Dreams of the Chosen Read online

  Since 1989, Brian Caswell has written 31 books including the best-selling A Cage of Butterflies. His work has received numerous awards and shortlistings, including the Children’s Peace Literature Award, the Vision Australia, Young Adult Audio Book of the Year Award, the Aurealis Award, the Australian Multicultural Children’s Literature Award, the Human Rights Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (four times), and he has been included in the prestigious International Youth Library’s ‘White Ravens’ list four times. All his published novels have been listed as Notable Books by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

  He also researches and designs ‘cutting-edge’ educational and personal-development programs, listens to all kinds of music (usually far too loud), watches ‘an excessive number’ of movies and DVDs, and reads ‘anything with words on it’. Brian lives on the NSW Central Coast with his wife, Marlene, and his dog, Indy. He has four children and 13 grandchildren.

  Also by Brian Caswell

  Deucalion Series

  Deucalion

  The View from Ararat

  Young Adult

  Merryll of the Stones

  Dreamslip

  A Cage of Butterflies

  A Dream of Stars (short stories)

  Asturias

  Double Exposure

  Loop

  By Brian Caswell and David Phu Au Chiem

  Only the Heart

  The Full Story

  Younger Readers

  Mike

  Lisdalia

  Maddie

  Relax Max!

  Alien Zones Series

  Teedee and the Collectors or How It All Began

  Messengers of the Great Orff

  Gladiators in the Holo-Colosseum

  Gargantua

  What Were the Gremnholz Dimensions Again?

  Whispers from the Shibboleth

  For Marlene – who keeps her time-traveller

  anchored securely in the present.

  We do not choose

  We are chosen.

  We do not own the Dream

  We borrow it from the Universe.

  Saebi t-Aiby-el-Rhae

  Thoughtsong of the Returning Canto 7

  Prologue

  Before the Coming of the Night

  I don’t know what kind of weapons will be used in the third world war . . . But I can tell you what the fourth world war will be fought with – stone clubs. Albert Einstein

  Wolfram/Lee/Sumitomo

  Data-Control Facility, Melbourne

  Republic of Australasia, Southeast Sector

  July 18, 2456ad

  AIDAN

  ‘What the—’ Aidan Tan pushes back slightly from the screen-wall, though the tips of his fingers remain in contact with its liquid plasma surface. The words – and the movement – are a pre-conscious flinching, as if the sudden gibberish that has replaced the ordered flow of information across the huge display somehow threatens a physical hurt.

  All along the screen-wall, technicians and program analysts, graphic designers and data-processors are moving their wheeled stools back from their posts, staring up at the display. Puzzled expressions, whispered queries, some colourful language, even a bemused smile or two. Faces bathed in the bluish radiance of the wall, watching the meaningless strands of digital code peter out until the display is blank. A deep blue empty field, shimmering with an ambient sense of motion suspended.

  Perched behind the control desk at the edge of a mezzanine platform overlooking the work floor, Den Rodriguez looks down at the thirty-seven people on her shift, then back up at the screen-wall, then down at the array of smaller screens ranged around her on the console: the ones she uses to track the progress of individuals as they play their part in the organic whole. The screens glow as blue and empty as the wall, and for the first time in her working life Den Rodriguez knows fear.

  For the blue screen is an impossibility. Connected as it is to the planet-wide corporate network that forms the beating heart of Wolfram/Lee/Sumitomo, it is a small, but integral part of a living entity that feeds on data, giving and receiving a trillion trillion bytes of information every second, blending and measuring every finger-stroke on every W/L/S screen across the entire face of the planet.

  It cannot simply be blank, any more than a waking brain can be.

  Slowly, she becomes aware that sometime in the past minute she has stopped breathing, and the realisation shocks her. Down below, her team has fallen uncharacteristically silent. They stand, staring up at the blue of the screen. No one speaks, because no one can find the words.

  Somewhere beneath the confusion, a quiet electronic bleat registers, and a flashing red telltale draws her gaze from the screens. She touches a comm-square on the console and a man’s face appears on the surface of the desk in front of her.

  ‘Henry.’ She hears the break in her own voice. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Before he can answer, the image on the desktop flickers once and disappears and the surface returns to opaque black.

  ‘Henry?’ She repeats the name stupidly to her own reflection and slams her open palm down hard on the desktop. ‘Shit! SHIT!’

  ‘Denise?’ Aidan has moved up behind her. The unspoken question is phrased in the raising of an eyebrow and a tiny lifting of his shoulders.

  She replies to his reflection in the dead screen. ‘How the hell do I know, Aid? First the wall; then the comm. It’s like—’

  ‘A meltdown?’

  ‘No. I – I don’t know.’ She stands and moves across to the small window that breaks the grey monotony of the wall behind her, looking down one hundred and twenty storeys towards the street, invisible in the haze below. ‘You don’t think maybe the rumours—’

  Aidan shakes his head. ‘What? First Strike? Surely they couldn’t be that stupid. Could they?’

  ‘Couldn’t they?’

  A sudden movement above the roofline of the next building catches her attention. A commercial flyer painted in the orange and black livery of Pan Pacifica has erupted from a bank of dark cloud on a trajectory that threatens to send it crashing into the roof of the tower opposite.

  Caught by her reaction, Aidan has moved up beside her at the window in time to see the flyer lurch erratically, as the pilots struggle for control.

  For a moment, it appears that the manoeuvre has succeeded. The flyer clears the rooftop and begins a slow shuddering climb, but then the nose dips and it dives. Directly towards them.

  Instinctively, Aidan throws a protective arm around Den’s shoulder and drags her away from the window. Half a second later, the crippled flyer strikes the building further up, and the explosion that accompanies the impact buckles the floor beneath their feet and tears at the solid skin of the structure.

  The wall, the small window and part of the floor disappear in a Niagara of shattered Plascrete, steel and glass that hurtles with murderous force towards the street hundreds of metres below, and among the rubble a woman falls, screaming, eyes impossibly wide, hands like rigid claws, clutching at the air as she passes.

  Then she is gone and the winter wind gusts around them. The rolling thunder of the explosion echoes back from the windows opposite. They reflect the billowing orange of the fireball and the wound growing in the face of the stricken building, as the skin of its façade is peeled away.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouts, his words torn away by the wind.

  They step back carefully, hand in hand, away from the cracked and ragged edge of the Plascrete slab.

  Inside the room, no one else has moved. The entire shift
stands in stunned silence, staring up at the devastation.

  ‘Come on!’ she screams. ‘Let’s get the hell out!’

  In the hallway, the lights flicker and fail and, for a moment, there is pitch black. And a gut-deep primal fear that closes like a fist around the heart.

  Then the emergency lighting cuts in, a dull orange glow barely more comforting than the dark.

  Someone tries the elevator button, but it remains stubbornly unlit.

  ‘Looks like we hoof it.’ Aidan whispers the words from close behind her, as if he is afraid to voice them to the crowd in the elevator lobby.

  ‘It’s a hundred and twenty storeys,’ she replies.

  ‘And won’t get any less for the waiting. We may as well start.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just wait until—’

  ‘Until what? Until they turn the power back on?’ He draws her aside, whispering the words quietly, watching the others hover uncertainly around the elevator shaft doors. ‘Think, Den. It’s a systems-crash on a scale we don’t dare imagine. And if the cause is what I suspect, they won’t be turning the power back on for a very long time. Now come on, we have a long climb down ahead of us.’

  The stairwell is dimly lit and shrouded in shadows. She stumbles on the first step and he catches her before she falls.

  ‘Only a couple of thousand to go.’

  The joke is weak, but she smiles despite herself.

  ‘Just don’t go counting them down,’ she says, ‘or I’ll have to kill you.’

  At the next landing, she pauses and checks the chrono on her wrist. The display glows orange.

  16:15:23.

  She counts the seconds off in her mind. In less than two hours it will be dark.

  Less than two hours.

  Her hand is shaking and she feels the fear beading on her forehead and running down her face. Angry at her weakness, she grabs the hand to stop it trembling and breathes in deeply.

  Get a grip. You’re losing it.

  Aidan stops three steps below her and turns, making his way back up to where she stands. They lean against the wall, out of the steady stream of foot traffic that is beginning to flow down the stairwell.

  ‘We’ll be okay,’ he whispers, placing his hands around hers. ‘Trust me.’

  Her eyes shift down to his hands, then back up to his face. His stare is confident and uncompromising, and something in it makes her believe him.

  Then the door beside them opens, and a girl of sixteen or seventeen inches nervously through, watching it close behind her, like the gate of a prison cell. The photo ID on her tunic is a poor likeness. Samantha Pickford.

  Aidan holds her gaze and attempts a smile. ‘Going our way, Samantha?’

  But the girl doesn’t answer. She is biting her lip as she begins the long journey down.

  Wolfram/Lee/Sumitomo

  World Head Office, Atlanta, GA

  Former United States, Southeast Sector

  July 18, 2456ad

  CYRUS

  The old man sits alone in the dark room. His hands are white shapes, the bronze horse on the desk before him barely more than an ill-defined shadow.

  The office door swings open and the beam of a glo-lamp cuts the darkness, playing across the floor as it moves towards him.

  Simon Henley pauses a couple of metres from the desk, a shadow behind the room’s new source of illumination. For a moment the younger man remains silent, unmoving. Then he speaks.

  ‘Well, Cyrus?’

  ‘We couldn’t have known,’ the old man begins, but there is no conviction in the statement.

  ‘It was in the bloody report! We should have taken more—’

  ‘The minority report! A couple of dissenting opinions—’

  ‘That happened to be right. What the hell are we going to do?’

  ‘Do, Simon?’ Cyrus Hamilton the Fourth stands and moves towards his second in command, taking hold of the glo-lamp. ‘There’s nothing we can do. It’s too late. The world’s about to go all to hell, and the poor bastards won’t even know why.’

  ‘Christ! How could we have been so stupid?’ Henley rubs a hand across his face, struggling to keep himself from slamming his fist down on the polished perfection of the desk.

  Hamilton’s voice is steady and without discernable emotion. ‘How could we not?’

  He turns towards the desk and opens the small antique showcase, which takes pride of place at the centre near the front edge. Then he pauses for a moment, looking down at the masterpiece it contains.

  In the light from the glo-lamp, it shines, silver and perfect, and he runs a finger along the barrel and over the polished ivory of the handle, before placing the lamp onto the desk and picking it up.

  ‘The Colt 45.’ The reverence in his manner is unnerving. Cyrus Hamilton is not one to revere anything but a favourable profit-and-loss statement. He holds the gun out to Simon, cradled carefully in both hands, an artefact of great value and beauty. ‘You know how old this is?’

  Simon Henley shakes his head, lost in the horror of what has occurred, yet fascinated by the old man’s unnatural calm.

  Cyrus continues as if he had not really expected an answer. ‘Almost six hundred years. Six centuries. And it’s still perfect. When it was made, most of the great cities were small towns still. There was no electricity, and no flyers. And no law – except this.

  ‘We were a frontier people then and America was a dangerous place.’ A small sound escapes – half sigh, half resigned chuckle. A slight shaking of the head, then the mask of calm is in place again. ‘Strange the way the world turns.’

  Finally, anger supplants fear. For the first and last time in his career, Simon Henley raises his voice to his superior. ‘For God’s sake, Cyrus, stop being cryptic and focus! What are we going to do?’

  The old man moves around the desk and sits back down in the chair. His gaze is still fixed on the treasure in his hands.

  ‘We? We are not going to do anything. You, my dear Simon, are going to take that lamp and get the hell out of my office. Go home and kiss your wife. See if she still remembers who you are. Get to know your kids, while you still can. Me, I’m going to sit here alone for a while in the dark.’

  The younger man hesitates.

  He is looking down at a stranger with Cyrus Hamilton’s face. Finally, he takes the light, turns and leaves the room.

  Like a man waking from an already half-forgotten dream, Simon Henley looks around him. The huge office is empty, the screen-walls and the data displays dead and dark.

  He is vaguely aware of the bloody glow of sunrise, cresting the jagged skyline, as he takes the first steps towards the exit and disappears into a dangerous and uncertain future.

  From the closed office that he has left behind come the dull explosion of an ancient weapon and the sound of a body falling.

  PART ONE

  THE HANGING CHORD

  How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations! Lamentations 1

  1

  Orphans

  Expeditionary Ether-Shuttle Cortez

  in geo-stationary orbit above Al-Baada, Deucalion

  15/14/1008 Standard (Jump-Day minus eight)

  ERIN’S STORY

  It was like being back in school.

  Part of our mission was to share, with anyone we might find alive, the history of our planet over the past thousand years. After all, we’d probably be as much of a mystery to them as they were to us.

  But what is history?

  For me, it had never been about big moments and personalities. The history of Deucalion had always been about understanding ourselves. What it meant to be part of ‘a race transplanted’ – as the Elokoi thought-poet Saebi had once described us.

  I wasn’t the mission historian –
far from it. There were crew members far better suited to that role than I was – but as the one who would be making first contact, I needed to be able to explain us to anyone who might need to understand. And that meant getting a handle on what it was that I understood about being Deucalian.

  A race transplanted. I liked the phrase. It resonated with something my father had told me a few days before he died.

  – Erin, he sent, fighting to keep the Shield in place and mask the pain. You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?

  I’d nodded, fighting back tears.

  I knew that part of what I felt was leaking out past the Shield, but there are some emotions that no amount of Etiquette training can help you control. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted to anyway.

  – And I know your mother would have been proud too, he went on, sending out a subtle wave of warmth and support, as he put into words some emotions of his own. I mean, you know I didn’t want you signing on for the mission in the first place, but I want to tell you . . . I’m glad you did.

  For centuries, we’ve been like orphans, cut off from our past, and filling the gap with speculation. Now we have the opportunity to close that gap – to make contact with Earth. And if there was anyone I’d choose to show them the best of what we’ve become – what we’ve built, and how this world has changed us – it would be you.

  When I start to question why I ever let myself get involved in this whole thing, I remember him lying there, and it helps me put the doubts to rest.

  So what was I doing? In between supervising the preparations and going through the mind-numbing training schedules, I was poring over all my old study notes – anything to do with history, politics and what made Deucalian society tick.

  I scrolled down the screen, until I reached a thought-cube interview with Eleanora De Buiss.

  She was probably the most famous historian of the eighth century, which was a period when we ‘rediscovered’ a lot of our early history. Not that it had ever been lost, exactly. I guess people had just lost interest. Professor De Buiss had almost single-handedly rekindled that interest.