The story of the Freemen came in fits and starts over the next few days as we travelled. It was told in a mix of mime and pointing at words in the dictionary, and because of that I might still not have it quite right, but I think I have the general idea. I do know I have the specific reason John Dark came to this place looking for the one Freeman in particular. I know what her grudge against him was. He had killed her daughters.
But before we get to who the Freemen were, or maybe even still are, I should put us on the road again. After the night of the wolves, we left the stadium, taking our honey and the horses. The one that had been wolf-bit seemed almost unaware of the damage to its flank until John Dark put a thick wipe of honey across the wound, and then it flinched and whinnied and tried to bite her. I was holding its head and the convulsion nearly pulled me off my feet.
She had quizzed me at first light about the way I had found the key. As best I could, I explained about the tower and the pile of clothes and my feeling that the person—who she called “Freeman”—had killed himself by jumping off the platform. She asked me about the clothes and I told her about the boots and the red-hooded jacket. The jacket seemed to confirm things for her.
It also untethered something behind her eyes, and she sat for a long while, not looking at me but not looking away either, as if she had forgotten I was there while she watched whatever it was that had been pulling her away. I think knowing that the Freeman she was hunting was dead was not a simple release for her. I think she had filled whatever the hole was inside her with the quest to find him, and now that was not possible, she didn’t feel satisfaction, but a different kind of loss. I wonder if that explains why she rode with me. She suddenly had no purpose. Maybe she rode with me while she worked out what her new purpose was going to be. Maybe she just wanted company. Maybe she knew more about where I was going than she let on. But she did ride with me, and I was happy with the company, and grateful for the horse to ride on. And as we rode, as we camped, as we sat by fires and streams, this is what she told me, in the most halting and patchwork way.
She and her family lived away from the sea, near the mountains between what used to be France and Switzerland. She said it was good farmland and there was snow most winters. There was a big lake on the Switzerland side and they went there and fished in the summer. They were horse people like we were boat people. That part of the story was easy enough to understand. They lived there because of the Freemen, although none of her family had ever seen a live Freeman. The Freemen had once lived there, because of the “brain circle” underground.
That’s where our trouble with communicating made things a little hazy. She said there was a big circle, underground, and it was said to be full of a brain. That seemed wrong, so after some back and forth with the dictionary we agreed that by brain she meant machines, or a computer. She had never seen them as they were locked away in a circular tunnel a hundred metres under the ground, but they must be long dead as there was no electricity to wake them up and make them remember things. Her father’s father’s father had gone down into the rock and seen the endless curve with one of the last Freemen. He had said it hummed. And then the Freemen had turned off the lights and it had stopped humming and they had left it and locked the entrance as they went.
It was a story her family told, that they had come here when the last of the old people who worked on the big underground machines were very old, and had helped them until they were gone. Those old people were Freemen. They had worked until they died, trying to make the underground ring remember so much about what humans had discovered so that it became human too. They had tried to teach her great-grandparents their secrets, but it was too late. They were already horse people and farmers. They were not science, she said. That’s what John Dark said, and it was what she had been told: they were farmers, and not science now. Her family had been told that the underground brain was just one of several across the world. She said there were once other groups of Freemen trying to do the same thing.
Life, she said by pointing at the words in the book. Life in machine. Body die. No babies carry new life. Freemen try make life go in machine.
And then she found another word, and her blunt finger stabbed it to the page.
Freemen mad.
Freemen say: life in silicon.
I asked her what that meant.
She shrugged and said it was something her great-grandparents told her it was what the Freemen said a lot.
Freemen say life bigger than people. No babies. No new bodies. So life not in bodies. In silicon.
Silicon is a kind of rock. Life in rock?
It made no sense then. It makes less sense now even though I know a little more about the Freemen and the scientist who they named themselves after. But I got that part of the story in plain English, later, from my worst enemy. And even though that helped it sort of make sense, just thinking about the size and the ambition of what they tried and failed to do leaves me feeling sadder and more alone somehow. Definitely more helpless.
You had an internet. You lived in a web that linked you with all the answers that ever were, and you carried them everywhere with you in a glass and metal rectangle that was pocket-sized but could talk to satellites. You never needed to be stupid, or not know things about everything.
We’re out here on the wrong side of a dying world trying to piece together the story of what’s happened from torn fragments that we can only snatch at as they flutter past us in the wind. Like with the army tank with the doll’s head in the gun-barrel under the fallen petrol station canopy, I will never know why everything happened. Or what it meant. I will never see the big story.
She said there were other Freemen and though the tunnel was locked away, her family always remembered where the door was in case one of the other Freemen came, but they never did. Not for three generations, by which time it was quite clear the Baby Bust Freemen were long gone.
And then the Freeman came from the east, riding out of the mountains, carrying the key that matched the symbol on the door of the Freemen’s cave. The key that I had thought was a pendant. The man who killed them all.
He came from far away across the mountains. He was not one of the old people. His family learned from the Freemen. They did not become horse people. Not farmers. Not only farmers. They learned what their fathers and grandfathers learned. To be what he was. Electricians. The word in the dictionary was almost the same in French as English, only with an e instead of an a.
Understand machines not, she said, pointing at the words. Only know turn on power.
So I think the electrician and his family had been taught how to maintain the power at a place where other Freemen had buried a brain machine, and had passed that on down the generations.
Power electrician home not work, John Dark indicated. Bad time. Electrician come find family me.
So maybe when the underground computer brain his family had tended all the long years had died, he came looking for one of the other ones to make that work.
Except he couldn’t and it didn’t.
Brain dead, she stabbed. Power dead.
She was crouched beside me over a campfire in the dark when she told me that, because I remember she had to tilt the pages to catch the light from the flames as she did so.
Ordy natoor footoo, she said out loud, and spat into the flames.
And then he had killed her family. Not on purpose. But when you’re dead the how doesn’t matter as much as it does to the ones you left behind. He brought a disease.
La pest, she called it.
Maybe that’s what made him come looking for another Freeman settlement. Maybe his family died of la pest. Anyway, he brought it with him, because she saw the boil scars under his arms when he bathed. And his were healed but the ones that her family got didn’t.
Jay duh la sharns, she said, her face twisted and sour as she spat into the fire again.
Sharns, as she later showed me in the dictionary, is spelled “chance” and means lucky.
The sour twist in her face meant she wasn’t.
He left while she was nursing the last of the people she had loved, and then when she had buried them, she followed him with nothing in her mind but the need to send him after them.
I understood without her having to put a name to it, but before she put the dictionary away for the night, she showed me anyway.
Vengeance is the same word in both languages.