Chapter 6a
“Thomas Shanks?” said the man in the expensive business suit.
Shanks was sitting up in his hospital bed, trying to recreate the sketch of the piece of electrical equipment he'd discovered on the back of a letter from a colleague. The sketch that might have been an early idea for a high frequency alternator that the Radiants seemed so afraid of. The original had been destroyed during the attack on Adams Valley, but the scientist was pretty sure he remembered how it went. There were only one or two details he was unsure of, and so he'd drawn several variants of the design, all of which were being sent to electrical engineers up and down the country, in the hope that one of them would be able to recreate the machine that Maxine Hester had built. The machine that the Radiants seemed willing to go to any lengths to prevent ever being built.
He put the pencil and paper aside as the man in the expensive suit stood in the doorway. “Yes,” he said. “Are you a doctor? How's Andrea?”
“I'm not a doctor,” the man replied. He closed the door to the small room, then reached into an inside pocket and produced a tin badge. “Morris Tyrell, Ministry of Intelligence. I'd like to speak to you for a while.”
“Andrea’s the head scientist, I'm just her assistant. She's the one you want.”
“No, you're the one I want.” He sat down on the small chair that stood beside the bed and picked up the circuit diagram he'd been working on. “This is the thing that might save us?” he asked.
“We think so, yes. If someone can finish it.”
“I'm told that you and Andrea McCrea are the best in the world. What are the chances, really, that some common engineer who only knows how to lay copper wires will be able to recreate Maxine Hester’s genius?”
“Small, maybe, but if there’s any chance at all we have to take it.”
“Yes, of course.” He laid the diagram aside on the small bedside table, next to a vase containing a few shrivelled cut flowers placed there by some caring relative for the previous occupant of the room. “How are you feeling, by the way?”
Shanks looked down ruefully at the bandages covering his arms. “It looks worse than it is. The doctors say I'll heal. I'll have a few scars to remind me of what happened, but they expect to be able to discharge me in a few days.”
“Yes, I know. I've spoken to them. You blew up a Radiant by running at it with a hot electric candle, igniting the hydrogen leaking from the bullet holes in its buoyancy sacks. Pretty gutsy. You saved Andrea McCrea. She's still in a coma, but the doctors say she has an excellent chance of coming out of it soon. You're a hero, Mister Shanks.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“A modest hero. An enigmatic hero as well, it seems.”
He reached into an inside pocket and produced a small envelope from which he pulled a folded sheet of paper. He opened it and read from it. “Thomas Shanks, raised from a cat by parents Samuel Shanks and Martha Shanks who live in Hapsgood, Westsylvia. Declared human on the 23rd April 729 by the town wizard Simeon Aldercott. Attended Hapsgood primary school and secondary school, then enrolled in Dulchester Technical Academy in spring 740. Graduated with a degree in science and engineering five years later and took a position as assistant to Andrea McCrea a year after that.”
He folded the sheet of paper again and put it back in the envelope. “That's it. That's all we know about you. We sent a man to Hapsgood to try to find out more. He discovered that Simeon Aldercott had never heard of you. What's more, no-one in the town had any memory of anyone called Samuel Shanks or Martha Shanks, and nobody with your name ever attended either the primary school or the secondary school. They do have a record of you attending Dulchester, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned it’s as if you just appeared out of nowhere the day before. As if you just fell out of the sky, a full human.”
A look of resignation came over Shanks’s face. “You say you've spoken to the doctors. I expect you waved that badge of them. Threatened them with treason charges unless they cooperated and told you everything they found while treating me. Right?”
“We're not monsters, Mister Shanks. Everything we do is for the good of the Kingdom, for the people of the Kingdom. Yes, the doctors told me about your peculiar ‘abnormalities’. They don't attach any particular significance to them. They just think you're an aberration, such as crops up now and then. I've been fully briefed on what Brigadier Weyland James discovered in Mekrol, though, and the details of your peculiar anatomy match very closely with something he discovered down there.”
He reached out to Shanks’s hospital gown. Shanks reached out a hand to stop him, then sighed with resignation and opened the gown himself. Morris Tyrell stared in astonishment at his nipples, his navel and his genitals. “Mister Shanks,” he said softly, “You are a member of the Hetin folk.”
“So far as I know, that’s not a crime,” replied Shanks, covering himself again.
“True,” replied the intelligence officer. “However, forging a document of declaration is a crime. I assume you've voted in local affairs. Taken out a mortgage on a house. Taken out loans from a bank? All illegal without a valid declaration.”
“Is that why you're here? To prosecute me for a few minor misdemeanours?”
“I'm not here to prosecute you for anything. I just came to satisfy my curiosity. Mine and the King's. It was he who asked me to come when he discovered your little secret.”
“How did he find out?”
“That's not important. What I'd like to know first is, how many more of you are there, living in secret among us?”
“So far as I know, I’m the only one. Maybe there are others, but if so I have no idea who they are or where they are. Maybe I really am the very last. The very last of my kind in the whole world.”
“Oh I don't think so. I think there are lots more of you. A whole community. Not all in one place. Scattered all over the country, maybe all over the continent, but keeping in touch. Do you know why I think this?” Shanks shook his head. “Because you risked exposure to enrol in a technical college and get a high visibility job working for one of the country's top scientists. Why would you do that? Why take such a risk? I imagine that most of you live in isolation. Out in the middle of nowhere where you rarely meet normal people...”
“We're the normal people!” interrupted Shanks in sudden fury. He immediately looked afraid and shrank down into his hospital bed as if Morris Tyrell might order his arrest for his outburst.
The intelligence officer just looked interested, though. “We're,” he said. “Plural. So there are more of you. I understand your reaction. You are the native inhabitants of this world. The rest of us are descended from globs, brought to this world by the creatures that destroyed your civilisation. You must see us as invaders, like the Carrowmen who are even now trying to invade our country. I'm afraid you and your people have no choice but to accept the situation, though. We are here and we are going to stay. I can see no reason why your people can't live in peace with us, though, so long as those of you living in Helberion are loyal to the King.”
“We are neither loyal nor disloyal. As you yourself said, most of us keep to ourselves. We deliberately avoid getting involved in important matters. To survive, we hide. We avoid getting noticed. We are farmers, homesteaders, hermits. I suspect that most of them have no idea what country they’re living in or what the name of their King is.”
“Except for you. You got involved in affairs in a big way. You got noticed. And there was another, wasn't there? Hetin bones were found in the ruins of the RedHill fire. One of Maxine Hester's assistants was Hetin, wasn't he?”
“She,” corrected Shanks. “Sophie Bellhine.”
Morris Tyrell's eyes widened in surprise. “indeed. So why did you do it? Why take the risk?”
“You've clearly been thinking about this. You tell me.”
The intelligence officer stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. “The Radiants need us,” he said at last. “They need us for adoption, to be new Radiants, so even if they succeed in destroying our civilisation they're still going to have to look after us. See that we’re healthy and so on. We may all end up living in cages, but they’ll want a good, healthy population of humans to draw upon whenever they want to make new Radiants. You, on the other hand...”
Shanks nodded. “They have no use for us at all. We cannot be adopted, we can never be Radiants. We’re still a threat, though. We may want revenge for what they did to our civilisation, so they hunt us. They kill every one of us they come across. They won't be happy until we're completely extinct.”
“Which is why you joined Andrea McCrea's staff. You and, what did you say her name was? Sophie?”
“Sophie Bellhine. Yes. We are teetering on the brink of extinction, Mister Tyrell. Once, there were many more of us. Thousands. We had our own communities consisting entirely of true humans, none of you glob replicas allowed. We multiplied in our own way...”
“Yes I'd like to ask you about that later. Sorry for the interruption. Please carry on.”
Shanks looked at the small window as if gathering his thoughts. “Radiants came sometimes, looking for people to adopt. We drove them away. Back then, they usually went away if you put up too much resistance, but I suppose they eventually noticed that there were towns on the fringes of your kingdoms from which they'd never acquired an adoptee. When that happened, they would come in force. Take people whether they wanted to be taken or not, and when it was confirmed that they'd found a community of true humans they would attack and try to kill everyone. Sometimes we would have some warning. Enough time for us to scatter. Take what we could and disappear into the countryside. Other times they'd have us surrounded before we knew what was happening. Then they would move in systematically. A contracting circle that killed everyone. Men, women, children.”
“And by children, you aren't referring to adopted animals, are you?”
“No. We can adopt animals, but we try not to because they grow to become glob humans, like you, and then we're forced to kill them before they become fully aware.”
“Before they became people, you mean.”
“Yes. And so our numbers fell. Eventually we decided that having our own communities just wasn't possible. We would have to live among you. Pretend to be like you. It was dangerous, though. We could never allow ourselves to be seen naked. You people think nothing about stripping off on a hot sunny day to go swimming. Why would you? You're all the same. Men, women. Physically identical. You can actually choose whether you want to be a man or a woman, and you can change your minds at any time. Just grow your hair longer. Wear dresses. Change your name to Sally or something... Us, though, we had to keep our clothes on whenever we were among you. It meant we couldn’t participate in certain social gatherings. Saunas and so forth. We had to remain aloof, isolated, friendless, because there was rarely more than one family of true humans in each town. You have no idea how lonely we are. How desperately lonely.”
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