Flesh and Blood by Jackie French Page B

tussocks till Neil bent and pressed the button for forward.
    It wasn’t where we had meant to go. It didn’t matter. All I wanted to do was get away.
    ‘Neil, Neil, the Centaur, remember? We thought it was dead too, but it wasn’t …’
    ‘Those people down there were dead,’ said Neil grimly.
    ‘But they can’t have been!’
    ‘They were. Have you ever seen death before? Real death, not on Virtual?’
    I shook my head. Death was the great taboo in the City. I’d been shocked by the Outland custom of funerals when I was first banished. It seemed obscene to celebrate the dead, slightly disgusting to even mention them. Since the Declines the City dead were mechanically removed and incinerated as soon as they’d been autopsied. It was as though a City citizen had done something shameful by dying — not been meticulous with rejuves and regenerations, had been so disorganised that death was a possibility.
    ‘Well, I have seen dead bodies,’ said Neil grimly. ‘And those people were dead.’
    ‘But they attacked us!’
    ‘And they didn’t feel pain. Their blood didn’t flow. They were dead.’
    ‘Neil, that’s impossible!’
    ‘Is it? Have you ever seen a dead snake?’
    ‘No, of course not.’
    ‘When you kill a snake it can still move for hours. People have even been killed when they’ve tried to pick up a dead snake and it’s bitten them.’
    ‘But how?
    ‘Reflex. The nerves still send messages to the muscles even when the snake is dead.’
    ‘You think that’s what happened back there?’ I said slowly.
    ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s possible. That would be why the Centaur attacked us too. Maybe there’s something about the plague that activates the nerves after death.’
    ‘But why attack us?’
    ‘Like the snake,’ said Neil. ‘It bites because that’s what it does when it’s startled. It attacks, bites. Humans are animals too, remember. We were the last thing the Centaur saw. The final reflex is fear and when humans are afraid they fight.’
    I smiled wanly. ‘You sounded very like Theo then. That’s the sort of thing he’d say.’
    ‘He brought me up,’ said Neil.
    I gazed down at the brown grasslands. ‘We should tell Michael about this,’ I said at last. ‘It might be important.’
    ‘Let’s have a look at Dunghill first,’ said Neil. ‘Then … Well, I think we should do what he asked. Go to the City straight away.’
    ‘But why?’ Two years ago I longed for the City. Now I just wanted to be home, even for a day or two, our home, the quiet stone house by the utopia.
    ‘Michael’s right. There are better medical facilities in the City. The survival rate has to be better than in theOutlands. There are better Networks there too. Maybe you can make some correlation the experts have missed, something that just doesn’t appear on OutlandNets. Besides …’ he stopped.
    ‘Neil, what is it?’
    ‘I just thought,’ he said slowly, ‘that if we’re infected, or if you’re infected and I’m not, then maybe … maybe they can clone the baby, after we’re dead. So there’ll still be something of both of us left in the world.’
    The brown grass blurred below us. ‘All right,’ I said at last.
    ‘All right?’
    ‘Let’s go to Dunghill and then to the City. And yes to the cloning too.’

chapter 33
    I don’t know what I’d been expecting. A pretty plasticrete farmhouse, perhaps, like the Holsteins’, or the beekeepers’ poverty. Dunghill was different again.
    It was a dome, but massive, covering ten hectares or more. It was transparent too, a giant bubble that flashed red from the sinking sun. Below the dome I could see trees, dark green, and the brilliant flash of birds. It was like something out of a Virtual. But this was real.
    ‘Wow,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah. Wow.’
    There was a landing pad to one side of the dome, signalling its coordinates. The floater swung down automatically to land on it.
    I smelt it as soon as I opened the door. Bird shit. You could