Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You know what I miss most of all about being alive?” asked Ashley.
“What?”
“Flying. Flying my glider was the greatest. I loved it so much, being up there in the sky.”
“Anything would be better than being stuck down here,” Jan said with feeling. She had only been in the shelter twelve days and already the place profoundly depressed her. At first she had appreciated the sanctuary it had provided from the dangers of the blight land, especially Ezekiel, as well as the food and drink—as bland as the latter had turned out to be—but very quickly she had grown restless and uneasy. It was the fact that she wasn’t allowed to leave that aggravated her dislike of living in the shelter. If she had a free choice she might have been prepared to spend a month or more down there fairly happily. As it was she had become desperate to return to the surface, even though she had no idea of what she would do if she did manage to get back up top. She sighed.
Ashley looked at her with concern. “I’m sorry you don’t like it down here.” Today she was dressed in very short trousers, which she called, appropriately enough, ‘shorts’, a white vest and white shoes and socks. She called these garments her ‘tennis outfit’. A couple of days previously Jan had asked her why she appeared in different clothes each day. Ashley had shrugged and said, “It added to the sense of realism for my parents. I was photographed holographically in lots and lots of different clothes, you see, and they’re all stored in the computer, along with me. Besides, I like to look attractive even now. Mom used to say I was a vain little exhibitionist but I was pretty, wasn’t I?” And she twirled around to show herself off. Jan had said, bleakly, “Yes, you were. Very.” The fact that Ashley’s beautiful body was as insubstantial as a shadow was beginning, she had realized, to get under her skin in more ways than one. And her more than passing resemblance to Ceri didn’t help matters. Another reason for leaving the shelter and returning to the surface. …
“I don’t like being a prisoner. If only I was allowed out for a few minutes of fresh air every day I probably wouldn’t mind it so much down here.”
“Jan, you know if it was up to me you could come and go as you like, but Carl’s in charge and he doesn’t trust you.”
“I know that.” Jan had tried speaking to Carl directly on several occasions. It was an unnerving experience, talking to a disembodied voice that sounded human but was frustratingly unhuman in its responses.
“Anyway, why do you want to risk going topside again? That crazy cyberoid is probably still looking for you.”
“You told me Carl hadn’t seen any sign of him for over a week.”
“Not in the vicinity of the villa, but there’s a limit to Carl’s sensor range. The cyberoid could still be lurking nearby in the woods.”
“I suppose so,” said Jan, worriedly. She had nightmares still about Ezekiel. She would be running through an endless stone maze with the cyberoid close behind her yelling its crazy words about death and vengeance while leaving bloody footprints behind it. The blood was Milo’s. …
“What about Sky Lords? Any more sightings?”
“I’ll ask Carl,” said Ashley. “Yep. One of them passed almost directly overhead a couple of hours ago.”
“Damn.” Carl had made sightings of either the Lord Pangloth or the Perfumed Breeze almost every day since she had arrived. The warlord was not giving up. She shivered at the thought of what he would do to her if she fell into his hands again.
“See?” said Ashley, as if reading her mind. “You’re much better off staying down here. With me. Now come on, stop looking so glum and tell me more about your adventures.”
Ashley had demonstrated an inexhaustible curiosity about Jan’s life and Jan had obliged by spending hours telling her about Minerva and the events following the bombing and her capture. “Adventures? I haven’t had any adventures. I’ve been through an ordeal.” Which is still going on, she added under her breath.
“Well, they sound like adventures to me” Ashley told her. “Go on, tell me again about Prince Caspar. He sounds dreamy.”
Jan sighed. “What more can I say about him?”
“Tell me what happened when you were in bed together.”
Jan couldn’t help feeling mildly shocked. “Why do you want to know that?”
Ashley smiled mischievously. “Why do you think?”
“I don’t want to be impolite,” said Jan slowly, “But I don’t understand how you can be interested in sex when you don’t have, er, a body.”
“But I told you before—I still have feelings. Well, like I said, they’re more the memory of feelings than the real thing. …”
“Feelings, yes,” said Jan with a frown. “That I understand, I think, but sex is, well, an appetite.”
“Oh yes, I have appetites. I mean, they’re just the same as feelings, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so,” said Jan doubtfully.
“My appetites got recorded along with the rest of me,” Ashley told her. “They didn’t think of that when they made me what I am. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been transcribed into a cloned body, but being what I am it’s impossible, of course, for me to satisfy any of my appetites. At first it was really awful; I was hungry all the time. But then a technician made some adjustments and kind of dulled my appetite for food. The scientists said they couldn’t just remove all my appetites without the possibility of eradicating parts of my personality completely.”
Jan was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a mind without a body. She tried to imagine being hungry for over 400 years while knowing you would never have the chance to eat again. “You poor thing,” she said.
“Oh, I’m used to it now,” said Ashley cheerfully. “Besides, like all my other ‘feelings’ my appetites are slowly fading away and one day I won’t have any at all.”
“But now you still have, er, sexual urges?”
“Yeah. Kind of. It was a bit of a problem when Vic was here. I told you he was really pretty, didn’t I?” She glanced wistfully at the bones by the wall. “It was a bit of a problem for him too. Not being able to touch me made him go crazy at times.”
Jan felt a twinge of sympathy for the dead Vic. “Did you ever have a lover? When you were alive, I mean?”
“Oh sure. I had two. One was my gliding instructor. He was over thirty but he was dreamy. We did it once in his training glider, fifteen thousand feet up. Marvellous!” She shook her head in wonder at the memory. “So come on, tell me all about what you got up to with your Prince Caspar. I want to hear everything!”
Another three days dragged by. Jan felt increasingly oppressed by the shelter, which consisted of five separate rooms. Apart from the main one, the living room, there were two bedrooms—one of which contained the bones of Ashley’s parents—a kitchen and a bathroom. That, at least, was the accessible area of the place, but Jan knew there were hidden areas containing various machines, including the projectors that created Ashley’s holographic image, which could appear in any part of the shelter. The power source for all the machinery, Carl had informed Jan, came from heat deep within the earth.
In the hope of persuading Carl to let her out Jan spent more and more time talking to ‘him’, much to Ashley’s annoyance. He persistently refused to discuss the reason for her containment but was willing to provide any other kind of information she required. More to alleviate her boredom than anything else she asked about the old world before the Gene Wars, curious to see if Milo had been telling the truth or merely spinning more tall tales. In response, Carl dimmed the lights and a glowing screen appeared suspended in the air. Carl then announced he would replay a series of news transmissions from the periods concerned, which prompted a groan from Ashley. “Oh God, it’s like being back at school. …”