Float and drink a cup of tea, eat a rice bun and sing the national anthem, but otherwise one day’s pretty much like all the others. And of course, everybody knows everybody, and there’s just the Floats, unless you get really bored, in which case you can take your car and drive to Mount Everest; that’s the only point on the surface anyone ever goes to. They reckon you can stay there for fifteen minutes and it won’t do you any harm. But it’s a three-month drive, so you’ve got to be really desperate. I’ve been twice. Actually, there’s not much there, just the pointy top of the mountain and a little platform you can stand on. But it makes a change.
Say what? Legal system? Oh, you mean laws, yes, that’s right, we were told about all that stuff in school. Fancy you remembering about laws, when you’ve forgotten absolutely everything else. Well, we don’t have them any more, of course. Don’t need them. Basically, everybody gets on really well with everybody else, so… All right, yes, if six people sign a declaration saying you’re horrible, then they push you over the edge. But nobody’s been horrible for, what, two hundred years or something. We’re all really nice to each other. Why wouldn’t we be?
Theo swallowed carefully; his mouth had gone dry. “No idea,” he said. “I try to be nice to everybody all the time. At least,” he added quickly, “I’m sure I do, though of course I can’t remember. But if I wasn’t nice to people, they’d have chucked me off the edge years ago, so it stands to reason I’m nice, doesn’t it?”
She gave him an odd look. “Well,” she said, “that’s all I can think of to tell you. How was the tea?”
“Delicious.”
“We make it out of rubber-tree bark chippings mixed with finely ground maize husks. Just as well you like it, because that’s all there is, besides water.”
“I like water. I expect.”
She looked at him some more. “You know,” she said, “it was really weird, about the other guy.”
“Oh yes?”
“Mphm. I mean, like I said, everybody knows everybody, so you’d think, if someone showed up who’d lost his memory, it wouldn’t be long before he got recognised by someone who knew him. Or at the very least, the other people in his sect would wonder where he’d got to, or his family, come to that. But the other guy, he’s been here a year and nobody knows who in sky he is. To begin with we all thought he must be a sunlighter who’d fallen off a Bubble and bumped his head. But nobody in Sunlighter Guild’s ever seen him before.”
“Maybe he’s from—” Theo paused. “Somewhere else?”
She laughed. “There isn’t anywhere else, silly,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, we’d know about it by now if there was. Unless you believe in little green men from Mars, of course. But he’s not green. Nor,” she added with a tiny frown, “are you.”
“Um. I mean no, definitely not. I’m sure I’m really quite ordinary and nice, if only I could remember.”
“I’m sure too,” she replied, with a slightly forced smile. “Anyhow, I think the best thing we can do is take you down-float so you can meet the Duty Officer. He’ll know what to do.”
“Duty…?”
“Oh, it’s just a name left over from the old days,” she said casually. “It means whoever’s in charge. We all take turns, you see. Each one of us, just for one day. There’s never anything to do, of course, you just sit in a big chair and look important. I’m due for my turn in twenty-six years, four months and three weeks come Thursday.”
“I see,” Theo said. “And whoever’s turn it is today will know what to do with me?”
“Of course,” she said, “he’s the Duty Officer. Come on, we can go in the car.”
Theo suddenly felt a tremendous reluctance to get out of his chair. “Go out there, you mean.”
“Well of course out there, silly. He’s not going to come to us, is he? It’s only a four-hour drive. I can drop you off on my way in to work.”
Drop me off, Theo thought. “I really don’t want to be any bother to anyone,” he said. “Why don’t I just stay here and try very hard to remember what I’ve forgotten?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you want to meet the Duty Officer? Most people do. He’s the most important person on the Four Floats.”