The Last Arcadian

By Pamela Lamb

The crash of a rock against glass smashes Cassie’s familiar world. The air outside Arcadia is poisonous, or so she’s been told. Is it better to risk a quick death outside the dome or to suffer a slow decline within? Paul has been told the old dome contains biological hazards that threaten the lives of the people of Rangelands. But Cassie is just an ordinary girl, or as ordinary as any girl can be who has lived her whole life locked away inside an ancient dome. With all the obstacles thrown into their path, it seems impossible Cassie and Paul will find a way to be together. But sometimes the power of love can surprise us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pamela Lamb
• Release date: Oct 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311195876

Pamela Lamb

Must ... stop ... writing ... Sometimes I really wish I could. It gets in the way of real life. At the weekend I prefer sitting in front of the computer with my pretend friends instead of going out with my real ones. It destroys my sleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night knowing I need to change one word in the paragraph I wrote the evening before - and I have to get up and do it. And it makes me a dangerous driver. Get me on the road and my characters start having conversations in my head. And why are they so much more lucid and logical then than when I attempt to scribble them down at the next red light?I write because I love language. I love English with its collection of mongrel words. It's like an enormous button box where you can pick between half a dozen languages each one of which holds the history of Britain at its heart. I love the shape of words and the sound of them. I love what you can make them do on the page. And what you can make them do to your readers. Laugh, cry, stay up at night.What I like best is having a conversation with a reader about one of my characters. The reader talks about my character as if s/he is a real person. Discusses the character's motivation. Speculates about what the character did after the end of the novel. And I think, but it's all made up. Every bit of it. Out of my head.Then I know it is all worthwhile. Bringing characters alive to walk on the page. Creating a world for them to live in. Immersing myself in the shape and rhythm of a novel in the making. It's exciting stuff. And it's even more exciting when the book is finished and I hand it over to you, the reader. Enjoy!

Book preview

The Last Arcadian

Pamela Lamb

Published by Agneau Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Pamela Lamb

Discover other titles by Pamela Lamb at smashwords.com/profile/view/pamelalamb

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Chapter 1.

Cassie reached down her hand and rubbed the surface of the rock by the waterfall. She stared at the brown flakes on her palm. Under the brown layer, the rock was grey and grainy with small, shiny pebbles. Like the rocks in the stream, she thought, where the water has worn them away. She put her hand into the cool water and watched the flakes float downstream, twisting and turning in the current. Little fish darted away into the shadows.

In the trees above her head the chorus of cicadas stopped suddenly. Cassie looked up at the luminous grey sky. She could feel the heat radiating down through the thick leaves of the tropical forest. Her stomach growled.

She stood up and began to make her way back along the narrow path that followed the stream out of the forest. A bird took flight with a harsh clap of its wings, shaking water droplets from the heavy green canopy. As her bare feet stepped nimbly down the steep track she was aware of the forest creatures around her. The lazy flit of a butterfly in a patch of sunlight, the quick skitter of a lizard through dead leaves, the slow glide of a snake twining itself upwards around the trunk of a tree. Sometimes when she came up to the waterfall, Cassie would sit with her legs stretched out in front of her and wait for the creatures to show themselves. There was a big water dragon with red patches under his body that would take scraps of meat from her fingers with a snap of his bony jaw. She could see him basking on his rock by the stream as she hurried by.

The heat struck her face like a slap as she emerged from the trees into the food garden. The banana and pawpaw trees, heavy with fruit, gave way to rows of tomato and cucumber staked up on their trellises. Cassie pulled a ripe tomato from the vine as she passed. She crammed the sweet red fruit into her mouth, relishing its sharp, tangy flavour. At the edge of the trellises she paused and looked down the slope at the huddle of buildings on the far side of the food garden. She felt dizzy from the remorseless heat out here in the middle of the day. It was not a good time to be away from shelter. But she still had to find some green leaves for her mother and, having lazed away half an hour by the stream, she knew she’d better hurry. Her mother had a short temper and a sharp tongue and Cassie didn’t like getting the edge of either.

She caught sight of her father standing in the damp shade of one of the round concrete fish tanks. Her mouth watered. Fresh fish was a treat. She dug down in the rich red dirt and broke off a knob of ginger. Ginger grew like sugar cane in the tropical heat and it tasted very good with fish. Her father looked up as she approached between the rows of vegetables. A big grey fish lay on the marble killing slab. It was still flapping in a desultory way, even though its guts lay beside it in a neat, glistening pile. Cassie felt sorry for it. She knew this fish was not like the ones in the forest stream. It was born to be eaten. All the same it was sad to see the life fade from its wet, knowing eye.

Her father glanced at the bunch of salad greens in her hand. ‘Take them in to your mother. Quickly now. Tell her to chop them up to stuff the fish. And, next time, don’t pick them in the heat of the day.’

But he was talking to her thin, bony back as she pushed her shoulder against the door and went inside.

The long, low-ceilinged living space was designed for more people than used it now: in fact, more people than Cassie had ever seen in her life. She knew what had happened to them, all those people. There was a thick book bound with black leather that lay on the desk in her father’s office. Inside the Book were all the Rules that governed their lives here in Arcadia, listed in alphabetical order. Death began with a D. When people grew old and died, or became sick with an illness medicine couldn’t cure, their bodies were placed in the big metal gas tank on the far side of the machinery shed. Thus, stated the Book, life which was born from the soil, air and water of Arcadia returned to them at the end to enrich new life.

Cassie knew that’s what had happened to all the people who used to sit in the two rows of metal-framed vinyl-clad arm chairs arranged down the middle of the room, reading the magazines laid out on the low chipboard tables painted to look like real wood. No new magazines had come into Arcadia in Cassie’s lifetime. She remembered a time when she and her brother had been allowed to sit quietly and read the old ones in the pause between bath and bed while their parents ate their dinner at the long, aluminium workbench that separated the living space from the food preparation area. Now the magazines were too fragile and too precious to be touched by anything but the ends of her mother’s feather duster.

But Cassie knew, too, that not all the people born in Arcadia had been disposed of according to the Book’s law. Her mother’s babies had been returned to the soil sure enough, but they had been laid in tiny graves by their grieving mother as they had been born and died one by one, until only Cassie remained, and her brother Jason who perhaps should have died too, because he was not right in the head. There was nothing in the Book about people who were not right in the head.

Now the babies had stopped coming and the row of little humps under the ancient poinciana tree behind the living quarters were hardly visible any more. Only Cassie’s mother went to visit them, to snip at the long grass with her kitchen scissors and brush the big, red poinciana flowers from them as they fell unheeding from the tree above. Her mother was thin and pale, as if part of her was not here any more but buried in the ground with her dead children.

Cassie walked into the food preparation area and dumped the salad greens into the sink. She turned on the tap and ran water onto them to wash off the clinging dirt.

‘My father said they’re for stuffing the fish.’

Cassie’s mother pursed her lips. ‘I’m making a pie. I don’t know why he bothered killing that fish. I told him before he went out it was going to be a pie.’

Cassie shrugged her shoulders. Her parents’ spats were too frequent for her to take any notice of them. She turned away, hoping to get to her bedroom before her mother noticed she was gone. Halfway across the living area, her mother’s voice drilled into her back.

‘Don’t you go off where I can’t see you. I’m going to want your help in a minute.’

Cassie walked back into the food preparation area and pulled open the cutlery drawer. Outside the window her brother Jason was crouched under the poinciana tree muttering to himself. He had cleared a patch of dirt in front of him and he was arranging his precious pebble collection in lines and squares. At sixteen, Jason was a bulky square-headed youth with vacant eyes and a wet chin. The Book stated that everyone in Arcadia should be given something to do, once they passed fifteen. There had been plenty of jobs in the old days: scientists, psychologists, agronomists, veterinarians and engineers, as well as those charged with keeping things going on a day-by-day basis: cooks, laboratory assistants, cleaners, mechanics and gardeners. Now Cassie’s parents divided the work between them. He maintained Arcadia’s machinery and worked in the food garden. She looked after the pigs and poultry and kept the living quarters clean. They hadn’t managed to find anything Jason could do with any reliability.

Cassie thought Jason should make himself useful by going into the gas tank with the dead people but she knew better than to say anything. Her mother doted on Jason and refused to hear anything against him. Cassie had tried to tell her father about the times Jason pushed her face into the green scummy water of the fish pond. She was terrified one day he would go too far and she would be the one thrown into the gas tank with the kitchen scraps and the remains of the animals her father butchered for food.

Paul was surfing Kirra point as he had done a thousand times before. The smell of the sea was in his nostrils, the feel of the cool water on his limbs. He heard the sound of gulls and of people on the beach. Nobody else was out here. He had the break to himself. All he had to do was wait for the perfect wave. He sat on his board and felt the swell roll under him. He turned his head and watched it curl over into a frothy, white-topped wave rolling towards the beach. Turned back to the ocean where the big one was gathering strength: deep green flecked with purest turquoise where the sun slanted down into the water. This was it. Paul felt his heart beating in his chest. Felt the muscles in his legs beginning to bunch up, ready for the movement that would bring him to his feet on the smooth, wet board. This time. This time for sure.

There was a loud screech inside Paul’s helmet. The image that was being beamed directly to his optic nerves by sensors in contact with his forehead jerked, slowed, then broke up into colourful pixillated shapes. Paul reached up and yanked the helmet from his head and the real world swarmed back into his senses. The feeling of cool water on his skin disappeared, replaced by a slick of sweat. He felt a nagging ache in the small of his back. Behind the drawn blinds the afternoon sun pulsed with golden heat. Paul sat up and swung his legs off the low leather couch. He reached out and flicked the switch on the simulator that stood on a narrow shelf under the window. The muffled screech inside his discarded helmet died to silence.

Bugger, he thought. The Kirra break was stuffed. Just as Noosa was stuffed, and Byron. He’d downloaded every file from every library in the world and none of them worked. And it was not like he could go and surf the real thing. Like all the rest, Kirra was buried under a shallow sea of stinking water.

Paul stood up and thrust his way out of his bedroom into the kitchen. His mother was hunched over a saucepan on the stove but Paul didn’t bother asking what was for dinner. He knew what it would be. Seaweed, or kelp, or agar. They were all same thing. The seaweed was grown in the warm, brackish water at the bottom of the range and trucked to the local processing plant where it was freeze-dried, bleached and stripped of its bitter, salty taste. After that, the chemists made happy with colours and flavours from their databases until something resembling normal food came bouncing merrily off the conveyor belts, packed in brightly coloured containers. It wasn’t that bad, although it tended to have a bland, unsatisfying consistency. Fifteen year old Paul, who would eat anything to assuage his constant appetite, didn’t really care what his mother placed in front of him so long as he could cover it with tomato sauce. It all tasted pretty much the same anyway, whatever she chose to call it. Paul liked tomato sauce. He liked its sweet, tangy flavour. He liked its bright red colour. He even liked the plastic bottle with the picture on the side. Round, red and shiny, that’s what tomatoes were. Or, at least, that’s what it said on the bottle. Paul had no clue what a tomato really was. He’d never seen one in his entire life.

Paul’s mother turned her head. ‘Are you off out?’ she asked brightly. Her voice was always bright. ‘Dinner won’t be long.’

Paul pulled open the back door. ‘Don’t worry about me, Mum. I’ll have something when I get home.’

Chapter 2

Paul’s family lived in the city of Rangelands which clung to the edge of the Great Dividing Range and looked down on the shallow sea that covered all the land to the east. Rangelands was home to a thriving population consisting in the main of two-parent, two-child families with the old people tidied away neatly into a retirement village on the edge of town. The history of the city was defined by two apocalyptic events - flood and plague - remembered nowadays only by an ancient crone whose reminiscences, delivered in a breathless, reedy tone, nobody wanted to listen to.

The rising seawaters which engulfed the land to the east of Rangelands had been a creeping menace for generations, turning the Brisbane River valley into a huge shallow bay and forcing business and government to move west onto higher ground. The second event struck with lethal speed. Avian flu which had passed between poultry and humans for a hundred years in the crowded Asian cities to the north of Australia mutated into a form that could be passed from human to human. It was an event governments the world over had long feared but funding for vaccines had dried up years ago. The resulting pandemic solved the problem caused by the rising waters: what to do with the excess population as cities and fertile land were gradually eaten away by the sea. In Queensland those who survived the deadly flu were moved into new, custom-built settlements well away from the creeping water and protected from disease-ridden wildlife by an encircling fence.

The perimeter fence that ran in a great semi-circle behind the town was a favourite meeting place for the city’s youngsters. Living in such a sanitised world, it was the closest they could get to the natural world, except for the virtual big game hunts on their simulators that, seriously, they didn’t believe were real. Out here where the wilderness poked through the fence despite the best efforts of mower and poison to keep it at bay they might encounter a snake skin, or a dead frog, or a feather. Only the very brave or the most foolhardy went any closer to these finds other than poking them with a stick. The kids knew quite well if their parents so much as suspected they’d touched such things they would be bundled away into the sanatorium to wait out a period of quarantine. Truth to tell, the kids were more afraid of the weeks in a stark white room looked after by people in masks and gloves than they were of any disease they might catch from chance encounters with wildlife. None of them had any experience of avian flu which had killed its last victim years before the mumbling