Chapter 28: The Wasteful Plain – Part 2

As they walked, they left behind the great gathering of junk the consciousness had awoken in, and beyond it there was not much amidst the gravel and the dust and the sand, not much on the surface of the plain and the rolling hills, and nothing but blue in the sky above.

There was not even a sun, though the day was bright and hot. The consciousness, yet nameless, wondered where the light and the heat could be coming from, but no answer revealed itself.

Sky explained that they were heading for a camp that was several days’ travel away. ‘There are countless like it,’ she said. ‘Maybe infinite. No one knows how far the world goes.’

‘A camp,’ the consciousness repeated. ‘How many people?’

‘A couple hundred, thereabouts,’ Sky replied. ‘As many tents. I say camp; it’s more of an outpost, really. If you go past it for another week or so, there’s a city. We call it the Scrap Heap, because it’s made of scrap. Discarded bits and pieces of everything you can imagine and everything you can’t.’ She gestured broadly to the landscape around them. ‘That’s all there is to work with here.’

‘How many people at the Scrap Heap?’

‘I don’t know. Thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe. They don’t take a census.’ She frowned, stopped, and turned to the consciousness. ‘Why does the population matter so much?’

‘It is an awful lot of people to discard.’

For some reason, that made Sky laugh. ‘Do you think I’ve been discarded?’

It looked at her, silent, confused.

‘I don’t remember much, but I do know that when I came here I was escaping something,’ she explained. ‘I remember thinking I’d lived my whole life in a place that never changed, and then change came for me and I wanted to keep it. And that led me here.’

She knelt and picked up an old piece of scrap metal, perhaps torn from a larger sheet of corrugated iron. ‘This is junk, and yes, junk gets thrown away here and we make use of it. But do you know what else this old bit of metal is? It’s different. Whatever it was meant to be in its own world, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t deemed right, so it ended up here. That’s what this place is. It’s where all the change goes.’

She set off again, and after a moment, the consciousness followed.

‘How long have you been here, Sky?’ it asked.

‘Just over three years,’ she replied. ‘I mark every day in my diary.’

For a while then, they walked in silence, until the consciousness thought more about what Sky had said, and another question came to it.

‘You said that the metal was meant to be something in its own world. Do you believe that there are other worlds?’

She looked up at it with an odd smile. ‘Of course I do. I remember one of them. And I hear a lot about everyone else’s. They’re all very different, but somehow all very much the same. Imagine a world full of people and yet utterly empty, where every day is the same as the last, so much so that you can’t ever keep track of them, even with a diary. They all just flow into each other, one to the next.

‘That world is every world. And all the bits that don’t fit, the bits that would cause anything different to happen ― those get sent here. That’s what I think this place is. It’s the junk yard of every other world, to house whatever didn’t fit the plan, whatever didn’t do what it was supposed to, didn’t look right, or feel right, or think right. And what does that make us? It makes us the ones who are free. The materials here might have been discarded, but the people haven’t. We’ve escaped.’

The consciousness made no comment on Sky’s hypothesis. It did not doubt that she was correct that there were other worlds, but it was not sure that the people in this one were free.

As they walked, it scanned the horizons for features, landmarks, variations in the geography, but there was nothing. Even the pieces of scrap that were scattered everywhere were all the same, really. Even though they each looked vastly different, and they could probably do vastly different things, they were all broken, and they were all discarded.

The only thing that changed was colour of the sky. As the hours wasted away, it slowly grew darker, and with it the land about them began to fall into shadow. Just as there had been no sun, neither was there a moon or stars in the sky. From blue it faded towards black, and as it did, something inside the consciousness’s eyes switched, the world flickered bright, and colour was gone.

‘Ah,’ it said aloud. ‘I believe I have night vision.’

Sky turned and squinted up at it. ‘Lucky you. Unfortunately, I don’t, and I can’t just keep on going like you either. We’ll stop here for the night.’

The consciousness had forgotten that some people needed to sleep. Uncertain of how to help, it simply watched as Sky slung off her backpack and set about putting up a small tent. When she was finished, a question occurred to it.

‘Is there nothing to be afraid of in this place? Were I not here, you would be alone. Is there no danger in sleep?’

‘Not much. Even if there were, it’s not like I have a choice.’ She reached into her coat and produced a small device, rectangular, with a light on the side. ‘The commonest danger here is that a hole in the world might open and drop a heavy piece of junk on you. Fortunately, the holes always ripple before they open, and there’s a very clever man in the Scrap Heap who worked out how to detect those ripples. If there’s any threat of one opening nearby, this will wake me up.’

‘A hole in the world,’ it echoed.

She nodded. ‘How do you think anything gets here? It’s not like there any doors about for them to come through. They fall. Usually not too far, but it varies. I once watched a house drop a hundred metres out of the sky and shatter on the side of a hill. Felt the impact from a mile away. But that sort of thing’s very rare. Tell you what ― tomorrow I’ll take you to the lake. It’s a bit out of our way, but worth it.’

That night was long. It was no longer than any other night, but it was the first night that the consciousness could remember, so it lingered. Minutes stretched into hours and thoughts grew long within the consciousness’s mind as it sat and tried to remember where it had come from, how long it had lived, and what its name had been.

It tried as the night crawled on, and it tried as the world began to lighten again, and it kept trying as the morning came and its night vision switched off and colour surged back into the world. It tried as hard as it thought it was possible to try, but no memories came to it. Its first moment remained one of blindness and confusion.

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As the morning grew brighter, Sky woke up. She was a little groggy at first and said nothing until she had finished eating what the consciousness thought was a very small breakfast, although on balance it supposed that since it did not eat, it had no basis on which to judge the size of a meal.

Once she was finished eating, Sky took down the tent and packed it back into her bag, then took out the compass and watched where its needle swung.

‘If I remember correctly,’ she said, pointing in a slightly different direction. ‘The lake is that way. Should be about two hours’ walk.’ She squinted. ‘You can see the hills around it from here.’

The consciousness followed her gaze and saw a range of hills taller than any others nearby. ‘What is this lake?’ it asked.

‘A lake,’ Sky said, unhelpfully, and set off towards it. ‘Strictly speaking, it’s a crater. Something fell, and a lot of water fell through with it.’

‘When?’

‘Oh, a long time ago. Before I was here. There’s a library at the Scrap Heap that’s stuffed full of little pieces of history. Records of events no one’s alive to remember, even old cities from before the Scrap Heap… You can find the ruins of them if you walk far enough. I suppose one day the Scrap Heap’ll be one of them.’

There was a look of sadness on her face as she said that, but she shook her head and it was gone. ‘Anyway, I’m rambling. One of those records says that about two hundred years ago a great metal palace fell from the sky, followed by a flood of water lasting only a couple of minutes. Now there’s a lake there. You’ll see.’

After that, Sky refused to say any more on the matter. She simply led the way towards the lake. The silence left the consciousness once more enwrapped in its own thoughts, and it found those thoughts lingering on the idea of a great metal palace. Somewhere in the far reaches of its mind, it was almost certain there was a memory of such a place, but it could not find that memory.

About two hours later, they came to the top of the ridge Sky had pointed out, and the lake was suddenly before them. Its spanned what must have been over a hundred metres and was almost perfectly circular, and though for the most part the water was clear and smooth, in the very centre of it something broke the surface and poked up into open air.

It was about the height of a building, but it was not a building. It was made of iron, thick with rust, and its roof tapered to a dome, but around the edge of it were long, rectangular holes. At first the consciousness could not make out what they were, but then it heard the sound of a lens moving echo through its head, and suddenly its vision was much closer. There were shards of glass still clinging around the edges of the holes ― they were shattered windows, it realised.

‘What is it?’ it asked, eventually.

Sky shrugged. ‘Could be a palace, like the legend says. Or a station of some kind. A few people have sailed over. It’s mostly flooded, but in the early days they found some bodies in that top section.’

The consciousness looked down, past the sand-and-gravel beach they were standing on, into the water. ‘How deep does this crater go?’

‘Very,’ Sky replied. ‘It’s quite steep quite suddenly. The station, or whatever it is, gets a lot larger under there, they say. Widens out. Some people have dived down and they say it’s all smashed up, but they think it might only be part of something bigger.’ She looked up at the sky. ‘I wonder if the rest of it couldn’t fit through. Or maybe it came through in pieces, all over the world, and this is just the only one we know about.’

The consciousness did not reply. It knelt down on the beach and picked up a stone. Though scratched and chipped, it looked as though it had once been smooth, and the parts that still were held an odd grey-green sheen that turned reflective as the light from the sky hit them.

‘What is this?’ the consciousness asked, looking up at Sky.

She glanced down at it. ‘Oh, they call that seastone. If you believe what some folk say, when the wreck and the water fell through, creatures fell through with them. It’s said they were all dead by the time anyone got here, but they looked like something out of a nightmare. Over time, they rotted away until their scales were all that was left, and those became the seastones.’

‘So this is a graveyard,’ the consciousness said, straightening up.

‘You could put it that way,’ Sky agreed. ‘I think it’s beautiful.’

‘You see a beauty in death?’

‘A kind of beauty.’ She took out her compass and looked down at it. ‘Come on, we should get going.’

When she set off around the edge of the lake, however, the consciousness did not follow. It was staring blankly at the ruin in the middle of the water. There was a vision, or an idea, somewhere buried within itself, just out of reach.

After a few seconds, it heard Sky come to a halt. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think I remember something,’ it said, slowly.

‘Don’t push it too hard if it’s slow coming to you,’ she warned. ‘Is it something about your world? Or your name?’

It shook its head. ‘No name… My world… A field… No, a graveyard.’ It felt one of its hands clench into a fist, an iron fist. ‘I see a graveyard that spans a whole world, and in it fire rages and the dead fall in their thousands. It is the world I was meant for. A world of war… a world of death.’ It turned to look at Sky. ‘I remember what I was supposed to be. I am a war machine. How did I get here?’

She shook her head, a look of concern in her eyes. ‘Only you could say, if you remember. It might take time, though.’ She walked up to it, reached up, and placed a gentle hand on its shoulder. ‘You can’t force memories. If they come back, they’ll do it in their own time. They―’

Sky was cut off when the consciousness’s arm shot up, wrapped its metal fingers about her throat and lifted her off the ground.

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