Questors Read online

  ‘But why the fuss?’ Bryn was saying, his mouth full. ‘On Kir, mothers stay with the girls and the boys go into a pack. That’s just how it is. So I wouldn’t have known Kate or Madlen anyway, not much. You, on the other hand…’

  Madlen held her breath. If Bryn asked Cam the question, she wouldn’t have to. They still hadn’t noticed her standing there.

  Then, ‘Look, kid,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how to say this tactfully, but I’ve known you now for, what, hours, right, and I still can’t tell…’ He ground to a halt. His face was getting red.

  ‘Can’t tell what?’ said Cam, concentrating on the food.

  ‘I just can’t tell…’ he started again, and then finished in a rush. ‘Look, are you my brother or my sister?’

  Cam stopped eating and stared. ‘I’m neither.’

  Madlen made a choking noise. Bryn turned and saw her watching them. His face got even redder.

  ‘No, you don’t get the question,’ he said, turning back to Cam. ‘I know this must sound really, really stupid, but – I don’t know what sex you are. You know, boy or girl, pink or blue, that sort of thing. To be honest, I really can’t tell.’ He spread his hands. ‘Sorry!’

  ‘No,’ said Cam. ‘I got the question, and the answer is – I’m neither. I’m an emergent.’ And, as the other two stared, ‘Give me a chance, will you?! I’m only eleven!’

  ‘What are you talking about?!?’ chorused Madlen and Bryn in unison.

  Cam looked from one uncomprehending face to the other. ‘You’re Trentorian, right? And you’re from Kir. Are you trying to tell me neither of your Worlds has emergents?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bryn, speaking very slowly. ‘That could very well be exactly what we’re trying to tell you. If we had a clue what you were on about.’

  The Dalrodian leaned back and whistled. ‘Well, I never. You just assume, don’t you, that everything’s the same all over. My word…’

  Bryn growled.

  ‘Right! Right… So, emergence – well, it’s like this. On my World, we don’t settle on a sex until we hit puberty’ Cam paused at a sudden thought. ‘You do have puberty, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we have puberty’ said Madlen impatiently. ‘Of course we do – I mean, otherwise we’d all be children forever – but – are you trying to tell me you don’t have a, a gender before that?!’

  Cam shook his – her – its head.

  ‘What would be the point?’ it said. ‘I mean, you have different sexes so you can make babies, right? And you can’t make babies before you get to puberty, so why have a gender before that? It wouldn’t make any sense.’

  Madlen and Bryn stared at each other open-mouthed.

  ‘But… but…’ stuttered Bryn.

  ‘But there’s a lot more to being female than just, just, making babies!’ squeaked Madlen.

  ‘Yeah – and boys, er, male too!’ agreed Bryn.

  Cam shrugged.

  ‘Don’t get all twisted,’ it said. ‘We just don’t do it like that. With us, you’re neither sex until you’re ready to settle into the one you’ll be as a grown-up. You’re better able, by then, to know which one’ll suit you.’

  ‘Yοu mean you can choose?’ Bryn’s eyes had got huge. ‘You go up to somebody and say, I fancy being a man, and they make you one?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Cam scornfully. ‘You don’t tell anybody – it just happens. You gradually know and then it just happens. It’s not a sudden choice – I’ll try this! – it’s more of a growing certainty – this is what I am’

  There was a busy silence as Madlen and Bryn tried to take on board what Cam was telling them.

  ‘But what –’ said Madlen.

  ‘But how –’ said Bryn at the same time.

  They both stopped.

  ‘You first,’ said Madlen.

  Bryn looked uncomfortable and said, ‘No. That’s OK. You first.’

  ‘This is hard to imagine…’ said Madlen slowly. ‘But listen, how do people know how to, well, treat you? With us, there are all these guidelines – unspoken stuff, you know? – about how you treat boys and how you treat girls, and how you’re supposed to bring them up. Right from the moment you’re born, practically. Stuff shifts as soon as everybody knows what sex you are. But with you –’

  ‘Yeah, I can hear it now,’ interrupted Bryn. ‘The midwife’s saying, One more push, dearie… Congratulations, it’s an it!’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Madlen crossly. ‘At least I’m trying to understand. What was your question anyway?’

  Bryn looked suddenly reluctant. ‘No, it was nothing,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Come on, Bryn,’ said Cam. ‘Go ahead and ask. I won’t mind.’

  ‘Sure?’ said Bryn. He was turning red again.

  Cam nodded encouragingly.

  ‘All right, then. What I wanted to know is, before you settle on a sex, you know, when you’re still an emergency –’

  ‘Emergent,’ said Cam firmly.

  ‘– emergent, right, well, so, how do you go to the toilet?’

  There was a moment of total silence. Bryn nervously tried to fill it.

  ‘I mean, you can hardly wait till you’re thirteen, or whatever…’ he burbled.

  ‘Bryn,’ said Cam in a dead flat voice, ‘in my World we do go to the toilet. We do not wait until we are thirteen. And we go to the toilet… IN PRIVATE.’

  Cam leaned across the table and grabbed Bryn by the shirt.

  ‘IN PRIVATE, understand? None of your business, understand?’ With each sentence Cam gave him a shove and dragged him back again.

  ‘OK, OK, just wondering…’ babbled Bryn.

  Cam shoved once more, and tipped him on to his backside on the floor.

  ‘DON’T… WONDER,’ it said. And then it grinned. ‘Trust you,’ it said. ‘Flipping trust you to ask something like that.’

  Madlen put out a hand to Bryn and pulled him on to his feet.

  ‘Nice one, Mouth,’ she said. ‘Eat your breakfast.’

  ‘Getting to know each other, are you? That’s lovely’ Mrs Macmahonney bustled into the room. It wasn’t clear how much she’d heard, but she busied herself at the cooker and didn’t look too closely at the three, as if to give them time to collect themselves. ‘Your mother isn’t back yet – these all-night sessions aren’t sensible for anybody, in my opinion – she’s going to be good for nothing without some sleep.’

  ‘She’s still not back?’ asked Bryn. He sounded concerned.

  ‘You’re soft on her ‘cause she wears tight leather,’ scoffed Cam.

  Bryn looked aggrieved. ‘Me?!’ he spluttered. ‘It was you who said she looked better like that! The way you looked at her – I bet you grow into a male, I really do! Anyway, I think you two are too hard on her – it’s not as if –’

  ‘Kate!’ Mrs Macmahonney’s greeting cut him short. ‘Come in and tell us all about it. Cam, get some coffee for your mother.’

  Cam started to protest – it was not used to being talked to like that – but then it saw how tired and pale Kate was. She leaned against the table, looking at them silently.

  ‘Kate?’ said Mrs Mac again. ‘Is it bad?’

  Kate shook her head.

  ‘It’s worse than bad,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s awful.’

  6

  Council of the Worlds

  There were always five of them. Five Prelates in charge of the three Worlds. Over time the individual members had changed, of course, but the number and the task remained constant.

  The current Council was made up of those who had reached that point of middle age which could be seen as old, but not dead old. They were:

  Lord Metheglin – tall, thin, nervy, a man given to finicky attention to detail and prone to migraine.

  Lady Vera – large and bosomy, with a voice to match, and all the sensitivity and tact of a rhino with sunburn.

  Lord Bullvador – also built larger than life, he is sentimental, courtly and curt by turns.

  Lady Mar
y – the motherly one, perpetually sorrowful that she was not a few inches taller and a few pounds lighter, trapped within the confines of being thoroughly, relentlessly nice.

  As a team, these four had developed a policy of downplaying the dangers of their work. The act of appearing to be ever so slightly bumbling was something that had evolved partly to suit their own eccentricities and partly to reassure those in their care – if what looked like a bunch of practically pensioners could keep the Worlds in trim, then it mustn’t be that big a deal. Not worth worrying about.

  But then there was Lady Beatitude. The most recent recruit, she had been, at first, a striking exception to all that. Young, brilliant and powerful, she did not spend long being overawed by the honour of her appointment. She proved restless at the pace of Council meetings, which exactly suited the other four; impatient at a style of working with enormous energies in flux that was second nature to her older, more experienced and, it must be said, more hidebound colleagues.

  They tried to be kind, but it wasn’t much fun for her, being the new kid on a pretty old block.

  All that, though, was before the accident. Lady Beatitude, still tall and elegant and slim, with flawless skin and pure white hair that floated about her, was now also, it seemed, several sandwiches short of a picnic basket.

  ‘I’ve brought the hard copy you wanted, Vera,’ said Lord Metheglin as he bustled in. ‘On the Questors.’

  ‘Don’t be pompous, Meth,’ said Lady Vera. ‘That’s not “hard copy”. That’s “paper”. Just bung it down on the table, will you? The others should be here any minute.’

  The Prelates took turns ‘setting up’ for Council sessions. Lady Vera’s idea of an environment within which to conduct business meetings was… businesslike. There was good electric lighting and a large table, behind which were five hard, straight-backed chairs for the Prelates, and, facing the Council at a respectful distance, there had been placed four more chairs in a row. Her remaining colleagues, as they entered, sighed, wished they’d remembered to bring cushions and sat down.

  Vera wasted no time on pre-ramble.

  ‘As agreed,’ she began at once, ‘we’ve brought the Questors plan forward. The children have been collected and are now available for briefing. None of it is as we might have wished, but the situation has accelerated beyond anything we could have expected and this and every other idea we’ve come up with has had to be pushed ahead to keep pace, and all I can say is it’s no blinking way to run the Worlds…’

  Lord Bullvador leaned over and patted her on the hand. ‘Needs must, old girl. Needs must. And the Questors plan is still one of the good ones.’

  Lady Mary coughed genteelly. ‘As a brief reminder…?’ She paused and looked about at the others. A small hologram hovered before her. At Vera’s nod of permission, she maximized it and moved it out into the centre of the room. ‘As you may remember, I filed it under theperfectionofthe Worlds.doc.’ She smiled shyly, and the Prelates gazed.

  ‘Fish!’ cried Lady Beatitude in delight. ‘Beautiful fish!’

  ‘Not this time, dear,’ said Lady Mary.

  But it was beautiful. A horizontal triangle of light glowed and spun slowly in the air, and at each of its vertices they saw a figure: one silver, one bronze and one gold. Each held an object. The figures were so luminous, it was impossible to see any detail to them or what they held, but there was also no doubt of their individual power and beauty. They were not the same, and yet they had an undeniable, indefinable family resemblance.

  ‘Potential,’ murmured Lord Metheglin. ‘That’s it, isn’t it – that’s what they’ve got. You could believe that anything is possible when you look at them.’

  Regretfully, Lady Mary made a gesture and the hologram faded. The room was a duller, more tired place without it.

  There was a knock on the door, and Kate herded Madlen, Bryn and Cam in.

  The Prelates looked at them. They looked at each other.

  ‘Are you sure these are the right…?’ whispered Lord Metheglin loudly behind his hand. The written descriptions of each of the Questors stared up at them from the table…

  Questor One, from the Outer World, with the stature and strength of a warrior, a hunter’s instincts, the epitome of courage and fortitude.

  Questor Two, from the Inner World, a visionary, richly imbued with the skills of the artist and attuned to the intangible.

  Questor Three, from the Middle World, a strategist, versed in pure mathematics and, by extension, music, and able to reason out any material challenge.

  The Perfect Team, on paper.

  While, staring back at them, round-eyed by the doorway, in the flesh…

  Three children. Madlen was at least tidy, but the other two looked as if they’d slept in their clothes. The best you could say about Bryn was that he was too short to be a warrior; Cam was biting its nails in an anxious and very unvisionary way; and Madlen – well, she just looked inescapably ordinary.

  ‘Whoops-a-daisy,’ said Lady Beatitude, though she was probably referring to something else.

  It was an awkward moment, into which Kate charged.

  ‘You did require them ten years early,’ she snapped. ‘Just what were you expecting?! Adults?’

  The Council was taken aback. They were not used to being spoken to by Agents in quite that way.

  ‘Well!’ spluttered Lady Vera, but Bullvador waved a finger at her.

  ‘It’s the maternal instinct,’ he murmured. ‘She can’t help it. Think of tigers.’

  Vera peered at him as if he were slightly crazed, but he just looked sentimentally at her and shook his head.

  ‘Yes. Well,’ she said, turning back to the group by the door. ‘Come in. Sit down. There’s a lot to discuss.’ She broke off and appealed to her colleagues. ‘This is not at all what I was expecting. Where do you suggest I start?’ she said.

  Lady Mary smiled at her reassuringly. ‘Just tell them everything, dear. That’ll be best. They’re bound to be exceptionally bright, even for children. But,’ she added in a whisper, ‘do try not to frighten them.’

  Lady Vera gave her an exasperated look and began.

  ‘Because of circumstances beyond our control, my colleagues and I find it is time to explain to you… er, everything. Even though you are somewhat younger than… it is earlier than… Let us begin at the beginning. You are, I’m sure, familiar with the Three World Concept,’ she said, in a voice she felt sure was child-friendly.

  Blank faces.

  ‘You do know about Multiverse Synchronicity generally, though,’ she continued.

  Nothing.

  ‘The Space-Time Continuum?’ She was almost pleading now.

  Madlen said, ‘Er,’ but got no further.

  Lady Vera turned to Lord Metheglin. ‘Don’t they teach them anything in those schools?’ she hissed. ‘I hardly thought when I said I’d explain everything that that included everything!’

  ‘It’s our policy,’ Metheglin whispered back. ‘We instructed all the Boards of Education to actively discourage teaching about the other Worlds, or their special relationship within the Continuum. Even with government officials, it’s on a “need to know only” basis. We did discuss this. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Lady Vera looked at him, incredulous. ‘And we thought that was a good idea?’

  Lord Metheglin nodded emphatically.

  ‘Divide and conkers,’ murmured Lady Beatitude.

  There was the moment of bewildered silence that often followed Lady Beatitude’s contributions. It was almost impossible to tell exactly when these were over, and no one wished to be rude. This time, however, there didn’t appear to be any more to come.

  Lady Vera shrugged. ‘Oh well, if we agreed it was a good idea, then it must be,’ she said. She patted down her hair, heaved up her bosom and turned back to the children.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘I am to take it that you have little or no knowledge of any World, other than your own. Is that correct?’


  Bryn stuck up his hand.

  ‘Yes, young man?’

  ‘I don’t know any stuff officially, Miss,’ he said, ‘but I did hear our Castellan talking with the Steward once, though of course he was pretty drunk at the time, and he said that everybody on Dalrodia was a spaced-out hippy, and everybody on the Middle World was a constipated number bumper, and none of them knew their elbows from their…’ His voice trailed off as he realized that everyone in the room was staring at him.

  ‘Come to think of it, I heard something about your World too,’ said Cam sweetly. ‘I heard that everybody on your World was stunted’ – and the Dalrodian gave him a poke – ‘and stupid’ – poke – ‘and covered with hair because it’s so cold’ – shove.

  From the floor, Bryn looked up at Cam.

  ‘I did say he was drunk,’ he said.

  Cam made a disgusted noise and turned away.

  Kate stepped in hurriedly. ‘There are bound to be, er, misconceptions, since the Worlds are kept so much in ignorance of each other.’

  ‘He’s not very bright, our Castellan,’ said Bryn to Cam’s back. ‘Even when he’s sober.’

  ‘Perhaps we could continue with –’ Lord Metheglin began, but Bryn was still trying.

  ‘Absolutely right about the hair, though, if it’s him you’re thinking of. Hairier than a yeti’s armpit, and only half as good at conversation.’

  There was a muffled giggle. ‘All right,’ said Cam, turning back again. ‘I accept your apology.’

  Bryn jumped up with a grin, and Lady Vera sighed noisily.

  ‘Might we carry on, if all that has been cleared up to everyone’s satisfaction?’ she asked heavily.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Cam calmly.

  ‘Fine by me, Miss,’ was Bryn’s cheery reply.

  Madlen fought the temptation to bury her head in her hands.

  ‘Lord Metheglin,’ said Lady Vera in her most formal, and formidable, manner, ‘I don’t feel we are getting anywhere quickly. May I suggest a rewind to the original conversation on the Questor plan, which, if memory serves me, includes a perfectly lucid explanation of everything.’