemical breath, and threw him through the thicket and onto the greensward.

  James climbed over the dry stone wall and drove Hector across the field, and then down into a wood. With the rope trailing behind him, the soldier was caught up in the momentum of the steep decline; he stumbled, and then fell head over heels over head. The bailiff followed at an implacable lope. The signal of the Process was weaker in the valley. After each fall, the soldier struggled to get up again.

  The Institute lay somewhere within the wood. The old landmarks were concealed beneath unchecked growth. The sheep trough was familiar: a circular concrete divot holding a shallow mirror of rain and a reflection of the morning cloud. The edge of the grounds was marked by a wall of crumbling brick sheathed with grey lichen; it had been broken, here and there, by roots and branches. James heaved the soldier over the fallen brick, then scrambled after him into the wood.

  The tall larch and beech trees made a vaulted ceiling. The light scattered by the leaves reminded him of the coloured patterns thrown by a stained glass window. He found serenity among the cool indifference of trees. A muntjac deer, small, with haunches higher than its withers, glanced at them through coppiced trunks, then darted away at their approach. James stepped through a bone-white configuration of fallen branches. So much dead wood. The soldier’s blood solidified into crimson beads, and his expression grew heavy and docile. James hauled him through the bronze mulch. There was no fight in him anymore; the semblance of humanity caused by that outburst of will and determination was gone, and he had returned to his factory setting of diffident automaton.

  The wood sloped downward. Smoke rose from a charcoal burner’s camp pitched beside a stream. The kiln gave off its tarry trail. James dropped the soldier under a tarpaulin strung over a cooking fire and called out a greeting. Two grubby children in the brushwood watched but did not answer.

  Hung from an iron hook stuck into the earth, a dixie pot boiled on the campfire, a stew of muntjac bones, nettles and cobnuts. James waited for the charcoal burner to emerge from his cat hole, and soon enough the man came out of the woods, adjusting his braces and wiping his hands clean upon a wet leaf. He greeted them with mannered courtesy. James inquired about the condition of the Institute. The charcoal burner shook his head.

  “We don’t go there anymore.” He took a pocket knife and stirred the stew, poking at the venison. “They used to take two dozen sacks from me a month,” he gestured toward the charcoal kiln and its lid of earth sections, strewn with bluebells and fern fronds. “Then about a year ago, they stopped coming out to meet me. I went to speak to the woman who runs it, Ms Drown, do you know her?”

  James nodded. Alex Drown. The woman who had overseen his implant and made him into the bailiff.

  “She told me they wouldn’t be needing any more charcoal. Said they had made other arrangements. Bullshit. But I have learnt to
mind my own business. Do you have any tobacco?”

  The man mimed a pinch, his lean face streaked with charcoal, his collarless shirt ragged from being washed on river stones and dried on a branch. James shook his head.

  “Does he have any snout?” The charcoal burner gestured at the soldier, who sat upon a log with his head bowed. The soldier did not respond.

  “Your friend is very quiet,” said the charcoal burner.

  “Have you seen other soldiers in the woods?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not often I get to talk to a gentleman like yourself. When I go into town they aren’t so friendly since the crash.”

  “The Seizure,” corrected the bailiff.

  “Is that what it’s called now? The Seizure?” He speared a piece of venison and chewed over that thought. “The people in the Institute – I mean, the people who are left there – they’re not really people anymore.”

  “In what way?”

  “Ms Drown warned me not to return. That the staff and the inmates had been experimenting on one another. They were carrying them out on stretchers.”

  “Experimenting?”

  “Poking around in here,” the burner pointed to his own narrow skull. “I saw a figure through the windows of the great house, naked, about seven foot tall, and something wrong with his head. They do operations there.”

  “I know,” said James, running his fingers through his hair. “Have you seen anything recently?”

  “My sons went out there. You know what children are like. Wouldn’t listen. They listen now. They came back shivering and white. I would move to a different wood except my kiln is here and the stream is good. A man gets lazy.”