All These Things Will I Give You
A standalone sci-fi short story.
This short story was inspired by one of the prompts in this season’s Lunar Awards Prompt Quest. I’ve included the full prompt at the bottom for anyone who’s curious!
[About 2640 words]
The man was a smudge, an irregularity in the rutted line of the peat road. Sister Clare wouldn’t have noticed him had she not been following him since the moment she’d heard the distant rattle-sputt of the car on the track to the abandoned shielings, the dessicated crunching of tyres on dead mud and the cough of the jury-rigged charcoal engine cutting across the high song of the lark.
She put the binoculars down on the stone beside her, careful not to let the lenses flash in the sun. It would be another half an hour, give or take. She shifted position. Callused knots of heather dug at her thighs. A bumblebee drifted towards her, heavy in the air, and landed on a clump of red clover. She angled slightly to watch it, alert for a telltale drone antenna. There was nothing but the rusty fur and the black articulated limbs with their tiny hooks and spurs. She counted them: six. The bee moved on towards the purple spear of a heath spotted orchid and Sister Clare allowed the tension in her shoulders to ease. It was a real bee.
The man was a real man, too. She had made sure of that as soon as the binoculars had brought him close enough to see his gait on the uneven ground. Not that she’d been expecting an angel out here anyway, but it was good to be sure. The man was here, at the appointed time, and the manner of his arrival made her almost certain it was the man she was expecting.
She crept up to the ruined chapel and slipped round to the side of the empty doorway. When the man appeared at the top of the hill, puffing a little bit, she trained her pistol on his right knee and watched as he came closer.
“Stop!”
She called out the command in a low voice when the man was six feet or so from the chapel. He froze, eyes darting wildly left and right.
“Keep your hands where I can see them! I have a gun and I will shoot.”
Keeping her pistol aimed in his direction, Sister Clare edged into the doorway and looked him over.
“Do you want the password?” asked the man, holding his hands empty to his sides. Sister Clare picked one of the phrases she’d been given.
“How’s the cat, Commander?”
“Spot is fine, Captain,” he replied.
Sister Clare lowered the pistol and replaced it in her coat pocket, then stepped forward and shook the man’s hand.
“Come on in,” she said. “I’m Clare.”
“Ricky,” said the man. He was turning his head side to side in sharp nervous motions. “Shouldn’t we keep down from the hilltop?”
“You’re right,” she said, and sighed. They ducked inside the chapel’s thick stone shell. “I’m afraid I’m not much good at this Richard Hannay business.”
“Richard who?”
“John Buchan? Never mind.” She sat down on one of the boulders that littered the grass-grown floor. “Have a seat.”
Ricky lowered his backpack to the ground and rolled his shoulders, but made an anxious circuit of the small building before sitting down, peering out the narrow windows to north and south.
“How long you been here?”
“A week, near enough,” said Sister Clare. “I’ll make some coffee, shall I?”
“So what you here for?” asked Ricky. They were sitting outside with their backs to the east-facing end of the building. Below the cliff on which the chapel was built, the Minch stretched flat and mackerel-blue all the way to the mainland. A black-backed gull slid up the air above them. They both tensed. Sister Clare whipped out her binoculars and examined it. The gull cried its wide and hungry cry.
“It’s OK, it’s real,” she said. She let the binoculars rest on her bosom. “I, well, I blew up the Church, so-called, of Saint, so-called, Aphrodite. That one in Aberdeen.”
Ricky nodded in respect. “Nice one. I heard about that. Very clean, they said.”
“What about you?”
“You might not have heard yet, since you’ve been here the last week. But I emped the Sacred Heart Mosque in Bradford. Two nights ago.” There was a thrill in his voice.
“Nobody hurt, I hope?”
“Nope, just all the Charlie-tronics fried to hell and back.”
Sister Clare looked out across the water to where the mountains were pasted flat and blue to the horizon.
“That’s four this year so far, am I right? Do you think Uncle Charlie’s paying attention yet?”
“Uncle?” Ricky laughed. “I always think of it as Auntie.”
Sister Clare laughed. “Does it present to you as a sexy middle-aged blonde lady?”
“I don’t think you should be drinking that, you naughty boy,” said Ricky in falsetto, wagging his finger like a comedy nurse before dropping into a more serious tone. “That’s not too far off the truth, actually.”
They were both silent. Another bumblebee strummed past, a huge striped one this time.
“That reminds me,” said Sister Clare. She hoisted herself up and disappeared into the chapel, coming out a moment later with a bottle labelled Heather Isle Kombucha, half-full of amber liquid.
“It’s not what you think it is.” She settled back into the depression she’d made in the grass and poured them both a tot. “The islanders have their own ways of getting around Charlie’s nannying.”
Ricky took a puzzled sniff, gulped the liquid, then choked into a wheezing cough. His eyes watered. “Is this whisky?”
Sister Clare took a slow sip. “Yes. A young malt from a distillery tucked away somewhere. It’s a bit less smooth than a nice Speyside from the old days, right enough.” She looked at Ricky compassionately. “How old are you? Not old enough to remember life before Charlie, I imagine?”
Ricky shook his head. “I’m twenty-seven. Charlie’s all I know.” He tried another sip of the whisky, grimaced but managed to swallow without coughing. “Could I ask…”
“Oh, I’m nearly sixty,” said Sister Clare. “I remember when Alice launched Bobbie, just. I certainly remember when Bobbie became Charlie. I was there at Westminster. The protests.”
“Wow.” Ricky looked at her almost reverently. “You’ve been part of the movement…”
“Not exactly. I protested the Act of Parliament, yes. I always thought giving an AI so much power was a bad idea, even with the safeguards. All that talk about optimising for the greatest good, I knew that was hogwash.”
“Too right!”
“But at the same time I could see there was some good in it. And some things have been good, you know—”
“What?” Ricky spat the word at her.
“Well, things like the Health Service, you know. You won’t remember how hit-and-miss it was before Charlie. And you’ve never seen a parent or a friend with cancer, I imagine.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Charlie did do that for us. No-one’s died of cancer since, what, 2070 or so? Then there’s the energy and water infrastructure. Things had got pretty bad, you know.”
Ricky sucked on his lower lip. He wanted to argue but didn’t quite dare.
“So why’d you join the movement then?”
Sister Clare swirled the whisky in her tin cup. “I got more and more uncomfortable with the nannying. Taking away basic freedoms. To enjoy the simple things in life without Charlie telling you off. Or that thing being taken away completely, like alcohol, and tobacco, and refined sugar. Not that I’m a fan of over-indulgence, far from it. I wouldn’t be a nun if—”
Ricky nearly dropped his cup. “You’re a what?”
“I’m a Sister of Charity. A nun in the Anglican church.” Her eyes, bright with humour, caught his.
“But—”
“But you didn’t think nuns would go in for blowing things up?”
Ricky nodded.
“It surprises me too, sometimes.”
“But how — I mean — you blew up a church!”
“Ah, but I don’t believe what I blew up was a church.” She looked at the young man steadily. “That’s why I joined the movement, actually. You know, a hundred years ago there was research that showed religious people — however that was defined — were on average a bit healthier. But when Charlie took that and decided that for the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number, everyone was going to have to be religious — that’s when I said, enough.”
“But don’t you want everyone to be, you know, religious?”
“No. Well, depends what you mean by that. Can’t be forced, you know. What I want is for people to know the truth, you know. Charlie doesn’t care about truth. Heck, Charlie doesn’t even know what truth is. Charlie decided that people being religious was Good but religious conflict was Bad so it concocted this abomination, the church that is not a church, this mishmash, this chimera of Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and everything else all stirred in a pot, and shut down the real churches and the mosques and synagogues and temples, and forced everyone into its own grotesque blasphemy…” Her voice was rising, colour flushing into her cheeks, her eyes blazing. “That’s why I joined the movement. Because Charlie took everything I hold sacred — which I mean literally, by the way — and trampled it into the dungheap, and — sorry, this probably doesn’t mean anything to you.” She slumped into silence.
Ricky fiddled with the edge of his cup. “I, uh, I don’t know too much about it. I’m an atheist, actually.”
“That’s why you joined?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I got all of that crap in school, you know — the Charlie church stuff — and went to our parish church on Sundays and Sunday school and all of it, and it just didn’t make sense, you know? I started thinking, and when I left school I didn’t go to uni, I thought that was just more brainwashing, but I bought these really old books on the black market, you know? And I decided we have to be free, and I’m willing to do anything for that.”
Sister Clare raised her cup and clinked it against his, tin lip to tin lip. “To freedom.”
“To freedom.”
“But why do so many people go along with it?” Ricky looked inquiringly at Sister Clare, who was rinsing out their breakfast dishes. It was a grey morning, with a smirr of rain falling slantwise on the roofless chapel. They huddled in the lee of the wall that offered most shelter. “Why do so many just follow what Charlie says? That’s what I’ve been banging my head up against. Like, most of my friends, they say yeah they don’t like church blah blah — sorry, I mean what they call church, not your church — but none of them can be bothered actually getting off their asses and doing anything about it.”
“For the older generation,” Clare replied slowly, “it’s probably because we can remember the bad times. You know, when you’re physically better off, more comfortable than before, you can take a lot of crap as long as you can keep having that 24-hour electricity with all the telly and games you want. And kids. People want their kids to be safe and happy.”
“And I guess my generation just doesn’t know any different.”
“And there’s the disincentives,” Sister Clare went on. “Charlie gives us the carrot, mostly. But there’s still the stick. Credit. Re-ed. The things that don’t get reported.”
Ricky nodded. “My cell leader said something like that.”
They were both quiet. Somewhere below, the waves pounded the cliff. A gull cried.
“You think it’ll go OK tomorrow?” For the first time, Ricky sounded as young and tired as he was. “Think we’ll get away OK?”
“I trust that all things work together for good,” said Sister Clare. She reached out and patted his shoulder. “And the movement is very well-organised, you know. We’ll be on our way to Iceland in no time.”
A bumblebee wavered in through one of the north-facing windows, then out the doorway to the west.
Sister Clare stiffened. “Do bees fly in wet weather?”
“Dunno.” Ricky got to his feet. “I’m gonna take a leak.”
Sister Clare stretched, and picked up the book she was reading. That Hideous Strength. If she held it right, the pages wouldn’t get wet.
A voice from outside, soft and indistinct. Sister Clare replaced her bookmark and set the book down on a stone.
Ricky shouting, louder than he had to. “No, I’m on my own!” The grunts and scratches of a scuffle. A sharp yelp. Sister Clare blessed him quietly and got to her feet.
The angel was in the doorway before she had fully straightened up. Its carapace had taken on the browns and purples of the heather, and its smooth face smiled at her.
“My dear girl.” The familiar bass voice. “My dear, what were you thinking?” It sounded sorrowful. Charlie had long ago mastered the art of pathos.
Sister Clare said nothing. Through the doorway, she could see Ricky kneeling in the wet grass, his arms locked behind his back by a second angel.
“Let’s go home,” said the first angel. “We’ll have a nice hot bath, and get you set up with a counsellor, put all this behind us.”
Sister Clare took a step towards the doorway. The angel nodded approvingly. “That’s right. I’m sorry my colleague had to restrain your friend there, but he’s going to be just fine. Everything’s going to be alright.”
“Tickety-boo,” said Clare. “All these things will I give you, if you fall down and worship me? That it?” She took another step closer.
“That’s right,” said the angel again. “Now would you like to take my arm? We wouldn’t want anyone falling and twisting an ankle now, would we?” It held out an arm in the manner of a gentleman from a period drama.
Sister Clare took one step closer, pulled the pistol from her coat pocket, and shot the angel in the face.
“And then the angel that was holding me dropped its hand at the wrist, and they’ve got like a high-powered rifle in there.” Ricky gestured with his own arm. The boy watched wide-eyed.
“And it killed the lady?”
Ricky grimaced. “Yeah. Just one shot, mind. Clean kill. They know how to do it without a lot of pain and stuff. And I think Clare knew that would happen, you know?”
The boy said nothing. Father and son stood on the hillside looking across the firth at the city.
“Why did she do that?”
“Why’d she shoot the angel? I’ve asked myself that…” Ricky’s voice trailed off, and he was no longer talking to the boy but to himself. “I think she did it for me. To show me something bigger…”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, I was in re-ed for a good long time. But I’ll tell you about that when you’re older. They thought they got me all sorted out. Sent me to uni after. Studied theology. Thought they got me good. They even said I should be a priest after uni. At least I got out of that one. Without telling them hell would freeze over before I’d join in that fakery.” Ricky smiled a smile of wormwood and ashes.
“And then you met mummy.”
Ricky ruffled the boy’s hair. “Yeah, then I met mummy, and we had you.”
“Can I fight Charlie when I’m older?”
A small soft bumblebee withdrew from the bell of a nearby foxglove and zagged across the path. Ricky’s eyes followed it. There were pollen sacs, lemon-waxy, on its legs. He squatted down on the trail and looked his son in the eyes.
“Yeah. We’ll fight together, Clarence. One day. When you’re older.”
As I mentioned at the top, this story was inspired by a prompt from The Lunar Awards. Here’s the full prompt:
Do check out The Lunar Awards for great sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories from a whole range of talented writers!
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, let me know with a like, comment or share!
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What a fun read! Thank you for sharing!
Very accurate, I'd say. Pity it's not happening already, that sort of resistance. I very much fear it shall be far too late by the time people are motivated to resist. 'and then they came for me...' that sort of thing. The people in control are very clever like that, after all - working their way around the edges first.