Last Man, First Boy

Chapter 1



‘Everywhere man is in chains,’ said the disgruntled traveler returning home.

‘Sir, please place your bag on the counter so that I can check it.’

‘Oh yes, I’ll place my bag on the counter so that you can check it.’

The man doubled his short tubby body, puffed away some lint that hung from his beard stubble through the corner of his mouth, and hauled the first portmanteau higher than he needed, before letting it fall heavily onto the counter.

‘Check that.’

The customs officer remained calm. What hadn’t he seen while working twenty five years in the job?

‘And check that.’

In the same indelicate fashion, the traveler hauled another portmanteau onto the counter, this time smack bang on top of the first. The impact blew a gentle breeze against the officer’s face and lifted his hair a fraction.

‘Do you want to check my wife’s cases too?’

He accented the word check and the word cases. And he eyeballed the nonplussed officer. He started reaching for his wife’s bags but her dissatisfaction with his antics blocked him like an invisible force field.

You could almost hear the ting as his bald forehead bounced from it. He twisted back around to easier game.

The customs officer picked up where the man left off. ‘First I want to check your bags.’

‘Check them.’

Again the customs officer resisted the not-so-subtle challenge.

‘Sir,’ the officer leveled the two bags before him and in respect of the one directly in front of him, asked, ‘is this your bag?’

‘It’s the Queen’s.’

The response was childish. The customs officer and the traveler were around the same vintage. He expected better. Pointless rebellion was for the very young and the childishly old. Having thought that, there was more of it – childish rebellion - around nowadays.

The officer went on, ‘and did you pack the case yourself?’

‘I’ve traveled to every one of the six nations on this our fine planet Samarium, to Dhaliah, to Askan, Oppen, Turanite and Mexador and now I’ve landed back in Usayer. I do not keep a servant. I am a democrat.’

In royalist Usayer, thought the custom’s officer, circumspectly. He asked again, ‘did you pack the case yourself?’

In order to rally support, and catch his breath, the would be litigant turned around and looked beyond his wife at another passenger, a tall man in his early forties, wearing trendy shades, professional attire, and holding the hand of what appeared to be a very tired looking little boy who wore very weird clothes.

He wore a normal child’s suit actually but it was too big for him and he didn’t look right in it somehow, and his hair was cut like a girl, long and pulled behind. In fact he might be a girl. She might be a girl.

The professional man’s good looking face smiled at the litigant but offered no further support than that.

The fat little litigant took the small measure of – what would you call it? Not support. He turned back around to face his self appointed tormenter, the customs officer, and felt as if the fellow traveler was from a different class, yes, the upper class, even if he wasn’t standing with the other first class travelers in their own special queue. Maybe that was it, he thought – upper class.

Oppressed from one end and mocked from the other, conjectured the social warrior.

He adjusted his footing and continued, spitting in the vicinity of the customs officer somewhat as he did so.

‘Two weeks ago, during a single thirty two hour period alone, I traveled so quickly and so far and wide that the twin suns never set on my back. In each and every nation, without exception, the officials at the gates treated me with respect. No one questioned me. No one tried throwing me in prison and throwing away the key for untried charges relating to crimes against humanity, or whatever you want to call it. They welcomed me like an old friend. Now I return home, to the nation of my birth, and my own security forces rob me of any self respect and treat me like a common thief.’

‘Sir, I am a…’ The officer was about to say a customs officer doing my job. But he thought better of it, not wanting to brawl with a traveler who had probably spent the last day awake aboard a passenger liner. Like he kept telling himself at moments like these, he had spent twenty five years in the job, which was another way of saying that, if it weren’t for the new generation crisis, and the labor shortages the crisis gave rise to, he’d have six more years of it left, before a big juicy pension hit him in the face like sweet kisses. He continued, ‘please unzip the bag.’

The man grumbled, felt the prickly insistence of his wife to comply at his elbow, had almost spent his tantrum anyway, like a kid at a sweet shop with a week’s allowance to spend, and unzipped the portmanteau in one easy action, the odor of his dirty socks the first thing to hit the officer in the face. No sweet kisses yet.

The customs officer did his job. He poked around a bit, not having really expected to find anything anyway, and then went through the same procedure with the next bag.

The disgruntled traveler, the man in chains, whose name was Mr. Event, sucked in his second wind, which wasn’t great given that he had plenty to say seconds ago, and hadn’t much wind left or space to put it, and had, as he had claimed, traveled during the recent day without the twin suns of Samarium setting on his back, and was therefore pretty bloody exhausted, said, ‘what do you expect to find, smuggled child.’

But even he knew he shouldn’t have said that.

‘That’s not so funny,’ said the officer, just about wrapping up.

True enough. By now Mr. Event had connected with his tormentor, much like one might connect with one’s executioner, or terrorist kidnapper, he thought. Actually, and he sort of thought this too, or recognized it in some way, he had connected with the officer as might two middle aged men while walking through a park and, in discovering that the previous twenty years of their respective lives had been spent in a puff and smoke, and that they would be better off talking the little things that make up shared experience.

‘So tell me the truth,’ he winked. ‘Do you turn a blind eye to child importers?’ He chuckled, searching to exploit that unilaterally imposed connection, and not doing well. ‘I mean it’s not like we don’t need them, the little fry. God blessed me and my June with two boys now grown into men. But not everyone has been lucky with the cough and the – how should one put it – the in-fer-til-ity.’ He nodded.

On any other day the customs officer might have been happy to slide into the role of being one of two middle aged men with more shared than unshared experiences about the little things to discuss, whether they walked together through a park and discussed them, or met as traveler and customs officer in Usayer’s busiest international airport and discussed them there. But it wasn’t any other day. And blackshirt security officers had populated the arrivals area for reasons not entirely clear to regular customs staff. But it had something to do with just that issue raised by Mr. Event – illegal child importation. And one security officer stood a couple of feet away from the counter now. And she was within earshot. She wore a fashionable blouse, which was black nonetheless.

The customs officer zipped the bag and waved through Mr. Event, without answering his nod and wink question. He had outstayed his welcome. And, having asked Mrs. Event if she traveled with Mr. Event, which was obvious enough to anyone, but wanting an answer anyway, and receiving it in the affirmative, the officer waved her through too, not wanting her to remonstrate as her husband had, and not really seeing any reason to detain the couple further.

As Mr. Event had stated, he wasn’t a criminal, and shouldn’t have to be treated like one. And the officer supposed that went for his wife too.

The customs queue litigant took the dismissal in good grace but managed to feign disgust, sniffing through the bristles in his hairy nose at the injustice of it all, before lifting his head and hairy nose to the air and, with wife June in tow, removing himself from the company of government thugs. Yet he turned to the professional man, the upper class one, the noncommittal one, and the normally-abnormally dressed little boy or girl and said, ‘hope you fare better than me. I’m sure you will, Squire. It’s how the world works, as sick as it is. In chains, in chains…’

Meanwhile the customs officer conferred with the woman in black about the morning’s progress in general, and the security agenda in particular, sort of smiling and mumbling, deferentially, a little worriedly, and confirming that they were to look for an olive skinned Askan looking woman and white skinned girl.

The next traveler used the interlude and kneeled to the child, his silk overcoat scrunching about his polished boots, and whispered in the child’s ear, maintaining the sort of eye contact with those soft, toddler green eyes that might let souls converse.

‘You remember what I said, about a red scarf?’

The the man was gentle, and persuasive, and, in being so, he reminded the child of good things. The child asked, ‘what’s a scarf?’

‘You wear it on your head.’

‘Like a hat?’

‘Yes, like a hat, but it fits closer than a hat.’ The man smiled. ‘Will you run to her, if I tell you?’

‘Where is she?’

‘When I tell you, when I point her out to you?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know her…’

‘…yes, I know, you mustn’t listen to strangers.’

‘Yes.’

Dick Webster taught his own son the same, and the thought of his own son made him want to hold and protect the child.

This child was a good child, the one with him now, and his own son had been a good boy.

Warmed, he tried another approach. ‘Can you remember what Michael told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What had he told you?’

‘To do what you told me.’

‘And you trust Michael, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’ll do what I tell you.’

It made sense. ‘Yes.’

‘The woman in the red scarf loves you as much as I love you and as much as Michael loves you.’

‘Yes.’

Dick Webster smiled and caressed the child’s hair and stood in time for the customs officer to call him through.

Even the blackshirted security officer, Enticement, delighted in the child, smiled and waved with a small movement of her fingers.

The customs officer complimented Webster. ‘A beautiful brown skinned boy, Sir.’

He inflected the word boy as if to let the security officer in the black shirt nearby know that the traveler traveled with a boy child, not a girl child, and one who was quite olive skinned at that and not white skinned, and that everything was straight forward. Anyway Webster’s papers showed that he worked as a doctor in Downtown Usayer City and that he was a community minded man who belonged to the exclusive Usayan Club, a charitable organization, and that must mean – must it not? – that he was not an olive skinned Askan looking woman who illegally trafficked children.

And as the Mr. Event pointed out, and as the customs officer knew only too well, Webster, though waiting in a third class queue, was, by appearance, every bit a first class passenger. That meant – how did his peers put it – he, the doctor, might enjoy abridged entry requirements.

‘Please push through your baggage trolley.’

Webster, however, played the humble game and made as if to lift the portmanteaus to the surveillance counter.

‘That won’t be necessary.’

Webster humbly questioned the order.

‘Not necessary,’ said the officer.

The tough black shirted security officer delighted in smiling at the pretty child.

Webster gave in (of course) and followed orders and pushed through the trolley and handed the officer the passports. The officer glanced at them and compared photos with travelers, young and old, all for the sake of running through the motions, and not much else, and then slid the passports into the scanner, scanned them and returned them with a smile.

‘Welcome home.’

Webster took the passports, thanked the officer, smiled at the blackshirted security office, and urged the child towards the barriers, which, upon walking through them, would release them into daylight and relative safety.

It’s rare seeing a child, here or anywhere, thought the security officer, Rosaria Enticement, a woman in her thirties, made squat looking only because of the clothes she wore, the black blouse, the navy blue trousers, which were a bit tight, and because of her short, thin, straight ordinary brown colored hair, and because she carried extra kilos around her hips and abdomen.

Though in thinking such things, that children were rare, she knew she was in danger of taking a negative view of life. It wasn’t so bad, she must admit. Some schools remained open, and modern medicine must one day save the day, and then children would fill rooms, literally they would – they must once again -fill rooms, school rooms, nurseries, lounge rooms, playrooms, rooms, room rooms, you name it.

Yet she must confess to herself that a child as pretty as this one was rare, ongoing epidemic or no ongoing epidemic. And that was to take a positive view of life. So pretty and rare.

The child was olive skinned unlike Rosaria Enticement, who was fair skinned, as were most indigenous Usayans, and the child hadn’t anything of the heavy freckling and a dermal condition that she, Rosaria Enticement, had endured as a child, and that had developed into a dry, cracked genetic ailment covering her body in adulthood, as with most fair skinned Usayan peoples.

The child’s skin was supple and very, very natural. Unusually so.

The security officer put these observations behind her, smiled once more at the charming young thing, waved goodbye, and relished their meeting, an occurrence that she would draw on to provide her with some good humor later in the day when events and tiredness inverted everything southwards.

Look at the queue, those queues, those rows of waiting travelers, and their luggage, all that luggage, and with passenger planes continuing to arrive through out the day, and until late at night, and not an Askan in sight, let alone an Askan looking female with an white skinned girl.

Rosaria Enticement sucked in some air, imagined that she sat beneath a wide leaf exotic tree while staring at red sand dunes in red sunsets, and then she saw the alert flash across the counter monitor at the same time as the customs officer under her charge saw it, and both her and the customs officer under her charge were annoyed by the unstable computer system that showed unfounded alerts from time to time.

‘You’ll have to call him back,’ she said to her charge, while holding up her hand to block the passage of the next traveler, the one following Webster and the child. ‘The scanner probably misread the passport number.’

‘The computer can’t work properly without the right maintenance. We have one IT guy for the floor.’

‘That’s true. But we have to confirm the passport number,’ she stared at the screen, closer, ‘of the…child, Evart, Master Evart Webster.’

The next traveler hadn’t heeded the security officer’s hand signals, and had dropped her bags on the customs counter, and five hundred more travelers stood behind her, and the customs office was short staffed this morning, and its officers had a long day ahead of them…

…and seeing all this, the security officer, Rosaria Enticement offered, ‘I’ll go. It will only take a minute.’

She might enjoy the short stroll to the arrivals lounge and she might glimpse some daylight.

And of course she would meet the sweet little child again.

The arrivals lounge was jam packed. That might be the reason why Webster never heard her cry out. Well, she had called out, but loudly. Nothing. She had cried out – called out – pretty loudly. He hadn’t heard. Nothing. So she talked into her radio and asked that one of the airport’s floor security officers tap the man on the shoulder and she saw him walk towards Webster and she relaxed and looked outside.

Even if the terminal overhang blocked direct sunlight, it was definitely day out there and it looked fine.

Bad time to look away.

Next she heard Webster yell, ‘I’ve got a gun,’ and she saw him run back into the building and towards the escalators that led to the departures lounge, before the crowd scattered like a dry leaves in an unusual gust of wind, and pushed her back with them.

Fortunately the gunman hadn’t run between the exit and the mad crowd. So the panic had somewhere to release itself, like air gushing from the nearest vent following an explosion, and the crowd edged through the exit’s double doors, several of which remained opened, the constant thoroughfare of scared people tripping the automatic sensors and racing outside.

By the time Rosaria Enticement elbowed two young women in their ribs and regained her footing, Webster, and not Webster and his child, ran two thirds of the way up the escalator leading to the departure lounge. And not the child, which was a relief.

Webster will see himself gunned down, but at least he was not taking his child with him, thought Enticement.

Such a pretty boy with perfect skin. Such a pretty girl with perfect olive skin. Unusual.

Paint.

Someone painted the child who was a fair skinned girl!

At the same time as reaching for her radio, Enticement looked towards the exit, in the direction opposite to that in which Webster had fled. Webster set himself up as the decoy. She ordered, ‘get security forces to arrival lounge gates C through to G, now. Tell them to apprehend any child under the age of ten. They are to exercise extreme caution. They must not harm the child. They must not harm the child.’

As she terminated the transmission, she spotted an unused information counter and pushed through a group of people and climbed it to see over the collective head of swelling panic, and to the lounge exit area. Both privately employed airport hacks and government blackshirts pushed with small effect through the collective arms, legs and torsos of panic.

She couldn’t help her colleagues. She couldn’t help them even as she saw the child run like the crow flew, though beneath railings and around the collective legs of panic, rather than over their heads, and towards a woman wearing a red scarf.

Rosaria Enticement radioed through her report. Then she noticed a loose wire that must have torn from the transmitter as she pushed through people in order to climb the unused information desk.

Gunshot rang from upstairs, in the departure lounge.

He was the decoy, with a big mouth and no gun, and probably a dead one at that.

She went back to watching the woman in the red scarf scoop the child into her arms and race to the taxi stand, across two road barriers, where the collective mass of panic hadn’t yet been adept enough to spread itself. And she couldn’t communicate a word of what she observed to her fellow blackshirts.

The woman and child clambered inside the first cab on the rank and drove away in it.

In doing so they pushed away Mr. Event and his wife. And though Rosaria Enticement had no way of hearing Mr. Event’s protest from such a distance, and across such a maddened crowd, those nearby heard him declare that, ‘everywhere man is in chains,’ and, ‘to hell with the aristocracy and long live democracy.’ Then he turned to Mrs. Event and said, ‘come dear, we of the Miserati must take the next cab, for it is part of our unfortunate destiny.’

The fair skin girl left with the woman in the red scarf and Enticement had no way of telling anyone. Therefore the here and now no longer concerned her, even if her superiors’ inevitable investigation into this morning’s events at some time in the not-so-distant future must so concern her. She climbed down from the desk and pushed back through the thinning crowd towards the customs area.

She didn’t know what it was all about, or why so many special forces had rained down on the airport this morning, she amongst them. But she knew it wasn’t simply about child importation. The authorities usually turned a blind eye nowadays, especially if they were on less than friendly terms with the authorities of the aggrieved nation from which, for the want of a better way of putting it, the children were lifted.

Then again, in a world without a future, children hold the only key and, without a thing to lose, prospective adoptive parents would pay with everything. By default that increased the stakes.

But these thoughts went against monarchial edicts, to think that the world was without a future, or that the human race had run its race. It went against the accepted credos, the TV media, polite conversation, or however you wanted to put it. These thoughts were taboo.

Usayer wasn’t alone. Every land on Samarium ran taboo lore across the social landscape like road spikes across roads.

Taboo was less obtrusive, and more efficient than law at blocking free speech.

And she was sure that taboo governed the ancient humans of mythical worlds of other planets, if in fact those worlds ever existed, conjecture about which was also taboo nowadays.

And they must have existed because it was taboo to suggest they hadn’t existed. She blinked, tying herself in knots.

One thing remained certain. The child was pretty, and Rosaria Enticement could dwell on her memory of those pretty features, now that everything had inverted south for the day.