Scatterlings Read online

  Table of Contents

  SCATTERLINGS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SCATTERLINGS

  After the accident, Merlin wakes not knowing who or where she is. Strange voices whisper in her head, but the words mean nothing to Merlin, who cannot even remember her face. Only one thing is certain: this is not her world, though it might once have been. Bewildered and alone, but determined to find out who she is, Merlin sets off through the alien landscape, her only clues the mysterious voices and a primitive youth who befriends her.

  But Merlin will always be the outsider and as she learns of the devastation wreaked by the Citizen gods, and the scatterlings’ impossible struggle to resist them, she comes to realise that only she has the power to free the clanpeople. Somehow, she must tap the ancient knowledge mysteriously embedded in her mind and in so doing straddle past, present and future to break the deadly cycle of violence.

  Winner of the 1992 3M Talking Book of the Year Award. A Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book, 1992. Shortlisted for the 1992 NSW Premier’s Literary Award.

  SCATTERLINGS

  ISOBELLE CARMODY

  Puffin Books

  Acknowledgements

  The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Victorian Ministry for the Arts in the writing of this work.

  Copyright

  Puffin Books

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd

  250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Ltd

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books, a division of Pearson Canada

  10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd

  Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty)

  Ltd 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg, South Africa

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd

  11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

  First published in Viking by Penguin Books Australia, 1991

  This Puffin edition first published, 1992

  Copyright © Isobelle Carmody, 1991

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228440-8

  Dedication

  For Nanny and Pop Carmody,

  who gave refuge to this scatterling

  Map

  1

  For a long time there was silence and endless sleep.

  Then came a grinding sound – a metallic scream and a dazzling flash of whiteness.

  A voice screamed in fierce celebration: ‘Hallelujah!’ as if from inside the dream. It was such a peculiar sensation that she came closer to waking, too close to retreat back into the quiet shadows of unconsciousness.

  Something was covering her face, pressing against her lips.

  Feeling half suffocated, she clawed her way free.

  She was in the back of a van surrounded by blankets, pieces of broken glass and unfamiliar implements. Through a dark tinted window under her, running the length of the cabin, she could see foliage pressed against the glass. A matching window above showed the sky. Clearly she had been in an accident and the van had overturned.

  She sat up, fighting a dizzy sickness, wondering if this meant she had been hurt. Her throat felt raw and bruised.

  Trying to remember what had caused the accident, she became aware of a fierce hissing noise in the cabin. Gas!

  Her heart juddered into a faster, uneven rhythm. Get out, she told her sluggish limbs. Move!

  Disorientated by the angle of the vehicle, she was unable to find the door, but the thick window glass was broken at one end. Pulling herself nearer, she gagged at the acrid smell of mashed foliage which flowed through the opening. She smashed at the glass, making the hole bigger. The glass was surprisingly tough.

  Fortunately the van was not flush with the ground and there was enough of a gap to allow her to slide out.

  She went head first; a faint, hot breeze blowing against her face. It was a tight squeeze and the effort made her head ache. Absently she noticed the van was white.

  ‘Ambulances are vehicles which are painted white and carry sick people to hospital buildings where they can be treated . . .’ said a queer staccato voice inside her mind.

  Ambulance, she thought dazedly. I was in the back of an ambulance so there must have been something wrong with me before the accident.

  The metal above her creaked alarmingly, and she made a last violent effort to free herself from under the vehicle before whatever was holding it up gave way.

  Once out, she laid her head on the ground, waiting for the waves of sickness to recede.

  Something crawled down her neck. Irritated she batted at it. Her face felt wet. She brought her fingers up to her eyes and stared at their red tips. My blood, she thought, sickened. Maybe she had head injuries and that was why she had been in an ambulance. She couldn’t remember the moments leading up to the accident, and that meant she must have been unconscious when it happened. She swallowed convulsively, wondering how badly she was hurt. She did not feel any really serious pain, only weakness and bruising.

  ‘Serious injuries are often completely painless . . .’ the clipped internal voice offered.

  She blinked, startled.

  The van creaked again and the hissing intensified. She dragged herself away, driven by an instinct of danger that bypassed the fog and the queer voices in her mind. Her thoughts moved sluggishly, as if her head were full of wadded cotton.

  Maybe I’m drugged, she thought.

  A loud groan stopped her and a realisation struggling through the mental soup broke through to the surface. If she had been the passenger, there must have been someone driving. Someone was still inside the ambulance!

  Grimly, she worked her knees up under her body. She paused, gathered her strength and pushed herself back onto her knees. She was nightmarishly weak.

  She did not know how she could help the driver. She stared at the overturned wreck, struck by its unusual shape. It had seemed odd from the inside, but she had attributed that to the vehicle being upside down. But even crumpled and overturned, it looked like no ambulance she had ever seen. Where were the wheels?

  Someone groaned again. ‘Help . . . me.’ She could not tell if the driver were male or female.

  She reached out and took hold of a low-growing branch of one of the huge twisted trees growing all around, using it to pull herself to her feet. The tree grew aslant out from the hillside and she guessed the road the ambulance had left was higher up the hill.

  She swayed groggily. Her lips moved but her voice came out as a breathless croak. She calculated five steps to the edge of the
ambulance. It seemed a thousand.

  She took one drunken step forward.

  The hissing noise rose to a sudden crescendo, ending in a loud, dull thump. The force of the explosion lifted her off her feet and threw her back against the tree. A gout of flame rose, forming an umbrella over the ambulance, then falling to engulf it.

  The driver started to scream.

  ‘Maya! Maya! Help me! There’s fire . . .’

  The words disintegrated into shrieks, then into a horrible animal gurgle of agony.

  Then there was no noise but the crackle of fire leaping into the trees and brush around the van.

  ‘Death is a thing all humans fear, because it is a mystery each must face alone . . .’ whispered a new voice, a boy’s voice.

  Dazed with horror, she stared at the burning wreckage.

  A smell wafted on the breeze. Her stomach rumbled hungrily at the scent of roasting meat to be replaced abruptly by a curling revulsion at the realisation that the smell came from the burning driver.

  Her stomach lurched and she leaned forward, vomiting with savage force on the ground at her feet. Little was ejected but a thin bile, but she continued to heave and retch until she was nearly suffocated. The smell of burning flesh filled the air and disgust gave her the strength to stagger away from the sight and smell of the ravaged vehicle.

  Tears streamed down her face at the memory of the voice, begging for help. She shuddered, knowing she might easily have shared the driver’s gruesome fate. She wondered how long before help would come.

  Pressing her hands to her head, she tried to remember why she had been in the ambulance. What was the last thing she remembered? A blur of images filled her mind, tilting and swirling like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope.

  ‘Your name is Merlin,’ said the boy’s voice in her mind, whispery and edged with inexplicable sadness.

  The name felt like it belonged to a stranger. Aloud, it sounded like something she was saying for the first time.

  She pressed her fingers into the eye sockets hard enough to make her eyeballs ache. She breathed slowly and deeply, deliberately thinking of nothing, of the lovely deep blackness from which the accident had wrenched her. Gradually her heartbeat slowed. She opened her eyes.

  All around were the immense trees. If she wandered away from the wreckage, no one would ever find her. They might even think she had been burnt. She guessed she was on an experimental government farm by the size of the trees.

  ‘The government has begun to look at new ways of increasing timber yields. Genetic manipulation of certain varieties has produced giant trees whose timber yield is extraordinarily high,’ offered the mechanical inner voice.

  The sound of footsteps cut through her confusion.

  ‘Movement alerts the hunter to the whereabouts of the hunted, when stillness would have made them all but invisible,’ advised the dry inner voice.

  ‘Come in, Sedgewick,’ said a voice distorted by a loud burst of static.

  ‘Sedgewick here,’ a youthful masculine voice responded.

  The first voice answered over what sounded like a two-way radio: ‘Have you seen anything of her yet?’ The speaker was an older man with a smooth, peremptory way of speaking. Someone used to ordering other people around, Merlin thought. Obviously both man and boy belonged to a rescue team. She opened her mouth to call out.

  ‘Do you think I am a savage to track footprints in the dirt?’ Sedgewick asked resentfully.

  There was a slight pause. Merlin waited for the older man to respond, puzzled by the antagonism between the pair.

  Another burst of static, then the man answered in measured tones. ‘You are certain she was not burned?’

  ‘It looks like she got out through a broken window. We’ll need heatseekers to find her. We should have brought them with us.’

  ’No one expected that she would need to be searched for,’ the man said coldly. ‘She could not have the wit nor the desire to hide.’

  Merlin was very still. She did not like the way the older man talked about her. What did he mean she didn’t have the wit and why should she want to hide from a rescue party? She felt curiously unwilling to alert the pair to her presence. If they were a rescue party, there was something very odd about them.

  The youth was speaking again. She could not see him, but judged him to be less than a few metres away. ‘Well, she has gone. The flier is a burnt-out mess and there is no signal on the tracer.’

  She frowned. Flier? That explained why the ambulance had looked so queer, and why she had been unable to see the road. But even for a light plane or helicopter, it had a strange shape.

  A sophisticated sounding woman cut in on the transmission. ‘Andrew, her instinct for self-protection may have been aroused by the nearness of danger. She is functioning in some form; that is obvious. The question is, how far is she restored? I believe we would have found her by now if she were simply wandering aimlessly.’

  ‘Unless she is hurt, Sacha,’ the man answered smoothly. ‘I seriously doubt that she is fully functioning, whatever the stimulus. Just the same, we will return for the heatseekers, if only to ensure finding her before she makes contact. She must not be allowed to communicate with any of the outsiders. That would be disastrous. She would be contaminated.’

  The woman called Sacha interrupted. ‘You heard the flight recording. It was sabotage. The scatterlings may have her.’

  ‘I see no reason to believe this was any more than random sabotage by the scatterlings. They couldn’t even know she existed. Oren should have been more careful.’

  ‘Well, what are we to do now?’ Sedgewick asked impatiently.

  ’I have said already we will return for the heatseekers. Come back to the flier,’ Andrew ordered. ‘Out.’

  ‘Smug bastard!’ muttered Sedgewick to himself. Merlin held her breath and closed her eyes as the footsteps came towards her. She was filled with fear at the thought of being discovered.

  The footsteps stopped. She opened her eyes a slit, imagining him staring down at her.

  She stifled a gasp of astonishment.

  He was standing only inches from her on the other side of a bush, wearing a smooth, seamless, plastic suit, white boots, gloves of the same shiny-looking material, and a dark-tinted bubble helmet that completely concealed his features. He looked like a spaceman from a science-fiction movie.

  As she watched, the bubble tilted this way and then that in a vaguely dissatisfied manner.

  ‘He’s looking for me,’ she thought, with cold horror.

  She held her breath as the gleaming helmet turned in her direction. For one terrible instant it was still, and she thought he had spotted her, but after a long moment, he turned right around and looked the other way.

  Sweating with fright, she closed her eyes and listened.

  At long last, she heard footsteps; this time receding purposefully. He had given up. She opened her eyes, trembling from head to toe.

  She watched the white suit growing progressively smaller through the trees. It reminded her of the clothes laboratory technicians wore when they were handling contagious diseases. Or radioactive substances.

  A terrible suspicion filled Merlin’s mind. The grotesquely large trees; the memory of experimental government farms; the white suits – was it possible there had been some kind of scientific accident? She remembered something else. One of the searchers, she thought it was the woman, Sacha, had said something about contamination. But if something had gone wrong, where did she fit in? Was she a survivor? A witness? A subject?

  It sounded as if she had been drugged. That would explain why Andrew had called her witless. But the talk of her hiding made her think she had been a prisoner. If only she could remember. Maybe being drugged had affected her memory. But why would the government drug her?

  ‘What the people know of the activities of their own elected government is ludicrously minimal,’ said the inner speaker with complete disregard for the relevance of the information it offered. Maybe t
here had been some kind of government cover-up. Merlin bit her lip.

  A song fluttered into her mind like a torn scrap of paper: ‘It ain’t no use to sit an’ wonder why, babe . . . it don’ matter anyhow . . .’ The voice was raspy, bitter and oddly compelling.

  She stood shakily, deciding the singer was right. There was no point in sitting and wondering. She had better get away from the wreck before the searchers returned. She would have to get to the nearest city. Maybe the police could help her. Or better still, a newspaper because if it were a government cover-up, maybe the police were in on it too. She began to walk in the opposite direction to that taken by Sedgewick. The words of the song echoed in her thoughts.

  ‘Some things, some songs, some words, live longer than men and women . . .’ said the boy’s voice, secretive, confiding.

  Merlin frowned. The voice was hauntingly familiar, yet she was unable to remember a name or even a face to go with it. She wondered if hearing voices inside her head meant she was mad. She felt perfectly sane, if confused.

  If she could just remember what had happened before the accident.

  Even her name seemed strange. If not for the voice in her mind, she doubted she would even have remembered it. Her steps slowed. She stopped.

  She realised she could remember nothing about herself.

  The discovery took her breath away. It was not just that she had forgotten the accident. She had forgotten everything but impersonal bits of information and even those came to her through the insistent inner voices. Her head began to throb painfully, resisting her attempts to force a memory. Her heart was beating very quickly.

  She found she could remember things – streets, cities, cars, even television programmes and voices, news broadcasts, but nothing that had anything to do with her as an individual. And the memories were oddly generalised. She tried to focus in on a day and a sense of panic welled up in her at the realisation that she had no idea when it was – not the day nor time of year. Not even the year!