12 - BOOKS! BOOKS! REAL BOOKS!

 

Rostokovich stood in the middle of the enormous bay window that looked out over the quadrangle and watched as Talura walked across the lawn with the new boy. She turned to Frank, who was standing next to her. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that?’

Frank shook his head.

‘Quite remarkable. He doesn’t have the slightest clue, does he?’

‘Oh, that,’ said Frank sounding surprised. ‘I thought you were talking about Talura. I’ve never seen her switch off her cloaking device so quickly when she’s just met someone.’

‘Hmm,’ said Rostokovich. ‘That makes it even more special. Man and machine existing in complete harmony. That’s been the dream all these years, hasn’t it? And now we’re within touching distance. I shall start gathering the data tomorrow.’

Next to her, Frank folded his arms. He was delighted, of course, for Rostokovich, for X, for Talura, for the whole wide world, but something was nagging at the edge of his mind, a dark presence that lingered outside the confines of the college spires.

Downstairs, Talura grabbed Extolziby by the sleeve of his jacket and dragged him towards a door at the end of the far walkway. ‘You want to see the rest of the place? Come on, I’ll give you the guided tour. This is the main quadrangle,’ she said, taking in the grassy square with a theatrical sweep of her arms.

Extolziby was still digesting what she’d told him about how the holographic projectors situated everywhere that could make any part of the college look like anywhere and anything, even make it disappear. Not that it actually did disappear but someone standing outside, for instance, walking along Broad Street, wouldn’t see the college. Instead they would see a dilapidated old building with huge fences, razor wire and, from time to time, security guards with great big German Shepherd guard dogs that would leap at the fence if anyone came close.

In reality, Talura had explained to him, there was a fence in the same place as the one that was projected so if someone decided to break in they would have to get through or over it. But by then the motion sensors would have tripped and the security ‘procedures’ would take effect. She didn’t know exactly what the security involved but she knew it worked when it had to.

‘And what about if you want to go out?’ Extolziby had asked.

She shrugged. ‘That’s fine. You have to get permission like you would at home and be back by a certain hour. Oh, and you have to take a friend for safety. Until you’re fifteen. But none of us is fifteen. So it’s just like at home. More relaxed, really, because I lived at an embassy before I came here and the security was off the hook. Well, most of the time.’

‘An embassy?’

She didn’t reply so he left it alone. He was still feeling terrible about calling her ugly. Worse than terrible. He wished they had a gadget to go back in time so he wouldn’t have said it. He had hurt her feelings. He didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings but this was worse because she seemed like one of the nicest people he’d ever met, good and kind and not at all snobby.

‘I don’t have to be in by any particular time at home,’ he said, as they stepped into a smaller  quadrangle. At the far end he saw what looked like a little castle, complete with two turrets and battlements.

‘That’s the library,’ said Talura, pointing up at it. ‘I’ll show you.’ She fumbled in the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a small brass key. ‘We can go in any time.’

A library sounded a bit old-fashioned, Extolziby thought, as he followed her.

They ran across the grass towards it. ‘Do you really not have a bedtime?’

‘No,’ said Extolziby.

‘Like, not at all?’

‘Nope,’ he said.

‘Oh, my God. That’s awesome!’

‘Aye,’ said Extolziby. ‘Awesome.’ But it wasn’t. He’d never told anyone this, not even a teacher or one of the many social workers who spoke to him like was he a complete numpty, but he hated not having rules. It was nice to be able to do what you wanted but he didn’t have a bedtime because someone wanted him to be free: they let him do what he wanted because they didn’t care. They loved him, but not enough to worry about him so much that they wanted him inside before dark.

They had reached the door. Talura turned the key in the lock and it opened into a room so vast and opulent that Extolziby thought it might be another hologram.

As if she were reading his thoughts, Talura nudged him with her elbow. ‘It’s real,’ she said, stepping inside.

He followed her. The floor was white marble. Huge cloth tapestries had been hung on the walls. There were kings and queens, battles, dragons and scenes from British history. Directly ahead a wide marble staircase swept majestically upwards to another vast room. Talura was already halfway up. She stopped and turned back to Extolziby. ‘Come on, slowpoke!’ she said, with a flick of her long blonde hair.

He took off after her. She was waiting for him at the top. The room took his breath away. Everywhere he looked there were bookcases that stretched up to the ceiling. They went so high that there were nine ladders you had to climb to get to them. You climbed the ladder to a walkway, then you had to climb another ladder to get to the next level and so on. Extol had never seen so many books. He hadn’t known there were that many.

Books were another thing that made him feel different at home. He loved books. Real books. He loved the smell and the way the paper felt between your thumb and index finger as you turned the pages. But most of all he loved how he could read a book and suddenly he wasn’t Extolziby Gruff who lived in Tunnock. He was Robin Hood, romping through the forest, fighting the sheriff’s men, or Charlie, who’d just won a ticket to the world’s biggest sweetie factory, or James Bond, saving the world and a beautiful girl from some evil villain.

Not everyone at home shared his enthusiasm. More than once he’d been sitting quietly at the kitchen table eating his corn flakes and one of his brothers or a visiting cousin would walk past, flick his ear and say, ‘What are you reading that pash for?’ The more he tried to explain that it wasn’t pash, the more he’d get teased.

Extolziby turned around and around, staring at all the books. ‘Are all these kids’ books?’

Talura was scampering up one of the ladders. ‘Kids’ books. Science books. History books. You name it. Think of a subject and it’s probably here. Cool, huh?’

It was very cool, thought Extolziby.

Talura plucked a book from a shelf and threw it down to him. ‘Here,’ she said. It was a slim volume with a thick red cover and white letters. He picked it up and read the title: The Adventures of Ivanhoe.

She grabbed another book, this one a little bit thicker, a little bit heavier, and tossed it over her shoulder. It landed with a thump a few feet away. ‘Careful,’ he said. He was annoyed that Talura was throwing something that, if he was very lucky, someone might have bought him for Christmas.

‘There’s thousands of them,’ she said.

‘That’s no the point.’

She went halfway up another ladder. The spine of a big thick volume caught her eye. On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. ‘Oooh, this is a good one.’

She reached over to pluck it from the shelf and her foot caught on one of the steps. She lost her balance and grabbed at a shelf to steady herself. Her hand found air and she went over.

Extolziby watched in horror as Talura fell. Without thinking, he rushed towards her. Everything seemed to be in slow motion, just like it had been when he’d sailed over the top of the car. He didn’t know how he’d do it but he wouldn’t let her hurt herself. He stretched out his arms to catch her, bracing himself, knowing he wasn’t nearly strong enough to break her fall, never mind catch her.

But he did. One second she was falling towards him, and the next he was holding her. She didn’t weigh anything. It had been like catching a feather, but easier because feathers were so small. She was the same size as Extolziby but she couldn’t have weighed more than the book that had crashed to the floor next to them.

He didn’t understand. How was it possible? Now he was holding her she felt heavy. His arms were aching so much that he had to put her down.

‘What?’ he said. ‘But how?’

He wasn’t even sure how to ask what had just happened.

She did a little skip around him. ‘You did it,’ she said. ‘You caught me.’

She started to run back towards one of the ladders. ‘Hey, let me do that again.’

‘No! No!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t even know what I did.’

‘Duh!’ said Talura. ‘You caught me.’

‘Aye,’ said Extolziby. ‘I know that. But how? How did I catch you?’

She stopped climbing and glanced over her shoulder at him. Hanging onto the ladder with one hand she tapped her temple with two fingers of her other hand. ‘It’s all in your head.’

‘Like a dream?’

She laughed. ‘No, silly. Not like a dream. Come on, I’ll show you.’

He watched as Talura clambered down the ladder and ran out of the library. He peered at his arms. They didn’t look different. He flexed a biceps. It was as puny as ever.

Talura had reached the top of the marble staircase. She started to run down it. Extolziby ran after her.

Weird. Even though he was one of the slowest runners in his class, and Talura had had a head start, he caught up with her before she was even halfway down. He looked at his legs. They didn’t feel any different either. It was a dream. It had to be.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked, as he fell in beside her.

‘Are you sure this isn’t a dream?’

She puffed out her cheeks and made her eyes really wide. ‘You’re right. It’s a dream. Right now you’re back home in bed in . . .’ She paused. ‘Where is it you live?’

‘Tunnock,’ said Extolziby.

‘Right, you’re at home in Toon-ock,’ she said, making wavy patterns in the air with her fingers.

‘You’re weird,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘I was born in California. What’s your excuse?’

At the bottom of the stairs she turned left. When they had walked in, the ground floor had looked empty. Now, on the wall facing the door they had come in through, there was a lift. It was old-fashioned, like the kind you saw in films with gangsters, with a metal grille door. Talura heaved it open and Extolziby followed her inside.

‘Was this here before?’ he asked. ‘Or is it one of those hologram thingies?’

‘If it’s a hologram we’re in big trouble,’ Talura said, hitting a button next to a sign that said ‘Basement’. ‘Or maybe it’s just part of your dream.’

‘You’re making fun of me.’

‘And you’re very perceptive,’ said Talura.

The lift shuddered and they began to descend. It shook and rattled. The pulley squeaked as if it needed oiling.

‘Hey, Perceptive Boy,’ said Talura.

Extolziby didn’t know what ‘perceptive’ meant. He thought it was something to do with being clever but he didn’t want to ask her and prove he wasn’t that clever after all.

‘What is it?’

‘How come,’ she said, staring up at the bare light-bulb that swung from the ceiling, ‘people in elevators never look at each other?’

The lift gave an extra big shudder and rattled to a halt.

‘We’re here,’ said Talura, grabbing at another metal grille and struggling to open it. ‘Hey, can you get this for me?’

Extolziby grasped the handle and opened it with ease. ‘It wasn’t stuck,’ he said.

She stepped past him and he followed her into another huge room that made the library upstairs seem small. He pointed his finger at her as if it were a gun. ‘Hologram!’

She pointed at him. ‘No, and watch where you point that thing.’

The room was like the biggest school gym he had ever seen. At the far end was a swimming pool. The rest of the room was taken up with what looked like gym equipment. Along the walls were wooden bars. Ropes hung from the ceiling. In front of them was an obstacle course.

Extolziby hated PE. He was rubbish at just about everything, and if they had to pick teams he was always chosen last. Some of the girls in his class were picked before him, much to the amusement of the other boys. They wouldn’t dare say anything because of his family but they giggled and nudged each other as Fiona McFadden, who was even bigger than the teachers, shoved past him. Fiona wasn’t scared of anyone. One day she had got so mad at one of the boys who was teasing her about her height that she had picked him up and hung him from one of the coat hooks.

So, Extolziby hated gyms. He would have much preferred to stay in the library.

He turned to Talura, who was standing nearby with her arms folded.

‘So? It’s a gym.’

‘Perceptive Boy strikes again,’ she said, reaching over and patting his head.

‘Stop calling me that.’

Suddenly her expression changed and she looked serious. ‘Sorry, X. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just joshing you.’

‘S’okay. What did you want to show me?’

‘Actually, it’s kinda the other way around,’ said Talura, twirling, then gesturing to a stack of what looked to Extolziby like basketballs stacked in a big metal rack.

‘Let’s have a competition. Who can throw one of those balls through that hoop over there?’ She nodded at a metal hoop fixed to the wall nearest to them.

‘I’m rubbish at things like that,’ said Extolziby.

‘Go on. Just try, would you? Or are Scottish boys all wimps?’

Well, this one is, thought Extolziby. He walked across to the rack and picked up one of the basketballs.

‘Oh, and whatever you do,’ shouted Talura, ‘don’t bounce it. Just throw it.’

With every minute that passed Extolziby was growing more and more confused. Even if he could throw a basketball through a hoop, what would it mean? If anything, it would prove that he was in a dream because he’d never been able to do it before. He really wished they could go back to the library and he was starting to get hungry again.

He lined up the ball at the hoop as best as he could.

‘No, from back there,’ said Talura, pointing to a black line that ran down the middle of the room all the way to the blue waters of the swimming pool.  The room was almost as wide as a football pitch.  It would be like throwing a ball the full length of a basketball court.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘It’s too far.’

‘Please,’ said Talura.

‘Aye, okay. But no laughing,’ he said. He didn’t know why but she could have asked him to jump off a bridge and he would have done it. It wasn’t that he felt sorry for her because of the scar on her face. In fact, it seemed to make her even prettier like if it hadn’t been there she would have been too perfect.

‘Okay, concentrate, X. It will only work if you concentrate.’

He looked at the ball. He placed his left hand under it and his right hand on top. Time seemed to stand still. He could hear his heart beating and hear his lungs taking in air. Everything else was a blur, even Talura. There was only the ball and the hoop.

He threw it. It sailed up, up, up into the air and kept going. It was headed for the hoop.

He watched it as it kept going. It began to fall in a perfect arc. It turned as it went.

It whooshed through the basketball hoop, not even touching the sides. He had done it. He punched the air. This was even better than the library.

BANG!

The ball landed on the wooden floor of the gym with a crash. The wood splintered and gave way leaving a huge ball-sized dent. Extolziby looked at Talura. She was jumping up and down and clapping.

How had a basketball crashed through a wooden floor? Holograms? Dreams?

‘That ball you just threw,’ said Talura, ‘it’s like a medicine ball,^[2] only made of titanium. Metal. It weighs, like, a hundred pounds.’

This was getting ridiculous, thought Extolziby. ‘Can’t you just tell me what’s going on?’

‘I could but you wouldn’t believe it,’ said Talura.

‘So,’ he said, ‘I have, like, superpowers. I’m, like, a superhero or something.’

‘No,’ said Talura. ‘Superheroes are made up. This is real.’

‘She’s telling you the truth,’ said a woman. He turned round to see a small lady with short blonde hair wearing a suit. ‘It’s top-secret technology, and you are all, for want of a better phrase, our guinea pigs, but there’s nothing made up about it. Talura was invisible, right?’

Extolziby nodded. ‘I think so. I mean one minute I couldn’t see her and then she appeared.’

‘Silent Near-infra-red Optical Refraction Technology,’ said the woman, as Talura demonstrated.

‘We call it a SNORT,’ said the now invisible Talura. ‘Catchy, huh? Like a snoogie.’

‘It’s still not quite there yet,’ said the woman. ‘Under moonlight, say, with no artificial light sources, you can just about see it. But for most day-to-day uses, and because most people walk around in a daze anyway, it makes the user pretty much invisible.’

‘Okay,’ said Extolziby, still trying to take all this in. ‘But what about me being able to throw that ball? That was a trick, right?’ He looked up at the ceiling. ‘There are wires, or it’s remote-controlled, or the real ball disappeared and you used one of those hologram thingies to make it look like I’d thrown it.’

The woman smiled. ‘I’m Judy Rostokovich, the Principal of the college,’ she said. ‘All very plausible explanations but the truth is even more exciting. You really did that. It’s at the very edge of the range of your abilities, and we’ll have to take a look at you to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself, but human beings are capable of incredible things, Extolziby. Of course they seem impossible and not everyone can do everything but that’s mostly because they believe they can’t.’

There was the low humming whoosh of another SNORT, and Frank appeared next to the woman. ‘Sorry, X, didn’t mean to startle you. I was upstairs with one of these gubbins on, chasing the pigeons. They don’t half look puzzled when you appear next to ’em. Right old laugh it is.’

The woman shot him a look. ‘You’re rambling, Frank.’

 

[2]Medicine balls were originally invented as medieval instruments of torture. Banned by Good King John as a form of medieval torture, they were consigned to the dusty rubbish bin of history. Then, one day, they were rediscovered by a particularly cruel PE teacher, who had tired of eating hamsters, and since that day they have been used to make the lives of schoolchildren that little bit more miserable than they usually are.

 

‘I am?’ he asked. ‘Oh, yeah, s’pose I am. Anyway, what the boss is saying, X, is that children are adaptable. We take those who have been in accidents and we don’t just make them better, we make them even better than that. And you are the ultimate because we put all the special gubbins right in your head.’

Extolziby reached up to scratch the scar. ‘Gubbins?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ said Frank, ‘Neural Optimization Nano-thread Transmitter Technology, if you want the full name. But I just call it gubbins.’

‘You’re what we call a post,’ said the lady. ‘It stands for post-sapiens. There are human beings and, then, well, there’s you. There were monkeys, and then there were cavemen, and then human beings, and now there’s you. It’s evolution, only this time we’re in control.’

Next to her, Frank made a loud coughing sound. ‘Or,’ he said to Extolziby, ‘you could say that God gave us the brains to make ourselves better.’

‘Not that again, Frank,’ said the lady.

Frank waved his thumb. ‘We ’ave a bit of a disagreement about dinosaurs an’ that. Nothing for you to concern yourself with, X.’

Extol could see now why they hadn’t told him. Not human? A post-sapiens? They might just as well have said, ‘Congratulations, you got hit by a car and we turned you into a freak.’

For a moment he thought he might start to cry. Everything was welling up inside him. The only thing that stopped him was knowing that Talura was watching him. She had seemed so happy when he had thrown the medicine ball and he didn’t want her to think he was some kind of wimp. Now he was here, in a place where no one knew, or cared, what his life had been like before. He could be who he wanted to be. No more Extolziby Gruff, the weedy spod from a family of layabouts and criminals.

He felt Talura’s hand on his arm. ‘It’s up to you now, X,’ she said. ‘It’s still your mind, you’re still in control.’

‘A good point,’ said the lady.

‘Yes,’ said Frank. ‘If you like you can go through the rest of your life and no one need ever know and you need never have to use any of it. It’s your decision, X.’