Escape by Manjula Padmanabhan

Author:Manjula Padmanabhan [Padmanabhan, Manjula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette India
Published: 2015-07-20T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

The past sculpts the future as surely as a scalpel carves a block of flesh.

– from: The Generals: We Are Tomorrow

The next morning, before the sun had risen, Youngest took Meiji for a walk up the east ridge. She brought the puppy with her, carrying it in a sling tied across her front. Youngest took his backpack and everything of value in the room.

They climbed till they were at the summit, looking down at the little town and across the gap in the ridge, towards the west. Youngest pointed across the gap.

‘That group of buildings there,’ he said, pulling out the monoscope and passing it to the girl, ‘is the estate with the dronery. If you rotate this ring here, you’ll be able to focus sharp enough to see the rust on the spikes on top of the boundary wall.’

The wall was high and solid-looking, pierced by a guardhouse gate in front. Only one structure was tall enough to poke up from behind the wall, a plump dome glittering softly in the predawn light. It looked incongruously ornamental, like a mushroom growing in the middle of a glaze-tiled bathroom floor.

‘That guardhouse,’ said Youngest, ‘is bristling with drones. Not armed, of course, because they’re not built for combat, but enough of them that they constitute an impassable barrier of breathing bodies.’

‘Why is it guarded like that?’ asked Meiji. ‘What are they protecting?’

‘The estate. The machinery –’

‘What machinery?’

Youngest shrugged. ‘All droneries require a certain amount of equipment – the gestation rooms for the animals and for the incubators. Meanwhile, since there are no functioning industries left in production – no mines, no refineries, what used to be called heavy industries – droneries like this one must be protected from vandals who might break in and steal the machinery for resale to other facilities –’

‘Don’t we have a dronery back at the Estate?’

‘Of course,’ said Youngest, pausing very slightly before continuing in the past tense, ‘we did. A very large one. We produced hundreds of drones – but we also had hundreds of acres. Our Estate was so spread out, it wasn’t obvious that our dronery was just as heavily guarded as this one.’

Meiji frowned, as she processed the information. ‘What’s the point of producing drones if you have to guard them so much?’ she asked.

‘Everyone needs drones, but only a few estates have licences to produce them. On our Estate, we use all the drones we produce. On small facilities like this one, the estate-owner probably creates drones mostly for trade, not his own use. And he’ll get a good price for them because there’s no one else in the area creating them –’

‘What’s special about making them?’

‘You need a licence from the Generals to own the machinery with which to produce drones and you have to register every single worker that comes out of the incubators – the penalty for creating or distributing unregistered drones on the black market is death, I believe. Or it is, anyway, in our General’s jurisdiction.’ Youngest glanced at Meiji, unsure how much of this she was following.

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