‘I feel totally betrayed,’ his mother said. ‘How could you write such vile, satanic filth? To think how we trusted you—’
She turned away, laid her face on her husband’s shoulder, and sobbed.
‘Now look what you’ve done to your poor mother.’
Jordan had expected to feel guilty at this moment, the moment he had put off for so long, the moment when he let his parents know what he really thought. Now that they had found out for themselves he felt embarrassed, sure – his cheeks burned at the thought of them reading his diary – but most of what he felt was anger at their doing this. The gall of it, the effrontery!
‘Don’t I have any privacy?’
He snatched the diary away and snapped it shut. His hands and voice shook.
‘Not while you’re under my roof and my responsibility.’
His father looked set to launch into a denunciation. Jordan spoke before he had a chance.
‘That’s it! If I can’t live under your roof with the minimum civilized decency of knowing I won’t be spied on or have you rummage through my possessions then I won’t live here at all!’
His father jumped up. ‘Now, you wait a minute! We don’t want to drive you out. We’re worried – terribly, terribly worried about you. What you’ve been reading – even what you’ve been writing – if we talk about it, take your doubts to a minister or a counsellor, I’m sure you’ll come to see how you’ve been led astray by these wicked, lying rationalistic libertines whose philosophy and vain deceit have been refuted over and over again by Christian thinkers.’
‘No.’
Jordan let his eyes wander. He’d decorated the room as near as he’d dared to his tastes: space prints of distant galaxies and supernova shells (Creationist propaganda), pictures of tribal peoples (mission appeals), pictures of chastely clad but pretty and subtly alluring girls (Modesty advertisements). Ah well. The books they’d heaped together were all he really wanted to take. He dragged a rucksack from the corner and stooped to gather them up, then walked around randomly grabbing clothes. Emotions are commanded by thoughts, and who but you commands your thoughts? Thus spake Epictetus, or possibly Wayne Dwyer. Whatever. Jordan commanded his thoughts.
‘Don’t turn your back on us,’ his mother said. ‘Don’t turn your back on the truth.’
‘You call yourself a free thinker,’ his father taunted, ‘but you don’t want to face anyone who might change your mind! All you’re really interested in is going after your own way, indulging your own carnal lusts. All this atheist garbage is just a miserable excuse. If you rely on that you will one day face God Himself with a lie in your right hand.’
Jordan felt he had swallowed ice.
‘As if I hadn’t heard all their arguments already!’ He took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I’ll listen to them. I’ll argue with your Christian thinkers but I’ll do it from out of range of the guns in their right hands.’
‘Don’t make me laugh! Nobody is threatening you with a gun.’
Jordan buckled the rucksack. He saw one remaining book that had been kicked aside, and retrieved it. Another of the Watts & Co Thinker’s Library: The History of Modern Philosophy by A. W. Benn. He smiled to himself, then straightened his face and back.
‘How do your Elders keep ideas out, people out, books out? With guards, with guns! You can’t have a free inquiry or discussion here.’
His father ignored the parry and asked, ‘Where do you think you’ll find this precious freedom? Some dirty communist enclave? Fine freedom you’ll find there!’
‘You’re probably right,’ Jordan said, thinking: Communist? ‘So I’m going to Norlonto.’
The high colour left his father’s face. His mother threw herself back on the bed with a moan. She said something into the pillow about the cities of the plain.
‘You would go from Beulah to that Babylon? Then you’re beyond reasoning with.’ His father looked at him with contempt. ‘Just you try it! You’ll soon be back with your tail between your legs. You don’t even have a passport.’
‘Yes I do,’ Jordan said. His hand patted his side pocket, felt the weight like a book. ‘Freedom’s own passport. Money.’
‘So you’re a thief as well as a renegade.’
‘It’s not stolen—’ Jordan began hotly, then stopped.
The enormity of what he’d done struck him for the first time. Until now he’d been thinking forward, not backward, of the implications of having that money. What it amounted to was taking a fee from the ultimate enemy, the foe of the community, of the state that protected the community and of the alliance that shielded the state. And they knew or suspected it. That was why his father had thrown ‘communist’ in his face! Mrs Lawson must have found out something about his unauthorized activity and dropped some heavy hint. Scheming Christian witch.
‘Think what you like,’ he said.
He hefted the rucksack and took a step towards his parents, with some vague notion of a handshake, a kiss – stupid, stupid. They recoiled from him as if frightened. Jordan backed off to the door, and on a sudden inspiration smiled and waved and stepped out through it and closed it and locked it. It wouldn’t take them long to get out, he thought as he descended the stair-ladder, the stair, the steps. But, maybe, long enough. When he reached the street he turned left and started running, down the hill.
He cursed every subversive atheistic volume in his possession a lot sooner than his parents would have dared to hope. About ten minutes after leaving them, as he hurried along Park Road. It was a well designed frame rucksack, and it didn’t dig into his back and shoulders, but the weight was enough to send sweat flying from his face. He walked past upmarket shops – delis, boutiques, craft – and respectable apartment houses. This, however, was the faintly disreputable fringe of Beulah City, the abode of essential but intrinsically unreliable types: inspirational artists, clean-minded scriptwriters, decent clothing designers, conservative sociologists…they all found it necessary to congregate close to the border, and even to make discreet business trips across it. No amount of sarcastic pulpit speculation about what possible benefit they could derive from this proximity to the imminent Ground Zero of divine wrath made any difference. A fine sight they would make at the Rapture (Jordan had heard on innumerable Sundays) when, if – and, one was given to understand, it was a very big ‘if’ – they were among the chosen, they would float skywards miles away from the main body of ascending believers, clutching their drinks or worldly magazines!
But, scrupulous though it was about what it allowed in, Beulah City, as a literally paid-up member of the Free World, couldn’t afford to be seen restricting people from going out. A population self-selected for enthusiasm had to be a better advertisement for a way of life than a conscript citizenry. Such liberal principles didn’t apply to fleeing felons. And apart from the money, which, even if its source was as untraceable as the Black Planner had made out, would be difficult to account for, he now had a charge of unlawful imprisonment to answer.
After a kilometre the traffic on the road beside him slowed to a pace that had him overtaking one vehicle after another. Little electric cars and long light trucks, bumper to bumper. Jordan glanced at them idly. The flowery italics of a Modesty logo caught his eye. He had of course been aware that a lot of the community’s exports were high-cost and low-weight, ideal for transport by airship from the skyport – Alexandra Port, just up the hill in Norlonto. He simply hadn’t made the connection before.
He shook his head. The habit of averting eyes and thoughts had worn deeper tracks in his brain than he’d realized. But how else had he put up with it all for so long, put off the confrontation? To hell with it. He selected another truck. BP: Beloved Physician, the drug company. He jumped on to the running-board and grinned at the driver, who looked up startled from a laptop.