Scatterlings Read online

  ‘Amnesia: loss of memory,’ pronounced the tinny voice, smothering the rush of terror. She was struck again by the extraordinary fact of the voices in her mind, as incredible in their own way as her loss of personal memories. The passionless mechanical voice appeared to be dominant, stating facts as if they were being read from a dictionary or a computer memory bank.

  The thought of computers seemed to touch a hidden well of knowledge and she was swamped by detailed memories of the working of computers.

  I must be something to do with computers, she thought, grasping at the meagre clue. She concentrated on amnesia but her mental dictionary seemed unable to elaborate its laconic interpretation. She could not decide if a selective loss of memory were possible. It was not that her mind had been wiped clean, a total forgetting; she appeared only to have forgotten things connected with her own existence. All except for the two internal voices. Would an accident do that? Or was it something that had happened before the accident?

  She rubbed her eyes tiredly, then stared at her hand, looking beyond the blood and dirt to the dark gold skin.

  My skin, she thought. This led to the discovery that she had no idea what she looked like. Her hand looked alien to her, as strange as the hand of another person.

  Her name was Merlin. She remembered her name, but not her face. Was that possible?

  All at once it seemed vital that she see her face. She felt certain she would recognise it, and her memories would return. Lacking a mirror, water would be the next best thing.

  ‘Water catchments are best located in depressions in the ground . . .’ suggested her mental mentor helpfully. Merlin nodded. Ignoring aching limbs, she plunged straight down the incline at a run. It did not occur to her to question the information offered by the mysterious voice.

  The incline was unexpectedly slippery, and she was forced to slow down. The trees were thicker and older, cutting off all direct sunlight. The ground flattened out, and amidst the whispering of wind through the leaves, she heard the unmistakable sound of running water. The noise led her to a small waterfall, dropping a few metres into a shallow depression in the ground.

  She knelt beside a still runoff pool, and pushed away a crust of dead brown leaves.

  A face looked up at her from the water, dark-complexioned as the skin on her hand. The girl in the pool was about fifteen. The hair around the face was shoulder-length, coarse and copper-coloured. The water was stained an ochre hue, and this made the skin and hair even darker; the eyes a peculiar yellow shade.

  It was the face of a stranger.

  She lifted a shaking hand to the side of the face where the blood dripped, watched the surly-faced stranger mimic her, touching fingers to a dark, jagged gash running all the way down the hairline and onto her neck. The stranger traced the cut. Her fingers encountered something hard under the bloodstiff collar of the tunic. She squinted into the bleary water, trying to make out what it was. Some sort of neck jewellery, a collar. It looked like a featureless circlet. It was tight in one place on her throat, as if it had been bent. Maybe that was why her throat hurt.

  She ran her fingers around it, searching for the clasp. She turned the circlet, feeling something long and thick attached to the collar sliding up her back.

  She turned the collar right round, and reached underneath the tunic. Her fingers found a series of attached loops. Puzzled and curious, she pulled it out.

  It was a length of chain.

  2

  In the distance, Merlin saw a city.

  She had toiled to the top of an uneven spine of rock rising steeply above the other hills, determined to get her bearings. She was shocked to find that dark, foreign trees blanketed hills and valleys in all directions as far as she could see.

  A faint smudge of smoke on the horizon behind was the sole sign of the wreck she had left. Otherwise she might be the only inhabitant of the endless wilderness. There was no sign of the searchers, though once, moving away from the crash-site, she had heard the sound of movement in the trees. The scuffling was random and clearly the sound of some kind of animal rushing away. Whatever creatures lived in the forest, they were quick and shy, and Merlin saw nothing but the occasional bird fly up, startled by her approach.

  Where on earth am I? she wondered, amazed at the size of the wilderness region.

  That was when she spotted it.

  Almost hidden behind a ridge were the unmistakable angular shapes of skyscrapers. She was flooded with relief. All she had to do was get to the city. Then she could do something about finding out who she was.

  ‘Cities,’ the mechanical informant said suddenly, ‘contain all the comforts and wonders that humankind can devise, and all their vices . . .’

  In the open, the sun was painfully bright. Merlin went back into the thick shade with relief. Though she had no way of knowing exactly what time it was, she guessed from the sun’s height it was late morning. That meant she should be able to reach the city by nightfall. It did not look too far. She did not like the idea of being forced to sleep in the brooding forest, ignorant of the dangers of its resident wildlife.

  She was unnerved by the trackless wilderness, finding it easier to conjure up visions of cities: bustling streets, people hurrying along sidewalks, newspaper stands with vendors shouting to attract customers – than to envisage the less populated parts of the world. This made her certain she had been a city dweller, and most likely, an inhabitant of the city she had seen from the ridge.

  The air was cool in the shade, and a faint breeze blew constantly, riffling the leaves and setting up a rattling whisper. Everything grew close together and appeared to vary little in type. Apart from the enormous trees, there were only sharp, wiry grasses and a low spreading bush. Wherever the sun was able to penetrate the foliage, the ground was hard and bare.

  Merlin turned her mind resolutely to the conversation she had overheard between the searchers, sifting their words for clues about herself.

  The woman had been called Sacha.

  Merlin had not liked her clever, cultured voice any more than she had liked Andrew’s supercilious tone. Andrew was clearly the leader of the trio while Sedgewick appeared to be least important in the hierarchy. She had thought him young, but he must be older than he sounded to be working with other scientists. It occurred to her that he might have worn the white suit to protect himself not from the environment, but from her. The idea that she was the victim of some mad experiment was farfetched, yet she could think of no other alternative that fitted all the facts.

  ‘When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth . . .’ offered her memory with the air of quoting some irrefutable authority.

  That’s all very well, Merlin thought ironically. But what happened when what fitted all the facts made no sense? She imagined herself trying to explain to a policeman what had happened. She would sound mad.

  She chewed her lip. Perhaps that was what Andrew would tell people. She would have to be careful. It might be better to telephone a newspaper office from a public phone, just to see how they responded. They might already know what it was all about. Maybe she was even registered as missing.

  She forced her mind back to the conversation between the searchers.

  At some stage she had certainly been their prisoner. Why else would she be chained? Her fingers tugged automatically at the collar. It chafed but she had been unable to get it off. It seemed to be completely seamless.

  She drew a sharp, startled breath, remembering something else.

  One of the searchers had spoken of sabotage. Bits of the conversation floated back into her memory. Andrew had said the destruction of the flier was random sabotage. He had blamed a group called the scatterlings.

  But who or what were scatterlings and why would they want to destroy the flier?

  Again she wondered where she was. The weather was tropical, but the vegetation was not. She could remember quite a lot about world weather patterns, and she remembered a t
elevision programme during which the announcer claimed weather patterns were changing because of the heating up of the earth’s atmosphere. She could see the television announcer’s face and neat short hair quite clearly, and that made her lack of personal memory all the more incomprehensible.

  Merlin wished she had looked more closely at the city but she consoled herself with the hope that its familiarity would bring back her memory.

  She had ripped up much of the tunic she wore to make bandage sandals. The soles of her feet were very soft and even the little walking she had done had made them sore. Her legs had been stiff, too, at the start, as if she were not accustomed to physical exercise. But she was growing used to the movement, her muscles more willing.

  Her stomach growled and she pressed her hands to her flat belly. When she had vomited after the accident, her stomach had been empty of solid food. Yet she was not gaunt and undernourished. Whatever else had been happening to her, she had not been starved. Once she reached the city, Merlin knew she would have to find somewhere to eat, bathe and get some clean clothes. Without money, her only option was to find a Salvation Army refuge or a Good Samaritan Soup Bar before she was arrested for vagrancy.

  She was startled when a vivid mental picture of a cake stall run by charity to raise money dropped into her mind like an image in a slide show.

  ‘Charitable organisations try in vain to stem the growing number of street children in the cities who die of exposure and hunger . . .’ the mechanical voice said.

  The names of the charitable institutions and the cake stall sat oddly alongside the gaps in Merlin’s memory. How was it possible to remember things like that and yet forget her own face?

  Weary and preoccupied, she almost missed the road.

  What made her look down was the sound of something crunching under her feet. A black material lay in biscuit-thin slabs half concealed by the grass. Merlin stopped completely when she realised she was walking on the remains of a very old road: a fragile crust of tar which cracked like eggshells under the slightest pressure.

  She was filled with excitement. The disused road must lead to other, used roads. She walked along the edge rather than along the centre of the road, not liking the sound of it crunching underfoot.

  The nearness of safety made her suddenly nervous that Andrew and his searchers would catch up at the last minute. She looked over her shoulder anxiously but the dense foliage prevented her seeing more than a few metres.

  Listening for signs that she was being followed, Merlin noted again the absence of human noises. Surely a city so big would be audible a long way off. She had the sudden awful thought that the accident, whether nuclear or biological, had killed all the people. That would explain the silence and the white suits. Maybe Andrew and his people had been trying to help her before she was dangerously contaminated. The city might be silent because it had been evacuated.

  ‘Primary death figures from a nuclear holocaust would produce a misleading impression since final figures must include not only immediate deaths, but deaths relating to radiation spawned diseases, and hereditary dysfunctions leading to death. It would take several lifetimes to gain a true statistical picture . . .’ reported the mechanical voice.

  Merlin shivered. She appeared to have a morbid character which was not helped by the mechanical doom-mongering of her memory. There was no point in worrying about death and disaster until she was in a position to do something about it. Besides, if there had been an accident that killed the people, there would be no animals either and the furtive rustlings in the bushes assured her the creatures living in the wilderness were alive, if wary.

  As for Andrew’s people, none of the three had sounded like they were worried about her coming to harm. She had done the right thing, and the road told her she was getting close to the city.

  At length the road she was following intersected with another disused road. Further along, yet another road intersected, ending in a mess of rubble formed by the collapse of an immense bridge which had once supported an overhead bypass.

  Merlin was amazed that such major roads had been allowed to fall into disrepair. She had been listening unconsciously for city noises. She could imagine them vividly – car horns, brakes screeching, engines humming.

  The absence of these sounds gave the impression that she was still some distance from the outskirts of the city. This made the first sight of it, moments later, staggeringly unexpected.

  She came out of a thick copse of trees, and there before her lay the city. The old road she had been following led directly into the centre. The forest grew right up to the edge of buildings and through wide cracks in the road’s surface.

  All the roads running into the city were ancient; brittle as pieces of burnt toast. The city itself was a ruin. Skyscrapers were skeletal hulks of rotting stone and weathered steel. Glass was gone from the windows, and outside, steps were crumbled and overgrown with shaggy yellow grasses.

  Trees once confined to circular grills had grown to a monstrous size, their serpentine roots twisting and writhing in all directions, cracking open what remained of sidewalks.

  There were cars too, still parked in the street, though they were little more than rusting, gutted hulks, lacking all finish and interior materials. Leather and padding had rotted to a dry, black lace.

  Water ran freely along widening fissures in the street, and water plants grew along the edges, pushing up through manmade surfaces to dangle tendrils in the water. Leaves formed great, brown, soggy banks along the bottom edges of skyscrapers, where the wind had blown them.

  Merlin walked forward slowly, numbly.

  The wind rattled a piece of corrugated metal high up on a roof and the monotonous grinding noise made a fitting desolate accompaniment to her footsteps.

  She had been afraid she might find people dead or dying. She had even envisaged a city abandoned by its citizens. But not a ruin of such magnitude.

  The puzzling thing was the completeness of the decay. A decade of neglect would not cause so much corrosion. Such slow inexorable destruction would only occur over a very long period: hundreds of years.

  All the signs that might have offered clues to her whereabouts were long since eroded. The city was a faceless, featureless skeleton.

  A few more years and the encroaching forest would eradicate all traces of the crumbling buildings. There was no clue as to what had made people leave. There was no sign that the city had been bombed or physically damaged, no skeletons to say that people had died there.

  Merlin felt oppressed by the age of the ruin, the enigma of its emptiness, the silence, the echoing lifelessness.

  She noticed the remains of a large sculpture overlooking one street corner and frowned. Odd that she should be so certain it had been a sculpture since the fretted stone looked like nothing more than a lump of marble toppled from the surrounding buildings.

  The humped shape gave her a shivery feeling, drew her nearer.

  Her skin puckered into gooseflesh.

  ‘In this sculpture, the artist has made of the stone something soft and pliable . . .’ the whispering boy’s voice said, and Merlin saw the sculpture in her mind’s eye. It had been a nude woman with flowing hair. There was still the shape of the head, bowed, and part of one arm left. But this was barely enough to discern a human shape, let alone that of a woman. Yet Merlin remembered it clearly as a complete piece of art.

  She shuddered and backed away, frightened.

  Around her, the city seemed to reshape and reform before her eyes, assuming a ghostly familiarity. A corner, the outline of a tall building, the knowledge of other streets, all offered themselves as vivid memories of a big, bustling city. She had once seen those streets and watched cars hurry along them, street lights flicking on and off, bright, frivolous shop façades. But her memory was of a vigorous, busy, populated city, not an ancient ruin.

  She might have stood that way for hours, silent and perplexed, if it had not begun to rain. She had failed to notice the ominous
banking of clouds overshadowing the sun.

  The rain, when it fell, was no light spittle, but a hard forceful downpour that hammered on all surfaces and flattened smaller plants to the ground.

  Merlin stared up into the sky, astonished at the suddenness of the downpour. She yelped in pain when one of the drops stung her face and bolted for the nearest doorway, praying the rain would not send the building above down on her head. If it often rained so hard, she doubted the city would last another year.

  The rain increased in force until it was visibly eroding what remained of the street surface; black rafts of tar were wrenched away and whirled violently down fissure rivers. The sound was deafening.

  Eventually the rain fell so heavily that, like a grey curtain, it cut her off from the street.

  There was no door to the building and Merlin moved inside, too tired to worry about the roof collapsing. There were no seats or carpets or furniture left, just black damp rotting remnants of the past and a dangerously sagging floor.

  She sat on the edge of an old stairwell disconsolately, wondering what to do. If only there were someone to talk to.

  ‘It is a vast, lonely world,’ the inner voice confided. ‘It is a hard thing to have no friend to share it.’

  Merlin determinedly ignored the voice in her mind.

  Andrew had been worried she would be found or would communicate with whoever sabotaged the flier. That meant there was help to be found. All she had to do was find the people who had destroyed the flier – the scatterlings – before Andrew and his searchers found her.

  The trouble was she had no idea how or where to look for them.

  Her stomach rumbled, and the brief flare of hope drained abruptly, leaving her aching with hunger and tiredness.

  She shivered. She had no desire to stay in the dead city, but at least it offered shelter.

  The building above creaked dramatically, as if reminding her it was an unsafe refuge at best. She shivered again and wished she had not been so enthusiastic about ripping up the tunic for footwear.