SIMON

At dawn Simon took a rifle and a pair of binoculars and climbed the hill. The land looked dreary in the grey half-light and a chill wind blew from the river estuary, stirred the miles of cotton grass and whipped through the tatters of his white protective suit. Even after fifty-five years the toughened nylon still served its purpose, but the seams had rotted long ago and crude woollen stitches held it together. Scratches on the plastic visor impeded his vision and he raised it cautiously, watched the sky grow pink above the humped escarpment of the Cotswold hills.

As the light brightened the distances grew clear. He could see through the binoculars the wreckage of Avonmouth and the broken remains of the suspension bridge that had once spanned the river Severn. Water birds headed for the marshes and a colony of seals were dozing on the mud flats. Directly below were the ruins of the town and the orange overnight tents where Harris and Sowerby were sleeping. A stone jetty at the river’s edge dated back to Roman times, and the cross in the market square was even older. Celtic, Sowerby had said, and recently restored. Its dark shadow pointed towards him, or maybe to something behind.

Simon turned to look. Valleys dipped and hills rose before him, a rugged upland of gorse and heather, stunted bilberries and withered skeletons of trees. Later they would be heading into it and he raised his binoculars, hoping to see. There was a garden in a valley, his mother had said, green and fertile, where trees grew and cattle grazed. But all Simon saw were the ruins of yet another village and a single standing stone against the skyline.

It was time turning backward. Stones like that, which had marked the beginnings of civilization, now marked the end of it. No one in the bunker knew why the outsiders had resurrected the cromlechs, and monoliths, and stone circles, or how they had raised the giant blocks. Yet all over England the great stones marched across the trackless land, repeating the patterns of pre-history with uncanny precision. This one aligned with the Celtic cross behind him and he guessed it went on to Stonehenge. Everything led to Stonehenge, Sowerby reckoned.

‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,’ Simon murmured.

Those stones had a power that had survived nuclear war and some things could never be destroyed. He shivered in the clear morning light, watched as a pack of dogs came over the hill. They hunted like wolves, scented and circled their prey, a goat, or a sheep, or maybe a person. A movement among the ruins of the village caught his eye and once more Simon focused the binoculars. The figure came clear, robed and hooded, kneeling in the dust among the crumbling walls of a building. He, or she, appeared to be digging, sifting through the debris of an earthen floor, searching for something, oblivious of danger. And the dogs closed in for the kill.

Simon did not stop to think. He aimed the rifle. Bullets ricocheted from the brickwork, pinged against the stones around the doorway, an immense rattle of sound that blasted through the silences. One dog lurched and fell. The others fled, shot whining around their ears, yelping and howling back up the hill to disappear over the horizon. And the silence returned with the calls of birds and the sigh of the wind through dry grasses.

Simon ran, his goatskin moccasins going soundless over the half-mile of moorland. He stumbled over the stumps of ancient hedges, the wreck of a tractor and the massed brambles of a buried farmyard. He was afraid of what he would find, that he had not only hit the dog but the person as well, killed what he had meant to save. Through old fields gone to wilderness he ran, along a track that must once have been a road, clambered over mounds of crumbling concrete and rotting timbers to reach the gap of the door.

The dog lay dead on the threshold, its white eyes glazed and blood staining the dust. Foam at its mouth suggested it was rabid, so he felt no guilt, just stepped across it and entered the room. Morning sunlight came through the window spaces, showed cupboards fallen from the walls, ferns growing in the sink unit, and nettles through the floor. Simon crossed to the inner doorway. The person was crouched in the sooty shadows of a fireplace, the pale smudge of a face and white robes covered with soil.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

The girl held out her hand, as if to ward him away.

‘You will not shoot me!’ she said.

Simon was not sure if it were a plea or a command, but he laid down his rifle, picked his way among the litter of digging tools, and freshly turned earth and fallen roof-rafters. He thought she was hurt and went to touch her, but she shrank away from him, clutching the wall. Her voice sounded angry.

‘Weapons are evil!’ she said. ‘They are tools of the holocaust! There was a sound of thunder, and fire. Dust fell on the earth, and the darkness followed, and a great cold. All manner of creatures were destroyed. But the evil was gone. And the perpetrators of evil were gone. Gone for ever, Lilith said. But you’ve brought it back! You are one of the evil ones!’

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Simon said. ‘I was shooting at the dogs, not you.’

‘You have no right to destroy any living thing!’

‘If I hadn’t shot it you’d have been dead!’

‘Would I?’ asked the girl. ‘I doubt that.’

She glanced towards the doorway, as if to make sure the dog was really there. But like most other creatures that had survived outside her eyes were congenitally damaged, milky and opaque and probably blind, or so Simon thought in a moment of pity. He held out his hand.

‘Let me help you up,’ he said.

‘I can manage,’ the girl retorted.

She scrambled to her feet and brushed the soil from her gown. It was fine white wool, hand-crafted, with exquisite designs in green and ochre around the edges. Someone had made it. Someone had dyed and blended those soft natural colours. In comparison the clumsy stitches and uneven yarn of his own underclothes might have been fashioned by a five-year-old child. The girl might hold some pretty primitive beliefs but wherever she came from her people were skilled in other ways. He noticed the goatskin bag dumped by the fireplace, fringed with fur and decorated with beads. He noticed the fine beaten metal of her digging tools, a trowel with a carved bone handle, and fancy buckles on her leather sandals. His own moccasins were crude and shapeless, worn to holes after seventy miles of walking, and no one in the bunker possessed clothes and artefacts like hers. Simon began to wonder what the word ‘primitive’ really meant.

Voices were calling him, borne by the wind across the empty hillside. Harris and Sowerby, woken by the shooting, were coming to find him. But he stayed where he was, staring at the girl, noting the significance. Grandfather Harnden had always said that in the bunker they were teaching all the wrong things. He had been an old man, soft in the head, and no one took any notice, but suddenly Simon knew what he meant. Compared to this girl he was the progeny of an almighty failure, people incapable of doing anything much, and she with her blind white eyes fixed on his face realized it too. She was not blind at all! Black pin-prick pupils looked at him and saw, and he could feel her pity.

‘Simon!’

The voices called and he backed away from her. He was used to people dying . . . his sister of whooping cough, his brother of typhoid, his father of skin cancer. But he was not used to mutation. The girl was making him feel guilty, responsible for a war that had happened decades before he was born. It was people like him who had invented the bomb, unleashed the holocaust, turned the world into a radioactive desert, caused the extinction of species and the birth of mutants such as her. They had destroyed everything and preserved themselves . . . dinosaurs in a bunker, his mother said, with their rusting guns, drawing-board experts, and broken-down computers. They were paying for it now, suffering for everything they had done and not done. Their numbers declined as the outsiders thrived, and that girl knew and pitied him.

‘Don’t look at me like that!’

‘Simon! Where the hell are you?’

He turned on his heel, picked up the gun and binoculars, and went outside. His visor was raised and the sunlight burned his face. Shards of broken masonry hurt his feet through the worn soles of his moccasins, and a rusty nail on a nearby gate post gashed his leg through his suit. Simon watched as the scarlet blood seeped through the white material and rapidly spread. People like himself could rebuild cities, perform heart transplants, and travel to the moon . . . in theory. But when they ran out of tetanus injections they had not been able to manufacture more.

It was only a gash but Simon knew the implications and he did not need Harris to spell it out. He could not only lose his leg, but his life as well . . . gangrene, lock-jaw, septicaemia. Not that Harris knew much about it. He was a trained engineer, not a doctor. But he was in charge of the expedition, and the survival of many people depended on its outcome. If Simon got sick, Harris would abandon him, and the blood still ran in scarlet trickles down his leg.

‘Can you walk?’ Harris asked him.

‘I’ll need a compress,’ Simon replied.

‘I’ll go back to the camp,’ said Harris.

Sowerby and the girl came from the ruins.

‘She says there’s a healer nearby,’ Sowerby informed them.

‘How far?’ Harris asked anxiously.

The girl pointed to the standing stone.

‘Three miles along the line, eleven point two five degrees north of north west.’

‘You mean they’re compass lines?’ asked Sowerby.

‘Leave that until later,’ Harris told him. ‘We have to go and gather up the gear. You wait here,’ he said to Simon.

Harris and Sowerby walked away across the moor-land, up the hill and down towards the camp, leaving Simon alone with the girl. She squatted beside him, dabbed at the blood with the hem of her dress and examined the wound. He noticed there were hairs on the backs of her hands, fair and fine and thick as fur, albino in the light. Simon recoiled with a feeling of horror. She was not human at all! She was a genetic throw-back! A congenital ape!

‘Leave me alone!’ he said.

She left without a backward glance and returned to the ruins. But she reappeared a few minutes later carrying the goatskin bag. She had a handful of leaves which she had plucked from the jungle of garden, and she carefully placed them on the grass beside him. Then she took out a knife. Keen and sharp its blade flashed in the sun and he thought she was going to stab him. But she hacked away the long leather straps of her shoulder bag.

‘If you bind these leaves to your leg it will stop the festering,’ she said. ‘Will you do it, or shall I?’

Her white eyes met Simon’s in a kind of challenge. He did not want her touching him but finally he nodded. Pale hairy fingers made a compress of leaves, a pad from a white linen handkerchief, bound his leg with leather thongs and fastened the knot. The hood of her overgown, that had been hiding her face, slipped to reveal the snow-white fur of her countenance, her primate features. Her face was not deformed in any way, no degeneration of bone structure. It was the white animal fur that repelled him and made her a simian thing. Mutation was cruel and so was Simon. His dislike of her actually showed and he offered her no thanks.

The ape girl shrugged, picked up her things and went back to her digging. He could hear the hack of her pick and shovel in the dark interior of the ruined building. Appearances ought not to matter. There were mutants everywhere, Harris had said, and they were no less human than the people in the bunker. Simon went to apologize, limped along the track towards the house. Flies were already feeding on the body of the dog and the heat of the day was building up. Stepping from sunlight into shadow he had to wait for his eyes to grow accustomed, and she was just a vague white shape crouching below a fallen roof beam. But then he noticed the forked stick held in her hand, its slow steady motion above the cleared floor space before it jerked and twisted and she laid it down and once more started to dig.

Simon watched her curiously. Carefully she unearthed the bones of a skeletal hand, plucked a gold ring from its finger and placed it in her bag. Then she picked up the stick again. A few quick jerks and she unearthed the other hand, retrieved a diamond dress ring and a gold bracelet hanging with charms.

‘Grave robbing!’ Simon said in disgust.

‘Jewels are no good to the dead,’ she said.

‘I suppose you sell them?’

‘I give them to the artisans at Timperley,’ she said.

‘And what do they give you in return?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Why should they?’

She seemed not to have heard of trade or barter, although back at the bunker they had been trading with outsiders for years. Every fleece, every goatskin, every scrap of metal was loaded annually into the one remaining army truck, driven to the settlements at Watchet, or Sedgemoor, and exchanged for food. But now they had run out of petrol, just as they had run out of basic chemicals for the culture tanks. There were no more cloned vegetables. The soil in the glasshouse area was exhausted and the land around the bunker failed to grow. They were beginning to know the meaning of starvation and suffering. They were all half naked and undernourished . . . children with rickets, adults with scurvy, old people dying of hypothermia when the winter set in. It was cold underground and often dark, and there were no more spare parts to keep the electric generators going. Their only chance of surviving was to move out. And whatever Simon thought he could not insult a girl with a fistful of gold from whose people Harris had come to beg.

He chewed his lip.

And was bound to accept what she did.

‘You need a Geiger counter,’ he said.

‘I already have one,’ she replied.

‘I could trade you a battery-powered model.’

She looked at him thoughtfully and picked up the stick.

‘This one is mind-powered,’ she told him. ‘It can find whatever I want it to find, whatever we need . . . wood, clay, or water, gold or glass, old bones and buried scrap metal. What can yours do?’

Simon stared at her. The way she spoke of her mental powers made him uneasy. Maybe she was not sub-human and primitive. Maybe she was super-human, her mind gone way beyond him. Yet he dismissed the thought. It was instinct, he reasoned. Some uncanny instinct that enabled her to home in on things. Powers like that were nothing new. Records of pre-war society showed that many people had claimed to possess them. There was even a name for it which Simon failed to remember.

‘I am psychic,’ said the girl, as if she had read his mind, ‘a water diviner, among other things, and my name is Laura. You had no need to shoot that dog, you know. I could have controlled it. My mind is stronger than an animal’s mind. Stronger than yours, too.’

Simon sat on the crumbling edge of the window sill.

There was a throbbing pain in his leg.

He did not believe what she told him.

And he never would.

Laura laughed teasingly.

‘Once people believed that a nuclear holocaust would never happen,’ she said.

Simon limped along the track behind the others. He carried a back pack of camping gear and the midmorning sun made him sweat inside his suit. Just for a moment he wished he were like Laura, stripped to a simple shift with the heavy hooded over-gown stowed away in her goatskin bag, her limbs bare and her long fair hair blowing in the wind. The fine albino fur covered her completely, but it also protected her. Laura had nothing to fear from the ultraviolet light.

Harris and Sowerby seemed to accept what she was, or perhaps they no longer noticed. They had had dealings with mutants before and grown used to it. Usually, Sowerby told Simon, mutant people did not remove their robes, the cowled hoods that concealed their deformities. But Laura walked as if she were proud of it.

Simon was too far behind to hear what they talked of. Standing stones, probably. Sowerby was obsessed with standing stones. He was a qualified cartographer and the maps in the bunker were years out of date. There had been no aerial surveys in Simon’s lifetime. Landmarks had vanished. The major areas of habitation had shifted, and only the standing stones remained, visually linking the empty distances. What their purpose was, and why they had been restored, was something Sowerby had always wanted to know.

Sowerby belonged to a generation of academics, hot on theory but pretty useless when it came to practical know-how. Like Grandfather Harnden, Simon’s mother had always warned them what would happen. They were dinosaurs in a bunker, not knowing how to knit or sew, spin or weave, make planks from tree-trunks, carpenter wood or make a cart-wheel. Nobody could use a hammer or anvil, fashion metal, pulp paper, or manufacture decent shoes. Everything they did was just bungling attempts, and work on the land and animal husbandry were looked on as punishment duty.

They had clung too long to pre-war attitudes and old ideals, thinking they were some kind of élite. All their energies had gone into keeping up twentieth-century standards. They still dreamed of restoring the country to what it had been. They still dreamed of a technological revolution. They still dreamed of the United Kingdom with themselves in charge. Simon himself had grown up convinced that he was superior to the weavers, and crofters, and fishermen, who dwelled in the outside communities. He had actually believed that an academic education, and an ability to do advanced calculus, placed him above them. But not any more. A mutant girl had ended all that, and all his illusions were gone.

Fearless and free in the sun that would burn him, Laura strode across the hill. She believed that the nuclear war had not marked the ending of civilization, but the beginning. It had been a great event, like the birth of Christ, and part of God’s almighty plan. He had allowed mankind to destroy itself and rid the world of evil. Her calendar actually began fifty-five years ago with a purge of fire and a rain of dust and a few chosen survivors. She believed she had been born into a better world than the one that was gone, that her people were better people. She saw Simon as a remnant of the old evil and believed that she was superior to him.

It was humiliating, because in a way it was true. They had achieved nothing in the bunker which could prove her wrong. She was well clothed, well fed, secure in her way of life with her primitive religious beliefs and her Geiger-counter mind. For her, reality was good and she had no need to dream of a better world. And Simon was as well schooled as Sowerby and Harris, in theory, but he could do damn all in practice.

‘We can make bricks,’ Laura had told him.

‘I suppose you use them for building hovels?’ Simon had asked.

‘We build cathedrals,’ she replied.

Simon hated her for that. Perhaps it was automatic. Her appearance alone made her different from him, and human beings had always feared and hated anyone who was different. Two thousand years of history saw it being repeated over and over, the perpetual struggle of one race, or tribe, or creed, against another . . . each one thinking they were right, superior, morally justified, or chosen by God. Simon saw himself as normal, Laura as abnormal. He was human, she was a mutant. But her kind had everything, his kind nothing, and he resented it. Blood ran down his leg and soaked his moccasin as she stopped and looked back.

‘Are you all right, Simon?’ called Harris.

‘Want us to chair-lift you?’ Sowerby asked.

‘I’m not a cripple!’ Simon shouted.

And Laura laughed.

They were already half-way down the hill when Simon reached the top. The valley was below him, blurred by plastic, and indistinct. He stood with his back to the sun and raised his visor, drew in his breath. It was an incredible place. Fields of oats and barley rippled in the wind and there were trees as he had never seen before, towers of leaves swaying and sighing. Birds sang and bean flowers smelled sweet, and green woods grew on the hills beyond. Yet Simon hardly saw all that. It was just a setting for the great building that dominated everything.

This was not the place his mother had visited, a village of tin-roofed shacks and battered glasshouses. The building Simon was seeing was not even western in design. It reminded him of a Tibetan monastery he had once viewed on the computer video screen before the electronics broke down. Sheer walls rose several storeys high, smooth and plastered and coloured dusky yellow. Rows of tiny windows watched him like eyes and the slate roofs shone silver in the light. It was built in a square enclosing a vast courtyard, and on each side an archway led in beneath its walls. East, west, south and north, four tracks led away from it.

North beyond the building the stream had been dammed, making a small lake where wild duck nested in the reed beds and naked children swam. Willow trees grew on its banks and sluice gates let out the water. The stream flowed on through meadows where cattle grazed, past haybarns and milking parlours and a flour mill where a great wheel turned, and on again past the sewage beds where the arms of sprinklers slowly revolved.

These people had thought of everything. Not the technological revolution dreamed of in the bunker, but a way of life that was simpler and more wholesome, age-old methods that were tried and tested and seen to work. They had no need for dreams of underground air-conditioned cities, subway tunnels where solar-powered trains linked bunker to bunker, synthetic food production, or eventual colonization of worlds around other suns. They did not need qualified architects, nutrition experts, genetic engineers, army personnel training schemes, military supervision, or administration by a central government. They had managed without, flourished and survived. And not only was this place beautiful, it was functional as well.

Simon’s head started to spin and his vision darkened. He had been travelling for three days and had hardly eaten anything since they had left the bunker. Comparisons appalled him. He saw an alien fortress in an English valley, a gold-white girl walking free in the sunlight, a community that lived and thrived on the harsh outer surface of the world where he could have no place. He thought of crumbling concrete rooms, dark decaying passageways, and broken-down machinery. His mother was right. They were dinosaurs in a bunker. They could not live beneath the sun that whirled and spun and blazed its yellow light. Extinction stared him in the face as the world turned black and Simon hit the dust.

Simon hardly remembered arriving at the settlement. It was just an impression of yellow outside walls and dark inside shade, a feeling of relief when someone stripped him of his suit. He saw vague white faces. Heard a babble of indistinct voices before he went spinning away through the black empty spaces of unconsciousness. Someone made him drink . . . icy water from an earthen-ware cup. His leg hurt like hell and he was lying on a scrubbed table with a straw pallet under his head, in a room that was whitewashed and cool. Harris and Sowerby were standing in the doorway. He could see the courtyard beyond them, flowering baskets hanging from the cloistered walkway, the shaded overhang on the upper floors, and a covered well with a pool of sunlit water in the middle.

‘We’re moving on,’ Harris was saying. ‘Thanks for the meal. You’ve been most helpful.’

‘We’ll look after Simon,’ Laura said.

‘Okay,’ said Harris. ‘Tell him we’ll call for him on the way back.’

Simon went to sit up.

A fast hand held him down.

And Laura returned to him.

‘Lie still! You’ll disturb the pins!’ she said.

Simon remembered then. He had not been unconscious all the time. He remembered Laura telling him that someone called Johnson had taken the pins from the offices of a practising acupuncturist who had died in the holocaust, learned how to use them from instruction manuals and passed the knowledge on. Now Lilith was using them on Simon to block the neuronal pathways. She was going to suture the gash in his leg and he would not feel pain. But he would not be able to walk either, at least not well enough to keep up with Harris and Sowerby.

‘Enjoy yourself, Simon,’ Harris told him.

And Lilith laughed.

It was a mad laugh, guttural and imbecilic, the sound of a deaf-mute for whom Laura translated. Lilith too was a mutant, a middle-aged hairy albino with white stringy locks and those same white eyes. Her smile showed a mouthful of rotting teeth and black pin-prick pupils led deep into her mind. There was something about her Simon did not like, a look of gloating satisfaction, like a prophetess seeing in him the truth of her own predictions. Fear shot through the nerves of his stomach as he saw the cat-gut thread and needle in her hand.

Suddenly he was screaming. ‘Don’t let her touch me!’ Struggling like a wild thing to be off that operating table. He forgot about the four hundred people in the government bunker who needed to be rehoused. He forgot about survival being dependent on outsiders. He only knew he was not being operated on by a witch-doctor, or left behind with a load of goddamn apes! His language was rude and abusive, completely irrational. Diplomatically Harris acted in the only way he could. A hard right fist to Simon’s jaw sent him spinning away into a black oblivion.

When he awoke, hours later, he had been moved to another room . . . a whitewashed cell with a small window set high in the outer wall. Or maybe it only seemed high because his bed was a mattress on the floor. From the dimness of the light he guessed it was evening, although he was not sure if it were today or tomorrow, or how long he had slept.

He turned his head. A person was seated on a stool by the door, a shrunken unmoving human figure, the most hideous creature he had ever seen. An old grey dress informed him she was female, and her mouth sagged open as she slept showing toothless gums. Her hair was gone and her scalp was a mass of festering sores. Red burning skin, puckered and wrinkled and suppurating, made up her face. She was bones covered by flesh, rotting away even as he watched her.

Simon could not have guessed her age, but Grandfather Harnden had been almost ninety when he died and he had never looked like that. This aged woman must have lived right through it, the nuclear war and the radioactive fall-out, the fire and the dust. She must have survived outside during the great cold that followed, fifty-five years of struggle and suffering and sickness such as those in the bunker had never known.

Naked beneath the blanket Simon turned away his head, unable to look at her, unable to escape, trapped with her in the prison room as the twilight deepened and the evening grew chill. He could hear voices and laughter in the rest of the building, far away and muffled by walls, but he had never experienced such total isolation. It was as if he was the only human being left alive, and the thing by the doorway belonged to some other species. Then the door quietly opened.

‘I’ve brought you some soup,’ said Laura.

Almost eagerly Simon turned to face her. Her simian appearance no longer mattered. She was someone he knew, young and beautiful, compared to that festering old woman. His stomach was hollow with hunger but Laura had not been speaking to him. He watched as she placed the dish and spoon in the old woman’s hands. Shrivelled fingers gripped like a baby’s and Laura guided the spoon to her mouth. Simon realized then that she was blind, and from across the room the white eyes of the mutant girl met his own. He could actually feel the pity, not for the dying creature she was feeding, but for him.

‘This is my grandmother,’ she said fondly. ‘She is blind Kate now but she taught us how to see things clearly . . . who we are and how we came to be.’

‘God looked on the earth and saw it was wicked,’ the old woman muttered. ‘That men had corrupted His ways with their evil and violence, and He decided to destroy them.’ She laid down her spoon. Her clawed hands gripped at Laura’s arm. ‘Is he awake?’ she asked.

‘He’s awake,’ Laura confirmed.

‘Ask him,’ said blind Kate. ‘Ask if he knows them.’

‘It was thirty-five years ago,’ Laura objected. ‘Simon was not even born then and your kind of people seldom live very long.’

‘I have,’ blind Kate retorted.

‘You had a reason to,’ Laura said. ‘And not everyone has your will power.’

The old woman sighed and went back to her spooning.

Soup dribbled from her chin as Simon watched.

‘Do you want something to eat?’ Laura asked him.

‘Yes,’ Simon said sourly. ‘And where are my clothes?’

‘We washed them and they fell to pieces. I’ll bring you some new ones in the morning. I didn’t expect to find you awake. Aunt Lilith gave you a sleeping draught and we thought you would sleep through the night.’

‘She had no right to do that!’ Simon said angrily.

Blind Kate waved her spoon.

‘He talked like that,’ she said. ‘That Colonel Allison who came from the government in Avon. He talked about rights. He said we had no right to our own cattle and tried to steal them. It was the day your mother was born, Laura, and we named her after him. Johnson always said they would be back. But they haven’t come to steal this time, oh no. They have come to beg. And we give, of course, just as we always do.’

Simon sat up.

His voice was sharp.

‘What’s she talking about?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Laura, ‘she gets confused.’

‘I’ve survived for more than sixty years,’ blind Kate went on. ‘Sarah said I was meant to but I knew it anyway. I thought she was Sarah come back . . . Sarah and my father and Colonel Allison. But she wasn’t Sarah. She had another name. Amelia, I think it was, Amelia Harnden, and she was my sister too. Ask him if he knows her.’

‘It was too long ago,’ Laura repeated.

‘Ask him,’ blind Kate insisted.

White eyes turned to Simon.

‘Do you?’ Laura asked.

‘No,’ he said.

But he did. The name was not Amelia . . . it was Ophelia. She had married Wayne Allison and was Simon’s mother. This was the place she had talked of. This was the place she had visited with Grandfather Harnden and Grandpop Allison all those years ago. Blind Kate was his mother’s sister and Laura was his cousin. He was actually related to them, cousin to a mutant, just as human beings had once been cousins to the apes. Simon was not sure how he felt . . . sort of sick and revolted. It was a relationship he could never accept, never admit, not even to himself.

Simon did not sleep too well during the night. His thoughts plagued him, and the strong cheese he had eaten for supper gave him indigestion. His leg ached uncomfortably. He was accustomed to silence and absolute darkness, but here the moonlight was as bright as day. Night birds screamed and dogs howled on the surrounding hills, and Lilith came creeping into his room to check on him. She made incomprehensible guttural noises which were meant to soothe but instead served to alarm him, and examined his injured leg by candlelight. No blood showed through the linen dressings, so she smiled her gloating smile and went away.

The flax plants had come from Ireland, Laura had told him during supper, and now they grew them locally at another settlement, acres of blue flowers in a nearby valley. Soon her people would have summer clothes as well as winter ones, she said. It was one more accomplishment she had to boast about, and one more reason for Simon to hate her. But he was not afraid of her, not in the way he was afraid of Lilith. She was the hag out of fairy tales which Grandfather Harnden had told him as a child, a wise-woman weaving spells and brewing sleeping draughts, the archetypal witch in the midnight darkness. When she came to his room a second time he looked at her in dread.

But it was Laura who came with the morning, smiling to see him, bringing him clothes to wear and a wooden crutch to help him walk. Gooseflesh prickled his skin as he dressed in a long-sleeved shirt of creamy wool, a short brown over-tunic, brown knitted ankle socks and leather sandals with carved buckles of bone. He had never worn clothes like that before. Each garment seemed like a work of art, fine and comfortable. He needed a mirror to admire them and opened the door to find Laura waiting outside . . . her face in the sunlight white and furry, his cousin, an ape. Simon leaned on the crutch and she moved to help him, an ape-girl touching his arm. He shook her away.

‘I can manage!’ he said violently.

He thought for a moment she would cry. Then she shrugged and he followed her along the balcony. Above and around him the building was coming awake, doors being opened to let in the morning light. Every family had their own apartments, Laura told him, but everything else was done communally. Voices of children and people sounded on the upper levels but the well of the courtyard below was silent and empty, dark with shadow. Walls towered over him as Simon clung to the railings and descended the stairs.

Laura waited for him at the bottom in the shade of the overhang, pale and wraith-like in her long white over-gown. Above her head a basket of flowers shivered in the draught from the western archway, their glorious colours dampened with dew. He could see looms and spinning wheels in the workshop behind her, and a crude metal printing press in another. Laura pointed.

‘The washroom’s over there,’ she said. ‘If you go now, no one will see you.’

‘Why should I care who sees me?’ Simon asked huffily.

‘No one likes being stared at,’ Laura replied gravely.

Simon supposed they were bound to stare because he was a stranger but he discovered later that was not the reason. He was seated in the dining hall at one of the long wooden tables. Except for the cooks at the far end serving hot chicory coffee, wholemeal rolls and scrambled eggs, the room had been empty when he and Laura entered it. He was used to communal eating so he had taken no notice when the people started filing in . . . not until the noise and chatter finally stopped.

Everyone was staring at him in complete silence, men, women and children, and every one of them a mutant. Simon stared back at them in shock and horror, several hundred furry albinos with blank white eyes and black pin-prick pupils taking note of him . . . his bare legs, his smooth skin, brown eyes and black curling hair. It was he who was different, and it seemed they had never seen a human being before.

‘What’s that, Mum?’ one small child asked.

Laura rose to her feet.

‘This is Simon,’ she announced gaily. ‘He has come to stay with us. Lilith says we must make him welcome here.’

Mutant men and women nodded and smiled.

Mutant children asked questions.

And the answers carried.

‘No, dear, he isn’t an animal.’

‘He’s like blind Kate used to be.’

‘Once upon a time all people were like him.’

‘They were all bald-skinned with limited vision.’

‘No, darling, he isn’t dangerous.’

‘They were only dangerous collectively.’

‘They knew too much.’

‘But they weren’t intelligent.’

‘Intelligent creatures don’t commit genocide.’

‘Yes, they did kill each other.’

‘But there’s not many left of them now.’

‘They can’t survive, you see?’

‘That’s why some of them are coming to live with us.’

‘We’ve got to look after them.’

‘And you must always be kind to him.’

‘He can’t help what he is.’

A lump of bread stuck in Simon’s throat, a morsel of their pity which threatened to choke him. He wanted to lash out at them, scream at them, tell them they were wrong. All over England, in every government bunker, there were communities of people who were just like him . . . except that he was not sure about that. The communications system had broken down years ago and they had lost contact. It might be true. He might be a member of a dying breed who had never adapted to outside conditions and ultraviolet light, their numbers decimated by disease and incompetence and malnutrition. But if it were true, and the human race really was on the verge of extinction, one thing Simon knew for certain . . . he did not want a load of hairy mutants offering him pity!

He crammed the remains of his wholemeal roll in his mouth, picked up his crutch and walked out. He had to get away from them, those white eyes and the alien minds behind them. He had to get away from this place. He was not ending up like blind Kate being spoon-fed on sympathy and pap! He left by the northern archway and entered the sun, felt it cruel and burning on the backs of his legs and neck. His flesh would fry before he had travelled a couple of miles. He limped along the track towards the dammed-up stream, seeking the shade of the willow trees, and Laura came running behind. She was mutant like the rest of them and he did not want her pity.

‘Leave me alone!’ Simon howled.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry for what happened in there. I did try to warn you but the children were bound to ask questions. We never meant you to be upset.’

‘Stuff your apologies!’ said Simon.

‘What else do you want me to say?’ she asked wildly. ‘Would you rather we hated you? Threw stones at you? Spat in your face?’

‘At least it would be understandable!’

‘Why would it?’

‘Because we’re the ones who made you what you are!’

Laura stared at him.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the way we are,’ she said levelly. ‘And violence is incompatible with intelligence. I don’t understand why you’re behaving like this. We’re doing our best. We’re trying to make you feel at home here. If you wanted to eat alone you should have said so. You’re not obliged to mix with us. We know what you and your people have been through. Harris told us that. We feel for you and we’re not heartless. We’ve agreed to take in as many of you as we can. So what’s wrong, Simon? We’re willing to give you everything you need. What more can we do?’

Simon closed his eyes. Sunlight and shade from the willow leaves flickered on his face and her words hurt like cruelty, like nails being driven home, a slow crucifixion. She offered to give him everything, food, clothes, shelter. And not just him, others too. But they in the bunkers had never cared what happened to the outsiders so why should Laura care about him? Why should she give? Share? Offer? Everything she had?

‘Can’t you see?’ he groaned.

‘Obviously I can’t,’ she muttered. ‘And Lilith says our eyes are different from yours. We see blue silver shining on a rainbow land. We see the veils of ultraviolet light, its shifting intensities. We see the damaged sky. Where things will grow and where they will never grow beneath it. And I see you, Simon. Electrical auras surround all living things, white and gold and glowing, but yours is dark and depressing and I don’t know what to say or how to help you.’

Simon clenched his fists.

Laura was either innocent or stupid.

And he did not believe in auras.

‘You’ve already said it!’ Simon said bitterly. ‘If you’re all right then there’s obviously something wrong with me! I’m not only sick . . . I’m a freak! You’re killing me, Laura! Killing me with every word you say and everything you are! And there’s only one way you can help me. Sod off and leave me alone!’

She tried to argue.

But there were tears in her eyes when she walked away.

Simon sat in the shade of the willow trees. Sunlight reflected on the surface of the water and the green woods brooded on the hills beyond. He could hear the sounds of the settlement behind him, a rattle of butter churns and women’s laughter. Downstream the mill wheel was turning. Cows chewed their cud in the sleepy morning pastures and men worked in the bean fields up the valley. Seen from a distance, pale-skinned and human in shape, they looked no different from himself.

It was he who was a congenital freak, genetically isolated, unable to join them in the merciless light of the sun. Without the white protective suit Simon was useless. His skin would burn and blister, form weeping sores which were slow to heal, that turned into skin cancer and finally killed. If he wished to escape from this place he would have to travel at night, or not travel at all. The tree shadows trapped him and loneliness plagued him like the flies.

Mutants came and went along the dusty track between the outbuildings and the settlement. Small children played in the shallows at the other end of the lake. Nobody approached him. He supposed Laura had warned them away. His behaviour so far had not been exactly friendly. He was moody and vicious, dangerous if provoked, like a trapped animal. He slapped at the flies that buzzed around his eyes, stripped off the warm woollen shirt and swilled his face in the water. Reflections settled and stilled. A gong sounded and the children went away. The loneliness intensified with the heat and Simon wished he had never set out with Harris and Sowerby.

Back in the bunker they still had hope. They thought if they threw in their lot with the outsiders they would go on surviving. And maybe they would, an endangered species kept by the mutants like animals in a zoo, incapable of fending for themselves. In the bunker they saw it as a solution but there was no solution. Out here in the stark hot land there was no future for the human race, just life without dignity and total dependence.

It was not Laura’s fault. She had offered him charity and it was not her fault he could not accept. But someone was to blame, all those human beings back in time. They had never come to terms with the aggression factor. Perhaps in the beginning it had been a necessary facet of the evolutionary process, ensuring the survival of the fittest. But in the end it had destroyed them. Violence was incompatible with intelligence, Laura had said, and in this post-nuclear world it had no place. They should have listened to the warning cries of the peace-protesters before the war. In the government bunker they should have listened to Grandfather Harnden, although even then it had been too late.

They had been wasting their lives with their plans and blueprints, dreams of underground cities and technological revival. All her life Grandmother Erica had worked in the food laboratories. All her life Ophelia had peered at chromosomes down a microscope, whilst Sowerby messed around with his maps and Harris struggled to keep the generator running. Not one of them had faced the reality. They should have known resources were finite, that pre-war supplies of petrol, raw chemicals, and component parts were bound to run out. They should have known that if they did not adapt to changed environmental conditions they were doomed to die out. They had sacrificed their children’s futures for a technological breakthrough that had never happened, left Simon to face what they could not . . . that Homo sapiens would become extinct and mutants would inherit the earth.

Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the earth with their great grey brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent.

Yet, thinking of himself, Simon knew he was not stupid. Nor had he ever killed anything, except for the dog. As an individual apart from collective history, he had done nothing to be ashamed of. It was only in comparison to Laura that he appeared mentally deficient and emotionally unstable. Like Neanderthal man had been to Homo sapiens, so he was to her . . . a lower species. And there was nothing he could do about it, no way he could change himself.

He heard a scuff of footsteps in the dust behind him and turned his head. Blind Kate was standing on the shadow line. She carried a wicker basket and was leaning on a walking stick. A straw hat shaded her ravaged face from the sun but her arms were exposed, patches of raw red skin forming among the festering sores. Blue faded eyes stared sightlessly across the distances. Her dying voice called his name, and called again when he did not answer her.

Simon held his breath, watched and waited to see what she would do. She was his aunt, his own mother’s sister, but he could not bring himself to acknowledge her. Nor did he want her near him. She was what he dreaded most of all, an image of his own future, an ailing pathetic thing. He would become like blind Kate, twenty or thirty years from now. She shuffled towards him and put down the basket. Her breath rattled and she shouted at the open water where he was not.

‘I know you’re there! You didn’t want my Laura! But she sent this for you! It’s green salad sandwiches, strawberries and cream, cold mint tea and a caftan to keep off the sun. You come and get it! I know you’re there.’

From the grass at her feet Simon stared up at her. Emotions tore at him and he wanted to scream. He did not want their gifts . . . strawberries and cream and a fancy caftan. He would rather fry and starve than accept. But blind Kate held it towards him, cool white linen with a loose hood. Unseeing eyes looked directly at him, as if she knew he was there. Her lips twisted in scorn.

‘Give it, she told me. Give it to him. And all this morning was spent in making it. And she picked the strawberries herself. That’s how we taught her. We have no right to keep things to ourselves. What others need Laura will give, if she can. That’s how we taught them all. They must be better people, Johnson said. Better than us. And so they are. True to her kind, my Laura is, and better than you. They are all better than you. You only know how to take, don’t you? Take for yourself, not give and receive. I remember, my fine young man. I remember the likes of you!’

Simon bit his lip.

Blind Kate had mothered mutants, fostered a new way of life but she had not forgotten how to hurt. Laura inflicted cruelty by kindness, not even knowing, but blind Kate chose her words and used them like knives, truth cutting into him, paying him back for his nastiness to the granddaughter she loved. There was nothing pathetic about blind Kate now. She was the originator of the settlement, a survivor against all odds, revered and respected. A gobbet of her spittle smacked on the dusty grass beside him.

‘Worthless!’ she said. ‘Yes, we were all worthless, not knowing how to cherish this earth and each other! That was the evil which had to be destroyed. We allowed no wickedness here, Johnson and I. But you have learned nothing, hiding away in your bunker from the human struggle. Think to despise her, don’t you? Think yourself better than she? But you’ll learn the truth of it yet, my boy. You’ll learn!’

Simon reached for the caftan and clutched it to his chest. It was soft and beautiful, a gift from a girl who was better than both of them. He would put it on when blind Kate was gone and quit this place.

*

The caftan billowed in the hot summer wind as Simon crossed the dam, hung in graceful folds and swished around his ankles when he entered the wood. It did something for him, changed his whole personality, set him free from the galling humiliation of his own humanity. He was free to walk among the silences of trees and actually enjoy himself. He saw a colony of tiny birds feeding on the blight that dropped from the high branches. He saw day-moths fluttering in the shafts of yellow light. Ferns and foxgloves grew among the undergrowth and he could smell the fragrance of the air. White protective suits and plastic visors had cut him off from all of this, but the caftan was different. It let him become a part of the life that was all around him, and extinction seemed a thing of the past.

The path ascended steeply to the top of the hill and the stitches in his leg pulled uncomfortably. But he had left his crutch on the grass, along with the woollen undershirt and empty basket, and he was not going back. He climbed a stile in the wall that bordered the plantation, emerged on to empty moorland in the wind and sun, and pulled up his hood. Sheep grazed on the gold gorse hills before him and the valley was behind him and below, the great yellow building diminished by height, grown small among its surrounding fields.

Seen from above it was not so impressive . . . just a square-built kibbutz housing a simple rural community. Laura believed that mutation was an evolutionary step forward, but maybe it was not. He saw no evidence of an advanced society. Quite the reverse. It was simplistic and retrogressive, almost mediaeval. Technologically mutants were centuries behind the people who lived in the government bunker.

Simon felt his confidence restored. Maybe Laura was a nicer person than he, but her life style was archaic. Bucolic existence had been around for thousands of years and was non-progressive. As a species the mutants faced stagnation. They had no drive, no ambitions, no go-ahead ideas. Simple agricultural survival was not enough, and Laura had nothing to brag about, no more than he.

He brushed leaf mould and pine needles from his caftan and headed out across the moors, limping towards a group of standing stones he saw on the far skyline. He knew Harris and Sowerby had planned to go north and work their way west through the various communities, so he reasoned that if he went west and worked his way north he was bound to meet up with them. West was where the standing stones were, the way the wind came, untempered across the open empty spaces and tearing at his hood. He had to hang on to it and could feel the sun’s rays burning the back of his hand.

The stones were further than he thought. He had to detour around vast areas of bog. His leg hurt and it was early evening before he reached them. He sheltered from the wind and sun in the lee of a giant upright. A spot of bright blood showed through the bandages and he was beginning to feel hungry again. He looked for the next settlement, but only a church tower showed above the western horizon.

Simon had seen no evidence of organized religion among Laura’s people, but he reasoned that where there was a church there was bound to be a village. He walked slowly towards it, picking bilberries as he went. He could survive for ever out on these moors on the rich dark berries and water from the stony streams. The sun was already setting when he knelt to drink, drained of heat and dazzling his eyes. He did not know what made him glance around . . . a sensing perhaps.

The dogs were low on their bellies, pack-hunting, fanning out through the gorse and heather. Simon ran, great limping strides, not caring about the gash in his leg, not caring about anything except the fear that drove him. He had no rifle, no defence. His only hope was to outrun them, reach the church and seek sanctuary inside. But the distance was almost a mile and he knew he would never make it.

The plane seemed to fly from the sun, a snow-white glider with wings gleaming golden in the light, drifting down the thermals of windy air and dipping towards him. Lower it came, and lower, making its turn, whistling in from the northern hills, skimming the surface of the land, bending heather and grasses in a rush of speed. It passed directly behind him, between himself and the dogs, giving him space.

Simon did not stop to watch, he just went on running. And the plane stayed with him, circling and dropping, its great white presence warding off the attack. With its every approach the dogs fell back, snarled and waited, as Simon ran on. The caftan billowed. The wind whipped off his hood and the low sun burned his face, but he could not stop. He ran until his lungs were bursting, and blood soaked through the bandages, ran down his leg and stained the earth with his scent. The dogs would not give up but he made it to the church ahead of them as the white plane circled and dropped for one last time.

Simon entered the tower. The door had fallen inward, and maybe he should have gone for the main body of the church, but it was too late now. He skidded to a halt among a mess of mortar and bird droppings, mouldering hymn books and rotting shelves. Inside it was almost too dark to see and the door leading into the nave was locked. Simon spun around. He could just make out the shape of a vestry chest standing in the corner. It was solid oak but his brute strength shifted it and he hauled it across the gap of the doorway. He tore at the fallen shelves that had once held hymn books, tried to wedge them on top, a criss-cross barricade that refused to stay in place. He saw the glider heading away into the sunset. He saw white fangs and milky eyes as one dog gathered itself to spring, grabbed a fallen spar and lashed as it leapt.

The dog howled and fell backward, turned tail and ran as another took its place. Again Simon lashed, a blow to its head that laid it temporarily unconscious. The other dogs circled outside among grass and gravestones. He knew they would not go away. They would stay there all night if they had to, work out a co-ordinated attack. He needed to build the barricade higher, and there was a board in the corner, leaning against the wall where the vestry chest had been. Away from the weather it had been preserved. Gold lettering on black paint told the times of weekly services. Saint Andrew’s Rushfield, the church was called. Keeping an eye on the space of the doorway Simon dragged it across the room, heaved it on top of the chest. It completely blocked the doorway apart from a small gap at the top. He used the weight of his body to hold it in place and was finally safe.

Simon sat in the almost total darkness, trembling in every limb, not daring to move. The board was hard and his shoulder was jammed against it, but he knew it would hold as long as he himself did not slacken. Movement was difficult and he was already feeling sick from exertion, and when he touched the bandage on his leg it was sodden with blood, warm and sticky on his fingers, pumping more with every heartbeat. He had torn open the stitches and was likely to bleed to death.

He must have been mad to leave the settlement! Mad to walk the hills without a rifle! In this new world, grown from the dust of war, dogs had always been a danger. And there was a limit as to how long he could hole up here in this crumbling stinking tower without food or water. Dogs scrabbled at the inner door that led through to the nave of the church. Suppose, whilst they were in there, he made a run for it?

He tried to remember what he had seen outside. No village or settlement, just gravestones and a derelict vicarage, a few ruined cottages and a track leading downhill into a tangled valley with a river at the bottom. He tried to remember Sowerby’s map. If that was the river Wye he had seen below, then there were no settlements nearby. They were all to the north and he was too far west, outside the area Harris and Sowerby had planned to travel. He should have turned north at the standing stones, headed for the settlement at Newington. Now he could either go back the way he had come, or make for Timperley which was somewhere down in the valley . . . a good six miles in either direction. Simon knew he would never make it. He was trapped in the tower and no one knew he was there, except for the glider pilot.

Who was it could fly a glider in these parts? Mutants had no technology so it had to come from a government bunker. Cardiff had not survived the holocaust, nor Cheltenham either. So it had to be Hereford, head-quarters of the Special Armed Services division, thirty or forty miles away. Communications had ended years ago but the Hereford bunker would still be there. Simon reckoned it would be morning before they could reach him, and the following morning if they had no trucks or petrol. But it gave him something to hope for, set a time scale for his imprisonment.

Dogs gnawed at the woodwork of the inner door. Others prowled and whined around the perimeter walls. Night birds screamed in the belfry above him as Simon settled down to wait. It was only thirty-six hours at most, he told himself, but every minute seemed endless.

Simon was gripped by a lethargy that made him feel almost comfortable, his mind drifting between sleeping and waking, gone beyond fear or pain. His shoulder had gone numb from where the signboard cut into it but he was no longer aware of that. Then a sound in the distance caused him to listen, a nickering whinny and a heavy clopping tread, some kind of large unidentifiable animal. The dogs snarled and snapped with their teeth, whined and retreated as the creature came on towards the tower and stopped outside. He could hear the creak of leather, the jangle of metal and the snort of its breath.

‘Simon?’ said Laura. ‘Are you in there?’

In sheer relief Simon let go. The board crashed to the floor and he saw her sitting there, Laura in the moonlight with her pale hair blowing in the wind, white-robed and slender, riding a horse. He had not known horses still existed, but this one was real enough. Splotched piebald, it tossed its head and aimed a kick as the dogs approached it. Laura stroked its mane.

‘This is Timms,’ she said. ‘He was given to us by Morgan’s people who live in the north of Wales. Are you all right? I got here as fast as I could.’

‘How did you find me?’ Simon asked in astonishment.

‘Tyler told us where you were.’

‘Who’s Tyler?’

‘The glider pilot. Are you going to stay in there all night or will you come back to the settlement?’

‘I’m not coming out there with those dogs,’ said Simon.

‘I’ll get rid of them,’ Laura said.

She slid from the horse’s back. The dogs were only a few yards from her, gleaming eyes and teeth showing white in the moonlight. She turned to face them, inviting them to attack. But they kept their distance, and she raised her hand, pointed away to the midnight hills. ‘Go!’ she said. And the dogs obeyed her, sank on their bellies and slunk away. She was stronger than they were. Stronger in her mind. And stronger than Simon too. He went giddy the moment he moved and collapsed on the ground.

When he came to he was lying among the litter on the dirty floor. Single-handed Laura had shifted the heavy chest from the doorway, and a candle in a jam jar shed a flickering light, gleamed in the horse’s eyes outside and showed Laura kneeling beside him with a blood-soaked dressing in her hand.

‘That was stupid!’ she said. ‘A stupid thing to do! Why did you do it? Why run away from us? You had only to say you wanted to leave and we would have given you Timms, gone with you, shown you the way! You might have died if Tyler hadn’t spotted you. Don’t you care what happens to you? Are we so ugly and repulsive you couldn’t even bear to spend a few days with us? What’s wrong with us, Simon? What’s wrong with me?’

Simon sat with his back against the wall. There was nothing wrong with Laura. She was a wonderful, beautiful person. Strands of her hair were the colour of moonlight and she might have been human. But her eyes were white and on her arms the pale fur shone with sheen. There was nothing wrong with that either, except that Simon could not accept it. He could not forget she was a mutant. He tried to explain.

‘There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s me who’s wrong. I’m prejudiced, I suppose. One hundred per cent human. It’s in me and I can’t change myself. I don’t measure up to you and I never will.’

‘In other words you have an inferiority complex?’

‘It’s how you make me feel,’ said Simon.

‘We don’t mean to,’ Laura said worriedly. ‘We respect what you are, just as we respect all forms of life. You’re sacred, Simon. Everything is.’

‘But I can’t buy that quasi religious bullshit!’

‘Surely it’s axiomatic?’ said Laura.

‘Axio-what?’

‘A self-evident universally accepted truth.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since, failing to see it, your kind engineered a nuclear war and almost destroyed everything.’

‘That’s what I mean!’ Simon said furiously. ‘That’s what it all boils down to! The sins of my fathers! I’ve inherited what they did, a madman on the road to extinction! I’m a member of a redundant species, don’t you see? I’ve got no future, and I’ve got no purpose, and I don’t need you to spell it out. I know I’m useless! I’ve been getting the message loud and clear from the moment I met you. Well, thanks for the lesson, but I’m not staying around to have it rubbed in!’

Laura said nothing, went outside, took a compress and bandage from the saddle bag and rebound his leg. She gave him bread and cheese, water from a leather canteen, and the woollen shirt to wear beneath his caftan. Then she put on her over-gown, blew out the candle and waited for him to struggle to his feet. By now she had learned not to help him.

‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked.

‘How the hell would I know?’ Simon snapped.

‘I’ll take you to Timperley,’ she decided.

‘That’s miles away!’

‘You can ride the horse.’

‘I don’t know how to ride a horse!’

‘All you need to do is sit on his back,’ said Laura. ‘Surely even you can manage that much?’

Timms was loaded with bed-rolls and blankets, standing patiently as Simon attempted to mount. But his leg felt dead, unable to support him, unable to provide the necessary thrust. This time Laura was bound to help him, slim fingers clutching his waist. And something boosted him, some huge force propelling him upward until he was suddenly sitting astride and looking down on her.

‘How did you do that?’ he asked in surprise.

‘I eat spinach,’ said Laura. ‘Like the legendary Pop-Eye the Sailor blind Kate used to watch on television.’

‘Who the hell was he?’ Simon asked.

Without bothering to reply Laura caught hold of the rein and led Timms from the churchyard as Simon swayed and steadied himself, gripped with his knees and clung to the saddle. He expected to take the track to the valley but instead they stayed on the high ground, and the moon on the river made a silver ribbon in the darkness below. Trees shivered on the wooded slopes, unreal and glittering, like the landscape of a dream. It had all gone dreamlike, and a girl with white-gold hair was leading him on through timeless distances under the vast expanse of starry sky in a world he did not know.

The moon sank behind them. Simon was sagging with tiredness and his backside ached from riding before Laura suddenly stopped. He raised his head and saw a towering cromlech on the edge of a black abyss. Left and right a pathway wandered along the earth-bank borders between England and Wales, scuffed smooth by the feet of ages. It was Offa’s Dyke on Sowerby’s map, old and ghost-haunted in Simon’s imagination. And the land fell away, hundreds of feet to the river below at the pitch black ending of the world.

‘They call this place the Devil’s Pulpit,’ Laura said, as she helped him dismount. ‘We’ll camp here till morning. I don’t want Timms to break his leg.’

And Simon was too weary to argue.

On a bed of heather with a blanket to cover him Simon slept soundly and awoke with a start. He could smell smoke, see fire, and twigs from the dead trees crackled as Laura held out her hands to the blaze. The surrounding darkness was intensified, moonless and still in the black hour before morning. A small wind whined around the Devil’s Pulpit, and the air was as cold as ice. Simon shivered, draped the blanket around his shoulder, and went to crouch by the fire. Laura added more wood.

‘It will be light soon,’ she said. ‘Then we can move on.’

‘We didn’t need to stop here in the first place,’ Simon muttered.

‘You’d had enough,’ Laura stated simply. ‘And I wasn’t leading Timms over the edge in the dark.’

‘You knew it was there, so why come this way?’

‘I wanted to show you.’

‘Show me what?’

‘The view,’ said Laura.

‘You’ve brought me all this way to look at the blasted view? I suppose it didn’t occur to you I could lose my leg if I don’t get it seen to?’

‘If you lose your leg it’s your own fault!’ Laura retorted. ‘You shouldn’t have set out on your own in the first place. And criticizing me won’t make you any less stupid! So you may as well go back to bed!’

She was not so perfect.

She reacted as angrily as he did.

‘You can’t give me orders!’ Simon said belligerently. ‘I’ll do what I please! Go where I like, when I like, not when you say so! I’ll go to Timperley on my flipping own!’

‘I’ll tell them to expect you,’ Laura snapped.

‘Without a radio or telephone you can’t tell anyone anything!’ Simon said scornfully.

‘Can’t I?’

He stared at her, sensing the significance.

She was contradicting him.

Hinting at something that was not rational.

‘How did that glider pilot tell you where to find me?’ Simon demanded. ‘He didn’t land at the settlement. He headed west in the opposite direction.’

Laura smashed a broken branch and cast the dry wood chunks upon the fire. The flames leapt higher, reflected in her eyes, white and burning. Orange sheen danced on the fur of her face, showed scarlet on her hands as she once more spread them to warm.

‘If I told you,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t like it!’

‘So tell me anyway!’

‘We use telepathy!’

‘You what?’

‘The communication of direct thought.’

Simon sat back. Maybe he had sensed it right from the beginning, powers such as he had never imagined, dangerous and inhuman. Maybe that was why he had run, not wanting to face the full meaning of mutation. He remembered Lilith’s black pin-prick pupils drilling into him. He remembered the terror of her smile. Across the scarlet red burning of the flames his eyes met Laura’s and this time there was no escape.

‘Can you read my mind?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Sometimes I can feel what you’re thinking, but not very often. If I could have read your mind we wouldn’t have needed Tyler to go looking for you. You’ve a closed mind mostly, like the rest of your kind.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Simon muttered. ‘I guess Tyler is also a mutant?’

Laura shrugged.

‘We all are,’ she said simply.

Simon nodded grimly. Apart from blind Kate there were none of his kind left living outside, and the white-winged glider had been nothing to do with the government bunker at Hereford. He had thought at the time there was something odd about it. Now he realized what that something was. No unpowered aircraft could fly like that, skim across the surface and rise using wind power alone. And what had provided the initial lift?

‘Who flies the tow plane?’ Simon asked.

‘What tow plane?’ said Laura.

‘You need a tow plane to get a glider airborne.’

‘They use the wind off Tressilech Beacon.’

‘That’s aerodynamically impossible.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Where’s your initial velocity? Where’s your thrust? That’s not a hang glider. You’ve got to have power to take off.’

‘PK,’ said Laura.

‘What’s that?’

‘Psycho-kinetic energy. Mind over matter. The levitation principle. What else can we use? How else could we raise the standing stones, or build our settlements? How else could I have lifted you on to Timms’ back?’

Simon closed his eyes. Black and crimson the firelight flickered on his closed eyelids and Laura’s voice seemed to come from far away, from the distances of the future or the past. Mental powers were nothing new, she said. They had been around since the dawn of time. Probably, in the beginning, everyone had possessed them and known how to use them. Like instinct they were necessary for survival in a world without cranes, or telephones, jet engines, sub-machine guns, antibiotics and geological instruments. But the old intuitive ways of knowing and doing things had been pushed to the back of human minds, passed over in favour of logical explanations, conscious understanding, and clever machines. They had survived only dimly in memories of magic and myth. But radiation from the nuclear war and an increase in ultraviolet light had caused genetic changes, changes which were not just physical but mental as well. Maybe mutants were a throwback to earlier stages of human development, but more likely they were the inheritors of all the stages of evolution.

Simon struggled to accept what she was saying, the enormity of it, the huge implications. What kind of mind was it that could lift a glider from the ground? What kind of terrifying elemental force charged the neuronal circuits of the mutant brain? Allowed them to communicate over distances? Put to flight a pack of ravenous dogs? Locate gold? Heal wounds? And hoist him on to a horse? With powers like that the mutants did not need technology.

‘I think we’re a new species,’ Laura was saying. ‘I think we’ve hardly begun to learn, hardly begun to use our full potential. We don’t yet know our own minds, how they work, or what they can do.’

Alpha and omega, Simon thought savagely.

He was the last of his race.

She was the first.

And like Homo sapiens the mutants would find out.

Laura read his mind.

‘No!’ she said desperately. ‘Why won’t you listen? Why can’t you see? That was your way, not ours! It’s what the holocaust taught us. Life is too precious for us to damage or destroy. What’s left belongs to all of us. We can share it, Simon, and we don’t need to fight or kill.’

Simon looked at her in scorn. For all her power Laura was completely naive, and those who came from the government bunker would have no scruples. They might be willing to beg for houseroom among the mutant settlements but once it was granted, once they were all established, they would begin to take over, reclaim their rightful status in the social order. No one from the bunker would be willing to accept subservience. It was they who would rule, they who would become masters, and the mutants would be their slaves, put to work planting, and mining, and manufacturing machines. Mutants would build the underground cities, and fulfil their human dreams.

‘You’ll fight when you have to,’ Simon assured her. ‘When it’s either us or you, you’ll fight.’

‘Except that there’s not many left of you,’ Laura pointed out. ‘And every year there are less.’

‘We still have time.’

‘And we have the minds,’ she reminded him.

Simon glanced at her, feeling suddenly sick.

‘You could control us?’

‘Like dogs if we have to.’

The firelight seemed cold.

And there was nothing more to say.

Simon sat on an outcrop of rock. Daylight brightened around him and the valley below was shrouded in mist. He was a shivering useless lump of human flesh, numb with cold, unable to help himself. His injured leg was stiff and hurting, but pain no longer mattered. Nothing mattered any more. Laura had stripped away the last vestiges of pride, and defeat had nothing to do with war. It was an emotional experience, a sense of futility as relentless as grief. He had tried to fight it, lashed out in anger against everything Laura was, but all that remained was the final acknowledgement of her supremacy, the final giving up.

His caftan was soaked with overnight dew but the grey haze held a promise of sun. It did not cheer him any. He could not live in it, not without Laura. He would have to go crawling to her for everything he needed. It was her world now, not his, and he heard her saddling the horse, talking to it softly, making ready to go. She did not know what she had done to him. She did not know she had finally killed his hope.

It might have been easier to bear if the mutants had conquered them, taken them by force and stormed the bunker. In war, or death, or even enslavement, Simon could have retained a kind of purpose, a concept of eventual freedom. But the war was fifty years over. His own people had fought it and lost it, and he had been born in their defeat. Laura was not his enemy. He had no enemy, except himself.

It was himself he had to accept, not Laura . . . his pride, his aggression, his mistaken human belief that he was the lord over all creation, made in the image of God. There was no proof of that, and there never had been. If God was everywhere then He was no more in Simon than in the woodlouse that crawled at his feet, in the piebald horse and the seed-heads of grasses. And if God was in him then He was in Laura too, and in that case she was right, the world was made for sharing, even with him.

Tumbled banks of earth and stone, gorse and bracken, swept down to the unseen water. Simon could vaguely make out the ruins of Timperley Abbey, gaunt and grey among a sea of mist. The first rays of the sun gilded the opposite hills, turned trees to gold and burned the back of his neck. Automatically he raised his hood. Strange how he still retained an instinct for survival, self-preservation against all the odds. The whole of his species was genetically doomed to extinction, yet he clung to his own little life as if something inside him believed, in spite of everything, it was still worth living.

It was, of course. Life had always been a personal affair. Individuals had never much cared what had happened in the past, or would happen in the future, or how much others of their kind suffered or lacked. They did not care how many others died providing they lived. And government, to those who did not govern, had been largely a matter of indifference unless it happened to have a detrimental effect on the lives of individuals. Then, maybe, if the individuals had felt strongly enough, they had held protests, gone on strike, or started revolutions. Simon, if he were honest, did not give a damn who ruled him. Government by mutants could be no worse than government by humans, and it might even be better. If he were fed, and clothed, and looked after, what more could he ask?

It was the end of his pride but it did not hurt to let it go, experience humility and shame. He knew then that he was not answerable for others of his kind, nor could he change what others of his kind had done in the past. The future of the species had been sealed by the holocaust before he was born, but his own future was entirely personal. He had only one life and that was his own. It was not too late to make it a good one, to grow and give and gain in an individual way. He could not be held responsible for the sins of his fathers, nor was he obliged to perpetuate their less desirable traits. He could never live up to Laura mentally, or genetically, but he could live up to her as a person. It was not too late for him to evolve both spiritually and emotionally, morally adapt to the mutant way of life, and be better than he was. If he could do that then it would not be defeat, but victory.

He lifted his head. Below, in the valley, the mist was clearing. He saw a flicker of river water and the Abbey walls glistened like gold. Roof tiles shone amber in the light. It should have been a ruin, a gothic pile immortalized by poets of the past. But the mist revealed it . . . turrets and towers, sunlight reflecting from the window glass, and a town built around it, gold and glittering in the Midas touch of morning, streets and houses of old yellow stone.

Simon recognized it at once . . . the El Dorado of every human mind, handed down from generation to generation. In the slums and housing estates and highrise blocks, in New York and London and Tokyo, people had dreamed of a golden city, and dreamed of it still in a crumbling bunker beneath the windswept hills of Avon. In every creed, in every culture, in myths and legends and written history, the archetypal city had existed. But the mutants had built it, Blake’s Jerusalem, molten and shimmering beside an English river. It seemed to flow into the land around it, melt with the green of wooded hills and water meadows until the whole valley glowed, and the glory took away his breath.

‘Timperley,’ said Laura. ‘It was what I wanted to show you. It’s always best seen at this time of day.’

A few hours ago Simon would have hated her, accused her of boasting, but hatred had no place in a scene like this. He could understand how she felt about Timperley. It was like a scrap of heaven fallen to earth, the resurrection of something sacred, an architect’s triumph, its foundations buried in time. No one could hate what was truly holy.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he admitted.

Laura sat beside him on the rock. She too looked beautiful, a golden girl with a sheen on her fur and her pale hair shot with sunlight, like a living fragment of the scene below, perfectly belonging.

‘Do you know its history?’ she asked.

‘It was sacked by Henry the Eighth,’ he replied.

‘A man destroyed it, and a man rebuilt it,’ she said. ‘Maybe you know of him? His name was Dwight Allison.’

‘Dwight Allison?’

Simon stared at her.

‘Dwight Allison built that?’

Laura nodded.

‘He designed it,’ she said proudly. ‘He saw what it could be, dreamed the street plans and the houses, the stained glass patterns of the Abbey windows, its columns and arches, its roof vaults and gardens. He dreamed it and we constructed it. He dreamed our settlement building too. But that was long ago, before I was born. Lilith thought you might have heard of him.’

‘My mother married his brother,’ Simon said.

‘He died,’ said Laura. ‘Five years ago.’

Dwight had died, but his city lived on.

It was a legacy worth leaving.

‘Back at the bunker no one speaks of him,’ said Simon. ‘My mother would never tell me what he did, some kind of sabotage, I think. My father said he was a traitor.’

‘He was an artist,’ said Laura. ‘And we set him free. What will you do when you are set free, Simon? What will you make of your life with everything given? Dwight gave us Timperley, but what will you give? The great bridge back across the river Severn? Operating techniques for organ transplants? A ship that will take us to the stars?’

Simon stared at her.

But her gaze stayed fixed on the golden city.

‘It needn’t even be a concrete thing,’ she mused. ‘Ideas are enough. Ideas can become a philosophy and change the world. It wasn’t only the nuclear holocaust that made us what we are. It was men like Johnson and women like blind Kate. They taught us to be better people. Taught us to give and share, care about everything and damage nothing. They wanted us to succeed where the human race had failed, and become what human beings had failed to become. It was your kind who envisioned us, just as Dwight envisioned that city down there. Great men of the past have always dreamed of a future world and we inherit those dreams. We have the potential to make them reality. Do you understand what I’m saying, Simon?’

‘I understand,’ said Simon. ‘But I don’t quite see what you’re getting at. Where exactly do I come into it? What is it you want from me?’

‘Men like Johnson,’ said Laura, ‘and women like blind Kate, founders of settlements . . . they gave us all they could but they didn’t know everything. They didn’t know what you know, Simon. In your government bunkers you have kept alive a knowledge that we need. It will take us generations to sift through all the information collected in books and learn to apply it. By that time we may have lost the ability to understand. Those portions of our brains which are capable of calculative workings out could have fallen into disuse. Psychic powers are very important. Intuitive understanding is very important. But conscious understanding and logical reasoning are equally important. Without knowing how to reason things out we stand on the brink of a new dark age. That’s why we need you, Simon. That’s why we’re willing to try so hard to keep you alive. We need what you know in the bunkers. We need your technological understanding before it’s lost for ever. Now do you see?’

Simon nodded, and smiled.

He saw everything, as clear as day.

Whatever Laura gave him would not be for nothing.

Simon did not go on to Timperley. Riding high on Timms’ back, with Laura walking beside him, he headed home across the moorland hills of west Gloucestershire. The world had not ended at the Devil’s Pulpit. Instead it had begun. In that gold glittering city and in Laura’s words he had seen a future for himself. All the darkness and destruction, all the suffering and stupidity of the human race was over. But all that was worthwhile in them was still going on . . . great thoughts, great works, great love. Nothing worthwhile was ever wasted. It only evolved, and mutated. The vision always survived.

Cool wind fluttered his caftan and dark glasses protected his eyes from the sun. He wore linen gloves and a face mask, which the mutants had fashioned for him during the previous afternoon, his skin cocooned from the vicious light. It was a necessary precaution, as necessary as a wheelchair to a man with no legs, and Simon accepted it now. Genetically vulnerable he would always need protection. But freedom was not necessarily a physical thing. It was not a mind chained to a body, dominated by physical and emotional desires and seeking to gratify them. Nor was it a mind obedient to set social concepts and dogmatic beliefs. Freedom was a mind released from worry and struggle, released from personal ambitions and the impositions of society, free to follow its own inclinations, its own thoughts. And Simon’s mind soared, cloud high, escaped at last from the confines of the bunker into a world of unlimited possibilities.

What will you do? Laura had asked him. What will you do when you are set free and all things are given? Simon did not yet know, but he thought of it. With all his needs provided for, with food, and shelter, and clothing, with friendships and relationships, his life lay open ahead, vacant years waiting to be filled with whatever he wanted to do. In research or study, in technical or artistic or practical work, he would be able to realize his full potential. Whatever he learned he would be able to teach. Whatever he gained he could give. And of him too nothing worthwhile would ever be wasted. He could hardly wait to begin.

‘We’ll need laboratories,’ he said.

‘There’s at least one empty workroom in every settlement,’ Laura informed him.

‘We’ll need specialized equipment too. Raw ingredients. Component parts. You can’t harness solar energy without reflector shields, or build a suspension bridge without steel cables. You need copper wiring for electrical systems, silicon chips for computers.’

‘We have artisans who can work to your specifications,’ said Laura.

‘It’s not my department,’ said Simon, ‘but we’ve already designed a system of solar satellites. If we could build and fuel the launch rockets . . .’

‘Fossil fuels are pollutants,’ Laura objected.

‘You need them to provide the necessary thrust.’

‘Try talking to Tyler.’

‘Psycho-kinetic impulse? Is that possible?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Laura. ‘That’s why we need you. We need to know what’s possible, and how it’s possible.’

Simon pondered, jabbed his foot into Timms’ flank. It was a staggering hypothesis, mind-blasting into space. If he could calculate the impulse and tonnage lift available for a one second burst of mental energy, and how long the mutant mind was able to sustain the output, and if one mind could work in unison with others . . . then they might reach the moon again in his lifetime. And if he could calculate the range and accuracy of telepathic thought transference, they might be able to re-establish an international communications network, and maybe minds alone could monitor space flight.

Again it was not his department, but he wondered to what extent mutant minds could be melded together to form a gestalt, if each could become directly aware of what the other knew, thus speeding up the learning process. He wondered if each mind possessed the full range of psychic abilities, to what extent they could be developed, and if their application was learned or inherent. And what about teleportation? Could they transfer matter through space? Transfer themselves as some advanced yogis had once claimed to do? Just how far could mutants transcend the limitations of their physical bodies? What was the principle behind paranormal functioning? How did it work? And why? There were so many questions he needed to ask. So much he needed to understand.

‘These powers of yours . . . do they originate solely from inside your mind? I mean, are they internally generated? Do you feel energy flow out of you? Or do you become a channel for some external power? Is there some kind of well-spring, do you think? The source of creative spirit? The universal life force? God? Is that what we’re dealing with?’

Simon glanced around when Laura did not answer. Stark on the horizon behind him was the tower of Rushfield church. He had passed it without even seeing, urged Timms to a trot, and left Laura behind. Now she came running across the heather trying to catch up. Simon heaved on the reins and waited impatiently. With only one life he needed to reach the settlement, begin work immediately, with nothing holding him back. He had to establish a basic theory before he could begin to apply it. Timms stamped restlessly, sensing his mood, a piebald horse, as rare and precious as the knowledge Simon possessed, and made for sharing. Panting for breath Laura drew level, grasped the bridle and hung on.

‘You’re going too fast!’ she complained.

‘We can both get there quicker if we ride together,’ Simon said.

She looked up at him.

White eyes trying to read his mind.

‘I’m a mutant,’ she reminded him.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ he asked.

‘You didn’t want me touching you.’

‘I was stupid then.’

Simon held out his hand, inviting her, a mutant girl with white eyes and albino fur. It no longer mattered what she was, or how different. In the past the inability of people to reconcile themselves to each other’s differences had led to confrontation, tyranny, subjugation and war. Not any more did Simon see the need for that. Diversity was necessary and natural, part of the evolutionary process. If the human race had accepted each others’ differences instead of trying to oppose them, Christ might not have been crucified, and they might not have destroyed themselves. It was too late for them, but it was not too late for Simon. He could learn to live with Laura’s differences, learn to respect them, understand them, even love. But now she stood there, staring up at him, as if she could not believe he had changed so much and needed to be convinced.

‘We’re cousins,’ he told her.

‘We’re all cousins to the apes,’ she said consolingly.

‘I don’t mean it in an evolutionary sense. This is for real. Blind Kate is my mother’s sister.’

‘Your mother is Amelia Harnden?’

‘Ophelia,’ Simon corrected. ‘Ophelia Allison now.’

‘You told blind Kate you’d never heard of her!’

‘I lied,’ said Simon.

She was angry.

He could sense how angry she was.

And her voice was bitter.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why lie to her? What harm would it have done to admit you knew her? Was even that too much for you to give? A little pleasure to an old blind woman? What kind of person are you, Simon?’

He bit his lip.

He knew what he had been . . . mean, selfish, lying out of pride, unable to accept that he was related, not caring about anyone but himself. He had thought himself the highest form of life, a man created in the image of God, Homo sapiens, the chosen species. It was not easy knowing he was not, harder still to confess the truth of himself.

‘I’m human,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told you that. It’s the excuse for everything vile our kind has ever done and it’s my excuse too. Blind Kate said I would learn, and I have. I’m not exactly proud of myself, Laura. I’ll tell her about my mother when we return to the settlement. I’ll even apologize. Now will you ride with me?’

She hesitated, a beautiful girl in a white woollen gown, her hair hanging gold in the sunlight. She was as human as he was, sprung from the same stock, nearer to perfection but still unsure of herself. Maybe they had shared the same distaste of each other. Maybe she too was reluctant to grasp the gloved hand of friendship which Simon held out towards her.

‘Please?’ he said softly.

Laura made up her mind, smiled and accepted, and mounted behind him. Slim arms gripped his waist, tightened as Timms moved on. And two thousand years of strife-ridden history resolved itself in them, the wastage of centuries gone in a moment of time. Appearances did not matter. Creed or colour, race or religion or political affiliation, did not matter. They had raised themselves above all that. Spiritually, mentally and emotionally, they accepted each other. They were just two people on a piebald horse, voices in the wind being carried away across the flying land.

‘Will I meet your mother?’

‘She died when I was born.’

‘Grandfather Harnden died nine years ago.’

‘I wish I had known him.’

‘It’s a weird coincidence that we two should meet.’

‘Or maybe it’s wonderful,’ said Laura.

Maybe she was wonderful, Simon thought. She saw veils of ultraviolet light shining over a rainbow-coloured earth, auras of light around all living things, and heard over distances mutants speaking in her mind. She made a nuclear holocaust meaningful. Those untold millions of people had died that Laura could be born, and bones and buildings of past civilizations lay buried for ever. Through her Simon could see backward into time, through men and apes and mammals, through fishes and slime, into space and stars and the slow world forming. Through her he could see forward into the future . . . evolution, mutation, mind over matter, space and stars. She maintained the continuity of creation. For her blind Kate had survived and Simon had come here, each of them part of an unbroken perfect pattern that bestowed a meaning upon everything, little fragments of the mind of God which nothing could destroy.

Dodos and dinosaurs and Homo sapiens had not been wasted. The human race no failed evolutionary experiment, their nuclear war no ultimate disaster. It had happened because it was meant to happen and nothing was lost. The ideas, the thoughts, the achievements, Timperley Abbey and the standing stones on the stark horizon, Boyle’s law and Einstein’s theory of relativity . . . she would inherit it all, Laura with her arms around him, warm and touching and covered with white fur. She and her kind would reap the whirlwind, the mind of man and life on earth. Simon stroked her hand. He did not begrudge her, did not begrudge any of them the knowledge he possessed. They were better than he was . . . Homo superior, the children of the dust.