Green Monkey Dreams by Isobelle Carmody Read Free Book Online Page A

cellar and the girl.
    Her fingers closed around the boy’s wrist easily. He must have been little more than a baby when his mother hid him in the wardrobe.
    He called himself Roach and she had almost laughed aloud at that, knowing who had given the name. Trust his ironic sense of humour. Roach. Survivor.
    She breathed in deeply, swallowing great mouthfuls of the clean cold air.
    â€˜I am Mother,’ she whispered to the night. ‘Tomorrow we will go to the Country.’

T HE B EAST
    A s he emerges from the black taxi with its tinted windows and sleek carcass, I can see at once that he is one of those grave, serious children whom one would not notice in a crowd. He stands quietly waiting as if he has done it often, clad in spotless black shorts and a jacket that has obviously been tailored for him. These are clothes of a politician’s son or some high official, perhaps a blackmarketeer’s boy. boy.
    Centuries ago in another land, I wore similar garments to be confirmed. I cannot imagine why a boy dressed in such clothing has come here. This is an Industrial Zone, to begin with, not Residential, though there is little enough industry going on in it. The rows of factories are silent, inhabited by the mysterious, rusting machinery of another age, cogs still joined intimately in some unknowable rite from the Dark Age of Technology. Some furtive use of machinery still takes place in corners of these enormous places, but for the most part they are poor chop houses with almost everything being done by hand.
    Glancing into them at night when they brought me home after my last Renewal, I caught sight of the fitful orange glow of forge fires being stoked in the cavernous darkness, and the gleam of a sweaty muscled arm. I felt I was looking into the Age of Stone said by many to be the first age of humankind.
    It is not all factories, of course. Here and there are vacant lots studded with the inimical glint of dusty broken glass. Once this was prime land but no one builds factories any more so land has no value. In fact, no one builds anything any more because there is no need. There are far more dwellings than people to fill them, and even the wealthiest live like those crabs that once existed, scuttling from shell to shell.
    It is almost funny now to think how people feared that the Renewal Vaccine would end up destroying the earth by overpopulation. Instead, people just stopped having children almost overnight. There was no need for them to inherit or provide a dynastic immortality when you could just stay around yourself. Then, instead of everyone choosing to go on and on forever as experts predicted, they still died at pretty much the same rate after a hiatus of a century or so. During that time the population growth was virtually at a standstill, but various wars and pogroms killed off thousands either immediately with bombs and bullets and poisonous gases, or eventually because of the destruction of food supplies and the onset of disease.
    A lot more died when they stopped taking the Renewal Vaccine. People could go on and on, but what would be the point with the world the way it was? Better to see if there was any afterlife after all.
    Of course, just because it is zoned Industrial does not mean people did not live here. Nor were they poor scrabbling workers. There were a few streets with grand houses on the edge of this sector. You can see the places where trees grew in their yards and even – the extravagance of it – in the streets as well, to shade and perfume the paths perhaps. These dwellings would have been inhabited by the factory bosses who ruled the world for a time. The trees have long been lopped down and even their stumps have been hacked from the ground by the Anti-Green lobby which was established after the dismantling of any industry deemed to harm the environment. When the Rainbow Ban was announced, people wept for joy in the streets in just the same way as they had once wept when the