Opening of "Where Lapwings Fly" by Matthew K. Spencer

This is the beginning of an ecological alternative timelines novel, which should be completed and published some time in 2022.

Prologue, Hammer Hill

It was getting close to Christmas somewhere around 1980 and the timelines hadn't divided yet. Timelines didn't figure in people's lives (unless they were watching Dr Who), so the boy was oblivious as he caught a bus from Mander College towards home, just before sunset. The weather wasn't arctic by any means, but it was definitely a Bedfordshire winter and the bus would go past Cardington Airfield, which the Met Office celebrated, with reason, as the coldest place in lowland Britain. He cleared a patch on the glass by his seat with his glove, so he could see out and not get bus-sick, at least while the light outside lasted.

There were several stops going up London Road and Harrowden Road for Bedford townspeople to get off, but once the bus got past Shortstown the bus would hold real country folk and those going all the way to Hitchin, where bus drivers from Biggleswade Depot didn't like to linger in case the Red Indians got them. The bus was a green Bristol RE with an Eastern Coachworks body and a six-cylinder Gardner engine at the rear: the sort of vehicle that was still the backbone of the United Counties Omnibus Company. That configuration, with pneumatic gear-selection, kept most of the noise and vibration at the back where the smokers were and the boy was sitting in the clean air as near to the front as he could get without hogging one of the seats reserved for pensioners.

"Does anyone intend to get out in Cotton End?" The driver shouted the vital question as he stopped in front of the imposing facade of RAF Cardington's administration building at Shortstown. There was no reply, so the driver knew that he could use every yard of road through Cotton End for a good run-up towards Hammer Hill. Unless some elderly passenger was already asleep, that is: he leaned round the screen behind his seat and had a good look at who he had in the pensioners' seats. That lady came from Dead Man's Cross: it was go!

The Gardner roared, fairly smoothly, as the bus rounded the bend by the hydrogen plant's gasholder, giving the boy a good view of the airship sheds, looming like green metal mountains against the darkling sky to the East. He caught his breath: a huge flock of lapwings, more than he'd ever seen in one place in his life, were flying over the airship sheds towards Hammer Hill and the woods and spinneys of the Greensand Ridge to roost after searching the fields and flood-meadows of the Ouse valley all day for food. When he peered back towards Goldington Power Station and Willington, behind the flock, the sky was not actually dark yet. The lapwings alone had made it go dark!

The driver kept the bus accelerating gently through Cotton End: he didn't want to be going too fast for the bend in the middle of the village and there was a speed limit, but it was generally safe to nudge the speed limit just as you came out of the village so you could take full advantage of the straight and gently-rising unrestricted road past Wilhampstead Turn.The boy turned to look West through another patch of cleared glass across the aisle. There, against the setting sun and the several chimneys of the Stewartby Brickworks, three of which were painting the cold but colourful sunset with smoke, was another huge flock of lapwings that had risen from the fields and brickfields of the Marston Vale to roost further along the Greensand Ridge in the woods towards Ampthill. In some years, practically all the lapwings in Western Europe would spend the winter in Eastern England and this year what must have been a couple of million of them had chosen Bedfordshire, the river Ouse and the Greensand Ridge to see out the hard months. The sight was stunning, but the boy was the only person on the bus who really noticed. The driver was pleased to have the momentum to crest Hammer Hill without having to change all the way down to bottom gear or risk a stall. Everyone else was thinking about home and a hot cup of tea.

Darkness fell as the bus trundled towards Shefford at a more sedate pace via Haynes Turn and Dead Man's Cross and the view from outside was lost to the lights above the passenger seats. The boy's thoughts drifted away from the Bedfordshire landscape, to recent worries and an argument, if argument was the right word for something so completely one-sided.

His physics with chemistry class had been shown a film on the role of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, and he had at first found it difficult to believe and then, as the evidence mounted, alarming. Carbon dioxide trapped heat, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising, through a variety of causes which all tended in the same direction, and so the planet was getting a little bit hotter, year by year. He hadn't seen this reported in The Guardian, so far, nor did he know anyone else not in his class who knew about this, and even they were more bemused than alarmed. This was the sort of thing where corrective action in good time would save an enormous amount of pain, and he was old enough to know that political will tended to follow the path of least pain. But few people knew about global warming and even fewer took it seriously.

There was a local environmental campaign group and he occasionally went to meetings, but he hadn't heard a word about the warming, even there, and eventually he had concluded that he had better introduce them to the subject, because it was evident that no-one else was going to. A couple of evenings ago he had gone along, and when he had been, slightly patronisingly, invited to contribute to the meeting, he had started to say his piece and outline what he knew, winning a few interested and thoughtful nods and murmurs as he went. One lady in her thirties leaned forward a bit, absorbed by what he was saying. But Mr Shortmead, a middle-aged teacher who liked to dominate meetings, even though he prided himself on "helping his young co-learners to form their own ideas" was displaying, not simply restless impatience, but rising anger. Words, like "nonsense" and "poppycock" were spat out rather than muttered and followed by "utter codswallop" "patent lies" and "capitalist lackey!" At that last jibe, the interested lady, and everybody else, turned to face Mr Shortmead, wondering what all this was in aid of. The boy paused for a moment, to let them come back to him when Mr Shortmead had been made to realise that he was being very rude and unkind. The pause was fatal.

Words came from Mr Shortmead's mouth like bullets from a fixed-line machine-gun. The boy tried to get a word in edgeways, but he could not and neither could anybody else. Well, Mr Shortmead was a keen musician and he obviously had been trained in breath control, but it was almost as if he had been specifically trained to use a stream of condemnatory language as a speech-suppression weapon. There were no gaps into which even a sharp edge could be inserted -and all the words were bitter and damning, too! Who had taught him to do this: the KGB? Perhaps the Gestapo? Or was it King Herod's official spokesman?

"Global warming" was an evil plot by the Western nuclear power industry to frighten everyone into dropping their campaigns against nuclear power and allow nuclear power stations to be built by the hundred across Britain and beyond. Either the boy was a feeble-minded idiot, to repeat the lies, or he had already sold out and was a lackey, a collaborator! The torrent of words did not stop until the boy had made a helpless gesture at everybody else at the meeting, got his coat and left. He felt weak at not standing up for what he knew to be true, but Mr Shortmead made it quite impossible for anyone to even suggest they disagreed with him. Once the boy had left, never to return, there was a shocked silence in the meeting room as people wondered how they were going to cope: if a sincere belief (they had no idea if the boy was right or not) could be greeted with such frightening fury, was it safe to say anything at all in Mr Shortmead's presence? It would be several years before the group's members would dare to conclude that the boy had been basically right. Years in which a start might have been made, but wasn't, because Mr Shortmead was not alone.

Sitting on the bus as it waited for the traffic lights by the bank in Shefford, the boy shuddered at the memory of that furious verbal assault. In the past he had been punched in the face by people who hated him less: denying him -and every bystander- control of their own voice seemed more violent, more brutal, than mere physical violence, too.

If that's what the supposed bunny-huggers in the environmental movement were willing to do to someone on their side who was merely presenting what he believed to be a new and important idea, what might their capitalist oligarch opponents be capable of? If that was how the debate was going to be conducted, did it actually matter who won? The bus took a troubled boy onwards to his destination. That night, the Planet Earth timeline spawned new parallel timelines towards two additional alternative futures: Gaia and Technyar.

 

This extract, and the novel "Where Lapwings Fly" it is from, are copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 2021, all rights reserved.