turned out to be right about Father Stephen and Mother Quilla having been delegated to have a serious word with Sara about the climbing incident, but Sara was glad to discover that they were in no hurry to get on with it. Indeed, when they all climbed into the robocab clutching their lunchboxes and bags of junk, Father Stephen and Mother Quilla seemed even more enthusiastic than Sara to stare out of the window and pretend to be interested in the scenery. It wasn’t until they were on the Old Roman Road that either of them took the opportunity to speak.
“This road is two thousand years old,” Mother Quilla told her. “Well, not the road, but the route it follows. It’s a lot straighter than many that were built after it.”
“I know,” Sara said. “I’ve been on it before.”
“I only had six parents myself,” Mother Quilla went on, without the least hint of a mental gear-change. “Father Stephen had four. Father Lemuel had to make do with two, just like the days before the Crash.”
“Not exactly like,” Father Stephen pointed out. “He wasn’t biologically related to them—and his mother certainly didn’t have to give birth to him.”
“Details”, said Mother Quilla, dismissively. “The point is, there were only two of them. Not four, or six… and certainly not eight. Two’s a pair, eight’s a committee. Have you ever seen a picture of a camel, Sara?”
“Yes,” said Sara.
“Well, before they became extinct, people used to say that a camel was a horse designed by a committee. They didn’t say how many people there were on the committee, but if it wasn’t eight it might have been. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s difficult enough for two people to agree, or compromise, it’s more than twice as difficult for four, and more than twice as difficult as that for eight. There are people who think that eight people is too many to parent a child, and there’s a real possibility that the Population Bureau will change policy if things don’t seem to be going very well. Everyone’s on trial, you see—the whole system as well as individual households. But if the new Internal Technologies do work as well as the manufacturers say, and the human lifespan really will extend to a thousand years as from today or tomorrow…well, you can do arithmetic. If anyone is ever to have the chance again of parenting more than one child—and if they don’t, then how will they benefit from the practice?—they’re going to have to form even bigger households than ours. So.…”
“I only climbed the hometree,” Sara pointed out.
“Yes, I know,” said Mother Quilla. “It’s not the climbing we’re worried about—not any more. It’s not being able to decide how to cope with it.”
“I only wanted to see what I could see,” Sara said, defensively. “I promise I won’t do it again.”
“It’s not that, Sara,” Father Stephen chipped in. “The point is, it won’t be the last time that you do something that worries us—and in a way, it would be a great pity if it were. If you only ever did what we told you, you wouldn’t be able to develop the independence you’ll need to organize your own life when you go your own way. We just want you to understand what happened the other night. We feel that we let you down, you see, by not being able to form a united front and give you clear guidance. It couldn’t be good for you to see us fall out like that.”
“Oh,” said Sara, unable to think of anything else to say.
“But it’s probably inevitable,” Mother Quilla said, taking up the thread again. “If eight people could agree about everything, we wouldn’t need democracy. If eight people had ever been able to agree about anything really important, Old Manchester would never have been built, let alone ruined.”
“It wasn’t bombed,” Sara pointed out, figuring that she needed to say something to demonstrate that she was following the argument. “The people had to move out to be nearer the facfarms when the petrol ran out. Not like London, or Jerusalem.”
“It wasn’t quite that simple,” Father Stephen said, “but that doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s not unusual for eight people not to be able to agree. It’s unusual when they do. Not that anyone thinks you should have carried on climbing the hometree when we told you to stop—except perhaps Lem, who’d always rather be in a minority than a majority if he possibly can, and would probably like you to grow up the same way.”
“Which will be your decision,” Mother Quilla put in. “Not now, but some day. What we’re trying to say is that what happened on Wednesday night is normal, not something for you to worry about.”
“I wasn’t,” Sara said, truthfully.
“Good,” said Father Stephen, sitting back in his seat to signify that the conversation was over, for the moment—which was perhaps as well, because the robocab had drawn to a halt on the edge of St Anne’s Square, where hundreds of junkies had set out their blankets full of petty treasures salvaged from anywhere and everywhere in the ruins of the pre-Crash world. From now on, Sara knew, Father Stephen would be in a world of his own: the world of the collector, the searcher for curious things whose value their present owners did not fully appreciate.
“You will stay with me, won’t you?” Mother Quilla said, anxiously, as they got out of the cab. “You won’t go off on your own?”
“No, I won’t,” Sara said, meekly, feeling that she owed Mother Quilla at least one promise, and maybe as much as a whole week of good behavior. In any case, the kind of crowd that was thronging around them now both was far too intimidating and far too vigilant for her to risk getting too far away from Mother Quilla’s side. She knew only too well that if the impression got around that she were lost, there would be a great many more than eight people fussing around her furiously, until she was safely un-lost again.
She had to turn away, though, when a cloud of dust suddenly blew into her eyes. It had been whipped up by four bikes that had just roared past along the edge of the square. The riders—all male, she assumed, although it was impossible to tell—were decked out in all their finery, but Old Manchester wasn’t the best place to show off peacock feathers and tiger-striped fur, because they always picked up a grayish patina of powdered concrete. The ancient city was being slowly ground down by the scourge of the westerly wind and the rainstorms it carried in from the Irish Sea. The dirt on the ground was thick and murky, having as much red brick and ground glass in it as concrete residues—but whenever a few sunny days allowed it to dry out it was the tiny particles of concrete dust that rose into the air like a miasma as the passage of pedestrians and vehicles disturbed its rest.
When she had rubbed her weeping eyes clear, Sara saw that a second cab in Blackburn’s blue-and-silver livery had drawn up behind the one in which she had travelled. It was just disgorging its lone passenger.
Sara didn’t expect for an instant that she would recognize the passenger, even though the cab must have kept close company with their own for almost the whole of its southward journey, but nor did she expect to be so astonished by the sight of him.
The man who got out of the other cab was almost as unfashionably tall as Father Stephen, and even thinner. Like Father Stephen, he had darkened the color of his smartsuit almost to black for outdoor wear, and there were hundreds of other people in the square whose dress was equally sober—but the resemblance ended at the neatly-shaped collar. Like Father Stephen and almost everyone else in the square, the newcomer had politely left his face exposed to public view, the smartsuit’s overlay remaining quite transparent…but Sara had never seen a face like his before.
There seemed to be hardly any natural flesh lying upon the bones of the skull, and what there was bare hardly any resemblance to the soft contours of conventional adult appearance. It had a slight quasi-metallic sheen, which made it seem more like the skin of a lizard than a man…or like the polished plastic face of an android robot.
Although Father Lemuel was fifty-six years older than Father Stephen, and nearly a hundred years older than Mother Jolene, no one but a doctor or a master tailor could have read the difference in their features; whatever signs of aging Father