Chris Beckett's Blog, page 8

Two Tribes

Six boxes of hardback copies of Two Tribes have arrived for me to sign for those who like collecting signed new editions. (If that’s your thing and you want one, you can preorder from Goldsboro).

The book will be out in early July, so just over a month away. I had a skip through one of the copies in a break from signing, to remind myself what kind of book it is.

Most of it isn’t science fictional at all, but is set in London and Norfolk in the latter part of 2016 and early 2017. But the framing device is science fictional. The narrator is 250 years in the future, constructing the story from diaries and other sources, and giving herself a fair amount of license to guess things, or even make things up.

The story itself deals mainly with an architect called Harry who has recently separated from his wife and lives in London, and a hairdresser called Michelle who lives in a small Norfolk town called Breckham, and an unlikely and unexpected relationship between them.

The thing that prompted this book -or one of the things anyway- was a map of the results of the 2016 EU referendum, as they applied to East Anglia where I live. The whole region was a sea of ‘Leave’ but I happen to live in Cambridge, which was not only one of two islands of ‘remain’ in East Anglia (the other was Norwich), but the remainiest place in the entire country (75% remain). Yet an hour’s drive away, the Fenland area in the north of the same county was one of the leaviest (71% leave).

I voted remain, and have always had a warm feeling for the whole European project, so I was very saddened by the referendum result, but I thought to myself, how would it be if instead of looking at all this as me living in an island of correctness in a sea of error, or an island of civilisation in a sea of barbarity, or an island of decency in a sea of intolerance, I was to look at it more in the way that, say, an outsider looks at the political geography of Belfast.

Some areas of that city are strongly and publicly unionist, others are equally strongly and publicly nationalist, but from an outsider’s perspective this is not one group of people who are right and decent, and another who are wrong and bad, but rather two tribes, who have been brought up to have different allegiances, and have learned to see the same question in an entirely different way.

I think that’s how the great Brexit divide will look in a couple of hundred years for, after a certain point, when we look at the conflicts of the past, the issues being fought over lose their heat. The world has moved on into an entirely new place, and they are just not meaningful any more. And that’s the kind of perspective I tried to write from in this book.

In the case of the Brexit vote, there are factors apart from geography that inclined people to vote one way or another, and in particular I was struck by the fact that the ‘leave’ vote was proportionately higher in poorer areas of England (Scotland is different because Scots have the SNP) and in the poorer socioeconomic classes. (Cambridge is not only the remainiest but also one of the very richest parts of the UK.) So, as well as the two tribes of ‘remain’ and ‘leave’, I was thinking when I wrote this book of the two tribes that are middle-class people (and specifically the liberal professional middle classes of which I am undoubtedly a part) and working class people.

Being middle class is definitely one of my topics at the moment. I touched on it in America City, and also in Beneath the World, a Sea, and it continues to be a theme in the book I’m writing now. Most novelists are written by middle class people (or arguably all, since being a writer might itself be defined as a typically professional middle class occupation). As a rule that fact is simply a given, the base from which other topic are looked at, rather than as a thing to be examined in itself. But that’s what I’ve tried to do here.

Needless to say, I was also thinking about Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

‘Writers on lockdown’ (interview)

Interview here with fellow-writer and aficionado of dreams, Caroline Dudley.

Isolation stories

I’ve posted 20 stories here, loosely linked (in some cases very loosely) to the theme of isolation: isolation of many kinds, good, bad, literal, metaphorical etc.

Scroll down for the stories. Because of the way I posted them, they appear below in reverse order, but if you want to read them as a collection you may like to go back to story (1) and work back through them in numerical order.

I arranged them in what I thought was a pleasing order and all though all of these stories work as standalones, in a couple of cases a story is a sequel to another which I posted earlier in the sequence. Story (20), ‘Sky’, for instance, is a sequel to story (1), ‘Cellar’.

Personal favourites of mine: ‘The Kite’, ‘Atomic Truth’, ‘The Perimeter’, ‘Aphrodite’, ‘We Could Be Sisters’.

Isolation story: (20) Sky

This story could be read on its own but it’s a sequel to ‘Cellar’ which opens this collection of ‘isolation stories’, and works better if you’ve read that too. This is the last story I’m going to post here, and it seemed an appropriate note to end on (The two stories bookend my Spring Tide collection also.)

I’ll leave these stories up there at least until the lockdown is over. Hope you enjoyed them.

Sky

Jeremy
Burnet’s neighbours were concerned about him, and the woman who phoned the
police said she was calling on behalf of them all.   They
were fairly sure Mr Burnet was in his house –his car was parked in the street
and his bike locked in its usual place– but he hadn’t been sighted since a
Saturday afternoon just under four weeks ago, when some of them had seen him going
out in his car and returning with items from a builder’s merchant, power tools
and such, although there’d been no sign or sound of any work going on in the
house either before then or since.   Mr
Burnet had looked as if he hadn’t washed or shaved for weeks.  The woman who called the police had tried to
greet him –she’d known him a number of years– but he’d just stared right
through her as if he didn’t know she was there. 
And he’d always been such a tidy man, too, the sort that didn’t like
anything out of place, and yet the garden was now completely overgrown, and the
living room curtains at the front had been drawn for months, day and night,
while the bedroom curtains were never closed at all.

What had finally prompted this call,
though, was that one of the other neighbours had received a call from Mr Burnet’s
elderly mother who was too frail to visit him for herself.  She said she was worried because her son didn’t
call her any more, and never picked up when she tried to call him.   And surely, said the neighbour who’d phoned
the police, even if Mr Burnet had somehow managed to slip away without any of
them noticing, he’d have let his own mother know where he was going? 

Two police officers went to Jeremy
Burnet’s house, a policewoman and a policeman. 
Their names were Cheryl and Pradeep. They rang the doorbell for several
minutes, and then called through the letterbox. 
“Hello Mr Burnet?  Are you
there?  It’s the police.  Could we have a word?  You’re not in trouble of any kind, but we’re
just checking everything’s alright.  Your
neighbours are worried for you.”  

There was no answer, though, not
even that indefinable feeling of presence,
that sense of something listening deep inside the house, that in Cheryl’s experience
you tended to get when someone was in but didn’t want to be intruded upon.  “Either he’s not there or he’s not well at
all,” she decided.   Pradeep nodded.  He was the younger of the two by some years,
and tended to defer to his colleague’s wider experience.

Cheryl was about to make a call to
the station about a warrant to break down the door, when one of the watching
neighbours remembered he had a key.   Jeremy
had given it to him one hot summer several years ago, he said, “before all of this
started”, so he could come in and water Mr Burnet’s patio plants for him when
he was taking a holiday in Spain with his then-girlfriend.  Mr Burnet had asked the neighbour to keep it
in case he ever locked himself out.

The key turned in the lock, and the
two police officers entered, stepping over a drift of mail.  The door of the living room was open and, the
curtains being drawn shut, the light was switched on even though it was the
middle of the day.   There were cream-coloured
sofa and chairs, and expensive-looking curtains.  However what they immediately noticed was the
wide-open hatch in the middle of the floor, from which a rug had been rolled
back and shoved aside. There was a concrete staircase descending inside it, and
light shining up from below.  It was a very
strange place to put a set of cellar stairs, but there they were, and it seemed
exceedingly probable that they would find Mr Burnet at the bottom of them.

Cheryl leaned over the hatch and
called down the staircase.  “Mr Burnet?  Are you down there?”

“We’re just checking to see if you’re
okay,” added Pradeep. 

There was no answer, no sense of
presence at all, though the echo was surprisingly deep and strong.  

Cheryl drew in breath.  She had dealt with a few corpses in her time
–self-hangings, traffic accidents, a knifing once, a couple of people who’d
jumped in front of trains– but you never really got used to that initial shock
of stark primitive horror.   “Okay,
Prad.  Let’s go down and have a look.”

They’d assumed they’d descend for
the equivalent of one storey, and perhaps find two damp low-ceilinged rooms
down there.  But that wasn’t what
happened.  A storey down, the stairs just
turned and carried on their descent. The same thing happened again at the next
level.  It wasn’t until the third storey,
when there was enough space between then and the living room above to insert
another whole house, that everything suddenly opened up.  Long corridors, well lit by office strip-lights,
radiated out in four directions, with doors and the openings of side corridors arrayed
on either side.  And the staircase
continued on down.

They could feel goosebumps rising
on their skin, and a strange, pure, abstract kind of terror.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered
Cheryl.  “What is this?”

“We need to call for help,” said
Pradeep in the particular, slightly strangled, voice he used on the rare occasions
he asserted his recent training over Cheryl’s considerable experience.   He would have been hard-pressed to say what they
needed help with.  Corridors, rooms, stairs: where was the
threat in that?   Yet Cheryl concurred at
once, as almost anyone surely would have done in the same position.  The police exist to maintain order, after
all, to enforce boundaries.  What the two
of them had discovered wasquite clearly
so strange and inexplicable, that more than two people were going to be
required to keep a solid boundary in place between reality and hallucination,
sanity and delusion.  Two people were
simply not sufficient to reassure one another that what they were seeing was actually
there.

“I’ll do it,” Cheryl said.  There was no signal down there, so she
climbed up the stairs again to Mr Burnet’s living room and stepped out of the
front door to make the call.   It was
good to see the daylight and hear the sound of traffic on the main road nearby.

Four neighbours were standing out
there now.   Several more were watching
from their own front gates up and down the street.  They all searched Cheryl’s face for clues.

“Is he…?”

“We haven’t found him yet.   Do all these houses have cellars?”

“Cellars, no.  We don’t have a cellar.”  

“Us neither.  I don’t think anyone has one on this street.  I’ve never heard of one.”

*    *   
*

Soon
two whole van-loads of police arrived, along with an ambulance, while a second
patrol car brought a uniformed inspector to take charge.  Blue lights flashed importantly and Mr Burnet’s
house was quickly separated from the everyday world by a magical strip of blue and
white tape.  Yet what was the
emergency?   A missing man, and a cellar
of implausible magnitude!

 A small crowd was beginning to form.  Passers-by from the main road at the end of the
street saw that something was going on and came up wandering up, with a
slightly furtive air, to find out more.  
Several police officers remained outside the house to enforce that
stripy blue boundary, while the inspector, a sergeant, a dozen other police
officers and two paramedics, accompanied Cheryl back into Mr Burnet’s living
room, and down those strange concrete stairs.

“I had a quick look further down,” Pradeep told them when they joined him in a well-lit corridor, three flights of stairs below the surface.  “Two storeys down actually.  It’s exactly the same as this on the next two levels  –doors, corridors, lights – and the staircase carries on down even after that.  I don’t know what’s going on here, but–”

“Mr Burnet?” the inspector interrupted him, cupping his hands round his mouth.  “Mr Burnet?  It’s the police!  Are you alright?”   There was a long deep echo and then a silence, which all of them felt a vague need to cover up with activity and talk.

“It must have been here a long time, or people would–”

“I thought I’d seen some pretty strange things in my time, but–”

 “Let’s try some of these rooms,” the inspector said.

Several officers began opening doors in the corridors.  Most of the rooms were completely empty, their white walls and grey lino as pristine as if they had yet to be used.  One had a bucket and a mop inside it, another an empty water bottle.  Oddly, each door had a blank yellow post-it note stuck to it.

Cheryl glanced at Pradeep.  “Inspector, how about myself and Pradeep finding out just how far down how far the stairs go?”

The inspector shrugged.  Of course he had no more idea of what they were dealing with than anyone else.  One of his staff back at the station had made a call to the M.O.D. to ask if this was a nuclear bunker or some such, unlikely as that seemed, others had called the city’s planning department, the land registry and a well-known local historian, but no one knew anything about it.  There was no record of Mr Burnet’s house having any kind of cellar at all, and it had stood there since 1923. 

“Sure, why not,” the inspector said.  “Go down to the bottom and report back.  If you see anything that worries you on the
way, just come straight back up.  Meanwhile
we’ll begin a room by room search of each level from the top down.”

*   *   *

Cheryl
and Pradeep counted twenty-two storeys before they finally reached a floor
where there were no more stairs going down. 
Well-lit corridors radiated out from the staircase as they’d done on all
of the other twenty-one floors.  

“Okay,” Cheryl said, “so this–”

Pradeep interrupted.  “Cheryl, look!”

A couple of yards into one of the corridors, the lino had been torn back and there was a hole with lumps and crumbs of rubble scattered around it.   Feeling very isolated suddenly, very aware that all their colleagues were twenty-one storeys above them, and that all the levels in between were silent and empty, the two police officers crept towards the hole and peered down.  It had been roughly cut through about four foot of rock or concrete.  There was an aluminium ladder propped up in it, fully extended to a length of about four metres, and its feet were standing in another corridor below them, which looked just like the one they were in.

“Sweet Jesus,” murmured Cheryl.

“I’ll call the inspector, right?”

“You won’t get a signal.”

 “We’d better go up and tell him, then, yeah?”

“Up twenty-one flights of stairs?  For him to ask us what’s down the ladder, and why didn’t we look?   Wouldn’t it be better to check it out first?  Mr Burnet’s down there, I’m sure of it. ”

Pradeep nodded.  He leant over the hole.  “Mr Burnet?  It’s the police.  We’re just here to see if you’re alright.”

All around them, above, below and on every side, huge empty spaces devoured the sound of Pradeep’s human voice –small, sentient, anxious– and turned it back into something pure and inanimate and eternal, like the boom of wind in a deserted canyon, or the echo of a rockfall on Mars.

“Come on,” said Cheryl. “Let’s get this over with.  I don’t like ladders.”

*   *   *

There
were more stairs again down there.   They
descended another twenty-two storeys, with the same four corridors radiating
out from the staircase on each level.   Down
at the bottom, they found another roll of ripped lino, another hole with a
ladder in it, and another corridor beneath.  
It was if a row of office blocks had been plucked up from the centre of
a city and buried, not side by side, but in a stack, one above the other.

“Right,” said Pradeep firmly.  “So now we get the inspector.”

“If you want to climb forty-four storeys,” said Cheryl, “be my guest, Prad.  But surely it’s obvious that Mr Burnet is still somewhere below us? ”

*    *   
*

They
found him at the bottom of the third block, almost seventy storeys below the
surface.   He’d been at work on another
hole –it was already about a foot deep– and his pneumatic drill lay nearby,
along with a diesel generator and an empty fuel can.   Burnet himself was slumped against a wall, bearded
and emaciated, his clothes filthy, his lips dry and cracked.

Cheryl squatted beside him to feel his pulse.  “Mr Burnet?   Jeremy?”

His eyes flickered slightly and closed again.  One of his hands moved slightly.   He was alive, but whether he was conscious or not was hard to tell.   When Cheryl took his hand, the fingers seemed to make some effort to close over hers, but perhaps that was just a reflex.

“I’ll stay with him,” she said.  “You get up there.  We’ll need water –he’s very dehydrated–and some way of getting him safely up through the holes.  Take it steady on those stairs, though, Prad.  Sixty-six floors is a lot to climb, even at your age.”

As Pradeep began the ascent, she turned back to Jeremy Burnet.  Why had he tried to keep this place a secret?  Surely it would be obvious to anyone, as it had been to her and Pradeep, that just the business of being here at all was a task that required a whole team?

“What were you thinking of, Jeremy?  Why didn’t you tell anyone?  No one should keep a thing like this to themselves?”

She glanced at the hole he’d been
making when he finally collapsed.

“Yes,” she said.  “And what on earth were you looking for down
here?  What did you hope to find?”

*   *   *

Thirty
or forty onlookers stood out in the street now, beyond the blue and white tape.  Several more patrol cars had arrived with
lights flashing, along with an outside broadcast van from a local TV
station.  

A hush descended as the paramedics
emerged with the stretcher.  Revived
somewhat by water and glucose, Jeremy couldn’t move his head much because he’d
been tightly strapped him in to keep him safe while he was being manoeuvred
through the holes and up the stairs, but he could hear the people out there
murmuring to one another, and the crackling voices from the police radios, and
the traffic passing on the main road nearby. 
 He raised a tentative hand in
greeting and, to his surprise, there was a cheer from the crowd in response

Cheryl bent over him briefly as the paramedics lifted the stretcher into the ambulance, checking that he knew where he was and what was happening.  Her face was kind but puzzled. Hundreds of metres above her, long white clouds, tinged with grey, were blowing by.  Two crows were flying beneath them, calling out to one another from time to time as they crossed that immense vault beneath the sky.  

Copyright 2018, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (19) Piccadilly Circus

This story can be read on its own but is actually a sequel to ‘The Perimeter’ which I also included here as number 9 in this series of ‘isolation stories’.

It first appeared in Interzone in 2005 and is collected in The Turing Test.

I’ve almost finished posting these stories. Just one more to go tomorrow.

Piccadilly Circus

Clarissa Fall is heading for central London to see the
lights, bumping along the potholed roads at five miles an hour in her electric
invalid car, oblivious to the honking horns, the cars queuing behind her, the
angry shouts.  How many times has she
been warned?  How many times has she been
humiliated?  But she must see the lights.

“When I was a little girl there were still physical lights in Piccadilly Circus,” she’s telling everyone she can.  “I remember my father taking me.  They were the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.” 

*  *  *

She’d always been odd. 
There was that business when she cut holes in the wildlife fence to let
the animals into the city.  There were
those young consensual tearaways she used to insist on bringing home.  But things really started getting bad when
her husband Terence died, leaving her alone in that big old house by the
perimeter, that big fake chateau with its empty fountains and those icy lights
that lit it up at night like Dracula’s castle. 
I suppose it was loneliness, though when Terence was alive he and
Clarissa never seemed to do anything but fight. 

“I am two hundred years old, you
know,” she kept saying now.  “I am the
very last physical human being in London.”

Neither of these was true, of course, but she was certainly very old and it was certainly the case that she could go for days and even weeks without seeing another physical person.  There really weren’t many of us left by now and most of us had congregated for mutual support in a couple of clusters in the South London suburbs.  No one lived within five miles of Clarissa’s phoney chateau on the northern perimeter and no one was much inclined to go and see her. She’d always been histrionic, now she was downright crazy.  What’s more – and most of us found this particularly unforgivable – she drew unwelcome attention onto us physicals, not only from the consensuals, who already dislike us and call us ‘Outsiders’ and ‘spooks’, but also from the hidden authorities in the Hub.

Her trouble was that she didn’t really feel at home in either world, physical or consensual.  The arthritic dignity of the physicals repelled her.  She thought us stuffy and smug and she despised our assumption that our own experience was uniquely authentic and true.

“Would you rather the world itself
ended than admit the possibility that there may be other kinds of life apart
from ours?” she once demanded.

 But really, although she always insisted to us
that it wasn’t so, she was equally disgusted by the superficiality of the
consensuals, their uncritical willingness to accept as real whatever the Hub
chose to serve up, their lack of curiosity, their wilful ignorance of where
they came from or what they really were. 
While she might criticise us physicals, she never seriously considered
the possibility of giving up her own physical being and joining the consensuals
with their constructed virtual bodies. 
And this meant that she would still always be an Outsider to them.   

She may have felt at home with no
one but she became a nuisance to everyone
– physical and consensual – as a result of her forays into the city.  At first she went on foot.  Then, when she became too frail, she got hold
of that little invalid car, a vehicle which the consensuals of North London
would soon come to know and hate. 
Bumping slowly along the crumbling physical roads she would switch off
her Field implant so as not to be deceived by the smooth virtual surface, but
this meant that she couldn’t see or hear the consensual traffic going by either.  She could see only the empty buildings and
the cracked and pockmarked empty road. 
Consensual drivers just had to cope as best they could with her
wanderings back and forth.

When she parked her car, though, she always turned her implant on again.  This of course instantly transformed empty ruined physical London into the lively metropolis that was the Urban Consensual Field, a virtual city in imitation of London as it once was, superimposed by the Hub over what London had become.  Clarissa could still just remember those old days: the crowds, the fumes, the lights, the noise, the hectic life of a city in which, bizarrely, it still seemed feasible for millions of physical human beings to casually consume what they wanted of the physical world’s resources, and casually discard what remained. And she craved that bustle and that life, she craved it desperately.

We all had Field implants of
course.  They were a necessity for
dealing with a civilisation that had become, whether we liked it or not, primarily
digital.  Spliced into our nervous
system, they allowed consensual constructs to be superimposed over our
perceptions of the physical world, so that we could see the same world that the
consensuals saw, hear what they heard and, to a limited degree, touch what they
touched.  The rest of us invariably took
the position that we didn’t like having to deal with the consensual world, but
it was sometimes a necessary evil.  But
for Clarissa it was different.  When she
switched on her implant it just wasn’t a matter of practical necessity for her,
it was more like injecting heroin into an artery.  All at once there were people all around her,
there was life, there were shop windows and market stalls piled high with
colourful merchandise, and the dizzying suddenness of it was like the hit of a
powerful drug. 

But her addiction wasn’t so much
to the Field itself as to the moment of crossing over. After that first moment
the experience never quite lived up to its initial promise, for however hard
Clarissa tried, the consensual world shut her out.  And she did try.  She spent hours in the consensual city
outside shops and in parks and on street corners making rather pathetic efforts
to engage people in conversation, but most people avoided her and some made no
secret of their distaste.  It was true
that a few kind souls suppressed their revulsion at her age and her physicality
and briefly allowed her the illusion that she had made a friend, but it was only out of kindness.  Even apart from being an Outsider she really
wasn’t very good company.  She talked too
much; she didn’t listen; and, what was worse, however much she might criticise
her fellow Outsiders for our existential snobbery, she herself was as much of a
snob as any of us and a lot less inhibited about it.  She could never resist pointing out to
consensuals the shallow and illusory nature of their existence:

“You’re so very nice dear.  It’s such a
pity that you’re not really here.”

Usually she found herself alone in
a kind of lacuna, with people moving aside to pass her by at a safe
distance.  And in these situations she
would often become distressed and start to rant and shout:

“You’re not real you know!  You’re just bits of nervous tissue plugged into a computer!  You’re far away from here, suspended in jars of nutrients, and the computer is sending you pictures of the real London with all this consensual nonsense superimposed on top of it!”

Terence used to talk like that a
lot when he was alive, as haughty old physicals tended to do, but in those days
Clarissa always used to criticise him for it:

“Who’s to say our world is more
real than theirs?” I remember her demanding of him at one of the physical
community’s periodic gatherings, the two of them on opposite sides of a large
dining table laden with silver and fine china. 

Terence declined to answer.  Everyone in the room was willing Clarissa to
shut up and let us return to our customary state of numbness.

“Come on Terence, who’s to say?”
she insisted.  “At least consensuals
engage with life and with one another.”

She glared up and down the table.

“And what do you think would be
left of us if we stripped away
everything that had come from outside ourselves, everything that other people
had made?  We’d be naked.  We’d be gibbering imbeciles.  Think about it.  Even when we talk to ourselves inside our own
heads, we use words that other people gave us.” 

 But that was then.  Now it seemed that Terence had been speaking
all along on behalf of another side of Clarissa’s own self.

“Don’t look at me like that!”
she’d scold the consensuals when they pointed and laughed at her, “You sold
your true bodies for the illusion of youth and plenty, but I am real!” 

Sometimes, in the middle of one of
these rants, she would defiantly turn off her Field implant, making the people
and the traffic disappear from her view, houses become empty shells again and
all the shop windows with their cheerful displays turn back into hollow caves:

“I can’t even see you, you know!” she shouted, knowing that the consensuals could nevertheless still see her, for sensors across the city pick up the sights and sounds and textures of everything physical and this becomes the matrix within which the consensual city is built.  They had no choice but to see her.  “I’m in the real world and I can’t see you at all.  That’s how unreal you are.  I can turn you off with a flick of a switch.”

But though she might like telling the consensuals they didn’t really exist, their opinion mattered to her desperately and she couldn’t resist turning the implant on again to see what impact she was having.  (I’ve never known anyone who turned an implant on and off as often as Clarissa did.)  Almost invariably they would all be carefully ignoring her. 

It was in these moments, when she
had thrown a tantrum and discovered that no one was impressed, that things
could get out of control.  Once, a month
or so before her trip to Piccadilly Circus, she found she could get no one to
pay attention to her in the streets outside Walthamstow underground station.  Rather than admit defeat, she insisted
instead on going right down the stairs, arthritic and unsteady as she was, and
waiting on the Southbound platform for a train. 
The platform emptied around her as the consensuals crowded up to the
other end. 

And then when the train came in,
she promptly tried to step onto it.  Of
course she fell straight through onto the track, it being a virtual
train, part of the Field, which couldn’t bear physical weight, only the
notional weight of consensual projections. 
She broke a small bone in her ankle. 
It hurt a great deal and she began to hobble up and down calling out for
someone to help her up.  The rules under
which the Field operated meant that the train could not move off with her
there.  Yet she herself was breaking
those rules.   To the consternation of
the passengers she appeared to them to be wading waist deep through the solid
floor of the train, looking up at their averted faces accusingly and haranguing
them for their lack of compassion:

“Isn’t there a single soul left in
London prepared to help an old woman?  
Have you all lost your hearts as well as your bodies?”

Broken bones – and physical injuries in general – were completely outside their experience, so they would have had some excuse for not empathising with her plight, but actually they would have liked to help her, if not out of pure altruism, then out of self-interest.  For she was holding up the train – not to mention the other trains behind it – and she was distressing everyone.  Consensuals, unless they are destitute, are uniformly beautiful and, although they die at last, they don’t age in the way we do.  Spit never flies from their mouth.  Snot never runs from their noses.  Their make-up doesn’t run or smear.  It must have been truly horrific to see this dreadful wrinkled smeary creature wading up and down among them with its head at knee-height, like some kind of goblin out of a fairy tale.    But what could they do?  They couldn’t lift Clarissa back onto the platform with their consensual hands and arms, any more than the train could hold her up with its consensual floor.

So someone called the Hub, and the Hub put the word out to us in the physical community that one of our people was in difficulties and did we want to deal with it or should Agents be sent in? 

Phone calls went to and fro.  The physicals of London are like the members
of some old dysfunctional family who have seen right through each other’s
limited charms, know every one of each other’s dreary frailties, but who are
somehow chained together in misery.

“Bloody Clarissa.  Have you heard?”

“Clarissa’s up to her tricks
again.”

“Obviously we can’t let Agents
in.  The real people have to deal with
their own.”

“Bloody Clarissa.  How dare she put us in this position?”

In the end I was delegated to go
up there with Richard Howard to sort it out.  
We travelled right across London and, since of course we couldn’t use
the virtual escalators, climbed slowly and stiffly as Clarissa had done, down
the deep concrete staircase into the station.  Clarissa was still stuck on the track.  She had turned off her implant again, partly
out of defiance, partly to avoid being overwhelmed by the agitated consensuals
around her.  But as a result she had lost
the lights that the Field superimposed on the deserted and unlit physical
station.  For the last hour she had been
stumbling around crying and wailing in pitch darkness with nothing for company
except rats, and no sound at all except the drip, drip of water from somewhere
down the southbound tunnel. 

Richard and I had our implants
switched on so as to be able to see what we were doing, and so had to endure
the cold gaze of the consensuals.  They
sat in the train watching as we clumsily extracted Clarissa from the floor;
they stood on the platform watching as we dusted her down; they craned round on
the virtual escalators to watch us half-carry her up the concrete steps. 

“Look at those spooks!” someone in
the street said, quite loudly, as Richard and I helped Clarissa into Richard’s
truck. “Look at the ugly faces on them! 
Haven’t they got any
self-respect?” 

And there was a general hum of
agreement.  As a rule consensuals are
scared of us Outsiders and our uncanny powers over the physical world.  (Richard in particular is an object of awe,
with his immense height, his great mane of white hair, and his tendency to walk
contemptuously through virtual walls.) 
But we couldn’t have looked very scary just then: two breathless old
men, flushed and sweaty, helping a batty old woman with an injured foot into an
ancient truck. 

“Don’t forget my car!” wailed
Clarissa.

Somehow we manhandled her invalid
car into the back of the truck.   God
knows why we agreed to take it.  We would
have been within our rights to say it was too heavy and left it behind.  But Clarissa was powerful in some ways.  She always had been.  However much you might resent it, however
much you told yourself that there was no reason at all to comply, it was hard
not to do what she asked.

“Don’t expect us to bale you out like this again,” Richard told her as he bandaged her foot up back at her house. “Next time it’ll be Agents.”

None of us is sure what Agents really are, except that they are the servants of the Hub in the physical world.  They have no visible faces.  Their smooth heads and bodies are covered all over with a costume or skin in a special shade of blue which isn’t picked up by the Field sensors, and is therefore invisible to consensuals.  Some of us think they are simply robots of some kind, but others maintain that they are a new kind of physical human being, bred and raised apart from us for the Hub’s own purposes.  But, whatever they are, we fear them almost as much as do the consensuals, who only know of them by rumour and can only infer their presence from secondary clues.

“I couldn’t have borne that,” Clarissa murmured, “not Agents coming for me down there in the dark.”

“Well it’s your choice,” Richard
told her. “You get yourself in a fix like that again, and that’s all the help
you’ll get.”

He had been married to her once,
before the days of Terence.    Absurd as
it now seemed, they had once, briefly, been lovers, enchanted by the sheer fact
of one another’s presence in the world. 
And even now, absurdly, Clarissa attempted to defuse his anger by
flirting with him.

“I know I’ve been a silly girl,
Richard dearest, but I promise I won’t do it again.”

*  *  *

I’m thinking about what I wrote earlier:

“The rest of us took the
position,” I said, “that we didn’t like having to deal with the consensual
world, but it was sometimes a necessary evil…”

I’m imagining Clarissa reading
that and snorting with derision.

“Would you prefer it then if there
was just us and no consensual world at all?”

Actually that very thing is
looking increasingly on the cards. 

When the consensual cities were first
established as a way of withdrawing human beings from an environment which they
were about to destroy, it was decided that these virtual cities would be
congruent with the old physical ones. 
There were three reasons for this. 
Firstly many people could only be persuaded to accept consensual status
on the basis that they would still have access to what they still thought as
the “real world”.   Secondly, it was
thought important to allow consensuals to continue to be able to interact with
those of us who bought an exemption from the dephysicalisation process and allowed
ourselves to be sterilised.   (In those
days, after all, physicals and consensuals might be brother and sister, father
and son, schoolmates, life-long friends…) 
And thirdly it was because the processing capacity of the Hub, though
huge, was finite and a consensual world based on the physical one was less
heavy on the Hub’s resources than a purely invented one. 

All three of those considerations
have largely ceased to apply.  The Hub
has grown bigger, the physicals and the consensuals have grown apart and the
consensuals have long since lost any sense of the physical world as being the
“real” one.  So it would now be perfectly
possible for the Hub to decouple the physical city from the consensual one, and
in many ways this would be much easier than maintaining the status quo with its
costly network of sensors.

But, whatever we physicals might
say about the consensual world, I don’t believe any of us, if we were truly
honest, contemplates the possibility of waking up to a London where the
implants no longer work, without a sense of dread.  We rationalise this feeling by saying that we
need the consensuals for practical reasons, but the truth is we’re afraid of
being alone.

*  *  *

I think Clarissa’s promise held for all of two days before
she was off in her car again.  Within a
week she was back in Walthamstow, though she avoided the station and didn’t
make any scenes.  Before the end of the
month, she was charging up the battery for a major trip, right into the centre
of London.  And then she was off again in
earnest, bumping and bouncing grimly along the road and stubbornly refusing to
think about how far her battery would take her.

As ever she drove with her implant switched off.  She saw empty houses, abandoned petrol stations, an empty road, badly damaged by years of frost.  But once in a while she stopped for that hit she so constantly craved, that momentary burst of comfort and reassurance that came from switching on her implant and seeing a living city emerging from the silent ruins. 

“I’m going down to Piccadilly
Circus,” she told the people outside a row of shops in Stoke Newington.  “They used to take me there when I was a
little girl, to look at the coloured lights.”

 The shoppers all turned away.

“I used to love those lights,” she told a man outside a betting shop in Islington, “the way they rippled and flowed.  All that electricity!  All that lovely colour!”

“Why don’t you go home, spook?” the betting man muttered as he hurried off.

“I expect they still have lights like that now, don’t they?” she asked a young woman in King’s Cross, “Not real ones obviously, but ones for you people to see?”

“Oh yes,” said the young woman, whose name was Lily, “they’re lovely lights in Piccadilly Circus, but they’re quite real you know.  They’re not physical or nothing like that.”

Lily was not very bright and was
happy to be friendly with anyone.  She
had a simple round very low res face that was quite flat and looked like
something from a cartoon strip. 
Consensuals could choose their own appearance and be as pretty and as
interesting and as high resolution as their bank balances would allow, but some
consensuals couldn’t afford much in the way of looks – and Lily was very
obviously poor.  Her eyes were dots, her
skin a completely uniform pink, her clothes mere slabs of colour and her smile
a simple upward curve of the single line that was her mouth. 

“I’m pretty sure they’re not
physical anyway,” she said, in her tinny little low res voice.

And then she realised she had been
rude and the smile abruptly inverted itself into a downward curve of regret.

“Oh dear.  I didn’t mean to say there was something
wrong with being – you know – physical.”

“Oh don’t worry.  I get that all the time.  And you’re the first friendly person I’ve met
since I left home.”

Clarissa had opened a flask of
coffee and, still sitting in her little car, she poured herself a small
cup.  It was mid-October, a fresh autumn
day getting on towards evening, and she was beginning to feel the cold.

“My father took me to see the
lights in Piccadilly Circus when I was a little girl.  Apparently when we got there I asked him
where the clowns and tigers were.  ‘And
where are the pretty ladies in tights?’ I wanted to know.  He said it wasn’t that kind of circus:  ‘Circus just means a circle for the cars to
go round.’  I don’t remember that
conversation myself, but I do remember standing there with the beautiful
electric lights all round me and realising that I didn’t care about the tigers
and the pretty ladies.  Colours are so
magical when you are a child.   I looked
one way and then the other, but I wanted to see it all at once, so in the end I
decided to spin round and round on the spot.”

She lifted the coffee cup to her
lips and took a sip.

“I’m Lily,” Lily said helpfully,
staring wonderingly at the intricate wrinkles all over Clarissa’s hands, and at
the brown liver-spots on them, and the way they trembled all the time so that
coffee keep sloshing out down the sides of the cup.  If Lily’s low res looks were short on detail,
Clarissa seemed to possess detail in reckless abundance.  And yet – and this was the part that puzzled
Lily – it was to no apparent decorative purpose.  That look must have cost a fortune, Lily
thought, but why would anyone choose to look like that?

“I’m Clarissa, my dear.  I’m Clarissa Fall,” said the old lady
grandly, finishing her coffee and shaking the drips out of the cup before
screwing it back onto the top of the flask.

 “Do you know the way?” Lily ventured.  “Do you know the way to Piccadilly Circus?”

“I should think so,” Clarissa snorted.  “I’m over two hundred years old and I’ve
lived in London since I was born.  I’m
the last physical person left in London, you know.”

She looked at her watch.  She craved company and attention and yet when
she actually had it, she was always curiously impatient and off-hand.

“Oh.  Two hundred,” repeated Lily humbly.  “That’s quite old.  Only otherwise I was going to suggest I could
come and show you the way…”

“Yes, do come by all means,” said
Clarissa magnanimously. 

The laws of the physical universe
prevented physical people from riding on virtual vehicles, but there was
nothing in the rules of the Field to prevent virtual people from riding a
physical car.  The only difficulty was
that the invalid car was only designed for one, so Lily had to ride at the back
on the little rack intended to carry bags of shopping.

“I don’t mind,” said Lily, who
couldn’t afford dignity. “It’s not that far.”

“I’ll have to turn my implant off,
I’m afraid,” Clarissa told her, “so I can see the bumps on the road.  You won’t be able to talk to me until we’re
there.”

“I don’t mind,” said Lily
gamely.  She had no idea what Clarissa
meant, but she had long since accepted that life was largely
incomprehensible. 

Clarissa turned the key to start
the car.  As she did so she noticed the
meter that showed the remaining charge in the battery.  When she set out, the needle had pointed to
‘Fully Charged”, but now it was on the edge of the red area marked “Warning!
Very Low!”  She allowed herself for a
single moment to see the trouble she was in – and to feel fear – and then she
pushed it firmly from her conscious mind.

*  *  *

Clarissa drove slowly down Tottenham Court Road.  The shop buildings were dark and empty, their
windows blank, or sometimes broken and full of dead leaves.  The roads were bare and strewn with
rubble.  Apart from the whine of her
electric car and the click of stones thrown up by its rubber wheels, there was
utter silence.

But Lily saw windows full of goods for sale, cars and buses all around them, and people everywhere.

“Nearly there!” she called out cheerfully, still not fully grasping that Clarissa with her implant inactivated couldn’t hear her or sense her presence in any way.  Then she gave a little shriek as Clarissa nonchalantly swerved across the road directly into the path of oncoming traffic and carried on down the wrong side of the road, magnificently indifferent to honking horns and shouts of indignation.

“She’s physical,” Lily called out by way of explanation from her perch on the back of Clarissa’s little car.  “She’s just physical.”

Half-way along Shaftesbury Avenue, the battery gave out and the car died.

And now Clarissa was scared.  It was getting towards evening; it was turning very cold; and she was an elderly woman with an injured foot in the middle of a ruined city.  She had nowhere to stay, nothing to eat or drink, and no means of getting home.

But Clarissa was good at pushing things out of her mind. 

“It’s not far,” she muttered, referring not to the fake chateau, her distant home, but to Piccadilly Circus which still lay ahead.  Piccadilly Circus offered no warmth, no nourishment, no resolution at all of her difficulties, but all of that was beside the point.  “I’ll just have to walk,” she said.  “It’s absurd to come this far and not get to see it.”

She dismounted from her car and began, painfully, to limp the last couple of hundred metres, but then she remembered Lily and stopped.

“I’M GOING TO WALK THE LAST BIT!” she bellowed back, assuming correctly that Lily was trailing behind her, but erroneously that Lily’s invisibility made her deaf. “I CAN’T SEE YOU because MY IMPLANT’S TURNED OFF and I don’t want to turn it on again until I get there, or it will SPOIL THE EFFECT.”

She had it all planned out.  She would not turn on her implant until she
was right in the middle of the Circus.

“YOU’RE VERY WELCOME TO COME ALONG THOUGH!” she shouted, as if she
personally controlled access to the public streets. 

She hobbled forward a few steps
along the silent ruined avenue (while in the other London, cars swerved around
her, pedestrians turned and stared and Lily patiently plodded behind her as if
the two of them were Good King Wenceslas and his faithful page).

“I’ll tell you what though,” Clarissa said, pausing again.  Her face was screwed up with the pain of her injured foot, but her tone was nonchalant.  “If you felt like calling the council and asking them to get hold of someone physical to come and help me out, I would be grateful…  Only my dratted car has QUITE RUN OUT OF POWER you see, so it’s not going to be able to get me back.”

“I don’t have any money,” said Lily.  “Is it an emergency do you think?  Shall I call the emergency number?”

But of course Clarissa couldn’t hear her.

* * *

It was getting dark as she limped into Piccadilly Circus.  The buildings were inert slabs of masonry,
all those thousands of coloured light bulbs on the old advertising signs were
cold and still, and the statue of Eros was more like the angel of death on a
mausoleum than the god of physical love. 

Some gusts of rain came blowing
down Regent Street.  Clarissa’s lips and
fingers were blue with cold and her whole body was trembling.  (Lily was amazed: she had never seen such a
thing, for consensuals are never cold.) 
Clarissa was in great pain too – the broken bone in her ankle had
slipped out of place and felt like a blade being twisted in her flesh – and she
was tired and hungry and thirsty.  Too
late she realised she had left her flask of coffee behind in her abandoned car.

“You’re a fool, Clarissa Fall,”
she told herself. “You don’t look after yourself.  One of these days you’ll just keel over and
the rats will come and eat you up.  And
it will be your own stupid fault.”

Then she remembered her low res companion. 

“ARE YOU STILL THERE LILY?” she bellowed.  “Did you make that CALL FOR ME?  I’m just going
to get across to the statue there and then I’ll turn my implant on and WE CAN TALK.”

She hobbled to the base of Eros and then reached up to the implant switch behind her ear.  The colour, the electricity, the teeming life of a great city at night came flooding instantly into the desolate scene.  There were people everywhere, and cars with shining headlamps and glowing tail-lights, and black taxis and red double-decker buses full of passengers, lit upstairs and down with a cheery yellow glow.  But above all there were the lights, the wonderful electric streams of colour that made shining moving pictures and glittering logos and words that flowed across fields of pure colour in purple and red and green and yellow and blue and white. 

“Ah!” cried Clarissa in rapture, “almost like when I was a little girl and the lights were real!”

“I told you they was lovely,” Lily said, like a pet dog that will wait an hour, two hours, three hours for its mistress to glance in its direction, and still be no less grateful when the longed-for attention finally comes. 

Clarissa turned, smiling, but the sight of Lily’s cartoonish moon-face had an unexpected effect on her.  She felt a stab of pity for Lily and at the same time revulsion.  Her smile ceased to be real.  Her pleasure vanished.  She felt the bitter cold of the physical world pushing through, the needle-sharp physical pain nagging at her from her foot, the physical ache in her head that came from tiredness and dehydration.

Clarissa turned, smiling, but the sight of Lily’s cartoonish moon-face had an unexpected effect on her.  She felt a stab of pity for Lily and at the same time revulsion.  Her smile ceased to be real.  Her pleasure vanished.  She felt the bitter cold of the physical world pushing through, the needle-sharp physical pain nagging at her from her foot, the physical ache in her head that came from tiredness and dehydration.

Lily sensed her change of mood and the simple line that represented her mouth was just starting to curve downwards when Clarissa switched off her implant again.  Lily vanished, along with lights, taxis, buses and crowds.  It was very dark and quite silent and the buildings were dim shadows.

“The thing is, Lily,” Clarissa announced to the empty darkness, “that you consensuals are all just like these lights.  Just moving pictures made out of little dots.  Just pictures of buses, pictures of cars, pictures of people, pictures of shop windows.” 

Deliberately turning away from where Lily had been, Clarissa turned the implant on again and watched the lights come back.  But there was no thrill this time, no exhilarating shock, nothing to offset the cold and the pain.  It was no different really from changing channels on a TV set, she thought bitterly, and straight away reached up to flick the implant off again.  But now the switch, which was designed to be turned on and off a couple of times a day, finally broke under the strain of her constant fiddling with it and refused to stay in one position or the other.  Clarissa’s perceptual field now flickered randomly every few seconds from the consensual to the physical world and back again – and she couldn’t make it stop.  She stood helplessly and ineffectually fingering the switch for a short time, then gave up and sank down to the ground at the foot of the statue.  What else was there to do?

“Did you call up the council, Li…” she began, and then the consensual world disappeared.  “Oh dear.  LILY, ARE YOU STILL THERE?…  Oh you are, good.  Did you call the council only I think I ought to go home now…  Lily?  LILY!  ARE THE COUNCIL GETTING HELP?…  Tell them I don’t want Agents mind.  Tell them to get some physicals out.  They’ll be cross with me, but they’ll come anyway.  I don’t care what Richard said.”

* * *

Actually, whether she liked it or not, Agents were coming,
four of them, from different directions, from different errands in different
parts of London.  They were still some
way off but they were on their way. The Hub had sent them, having contacted
Richard Howard and been told by him that we physicals wouldn’t come out again.

Later Richard began to worry about what he’d done and called me.

“I know it seems harsh,” he said, rather defensively, “but I do feel we’ve got to keep out of this, don’t you agree?  Clarissa’s got to learn that when we say something we mean it, or she’ll keep doing this stuff over and over again.  I mean she’s in Piccadilly Circus for god’s sake! Even Clarissa must be perfectly well aware that she couldn’t go into central London and get back again in that silly little car of hers.  She obviously just assumed that we would come and fetch her.  She just banked on it.”

I was as furious with Clarissa as
he was.  I had spent the afternoon raking
leaves and tidying up in my secluded little garden.  I had just eaten a small meal and taken a
glass of port and was looking forward to a quiet evening alone in the warm
behind drawn curtains, making some preparatory notes for Chapter 62 of my book
‘The Decline and Fall of Reality’.   (I
had dealt in Chapters 60 and 61 with the advent of the Internet and the mobile
telephone and was just getting to what was to be the great central set-piece of
my whole account: the moment where the human race is presented for the first
time with incontrovertible evidence that its own activity will destroy the
planet, not in centuries or even decades but in years, unless it can reduce its
physical presence to a fraction of its current levels.) 

“Bloody Clarissa!  Bloody
bloody Clarissa!”

Why should I give up the treat of a quiet evening and a new chapter,
when she herself had deliberately engineered her own difficulties?  I absolutely dreaded going into the centre of
London at any time, as Clarissa surely knew, and yet here she was calmly
assuming that I could and should be dragged there whenever it suited her
convenience. And yet I knew I had to go to her.

“I can’t leave her to the Agents,
though, Richard.  I know she’s a pain, I
know we’re being used, but I can’t just leave her.”

“Oh for goodness’ sake, Tom, it’ll teach her a lesson,” Richard said, hardening in his resolve now he had my own flabbiness of will to kick against.  “How will she ever learn if we don’t stay firm now?  It’s for her own good really.  And anyway, the Agents can’t be called off now.  You know what they’re like.”

“Well if they’re going to be there anyway, I’d better be there too,” I said. “They scare her silly.  I’ll drive up there now, so at least there’s someone on hand that she knows.”   

I went out into the cold and
started up my car.  I resented Clarissa
bitterly.  I dreaded the dark feelings
that trips into London invariably churned up in me, the shame, the embarrassment,
the sense of loss, the envy, the deep, deep grief that is like the grief of
facing a former lover who belongs now to another and will never never be yours
again…  I was exhausted by the very
thought of the effort of it all, not to mention the discomfort and the cold.

 When I got to Piccadilly Circus, Agents were
just arriving, one emerging from Shaftesbury Avenue, one from Piccadilly and
one each from the northern and southern branches of Regent Street.  But, huddled up under the statue of Eros,
Clarissa couldn’t see them, for when she was in purely physical mode it was too
dark and when she was in consensual mode they were invisible.  Beside her squatted Lily with her consensual
arm round Clarissa’s physical shoulder. 
Sometimes Clarissa could see Lily and sometimes she couldn’t, but either
way she could get no warmth from the embrace, however much Lily might want to
give it. 

As my physical headlights swept across the physical space, the first thing Clarissa saw was two of the Agents looming out of the darkness and advancing towards her.  It felt like some nightmare from her childhood, and she screamed.  Then her implant switched on by itself and the lights and the buses and the crowds returned to screen them out.  But that was even worse because she knew that behind this glossy facade the Agents were still really there, slowly advancing, though now unseen.

She screamed again.

“Keep away from me, you hear
me!  Just keep away.”

“Don’t be scared, Clarissa,” said Lily.  “I’m here for you.”

But Lily didn’t have a clue.  She had never experienced cold.   She had never known physical pain.  She wasn’t aware of the presence of the Agents.  She had no inkling of the other world of silence and shadow that lay behind the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus. 

I got out of my car.  I had my own implant switched on and I picked my way gingerly over the ground between me and Clarissa, knowing only too well how easily nasty physical potholes can be concealed by the virtual road surface.  I was doing my best to ignore the many consensual eyes watching me with disapproval and dislike and I was seething all the while with rage at self-obsessed Clarissa for putting me through all this yet again.  How dare she drag me out here into the cold night?  How dare she expose me to the illusion of the consensual city and to the disapproving gaze of the consensual people, when I all I ever wanted was to be at home behind my high hedges that I had cut into the shape of castle walls, behind my locked doors, behind my tightly drawn curtains, writing about reality.

“You know her do you?” a man asked me. “Well, you want to do something about her, mate.  She’s nuts. She’s mental.  She needs help”

I didn’t respond.  I had never known how to speak to these people, so manifestly unreal and yet so obviously alive.  I both despised and envied them.  How tawdry their constructed world was and how craven their meek acceptance of it.  Yet how narrow and dull my own world was by comparison, my bleak garden, my clipped hedges, my book, my nightly glass of port, my weekly sally down the road to the Horse and Hounds, the Last Real Pub, to drink Real Beer with the diminishing band of decrepit and barren old men and woman who call themselves the Last Real People.

“She needs locking up more like,” said a woman. “That’s the same one that blocked the Northern Line last month with her carrying on.  I saw her face in the paper.”

I picked my way through the traffic.

“Alight Clarissa,” I called coldly as I came up to her, “I’m here again for you.  Muggins is here again as you no doubt expected he would be.  I’ve come to fetch you home.”

“Muggins?  Who’s that?” she quavered.  She was afraid it was one of the Agents.

“It’s just me, Clarissa.  It’s just Tom.”

“It’s who?” muttered Clarissa, straining to see me. 

“He said Tom, dear,” Lily told
her.

Clarissa glanced sideways at the
cartoon face with its little black dot eyes and its downward curved mouth.  Then Lily vanished again, along with the
whole Field, and Clarissa was back in the dark physical world.  But the lights of my car were there now and,
without the distraction of the Field, Clarissa could clearly see me approaching
as well as the Agents around me, waiting to step in if I couldn’t resolve
things. 

Awkwardly, wincing with pain, she rose to her feet. 

“I just wanted to see the lights again, like they were when I was a child,” she said stubbornly. 

And then she began to spin round on the spot like children sometimes do in play, but very very slowly, shuffling round and round with her feet and grimacing all the while with pain.  And as she revolved, the faulty switch on her implant continued to flicker on and off so that, for a few seconds the bright lights and the buses and the cars span around her, and then it was the turn of the darkness that was the source of her coldness and her pain, and it was the dim cold walls of the empty buildings that moved round her, lit only by the headlights of my car.  

Lily appeared and
disappeared.  When she was there the
Agents vanished.  When she vanished, they
appeared.  The one constant was me, who
like Clarissa could both feel the physical cold, and see the consensual lights.

“Come on Clarrie,” I said to her gently.  “Come on Clarrie.” 

The old lady ignored me for a while, carrying on with her strange slow-motion spinning and singing a tuneless little song under her breath.  People were craning round in cars and buses to look at us.  Pedestrians were standing across the road and watching us as frankly as if this really was a Circus and we were there expressly to put on a show.

Then abruptly Clarissa stopped
spinning.  She tottered with dizziness,
but her eyes were blazing like the eyes of a cornered animal. 

“Who are you?” she demanded.  “Who exactly are you?”

It was odd because in that moment
everything around me seemed to intensify: the sharpness of the cold night air
in the physical world, the brilliance of the coloured lights in the consensual
one, the strange collision of the two worlds that my Clarrie had
single-handedly brought about…  And I
found that I didn’t feel angry any more, didn’t even mind that she’d brought me
all this way. 

I switched off the implant behind
my ear, so that I could check up on what the Agents were doing.  But they were still standing back and waiting
for me to deal with things.

 “It’s me, Clarrie dear,” I said to her.  “It’s Tom. 
Your brother.”

The Agent nearest me stiffened
slightly and inclined its head towards me, as if I had half-reminded it of
something. 

 
“I reckon you’ve had enough adventure for one day, my dear,” I told my
sister, flicking my implant on again to shut the Agents out of my sight.  “Enough for one day, don’t you agree?  Don’t mind the Agents.  I’ve brought the car for you.  I’ve come to take you home.”

She let me lead her to the car and
help her inside.  She was in a very bad
state, trembling, bloodless, befuddled, her injured foot swollen to nearly
twice its normal size.  I was glad I had
thought to bring a rug for her, and a flask of hot cocoa, and a bottle of
brandy.

That strange moon-faced creature,
Lily, a human soul inside a cartoon, followed us over and stood anxiously
watching.

“Is she alright?” she asked.  “She’s gone so strange.  What is it that’s the matter with her?”

“Yes, she’ll be alright. She’s just old and tired,” I told her, shutting the passenger door and walking round the car to get in myself. 

I flipped off my implant, cutting off Lily and the sights and sounds of Piccadilly Circus.  In the dark dead space, the four Agents were silhouetted in the beam of my headlights.  They had moved together and were standing in a row.  I had the odd idea that they wished they could come with us, that they wished that someone would come to meet them with rugs and brandy and hot cocoa. 

I got my sister comfortable and
started up the car.  I was going to drive
like she always did, with my implant deactivated, unable to see the consensual
traffic.  I didn’t like doing it.  I knew how arrogant it must seem to the
consensuals and how much they must resent it – it was things like that, I knew,
that gave us Outsiders a bad name – but I just couldn’t risk a broken axle on
the way home on top of everything else.

“Really we’re no different when you come to think of it,” said Clarrie after a while.  Her implant was off at that moment and she looked out at abandoned streets as lonely as canyons on some lifeless planet in space.  “That’s the physical world out there, that’s physical matter.  But we’re not like that, are we?  People are patterns.  We’re just patterns rippling across the surface.” 

“Have a bit more brandy, Clarrie,” I told her, “and then put the seat back and try to get some sleep.  It’s going to be some time before we get back.”

She nodded and tugged the rug up around herself.   Her implant switched itself on again and she saw a taxi swerve to avoid us and heard the angry blast of its horn.  Briefly the busy night life of the Consensual Field was all around her.  And then it was gone again.

“Just the same,” she said sleepily.  “Just like the lights in Piccadilly Circus.”

Copyright 2005, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (18) The Caramel Forest

It can be pretty isolating to be the child of parents who aren’t getting on. I feel sorry for families right now who are in that position.

This was the cover story in Asimov’s SF in 2012 (the artist was Laura Diehl). It was subsequently collected in The Peacock Cloak, along with another story, ‘Day 29’, which was also set on the imaginary planet Lutania.

Lutania is the prototype for the setting of my most recent novel, Beneath the World, a Sea. In the novel, however, I moved it from an alien planet, to a remote place in South America, the Submundo Delta where life is entirely different to, and completely unrelated, to life anywhere else on Earth.

The Caramel Forest

In the
caramel forest the leaves, trunks and branches were all made of the same smooth
flesh, like the flesh of mushrooms.  It
was yellow, grey or pink.   A kind of
moss covered the ground, pink in colour, and also fleshy and
mushroom-like.  And there were ponds,
every hundred yards or so, picked out by the pale sunlight that elsewhere in
the forest was largely filtered out by trees. 
The ponds were surrounded by clumps of spongy vegetation, pink or white
or yellow. 

But the children, pressing their faces to
the car windows, were trying to spot something more interesting than trees and
ponds.    Cassie told Peter he would win
five points if he spotted an animal of some kind, and one hundred points for a
castle.  They’d only ever seen one of
those and that had been in ruins, its delicate, butterscotch, shell-like
architecture smashed and kicked to pieces by settlers. 

But the forest, with its spotlit ponds,
remained an empty stage.   There were no
castles, and no animals either, only the occasional solitary floater drifting
through the space between canopy and forest floor, trailing its delicate
tendrils, and bumping from time to time against the trees.  Cassie didn’t consider floaters either
sufficiently animal-like, or sufficiently interesting to deserve a point.

‘We see those all the time,’ she told her little brother, who nevertheless persisted in pointing them out.

‘Those aren’t really ponds, you know,’ she presently informed him.   ‘Under the ground they’re all joined up.  It’s like a sea covered over by a roof of roots and earth.’

‘Quite right, Cassie,’ said her father, David, from the front passenger seat. 

‘I wish we’d see some goblins,’ said Cassie, glancing defiantly at the back of her mother’s head. ‘I’ll give you twenty points, Peter, if you spot us one, and I’ll let you have turn with my microscope as well.’

‘We don’t call them goblins, do we?’ David reminded her.  ‘We call them indigenes.  They’re just living creatures like us, going about their lives.’

‘Everyone at school calls them goblins,’ said Cassie.

‘Well, most kids in your school are the children of settlers,’ said her father, ‘and they don’t know any better.  But we’re Agency people.  We’re supposed to set a good example.’

Another floater (which Peter, annoyingly, still pointed out), more ponds, more silent empty space beneath the mushroom-like trees.

‘Most of the kids say that goblins are only good for shooting and nailing up,’ Cassie said off-handedly.  ‘They say the Agency is soft.’

‘Well that’s just silly, Cassie.   There’s no reason to persecute the indigenes.  They harm no one, and they were here for millions of years before the first settlers came.’

‘They give you funny ideas though.’

‘Well, maybe.  But that’s probably just their way of protecting themselves.’

‘Protecting themselves?’ Cassie weighed this idea for a moment, tipping her head to one side, then dismissed it with a shrug.  ‘Well whatever it’s for, I…’

‘Must you talk about those horrid things all the time?’ interrupted Cassie’s mother, Paula.

She turned a corner, leaving it rather too
late, and the car only narrowly avoided a particularly large pond, a small lake
almost, with the road running along the edge of it.  David winced, but did not comment.

Peter pointed out two more floaters
drifting by above the water. 

‘You’d better play in the garden when we get back,’ Paula said, half-turning her beautiful but bitter face as they left the pond and headed back into the trees. ‘I need you out of the way so I can get ready for the visitors.  We’ve hardly got enough time as it is, let alone with you two getting under my feet.’

‘Honestly Paula,’ David whined.  ‘I can’t win.  You keep saying how bored and lonely you are.  I thought you’d appreciate the company.’

‘Yes, David, but it was just stupid to invite people to come to dinner at 6 o’clock, when you knew that we ourselves would still be two hours’ drive away at 3.’

Cassie tensed.   She dreaded her parents’ quarrels.

‘And anyway,’ Paula went on, ‘my idea of company is people who might be interested in talking about things that I like talking about.  Not two of your workmates who will just talk shop.’

She sighed.

‘And one of whom you obviously fancy,
incidentally,’ she added, ‘ judging by how often you mention her name.’

‘For god’s sake Paula.  What was I supposed to do?  They called me.  They said they’d be passing our way.  They asked if we’d be around.’

‘You could have said we were doing something else.  You don’t seem to find that hard to say that to me.’

‘Let’s sing some songs,’ Cassie said firmly to her brother.

*  *  *

The
bungalow sat in the middle of a wide bare lawn, surrounded by a two-metre chain
link fence to keep indigenes and animals at bay, with floodlights on poles at
regular intervals.  The lawn, rather
startlingly, was green, a colour entirely absent from the surrounding
forest.  

Juan, the caretaker, sat outside his hut
cleaning a gun.  He laid it down and
limped to the gate to open it for them, nodding, but not smiling, as they
passed through.

‘Bo da, senar senara,’ he greeted them with small stiff bow.  He could speak English well enough but usually confined himself to Luto.

Cassie organised a game outside in which
Peter was a dog called Max, and she was the dog’s owner.   Peter was five.  She was ten.  

‘Woof!  Woof!’  said the dog.

All around them was the silent forest.   It had a strong sweet smell, like caramel, but with a faint whiff of decay.

‘Woof!  Woof!  Woof!’

‘Quiet now, Max, I can’t hear myself
think.’

It was odd.  The one thing Cassie did not want to hear were the sounds of shouts or sobs from within the house, and if she had heard them, she’d had covered them up at once with noisy play.   Yet she couldn’t help herself from listening out for them: listening, listening, listening, all the while glancing down the road back into the forest on the far side of the chain link fence, willing their visitors to arrive.  

But the forest, that silent, waiting,
spotlit stage, was still.  Nothing made a
sound.  Nothing moved except for yet
another floater drifting through the trees.

‘We’re on an alien planet,’ Cassie informed her dog Max, who was too young to remember anything else.  ‘This is Lutania.  We come from Earth, where the trees are green like this grass, and there are no goblins or unicorns, and none of the creatures can talk to you inside your head.  One day we’ll go back there, across all that huge huge empty space.  Imagine that.’

Was that a sound from the house?  She held up her hand to tell her brother to be quiet.  But no.  It was just something banging in a gust of breeze in the garden of the other house behind hers, the empty house, which, apart from Juan’s hut, was the only other building in the vicinity.   They were on their own out here.  It was five miles to the next human settlement, and that was a Luto village, the one where Juan’s family lived, with no Agency inhabitants at all.   School was another ten miles beyond that.  

‘Come here now Max and eat this bone.  If you’re good I’ll stroke your head.’

‘Woof!’ said Max, crawling obediently across to her.

‘Oh, wait a minute,’ she said.  ‘Here are the visitors.  You’d better be Peter again.’

*  *  *

Every
night, through the thin wall of her room, Cassie heard her mother crying.

‘I hate this place…,’ she’d hear Paula sob, ‘I hate this stinking forest…’

 ‘Ssssssh!’ her father would hiss. 

Or, after half an hour of muffled sobs and murmuring, Paula would suddenly cry out:

‘Of course the kids don’t bug you when you’re away all the time.’

‘Shut up,’ Cassie would mutter, on her own in the dark.  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up.’

She’d try and distract herself by thinking
about the immense tracts of space between Lutania and Earth.  If she could only understand how big that
was, she felt, this little house, and this little local difficulty of her
mother being miserable and her parents not getting on, would become so small
that they’d be of no consequence at all. 
It was a bleak sort of comfort.

Peter, meanwhile, would sleep peacefully in
the room on the other side of hers. 

*  *  *

Right now,
though, there were the visitors to attend to. 
Ernesto and Sheema

‘Sorry about the short notice, but it seemed a shame not to call by when we were in these parts.’

‘Hope we haven’t put you out.  Good lord, look at this spread!  You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble!’

‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ cried Paula.  ‘No trouble at all.   Lovely to see you.  We’d have been most offended if you’d passed this way and not come to see us.’

Standing in the corner of the room, hand in hand with Peter, Cassie watched her mother with narrowed eyes.  Paula really did seem pleased to see these people, that was the strange thing.  She really did seem to mean what she said.  She was smiling.  She had laughter in her eyes.  But that was how she was.  You never knew.  You could be laughing and joking with her one minute, thinking you were having a lovely time, and then the next look round and see her collapsed and broken, crying hopeless tears.

‘My,’ said Sheema, ‘what beautiful children!’

Cassie turned her attention to Sheema, accepting the compliment with a severe half-smile and a gracious inclination of her head.   Sheema was quite pretty, she supposed.

‘Such wonderful red hair too!’ Sheema said, quailing in the intensity of the little girl’s gaze, and turning back hastily to the grown-ups.

*  *  *

‘Okay,
okay,’ Cassie’s father conceded over the empty dinner plates.  ‘They have an electromagnetic sense.   They communicate with microwaves in some
way.  The trees act as antennae.  I grant you all that, and I grant you that it
may allow them to detect human brain activity.  
But it doesn’t explain how they interpret
it…’

‘They don’t interpret it, Dave,’ Sheema said.  ‘They pick it up and beam it back to us.’

‘Sure, but you’re not getting my point.  They don’t just beam back random signals, do they?  They’re able to home in on certain things…’

‘Or perhaps just stimulate certain parts
of…’ Ernesto began.

David ignored the interruption. 

‘And anyway, Sheema,’ he said, ‘the “beam
it back to us” theory doesn’t explain how we manage to receive the signal.’

‘You’re both complicating this
unnecessarily,’ Ernesto persisted.  ‘Like
I say, they don’t receive or send a signal;
they just stimulate certain parts of our brains.   They disorientate potential predators by
stirring up uncomfortable feelings.  They
don’t have to know what it is they’re dealing with, any more than a chameleon
has to know that the red thing it’s sitting on is a tablecloth.  It just copies the colour.’

Peter was already in bed.  Cassie knew she would soon be sent to bed as well.  She glanced between the adults with sharp appraising eyes.  Dad and the two visitors were talking louder and louder as the evening went on, and crossly interrupting one another more and more, and yet they were smiling too.   They seemed, for some reason, to be having fun.  Mum was a bit quiet – she wasn’t a scientist like the other three – but even she was smiling.   She did seem very thirsty, though.  She was drinking glass after glass of wine.

For a moment, David glanced uneasily at his wife, noticing warning signs.  But he returned to the argument all the same. 

‘What you’re stubbornly missing, Ernesto,’
he said, laughing angrily and banging his hand on the table.  ‘What you’re refusing to consider is
this.  How can a creature whose nervous
system is absolutely nothing like ours at all, home in on our “uncomfortable
feelings” and stir them up?  One can just
about envisage how they or their trees might do this with other Lutanian
creatures with similar nervous systems.  
But with humans?  How?   How are they able to locate those feelings
in our quite different brains?’

‘A good point,’ Sheema acknowledged with a laugh.  ‘But what alternative are you suggesting?’

‘I suspect we may eventually need an entirely new theory of the mind. Think about it.  We have completely different brains from goblins.’  (For some reason, he was using the word freely, though he always corrected his family when they used it.) ‘They don’t even have neurons, as we understand them – they don’t even have an analogue of neurons – and yet indigenes are able to reach right through the species-specific particularities of the human brain, to find and stimulate the places where we keep our troubles.  How can this happen unless pain and distress has some kind of universal form that transcends the particular nervous system which expresses it?    And that being so, perhaps we need to radically rethink the place that mind has in the scheme of things.   Perhaps we need to stop speaking about space-time, and starting talking about space-time-mind.’

‘But that’s mystical nonsense, David,’ laughed Ernesto, angry and friendly all at once.  ‘With great respect, it’s just lazy mystical nonsense.   Just because we’ve failed so far to find an explanation in terms of the parameters of physical science, it doesn’t mean we have to give up and rewrite the entire rulebook.’

‘Why not, Ernesto?  Why not at least consider that possibility?  Space, time and mind.’

David’s eyes were bright.    He was in a playground where he felt at home, and he was full of energy, with the cowering, haunted look, so often there, quite absent from his face.   But he was careful to avoid looking back at his wife, whose eyes were shining in quite another way. 

‘Because it’s twaddle David,’ Ernesto laughed.  ‘It’s mystical twaddle!’

Paula rose to collect the plates.

‘Are we ready for dessert?’ she asked in a
loud bright voice that Cassie recognised at once as dangerous.

David glanced at her.  There was a brief flash of fear in his eyes, but he still turned back stubbornly to his friends.

‘One other point, Ernesto.  One other point that people sometimes
forget.  We’ve been assuming this evolved
as a defence against predators, but what predators exactly do we have in
mind?  It’s not as if…’ 

‘That was delicious, Paula,’ cut in Sheema, glancing with sudden anxiety at her hostess.  ‘I’ll come and help you.’

‘What was it you were saying about
goblins?’  Cassie asked the two men as
the women left the room.  ‘What were you
saying about their minds?’

‘Indigenes, darling,’ said her father, barely concealing his irritation at being distracted.  ‘Yes, we were just talking about how they somehow make people have uncomfortable thoughts when they get up close.’

‘They don’t make me have uncomfortable thoughts,’ Cassie said.

‘Ah, well maybe you haven’t been near enough to one,’ suggested Ernesto, with a friendly wink.

‘I have so, loads of times.  Here and at school.  One came right up to the school fence a couple of weeks ago.  I liked the thoughts it gave me.’

‘Did you indeed, sweetheart?’

Her father glanced at Ernesto, smiling and
raising one eyebrow in a superior and theatrical way that Cassie knew was only
made possible by the presence of visitors. 

She shrugged.

‘It happened, Dad,’ she said coldly. ‘Whether you choose to believe it or not.  I liked being near it.  But the other kids threw stones at it.’

David laughed uneasily, glancing again at his friend.

‘Nearly time for bed,’ he announced.

‘I haven’t had my pudding yet.’

There was a loud wail from the kitchen.

*  *  *

‘They’re
out there again!’

 David rushed to his wife.  Cassie hurried after him.

 They could see the goblins through the kitchen window: two of them, one squatting, one standing. 

‘Make them go!’ sobbed Paula. ‘For God’s
sake make the horrible things go away!’

They were thin grey creatures, about the
same height as Cassie, picked out by the bluish electric lights around the
fence.  Neither one of them was looking
at the house.  Both seemed engrossed in
some object that the squatting one was holding up for the other’s inspection: a
shell, perhaps, or a piece of stone.

‘Get a grip now Paula,’ muttered David.   ‘They’re completely harmless.’

 Sheema put her arm round Paula’s shoulders.

‘Easy now, love,’ she said in a warm and
gentle voice.

But the look she gave her husband wasn’t
warm at all, and seemed to Cassie to refer to some prior exchange between the
two of them.   Sheema hadn’t wanted to
come here, was Cassie’s guess: Sheema had warned Ernesto that Paula would be
difficult and make some sort of scene.

David and Ernesto went out through the kitchen door and starting running across the unnatural green of the grass towards the fence, shouting  and waving their arms, each one of them with his own set of multiple shadows thrown out by the floodlights. 

‘There there,’ Sheema murmured soothingly
to Paula.  ‘There there.  Remember it’s just a silly trick they
play.  Just a silly trick they play on
our minds.’

 Cassie
stepped just outside the kitchen door, so she could watch everything: the women
indoors, the goblins and men outside.  
The caramel smell wafted from the forest, carrying its faint hint of
decay.   The moss under the trees glowed
softly.  The many ponds shone with
phosphorescence.   And creatures were
moving out there, whichever way you looked. 
The stage was no longer empty. 

‘Go away!’

David ran up to the fence, kicking it and
banging on it with the flats of his hands. 
After a few seconds, the squatting indigene rose very slowly to its
feet, and then both it and its companion turned their narrow faces towards
David and regarded him with their black button eyes.  Their V-shaped mouths resembled the smiles in
a child’s drawing.  

‘Go on, be off with you!’ David shouted
again, quite pointlessly, for the creatures had no ears.

Both goblins tipped their heads on one side
– sometimes indigenes could look thoughtful and cunning; at other times they
seemed as devoid of intelligent thought as a tree or a toadstool – but neither
of them moved away.   Behind them, far
off in the softly glowing forest, a column of white unicorns was making its way
through the trees.

Cassie started to walk down towards the
fence.

‘Cassie darling,’ called Sheema without
much conviction.  ‘Don’t you think you
ought to…’

She tailed off – she had no confidence with
children – and in that same moment Cassie heard in her head the voice that
always spoke in the presence of goblins: her own voice, speaking her own
language, but not under her control.  

‘Fear,’ it said, ‘but no love.’

Again David banged impotently on the
fence.  It had no effect on the goblins,
but it brought Juan out of his hut, swearing in Luto, with a heavy pulse gun in
his hands.   He limped to the fence and
pointed the gun at the goblins at point blank range, barely acknowledging his
employer or his employer’s guests.

‘Be careful Juan,’ began David, ‘no need
to…’ 

Ignoring him, Juan pulled the trigger. The gun only made a faint thudding sound, like a beanbag dumped on a table, but the goblins staggered and clasped their heads.

‘I think that was excessive Juan,’ David said, as the creatures loped off into the forest.

‘You want them to go or not, senar?’ 

Juan shrugged and turned back to his
hut.  Cassie knew his children – they
went to the same school as her and Peter – and she knew that, if Juan had been
given the choice, he’d have killed the goblins without compunction, or maybe
caught them and nailed them to a tree.  It
was what Juan and his friends did for fun when they went hunting out in the
forest, with no Agency do-gooders there to pry or to spoil things.    

David and Ernesto walked back to the
house.   Cassie, unnoticed, followed
behind them.   She could see how David
deliberately turned slightly away from his friend, so Ernesto couldn’t see the
strain in his face.

‘So?’ asked Ernesto.  ‘What did you
hear in your head, David?  What wisdom
came to you through the channel of pure mystical being?’

‘I didn’t pay much attention,’ David said shortly.  ‘You know what, though.  I really wish Juan would listen to me a bit more, and do what I ask him to do, instead whatever he happens to think best.  The Agency pays his salary after all.’

He still hadn’t noticed his daughter following quietly behind them.

‘I heard the voice telling me that I was second rate,’ sighed Ernesto, ‘and that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good a scientist as you.’

In the kitchen, Paula was sobbing on
Sheema’s shoulder.  No one asked her what
she’d heard in her head.

David noticed Cassie and told her to go to
bed.

*  *  *

Some nights
were sobbing nights.  Some were sniffing
and snivelling ones.  But that night,
after Sheema and Ernesto had gone, was the worst kind.  Tonight was a wailing night. 

‘I can’t stand those things, David.  I can’t stand them.  Can’t you see that?  I just can’t bear another whole year of them.  Why can’t you get that?  Why doesn’t it matter to you?  I know you don’t love me, but don’t you care about me one little bit?   Don’t you care at least about the children?’

‘The children are fine with goblins, you know that.  And please keep your voice down, or Cassie will hear us.’

‘They’re not fine with goblins.  You really don’t understand anything do you?   Cassie pretends she’s fine with them as way of coping and trying to keep the peace.’

‘No I don’t,’ hissed Cassie in the darkness.  ‘Stop lying about me. Stop lying.’

She banged angrily on the wall.  Her parents’ voices subsided immediately to a murmur, but she knew the wailing would soon start up again.

‘Run away, why don’t you?’ asked a
voice inside her head.  ‘Why hold on to
this dream?’

She went to the window.  Sure enough, the goblins had come back.   They were squatting side by side with their backs against the fence.   

Cassie sighed.  It was only a matter of time before Paula also sensed their presence, and then there would be no peace at all.

*  *  *

‘My
dad said you had goblins round yours last night,’ said Carmelo next day in the
school playground. 

Cassie was in her usual refuge, a
place close to the fence where she could squat down behind a spongy clump of
pink vegetation and be shielded from the general view.   Juan’s son had come over specially to seek
her out.   He was dark and wiry, with
clever mocking eyes.  

Cassie shrugged.  ‘Yeah, we did.  I didn’t mind though.  I quite like them.’

Beyond the fence lay the silent,
empty forest.

‘You quite like them?’ 

The boy took a cigarette from his
pocket and lit it.  He was only eleven
but he drew the thick soupy smoke into his lungs like a smoker of many years, releasing
it slowly with a contented sigh.  

He squatted down beside her.

‘Dad said your mum yelled and
yelled when those goblins came back again in the night.’

‘Yes, she did.  We had to get your dad out of bed again to
chase them away.   Mum hates goblins.’

‘Well, that makes one person in
your family who’s got a bit of sense.’

‘Why?  What’s the harm in goblins?’

‘They slowly take over your head,
Agency girl.    Slowly, slowly.   Funny thoughts and dreams: that’s just the
beginning.  Next thing you know, you’ve
forgotten who you are or where you came from, and then you belong to them.   That’s why we shoot them and string them up.  We’d be goblins ourselves if we didn’t.’

He drew in more smoke and regarded
her with narrowed eyes as he let it back out through his mouth and nose.  The two them were still only children, but
there was a certain electric charge between them all the same.   Carmelo constantly mocked Cassie for her stuck-up
Agency ways, and she scolded him for his ignorant settler beliefs, and yet he often
sought out her company like this, when he could have stayed with the other
settler children, or brought them over to tease her. 

‘But you’re not allowed to harm goblins,’
she told him primly. ‘It’s against the law. 
You’re supposed to treat them like people.’

Carmelo made a scornful noise.

‘Like people!  We’ve been dealing with goblins here since
long long before your Agency came along with its stupid laws.   My dad
says, when he was a kid, every single village had dried goblins nailed up on
gibbets at the gates to warn the others away.’ 

He drew deeply on the cigarette,
regarding her carefully.

‘Goblins were here long before you
were,’ Cassie pointed out.

Carmelo laughed as he released the
smoke.

‘And we were here long before you,
Agency girl.   And Yava gave us this world.’

Yava was the settlers’ god, and
Cassie knew from experience that there was no point in even discussing him.

‘You shouldn’t smoke, you know,’
she said.  ‘It’ll mess up your lungs.’

‘Don’t
do this, don’t do that!’ the
settler boy mocked her, and took another deep drag.  ‘You agency people are all the same.’

‘Well it is bad for you.   That’s just
the fact of it.’

Carmelo exhaled.

‘Those goblins didn’t come back
again after their second visit, did they?’

‘No.  Not after your dad chased them away again.’

The boy snorted.

‘Chased them away!’

‘What?  What’s funny about that?’

‘He chased them out of your sight,
more like, and then did for the two of them with an axe.  That way he got to sleep the rest of the night,
without your mum and dad yelling for him every hour or so.’

Cassie stared at him.

‘He killed them?’

‘Of course he did.’

‘But we didn’t want that!’

‘Oh come on, Cassie, they’re only
animals.’

‘How could they take over our minds
if they were only animals?’

But Carmelo had spotted a floater
drifting in over the fence.   Taking one quick
final drag from his cigarette, he took careful aim and flipped the glowing butt
end upwards.   There was a hiss of gas as
the burning tip made contact, and then the floater sank, slowly deflating, onto
the ground.

Carmelo walked over to it, and
squeezed out the remaining gas with his foot.

*  *  *

One
night, a month or two later, Cassie was woken in the early hours of morning by
her parents quarrelling yet again on the far side of the bedroom wall.

 ‘Why don’t you listen, David?  I – don’t – want – to – stay!  Which part of that don’t you understand?’

She got up and went to the
window.   The lawn outside shone its unnatural
green in the bluish glow of the electric lights.   Far off in the forest, tall shadowy giraffe-necked
creatures were solemnly processing round a shining pond. 

‘Why is it impossible, David, why?’ came her mother’s voice.  ‘Why can’t you just go to the Agency and say
“sorry, we made a mistake, we need to go home before my wife loses her mind,
and my kids become even more weird and goblin-like than they already are”?  Why is that impossible?’

Cassie considered knocking on the wall
as usual.  Her parents had already had
one row that night.  Surely they could
see it wasn’t fair to wake her up again? 

But she didn’t do it.  Something in her mind had clicked into a new
position, though she couldn’t have said why, just now, after months and years
of this nightly torment.  Giving a little
firm nod of assent to her own impulse, she pulled on some clothes, and tiptoed
quietly to the door.  As she touched the
handle, her mother’s voice rose yet again in the next room.

‘I know David, but what you’ve got to understand is…’

She closed the door carefully
behind her.

*  *  *

Her
brother woke with a start.  

‘Peter.  Wake up. 
We’re leaving.’

‘What?’

He always obeyed his sister
unquestioningly, but he’d been deeply asleep.

‘Where are we going?’ he wanted to
know, while Cassie passed him clothes.

‘Away from here.  Mum’s shouting at Dad again.’

Cassie took the key to the compound
from the shelf beside the kitchen door, then crept out across the grass with
her brother, bleary-eyes, behind her.  She
slid back the bolt on the gate, very slowly and carefully so as not to disturb
Juan, then led Peter briskly through. 
She headed quickly away from the brightly lit fence and then immediately
off the road and into the forest.

‘Dad says you could walk five
hundred miles this way,’ she said, ‘and still not reach another road.’

All around them were ponds, and
phosphorescent moss, and creatures moving under the dim mushroomy trees. 

 ‘Where are we going?’ Peter asked again as he
trotted behind her.

 ‘I don’t know yet,’ Cassie said.  ‘But don’t keep asking me, eh?’

From a pond straight ahead of them,
unicorns emerged, scrambling one by one out of the bright water to snuffle and flare
their nostrils in the caramel air, before heading off in single file through
the trees.

Peter began to count them.

‘One, two, three, four…’

‘Seventeen,’ Cassie told him
shortly.

*  *  *

About
twenty ponds later, they came to one where a single, very small, goblin sat at
the bottom, lit by the pink phosphorescence of the pond’s floor.  The creature was not much bigger than a large
cat, and was quite motionless, staring straight ahead, apparently at nothing in
particular. 

Peter pulled at his sister’s hand, troubled
by the presence of the goblin and wanting to move away.  But Cassie resisted, making him wait until
the little goblin glanced up, its black button eyes taking in the two of them looking
down from the air above. 

‘Mummy is going mad,’ said a calm
cold voice inside Cassie’s head.  ‘Daddy
is a scaredy-cat, who hides away at work.’

‘Yes, sirree,’ she muttered with a
grim chuckle.  ‘You got that right, my
friend’

Peter began to cry, and Cassie
turned to him with a frown.

‘Go on then,’ she said, ‘Spit it
out.  What did it say to you?’

Her little brother just sobbed.

‘Well, whatever it said,’ she told
him firmly, ‘you may and well face up to it, because it’s true.   They don’t tell lies.’

Peter nodded humbly.

‘So go on then,’ Cassie persisted.  ‘Tell me what it said.’

‘It said…’ snuffled Peter, ‘it said
that Mum wishes I’d never been born.’

‘Oh that,’ Cassie snorted.  ‘Is
that all?  I
could have told you that.  I’ve heard it often
enough through my bedroom wall.  She
wishes she hadn’t had either of us.  Spoiled
her career apparently, and anyway she doesn’t like kids.  Come here, you silly boy.  Come to big sis.  I
love you don’t I?’

She pulled Peter close to her, putting
her arm round his shoulder in a rough masculine way.  Three baby water dragons appeared in the pond,
supple as eels and slender as human fingers, and began to chase one another round
and round the little goblin, which was once more staring straight ahead.

‘There you are, Peter,’ Cassie said,
hugging her brother against her, and absent-mindedly patting him.  ‘There there. 
That’s better isn’t it?  You’ve
got me to look after you, haven’t
you?  You’ve got your big sis.  So you don’t need them, do you?  You don’t need anyone else at all.’

Peter sniffed and nodded.

‘There’s all the food anyone could
want out here, after all,’ Cassie told him, giving him a little encouraging
shake.  ‘We’ll be quite happy having fun out here all by ourselves.  No Mum blubbing.  No Dad whining.’ 

She thought for a moment, a little
sadly, about Carmelo.

‘And no horrid school with settler
kids,’ she added firmly, ‘who think killing things is fun.’

At the bottom of the pond, the goblin
suddenly swum off, disappearing, in a single, frog-like stroke, into one of the
water-filled tunnels under the trees. 

 ‘Come on then, trouble,’ Cassie said to her
brother. ‘Let’s get moving again, before someone notices we’ve gone.’

*  *  *

All
that night, with pauses for food and rest, they wandered through the caramel forest,
Cassie telling Peter stories to keep his spirits up, or providing him with
improving pieces of information, or making up games for them to play together.  Who could find the biggest tree pod?  Who would spot the next dragon?

 ‘Why don’t you be Max the dog again, Peter,’ she
suggested when he seemed to be flagging, ‘and then you can snuffle things out
for us.’

Snuffling things out wasn’t exactly
hard to do, with the show in full swing all around them.

‘Woof!  Woof!’ said Max almost at once, spotting a
gryphon fanning a pair of incandescent wings that crackled with electric charge.

‘Woof!  Woof!’ he said again, as a white hart darted away
from them, and plunged into the underground sea.

‘Woof!  Woof!’ he shouted out, as an agency
helicopter came thump-thump-thumping over the mushroom trees, probing down into
the forest with long cold fingers of light.

 ‘Good boy Maxie,’ Cassie told her brother.  ‘Good
boy.  Now quickly come and hide.’

*  *  *

Not
long after the helicopter had passed over, dawn began to break.   The phosphorescent glow faded from the moss
and the ponds, the stage emptied, and the two children found themselves walking
alone through ordinary sunlight that filtered down through the trees, as in
pictures of Earth, that faraway world across the void, that place where leaves
were green. 

They lay down to sleep in deep soft
moss.

*  *  *

When
Cassie woke the sun was already setting. 
Beside her Peter still slept peacefully, sucking the edge of one finger,
and for a while she just lay there watching the shadows of dreams rippling
across his face and his eyes darting about under his closed lids.

During the quiet still hours of
daylight, Cassie realised, creatures had come to watch her dreaming, just as
she was watching Peter now.  She’d had strange
thoughts running through her sleeping mind, and a familiar voice in her head
had been telling her that there was no faraway home, no great void of space, no
‘Earth’ or ‘Lutania’, only a single, small, whispering, seething thing, strange
and familiar all at once.

From a nearby pond climbed a small winged quadruped, shaking its sparkling wings.

‘Come on Peter,’ Cassie called out gaily.  ‘Wakey, wakey!  It’s another lovely night.’

*  *  *

They
were deeper into the forest that night, further away from Agency stations and
settler villages alike, and they came across many goblins. 

The creatures were sometimes on
their own, often in twos and threes.  They
watched the children with their black button eyes and smiled their V-shaped
smiles.  One of them held out a white
stone, another a piece of twig.   One even showed them a small brown button from
a settler’s jacket.  

‘There is no space,’ said the voices in Cassie’s head, as the goblin’s eyes watched her.  ‘There are no people.  There is no such thing as far away.’  

It seemed strange to her that she’d ever been persuaded to believe in an immensity of empty space beyond the caramel forest and its sky, for it seemed obvious now that everything that existed was as close as could be to everything else: close enough to whisper and rustle and murmur, close enough to touch…

She looked at the button.  She nodded.  She turned away. 

Peter clutched her hand so tightly
that it hurt.

*  *  *

Several
more times they heard the thud-thud-thud of a helicopter passing over head, and
saw the Agency searchlights sweeping officiously through the mushroom-like
trees, leaching the colour from leaves and trunks.

The children just hid until they passed, surrounded by the whispering and rustling and murmuring of the caramel forest.

Cassie had no desire to be plucked
up into the empty sky.

*  *  *

When
dawn came again, they came to a castle beside a pool.  It was very small, only about Peter’s height
in fact, and looked at first like a little smooth stalagmite that had grown
there, for some reason, beside the water.  
But one side of it was open, and they could see the intricate little chambers
inside it, with their amber whirls and coils that enclosed even smaller
chambers, and yet-tinier whorls…  

When they tired of looking at it, the
children gathered the spongy vegetation that grew around the castle and made
themselves a secret nest nearby, well hidden from the sky.  Then they found some savoury chicken fruit to
have for their supper and a couple of toffee apples for afters. 

‘Now wash your face and clean your
teeth in the water, Peter,’ Cassie said when they’d finished. ‘And then let’s
get you settled down.’

She stroked his head and told him a
story, while the sun rose in the sky, turning as it climbed from a syrupy
rosehip red to pale lemon.

‘I’ll look after you, my little bruv,’ she whispered to Peter’s already sleeping face. ‘I’ll always look after you.’

*  *  *

Three
goblins arrived.  One by one they
caressed the little amber castle, and bent down to stare into its
interior.  Then they settled on their
haunches on the bank of the pond, without even a glance at the two children.

‘Won’t find your way back now,’
said the voices in Cassie’s head.

‘Not if I can help it,’ muttered
Cassie contentedly, stretching out in her improvised bed.

*  *  *

Crack!

There was a gunshot, followed by human
voices and barking dogs.

Peter lurched into wakefulness with
a whimper.

Crack! 

One of the goblins dived into the
pool.

Crack!  A
man ran to the bank and fired into the water.

‘Is alright now, darlings.  We take you back to your Ma!’ growled another
man’s voice, right next to the children in a thick Luto accent.  ‘Goblins won’t scare you no more.’

Sitting up, Cassie and Peter clung
together.   The whispering and murmuring
of the caramel forest was suddenly far away.

‘And maybe this time Agency go
listen eh?’ grumbled a third man, helping Cassie and Peter to their feet.   ‘Maybe this time they go understand why
goblins is bad.’

The air was full of smoke.   These weren’t pulse weapons that these men
were carrying.  They were proper old-fashioned
guns, blasting out deadly balls of hot, hard matter. 

Dogs came sniffling and snuffling, first
round the children, and then, rather more interestedly, round some smooth greyish
stuff that was strewn over the ground nearby.

Cassie gazed at it,
uncomprehendingly.

‘Don’t worry about nothing,’ said
the leader of the search party.  (It was one
of dozens spread out across the forest, linked by radio to the Agency
helicopters overhead).  ‘Is only crazy
ideas these goblins put in your head. 
That’s all.  Only crazy
ideas.  They’ll went away soon enough.’

He ruffled Peter’s hair kindly, and
gave Cassie a friendly wink.  She stared
at him.  The other men were breaking up the
castle with their gun butts.

One of the dogs took an experimental mouthful of the grey stuff, then sneezed and spat it out.   It was goblin flesh, smooth all the way through, like the flesh of mushrooms.

Copyright 2012, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (17) Monsters

Clancy the traveller (see story 12) visits a poet in an obscure provincial outpost. The one who is most isolated in this story is an animal, a kind of carnivorous horse, which has been shut away in solitary confinement all its life.

This story was first published in Interzone in 2003 and was collected in the Turing Test.

Monsters

‘This is Dirk Johns, our leading novelist,’ said the poet’s
mother, ‘and this is Lucille, who makes wonderful little landscapes out of
clay…’

‘Oh, just decorative,’ protested the novelist’s tiny, bird-like wife, ‘purely decorative and nothing more.’

‘And this is Angelica Meadows, the painter.  You perhaps caught her recent exhibition in the Metropolis, Mr Clancy?  I believe it received very good notices.’

‘I believe I did hear something…’ I lied, shaking hands with a very attractive young woman with lively, merry eyes.  ‘I’m afraid I spend so little time in the Metropolis these days.’

‘And this,’ went on the poet’s mother, ‘is the composer, Ulrika Bennett.  We expect great things of her.’

No, I thought, looking into Ulrika
Bennett’s cavernous eyes, great music will never come from you.  You are too intense.  You lack the necessary playfulness.

And then there was Ulrika’s
husband, ‘the ceramicist’, and then an angry little dramatist, and then a man
who uncannily resembled a tortoise, complete with wrinkled neck, bald head and
tiny pursed little mouth.  

Well,’ I said, ‘I’m honoured.’

The tortoise was, it seemed, was
‘our foremost conductor and the director of our national conservatory.’

‘The honour is ours, Mr Clancy’ he said. ‘We have all read your extraordinary books, even out here.’

* * *

‘William!’ called the poet’s mother, ‘let us lead the way to
dinner!’

The poet turned from a conversation with the painter Angelica.  He had wonderfully innocent blue eyes, which had the odd quality that, while they seemed terribly naked and vulnerable, they were simultaneously completely opaque. 

‘Yes, of course, mother’

He pushed her wheelchair through
into the panelled dining room and the guests took their seats.  I was given the head of the table.  William sat at the opposite end, his mother
by his side.  Servants brought in the
soup.

‘William and I are trying hard,’ announced the poet’s mother to the whole company, ‘to persuade Mr Clancy that there is more to our little colony than cattle ranches.’

‘Indeed,’ I said soothingly, ‘there
is clearly also a thriving cultural life which I would very much like to hear
more about.’

Well, they needed no second
bidding.  Remarkable things were being achieved under the circumstances, I
was told, for the arts were struggling by with an appalling lack of support. 
Apart from the poet’s mother, Lady Henry, who was of course wonderful, there was not a single
serious patron of the fine arts to be found in the whole of Flain.  Everyone present did their heroic best, of
course, but not one of them had achieved the recognition that their talents
deserved…

And so on.  I had heard it many times before, in many
more provincial outposts than I cared to remember.   I made my usual sympathetic noises.

It was as the dessert was being
served that I became aware of the poet’s blue eyes upon me.

‘Tell me honestly, Mr Clancy,’ he
asked – and at once his mother was listening intently, as if she feared he
would need rescuing from himself –  ‘Had
you heard of even one of us here in this
room, before you knew you were coming to Flain?’

I hadn’t, honestly, and from what
little I had seen of their outmoded and derivative efforts, it was not
surprising. (Let us face it, even in the Metropolis, for every hundred who
fancy themselves as artists, there is only one who has anything interesting to
say.  It is just that in the Metropolis,
even one per cent is still a good many gifted and interesting people.)

But before I could frame a suitably
tactful reply, William’s mother had intervened.

‘Really, William, how rude!’

‘Rude?’ His face was innocence
itself. ‘Was that rude?  I do
apologise.  Then let me ask you another
question instead, Mr Clancy.  What in particular
were you hoping to see on your visit here?  
Please don’t feel you have to
mention our artistic efforts.’

‘Well I’m interested in every
aspect of course,’ I replied.  ‘But I
don’t deny that I’d like to learn more about the fire horses.’

There was a noticeable drop of
temperature in the room and everyone’s eyes turned to Lady Henry, watching for
her reaction.

‘Fire horses,’ sighed the novelist,
Johns. ‘Of course.  The first thing every
Metropolitan wants to see.  Yet surely
you must have them in zoos there?’

 I shrugged.

‘Of course, but then we have everything in the Metropolis, everything
remotely interesting that has ever existed anywhere.  I travel to see things in context.  And Fire horses are Flain to the outside world, the thing which makes Flain unique.
It was wonderful when I first disembarked here to see boys with their young fire
horses playing in the streets.’

 ‘How I wish
the brutes had been wiped out by the first colonists,’ said the poet’s
mother.  ‘Your curiosity is perfectly
understandable, Mr Clancy, but this country will not progress until we are
known for something other than one particularly ugly and ferocious animal.’

‘Yes,’ I said, soothingly, ‘I do see that it must be irritating when one’s homeland always
conjures up the same one thing in the minds of outsiders.’

‘It is irritating to think that our country is known only for its
monsters,’ said Lady Henry, ‘but unfortunately it is more than just
irritating.  How will we ever develop
anything approaching a mature and serious cultural life as long as the educated
and uneducated alike spend all their free time yelling their heads off in
horse-races and horse-fights, and a man’s worth is measured in equestrian
skill?  I do not blame you for your
curiosity, Mr Clancy, but how we long
for visitors who come with something other than fire horses in mind.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said several of them,
but the poet smiled and said nothing.

‘Well, I’ll have to see what I can
do about that,’ I said.

But of course in reality I knew
that my Metropolitan readers would not be any more interested than I was in the
arch theatricals at the Flain Opera or the third-rate canvasses in the National
Gallery of Flain, straining querulously for profundity and importance.  ‘The Arts’ are an urban thing, after all, and
no one does urban things better than the Metropolis itself.

‘I hardly like to mention it,’ I
said in a humble voice, which I hoped would be disarming, ‘but the other thing
for which Flain is famous is of course the game of sky-ball.’

The poet’s mother gave a snort of
distaste.

‘Ritualised thuggery!’ she
exclaimed.  ‘And so tedious.  I can’t abide the game myself.  I honestly think I would rather watch paint
drying on a wall.  I really do.  At least it would be restful.’

But Angelica the painter took a
different view.

‘Oh I love sky-ball!’ she declared. 
‘There’s a big game tomorrow – the Horsemen and the Rockets.  William and I should take you there, Mr
Clancy.  You’ll have a wonderful
time!’ 

William smiled.

‘Good idea, Angie.  I’d be very glad to take you, Mr Clancy, if
you’d like to go.’

‘But Mr Clancy is to visit the
Academy tomorrow,’ protested his mother. 
‘Professor Hark himself has agreed to show him round.  We really cannot…’

‘I do so appreciate the trouble you’ve gone to,’ I purred, ‘but if it is
at all possible to put Professor Hark
off, I would very much like to see the Horsemen and the Rockets.’

For, even back in the Metropolis, I
had heard of the Horsemen and the Rockets.

‘Well, of course,’ said Lady Henry,
‘if you want to go to the game we must take you. You know best what you need to
see.  I will talk to Professor Hark. No,
a sky-ball game will be… an experience for me.’

‘But good lord, Lady Henry’ I
protested, ‘there’s no need for you to come if you don’t want.  I’m sure William and Miss Meadows and I can…’

Polite murmurs of support came from
the distinguished guests, but Lady Henry was resolved:

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mr Clancy, of
course I will come. We must sample every aspect of life, must we not?  Not just those we find congenial.’  She summoned up a brave smile.  ‘No, I am sure it will be great fun.’

* * *

So we set off in the Henrys’ car the next morning, Lady Henry
riding up in front next to the elderly chauffeur  (the seat had been removed to accommodate her
wheelchair) while William and myself reclined on red leather in the back.  We picked up Angelica on the way and she squeezed
in between us, warm and alive and smelling of freshly mowed grass. 

‘I do hope you don’t support the Rockets, Lady Henry,’ she exclaimed, ‘because I must warn you I’m an absolutely rabid fan of the Horsemen!’

 Lady Henry gave a breathless, incredulous laugh.

‘I can assure you I really have no
idea about “supporting” anyone, Angela, but I’m absolutely determined to have
fun!’ cried the poet’s mother bravely.

She grew braver and braver by the
minute.  In fact, as the stadium itself
came into view and we began to pass the supporters converging on the ground,
Lady Henry’s braveness became so intense that I feared it might blow out the
windows of the car.

‘What a good idea this was, Mr Clancy!  What fun!  The colours are very striking don’t you think in this light, Angelica?  Red, blue. Almost luminous.  One thinks of those rather jolly little things that you paint on glass.’ 

‘Which are the Horsemen and which
are the Rockets?’ I asked.

‘The Horsemen wear red,’ William
began, ‘because their emblem is a…’

‘Here, Buttle,’ interrupted Lady
Henry, ‘pull over here and let me speak to this man.’

A steward was directing the crowds to the various gates and Lady Henry waylaid him:

‘I say, could you arrange some balcony seats for us please…  I will need someone to carry me up the stairs… And our hamper too…  No, no reservations….  I do hope you are not going to have to be bureaucratic about this, as I am a personal friend of the mayor… and this is Mr Clancy from the Metropolis, the distinguished writer… Thankyou so much… Here is something for your trouble… You are doing a stalwart job I can see.’ 

I glanced at William.  I could see he was angry and embarrassed, though Angelica seemed just to be amused.

‘There,’ said Lady Henry with satisfaction.  ‘Drive on Buttle, thankyou.  Now if you drop us off just here I believe these are the young men now who are going to help us up the stairs.’ 

* * *

With one steward unpacking our substantial picnic hamper for
us, another sent off to find her a blanket and a third dispatched to search for
aspirin (for she said she had a migraine coming on), Lady Henry settled into
her seat and surveyed the scene.

‘Of course, I have absolutely no
idea of the rules, William.  Just tell me
what on earth these young men are going to be trying to do.’

‘To begin with the Rockets will be
trying to get to the top, mother,’ said William, ‘and the Horsemen will be
trying to get to the bottom.  After each
goal they reverse the direction of play. 
The main thing is…’

At this point the game itself
began, to a great bellow from the crowd.

‘The main thing is, mother…’
William began again patiently.

But the old lady made an
exasperated gesture.

‘Oh, this is all much too
complicated for me.  I’m just going to
concentrate on the spectacle of the thing I think.  The spectacle.  And it is all rather jolly I have to
admit.  Rather your sort of thing
Angelica isn’t it?  Red and blue painted
on glass.  The sort of cheerful, uncomplicated
thing that you do so well.’

Then a huge roar of emotion rose
around us like a tidal wave, preventing further conversation.  A goal had been narrowly averted.  Angelica leapt to her feet.

‘Come on you reds!’ she bellowed like a bull.

William, watched her with a small,
pained, wistful smile which I could not properly read, but did not join
in.  Lady Henry winced and looked away.

‘I quite liked your last show
Angelica,’ she said, as soon the painter sat down in the next lull, ‘but if you
will forgive me for being frank, I am starting to feel that you need to stretch
yourself artistically a little more if your work is not in the end to become a
bit repetitive and predictable.’

‘Let’s just watch the game, shall
we, Mother?’ said William.

* * *

Six massive pylons were arranged in a hexagon around the
arena and between them were stretched at high tension a series of horizontal
nets, one above another every two metres, ascending to fifty metres up.  Each net was punctured by a number of round
openings through which the players could drop, jump or climb, but these
openings were staggered so that a player could not drop down more than one
layer at a time. 

All the same, if no one stopped
them, the specialist players called ‘rollers’ could move from top to bottom
with incredible speed, dropping through one hole, rolling sideways into the
next, swinging beneath a net to the one after, dropping and rolling again…the
ball all the while clutched under one arm, and the crowd roaring its delight or
dismay.   ‘Bouncers’, who specialised in upward dashes, used the nets as
trampolines to move with almost the same breath-taking velocity as the rollers,
even though they had to work against gravity instead of with it. 

But of course neither bouncers nor
rollers got a clear run.  While these
high-speed vertical dashes were taking place through the nets, other players
were swarming up or down to positions ahead of the opposing team’s rollers or
bouncers in order to block them off. 
Pitched battles took place at the various levels, with players bouncing
from the nets under their feet to launch ferocious tackles, or swinging from
the nets over their heads to deliver flying kicks.   It was like football, but in three
dimensions and without constraints. 
Eight players were taken off injured during the match.

‘Do you play sky-ball at all,
William?’ I asked in the car on the way back.

William was about to answer when
his mother broke in.

‘I always insisted that he should
be excused from the game,’ she said, turning her head towards us with
difficulty. ‘William never showed the slightest inclination towards it, and it
seemed to me absurd that a sensitive child should be put through it.’

‘Oh but my brothers loved it,’
exclaimed Angelica.  ‘Michael must have
broken every bone in his body at one time or another, but it never put him
off.  He couldn’t wait to get back into
the game.’ 

We turned into the drive of
Angelica’s home.  In front of her
family’s large and comfortable farmhouse, William got out of the car to let her
out and say goodbye.  A short exchange
took place between them which I couldn’t hear. 
I wasn’t sure if they were arranging an assignation or conducting a
muted row.

‘Do you know, William,’ said Lady
Henry, when he had rejoined us and we were heading back down the drive, ‘I’m
beginning to have second thoughts about Angelica. I am not sure she is quite one of us, if you know what I
mean.   I can’t help feeling that
Angelica the artist is really a very secondary part of her nature and that
underneath is a pretty average country girl of the huntin’ and shootin’ variety.
Don’t you agree?’

But the poet declined to answer.

‘There are some fire horses for
you, Clancy,’ he merely said, as we passed a paddock with a couple of yearling
beasts in it, feeding at a manger in the far corner.

‘I gather boys in Flain are given
baby fire horses to grow up with?’ I said.

‘It’s traditional, yes,’ William
said.

‘And were you given one?’

We had left the estate of
Angelica’s family and were back on the empty open road.  William looked out of the window at the wide
fields. 

‘Yes.  My Uncle John gave me one when I was six.’

‘Did you learn to ride?  I’ve seen boys in the street with their small
fire horses and they seem quite dangerous.’

‘No, I never learned.  And yes, they are dangerous.  In fact Uncle John himself died in a riding
accident only few years after he gave me the horse.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be, Mr Clancy,’ said
William’s mother, once again straining to turn round and look at me.  ‘Don’t be sorry at all.  My brother was a foolish and immature young
man who liked to show off with fire horses and fast cars because he wanted to
impress a certain kind of silly young woman. 
The accident was entirely his
own fault.’

I glanced at William. 
But he still looking out of the window and I couldn’t see his face.

‘What would have been tragic,
though,’ went on Lady Henry, ‘would be if I had allowed my brother to persuade
William to ride – and William had had
an accident.  After all William is now
Flain’s foremost poet and it was obvious even at that age that he was quite
exceptionally gifted. Imagine if all that had been thrown away because some
stupid animal had flung him off its back and broke his neck?’

Some minutes later William, with an
obvious effort, turned towards me.

‘Ah here we are.  Almost home. 
Do you know I think I must have nodded off a while there, I do apologise.  A whisky Clancy perhaps, before we change for
dinner?’

* * *

Two days before my departure from Flain, Lady Henry received
some bad news about her northern estates. 
It had come to light somehow that her steward up there had been
embezzling funds over many years.  Lady
Henry was in a state of distraction that night, torn between competing desires.
For whatever reason, she seemed to hate the idea of leaving William and myself
to our own devices, but she also found it intolerable not being at the helm to
manage the crisis in the north.  In the
end it was the latter anxiety that won out. 
The following morning, after a great flurry of preparation that had
every servant in the house running around like agitated ants, she set off in
the car with Buttle.

William and I took our coffee out onto the stone terrace which overlooked the park and watched the car winding along the drive, out through the gate and on into the world beyond.  It was a bright, fresh, softly gilded morning, on the cusp between summer and autumn.

William sighed contentedly.

‘Peace!’ he exclaimed.

 I smiled.

‘Mother has arranged for us to visit that sculptor’s workshop this morning,’ he then said.  ‘Do I take it you actually want to go?’

 I laughed.  ‘To be quite honest, no.  Not in the slightest.’

 ‘Well, thank God for that.  I think I will scream if we have to traipse round many more of Mother’s artistic hangers-on.’

We poured more coffee and settled back comfortably in our chairs.  A family of deer had emerged from the woods to the left to feed on the wide lawns along the drive and we watched them for some minutes in companionable silence.      Then he suddenly turned the full blueness of his gaze upon me.

‘Have you read many of my poems, Clancy?’

‘Yes, all of them,’ I told him quite truthfully.  ‘All your published ones at least.’

I do my research.  When I decided to accept the invitation from William’s mother to visit them, I had hunted down and looked through all six of Williams slim little collections, full of veiled agonised coded allusions to his mother’s catastrophic accident while pregnant with William, his father’s shotgun suicide a week before his birth.  (Why do we feel the need to wear our wounds as badges?)

‘And, tell me quite honestly,’ William probed.  ‘What did you think of them?’

 I hesitated.

‘You write very well,’ I said.  ‘And you also have things to say.  I suppose what I sometimes felt, though, was that there was a big difference between what you really wanted to say and what you actually were able to express in those verses.  I had the feeling of something – contained… something contained at an intolerably high pressure, but which you were only able to squeeze out through a tiny little hole.’

 William laughed.  ‘Constipated!  That’s the word you’re looking for.’

On the contrary, it was precisely the word I was trying to avoid!

I laughed with him.   ‘Well no, not exactly, but…’

‘Constipated!’ His laugh didn’t seem bitter.  It appeared that he was genuinely entertained.  ‘That is really very good, Clancy.   Constipated is exactly right.’

 Then, quite suddenly, he stood up.

‘Do you fancy a short walk, Clancy?  There’s something I’d very much like to show you.’

* * *

The place he took me to was on the outer edges of their
park.  The woods here had been neglected
and were clogged up by creepers and by dead trees left to lie and rot where
they had fallen.   Here, in a damp little
valley full of stinging nettles, stood a very large brick outbuilding which
could have been a warehouse or a mill. 
There were big double doors at one end, bolted and padlocked, but
William led me to an iron staircase like a fire escape to one side of the
building.   At a height equivalent to the
second storey of a normal house, this staircase led through a small door into
the dark interior.   Cautioning me to be
silent, William unlocked it.

It was too dark inside to see anything at first, but I gathered from the acoustics that the inside of the building was a single space.   We seemed to be standing on a gallery that ran round the sides of it.  William motioned to me to squat down beside him, so only our heads were above the balustrade. 

Almost as soon as we entered I
heard the animal snorting and snuffling and tearing at its food.  Now, as my eyes adapted, I made it out down
there on the far side of the great bare stable. 
It must have been nearly the height of an elephant, with shoulders and
haunches bulging with muscle. It was pulling with its teeth at the leg and
haunches of an ox that had been hacked from a carcass and dumped into its manager.

‘He hasn’t noticed us yet,’ whispered William.  ‘He wasn’t looking in our direction when we came in.’

‘I take it this is the same horse that your uncle gave you?’ I asked him, also in a whisper.

William nodded.

‘But you never rode him?’

‘No.’

‘And will you ever ride him?’

William gave a little incredulous snort.  The sound made the fire horse lift its head and sniff suspiciously at the air, but after a second or two it returned again to its meat.

‘No of course not,’ he said, ‘even if I knew how to ride a fire horse, which I don’t, I couldn’t ride this thing now.   No one can ride an adult fire horse unless it was broken in as a foal.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘I’ll tell you something,
Clancy.  If you or I were to go down and
approach him, he would tear us limb from limb. 
I’m not exaggerating.’

I nodded. 

‘So why do you keep him?’

It seemed that I had spoken too
loudly.  The beast lifted its head again
and sniffed, but this time it didn’t turn back to its food.  Growling, it scanned the gallery.  Then it let loose an appalling scream of
rage.

I have never heard such a
sound.  Really and truly in all my life
and all my travels, I have never heard a living thing shriek like that dreadful
fire horse in its echoing prison.

And now it came thundering across
the stable.  Right beneath us, glaring up
at us, it reared up on its hind legs to try and reach us, screaming again and
again and again so that I thought my eardrums would burst. The whole building
shook with the beating of the animal’s hooves on the wall.  And then, just as with my hands over my ears
I shouted to William that I wanted to leave, the brute suddenly emitted a bolt
of lightning from its mouth that momentarily illuminated that entire cavernous
space with the brilliance of daylight. 

William’s face was radiant, but I
had had enough.  I made my own way back
to the door and back into daylight. 
Those decaying woods outside had seemed sour and gloomy before, but
compared to the dark stable of the fire horse they now seemed almost
cheerful.  I went down the steps and,
making myself comfortable on a fallen tree, took out my notebook and began to
record some thoughts while I waited for the poet to finish whatever it was he
felt he needed to do in there.  I was surprised
and pleased to find my imagination flowing freely.  The imprisoned fire horse, it seemed, had
provided the catalyst, the injection of venom, that sooner or later I always
needed to bring each book of mine to life. 
Inwardly laughing, I poured out idea after idea while the muffled screams
of the tormented monster kept on and on –- and from time to time another flash
of lightening momentarily illuminated the cracks in the door at the top of the
stairs.

After a few minutes William
emerged.  His face was shining. 

‘I’ll tell you why I don’t get rid
of him, Clancy,’ he declared, speaking rather too loudly, as if he was
drunk.  ‘Because he is what I love best
in the whole world!  The only thing I’ve ever loved, apart from
my Uncle John.’

Behind him the fire horse screamed
again and I wondered what William thought he meant by ‘love’ when he spoke of
this animal which he had condemned to solitude and darkness and madness.

‘I feel I have fallen in your
esteem,’ he said on the way back to the house.

There had been a long silence
between us as we trudged back from the dank little valley of brambles and
stinging nettles and out again into the formal, public parkland of William’s
and his mother’s country seat.

‘You are repelled, I think,’ William persisted, ‘by
the idea of my doting on a horse which I have never dared to ride.  Isn’t that so?’

I couldn’t think of anything to
say, so he answered for me.

‘You are repelled and actually so am I. 
I am disgusted and ashamed by the spectacle of my weakness.  And yet this is the only way I know of making
myself feel alive.  Do you understand
me?   You find my work a little
constipated and bottled up, you say.  But
if I didn’t go down to the fire horse, shamed and miserable as it makes me
feel, I wouldn’t be able to write at all.’

I made myself offer a reassuring
remark.

‘We all have to find our way of
harnessing the power of our demons.’

It would have been kinder, and more
honest, if I had acknowledged that the encounter with the firehorse had been a
catalyst for me also and that for the first time in this visit, my book had
begun to flow and come alive.   But I
couldn’t bring myself to make such a close connection between my own experience
and his.

.  

* * *

That night William slipped out shortly after his mother
returned, without goodbyes or explanations.

‘I suppose he showed you his blessed horse?’ said Lady Henry as she and I sat at supper.

‘He did.  An extraordinary experience I must say.’

‘And I suppose he told you that the horse and his Uncle John were the only things he had ever really loved?’

 My surprise must have shown.  She nodded.

‘It’s his standard line.   He’s used it to good effect with several impressionable young girls.  Silly boy.  Good lord, Mr Clancy, he doesn’t have to stay with me if he doesn’t want to!  We are wealthy people after all!  We have more than one house!  I have other people to push me around!’

She gave a bitter laugh.

‘I don’t know what kind of monster you think I am Mr
Clancy, and I don’t suppose it really matters, but I will tell you this.  When William was six and his uncle tried to
get him to ride, he clung to me so tightly and so desperately that it bruised
me, and he begged and pleaded with me to promise that I’d never make him do
it.  That night he actually wet his bed
with fear.  Perhaps you think I was weak
and I should have made him ride the horse? 
But, with respect Mr Clancy, remember that you are not a parent
yourself, and certainly not the sole parent of an only child.’

Her eyes filled with tears and she
dabbed at them angrily with her napkin.

‘His father was a violent, arrogant drunk,’ she
said.  ‘Far worse than my brother.   He was the very worst type of Flainian
male.  He pushed me down the stairs you
know.  That was how I ended up like
this.  He pushed me in a fit of rage and
broke my back.   It was a miracle that
William survived, a complete miracle. 
And then, when I refused to promise to keep secret the reason for my
paralysis, my dear brave husband blew off his own head.  I wanted William to be different.  I wanted him to be gentle.  I didn’t want him to glory in strength and
danger.’

She gave a small, self-deprecating
shrug.

‘I do acknowledge that I lack a
certain… lightness.’

‘Lady Henry, I am sure that…’

But the poet’s mother cut me off.

‘Now do try this wine, Mr Clancy,’ she cried brightly, so instantly
transformed that I almost wondered whether I had dreamed what had gone
before.  ‘It was absurdly expensive and I’ve been saving it for someone who was
capable of appreciating it.’

* * *

In the early hours of the morning I heard William come
crashing in through the front doors.

‘Come and get my boots off!’ he bellowed.  ‘One of you lazy bastards come down and take off my boots.’

And then I heard him outside the door of my room abusing some servant or other who was patiently helping him along the corridor.

‘Watch out, you clumsy oaf!  Can’t you at least look where you’re going?’

He still hadn’t emerged when I left in the morning for the Metropolis.

Copyright 2003, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (16) Johnny’s New Job

Not the most subtle story I’ve ever written.

I used to be a social worker and then a manager of a team of social workers. This story poured out of me more or less in a single burst of rage, when the ‘Baby P’ tragedy was in in the news (the murder of Peter Connolly by his mothers boyfriend), and the media and the government were conducting one of their periodic carnivals of shame. During a previous such event, a fellow team manager had told me, ‘I managed to get my kids out of the house just half an hour before the TV cameras arrived on my lawn’.

My experience in that job has made me much more forgiving than most people are of the ‘mistakes’ made not only by social workers but by anyone who has to make decisions in real time, in the messiness and uncertainty of the real world. I did not feel inclined to condemn the police officer who ran towards an innocent Brazilian electrician and shot him, believing him to be a suicide bomber. And I will not be one of those calling for heads to roll in the aftermath of this Covid-19 episode. Hindsight makes all kind of things look like obvious mistakes that simply don’t look that way at all when they are happening.

This story first appeared in Interzone in 2010 and is collected in The Peacock Cloak.

Johnny’s New Job

Monday it was all round the factory
where Johnny worked that a little girl called Jenny Sue had been killed by her
wicked stepfather.  He had dropped her
down a dry well and left her there to starve.    

Wednesday, the
case was officially declared by the government to be an instance of Welfare
Knew And Did Nothing (within the meaning of the Summary Judgement Act) so of
course everyone kept their ears open and sure enough pretty soon the thrilling
voice of the Public Accuser came booming out of the factory Screens, demanding
on behalf of everyone there that culprits be identified for him to Name.

‘Ordinary decent
folk have had enough!’ the Public Accuser told the city government, while every
single soul in the factory stood raptly listening.  ‘Those responsible must pay the Price.’

Everyone
cheered.  Accuser’s dark unsmiling face
stared down at them from the giant Screen. 
And then on came Factory Manager Number One and suggested they all do
two hours of extra work for nothing, in memory of the little girl.

‘Let’s all do
our bit extra,’ Factory Manager said, ‘It’s what Jenny Sue would have wanted.’

And everyone
cheered once more and returned to their looms, working with such gusto that
their output for the next two hours was the same as it would normally be in
half a day.  And some of them had tears
running down their faces as they worked and worked for that poor dear dead
little child.

They knew they’d
need time off, you see, when Welfare’s Name was announced.

**

Friday afternoon at 3, Screen gave
out that the Announcement of Welfare’s Name would be in an hour’s time at City
Hall, to be done by the Public Accuser himself.

‘Work hard as you can to half three,’ said Factory Manager, ‘and then knock off early and go with my blessing on full pay.  I know you all want to do your bit.  And I will do mine.’

And once again everyone cheered, and told each other he really wasn’t so bad at all as bosses go, and they set to and worked at the looms as hard as they could until half-past three.  Then it was down tools and on with coats and down through the grey streets to City Hall where a big crowd was already gathering, with a brass band playing solemn music in memory of the little girl and a big flag hanging from the balcony.

**

Announcement was never on
time.   The last time it had happened was
when Welfare took a little boy away from his loving mum and dad, and they both
begged her not to, but the Welfare Officer didn’t care, that heartless cow,
even though the mum was pretty and the dad had once served in the wars in
Araby.  The wait was over seventy minutes
that time and the crowd was going crazy with impatience by the time the
Announcement was made.  But in a way that
was all part of it.  Announcement on time
would spoil things really.  It wouldn’t
give folk a chance to wind themselves up for what had to be done.

Anyway, at ten
past four the Mayor came out onto the balcony.

‘Fellow citizens, it is my sad duty to announce that a dear little girl from our city has died due to the criminal negligence of Welfare.’

There must have been two, three thousand there.  Everyone cheered and pretty soon the old familiar chant went up.

‘The names!  The names!  The names!’

And the Mayor gave a little wave as if to say, I do know and I’d like to tell you but I’m afraid it’s not my job.  And on the big Screen above, where his face was shown as high as a double-decker bus, you could see his little smile as if he was sharing with everybody the impatience he felt with that as a human being, whether or not he was Mayor.  And everyone said to themselves, well, he’s not so bad, he’s just like us really.

Then the Mayor went back inside – ‘The names!  The names!  The names!’ – and presently out he came again with that same shy little smile and held up his hands for quiet.  It was nearly half-past four by then.

‘Citizens!  Citizens!  Thankyou as ever for your commitment and concern.  You make me proud to lead this great city.  It is my great pleasure and honour now to give to you that mighty defender all that is good and decent in our community, that fierce guardian of everything that is right.  I give you…The Public Accuser.’

And out came Accuser in his black robe, and you could see on the screen that he never even nodded to Mayor, never even smiled. 

**

‘The names!’ yelled out Johnny,
just as everyone else was settling down, so you could hear his individual voice
right across the square.

And Accuser looked at him, looked over the top of his half-moon glasses right across the square at poor little Johnny down there in the crowd.

Johnny went
bright red.

‘Well I was only saying…’ he muttered.

‘My fellow citizens,’ boomed out Accuser, ‘a terrible crime has again been committed by Welfare in whom we generously placed our trust.  We did not ask much of them.  We did not ask of them that they make our city rich.  We did not ask of them that they heal the sick.  All we asked of them – the one little thing we asked – was that they protect our children, our precious little ones, and to ensure that none of them came to harm.  And yet they failed, again they failed, again they betrayed the little ones.  And it is has been looked into, as ever, by the proper people, and we are now at that point we always reach on these occasions when I tell you the name, or names, of the officers concerned.’

He slowly unfolded a piece of paper, placed it on the dais in front of him and smoothed it out. 

‘I have so far identified just one Welfare Officer who must take the blame, though more names may likely follow later.’

Accuser paused,
looked out over his half-moon glasses to make sure the people were ready for
the full seriousness of what he was about to say.

‘That negligent
and heartless Officer is…’ again he paused. 
‘That blundering and incompetent fool… That disgrace both to manhood and
to our city… is… ‘

And here he
looked down at his paper.

‘…is Officer
David Simpson of 15 Lavender Grove, Uptown.’

The crowed booed
and hissed.  Accuser took off his glasses
and scanned the faces below, as if to make sure that everyone present had fully
understood.

But he need not have worried.  The people were already surging out of the square, bellowing with grief and rage.

And off Johnny went with them, striding and sometimes even running through the streets, adding his own impatience to the general haste to get to 15 Lavender Grove and get the job done.

‘Welfare Officer David Simpson,’ announced Screens along the way, ‘had been receiving a salary of seventy thousand gold crowns a year….’

There were cries
of incredulity and rage.

‘…owns a real
car,’ the next Screen was saying.

You heard bits
as you passed the Screens every fifty metres or so, and then in between you
couldn’t hear.

‘…and this year
he went for a holiday in sunny Tartary with his wife Jennifer and his two
children, Horace and Portia, both at Younger’s Infant School.  That’s on Upton High Street, by the way, and
here are the pictures of the kids…’

The crowd looked
up at the children and hissed.

‘How would he
have liked it if it had been one of them?’

‘Tartary, eh?’
the announcer was musing aloud on the next Screen.   ‘Tartary. 
Not bad.  Not bad at all for a man
who was paid to care for little children and instead stood back and did
nothing while an innocent little girl was killed.’

‘The bastard, get him!’ yelled Johnny, who wouldn’t have minded a holiday in Tartary himself.

‘Yes get him,’ agreed the folk all around him, hurrying earnestly through the streets, determined that what happened to Jenny Sue must never ever happen again.

‘We’re doing this for you Jenny sweetheart!’ shouted out a woman nearby, in a voice that started strong and ended with a sob.

‘For you, Jenny Sue!’ the crowd yelled with her, and many joined her in angry tears.

‘Someone ought
to chuck his little girl down a well and see how he likes it,’ a man
said to Johnny: it was a tiny little man with a huge moustache.  ‘See how he feels about that.’

Well that
sounded fair enough to Johnny so he yelled it out.

‘Let’s get his
little girl Portia,’ he yelled. ‘Let’s chuck her down a well!’

‘Yeah, let’s get
her,’ a few people around him called out.

But it was a bit
half-hearted and quickly petered out, as if the crowd sensed that there was a
contradiction here somewhere, even if it was hard to put your finger on it.

Poor Johnny felt
a bit crushed that his contribution had gone unappreciated but a kindly woman
beside him put her hand gently on his shoulder.

‘We might hate
her,’ the woman said, ‘and we might well hope that she dies too, a horrible
cruel death, so he can see what it’s like, and be truly sorry.  But she is only a child after all, whatever
we might think of her.  We’ve got to
remember that.’

**

When they reached the sign that
said ‘Welcome to Upton’ everybody cheered, and for a little while the crowd
milled about in the middle of a cross roads, wondering where to go next,
growing and spreading out into the surrounding streets as more people poured in
from behind.  Traffic lights went red,
orange, green, orange, red to no avail while cars and vans waited respectfully
for these good but justifiably angry people to move on in their own good time.

‘Where’s Lavender Grove, mate?’ the crowd called out collectively to the people of Upton.

‘Up that way, turn right and then left, you can’t miss it, mate,’ the people of Upton called back in strong stern voices, only too glad to be of help.  And some of them came along.

**

Pretty soon the crowd reached
Lavender Grove, and, shouting and yelling all the while, began squeezing itself
in as best it could. 

It was street of
little detached houses with tidy front gardens. 
Outside every house on the street there were law officers in blue to
make sure that no one got carried away. 

‘It’s
frustrating isn’t it?’ said a tall man near Johnny.  ‘You want to do over the whole damn street of
them, don’t you?’

‘Course you do,’
Johnny said.

But the man’s
friend opined that it didn’t really help to take it out on the
neighbours.  A neighbour’s proper role in
this situation was more to come out and tell stories to Screen about the one
being Named.

‘…about how they never
would have thought it, and all that,’ the man said. 

‘Well, I
suppose,’ the first man reluctantly agreed.

There were law
officers in front of number 15 too.  But
theywere there for a different reason. 
Their job was to ensure that the people inside did not slip away before
it was time.  They had a couple of cars
ready with their engines running and red lights going round and round on
top.  Pretty soon the sergeant in charge
decided there were enough people crammed into the street.  He nodded to the officer by the door, and the
officer gave a sharp rap and out came the wife Jennifer and the two children
Horace and Portia, their faces white with the knowledge of their sin.  For, as everyone knows, to be in the presence
of sin is sin.  It’s something you catch like a disease.

And the crowd
booed and hissed and yelled and a couple of hotheads rushed forward to lay into
them, dear good passionate young fellows that they were, and had to be gently
pushed back by the law. 

Cold and stern,
the law put the mother and the two children in one of their cars and off it
went down the street with the other car following after.  You could see the law didn’t like it any more
than anyone else, letting Welfare’s family get off lightly like that, but they
had their job to do, and all credit to them.

‘Chuck them down a well and see how he likes
it,’ yelled a fat woman, and a great roar of approval went up. 

Johnny looked at
her enviously and wondered what she’d got that he hadn’t. But he noticed that
the crowd seemed to sense somehow that these were only words, not an actual
proposal.  It let the car go by and out
of Lavender Grove and off to wherever it was they were going.   

**

So now it was down to the real business.  All these good honest people who’d come up
here from City Hall were standing looking at the front door of 15 Lavender
Grove and everyone there knew there was no more wife and kids or anyone else in
there, just Named Welfare himself on his own. 
And it was a strange feeling, a strange exciting feeling that you felt
going right through you, in your body as well as in your mind, a bit like sex,
knowing he was inside there, scared witless, and knowing that somehow or other
they would soon get him out.

And then there was a rustle of excitement from the back of the crowd, and calls of ‘Gangway!  Gangway!’ and people moved back to make a path for Accuser himself, arriving not in a car but on foot, there in the actual flesh, moving among them.  He passed so close that Johnny could reach out and touch his black robe as he went by.

Straight up to the house went Accuser and rapped hard on the door.

‘David Simpson!’ bellowed the Public Accuser.  ‘Come out and face the people of this city.’

Nothing.  No sound from inside at all. So Accuser, grim-faced, picked three strong men from the crowd and they all went into the house and pretty soon, after a little bit of muffled shouting, came out again with the despicable man who had let little Jenny die.  The crowd, the poor wounded grieving crowd, went crazy with rage, screaming and yelling at him that he was scum and vermin.

Accuser held up his hands for quiet, and then he turned to the snivelling Welfare and demanded of him loudly and firmly and with great dignity that he own up to what he had done.

‘Do you deny that it was your fault that that dear little girl was thrown down the well?’ boomed Accuser in his great and dreadful voice.

 The Welfare Officer said something that no one but Accuser could hear.

‘He says he did his best,’ Accuser repeated, as if he was handling something dirty with tongs.  ‘He says it’s not always easy to know what is going to happen in advance. He says he had a lot on.’

 Accuser looked out at the crowd, letting that contemptible drivel sink in.  Then he roared out the rage that they all felt.

‘What could he have had on that was more important than saving a little girl?  What is more important than that?  Holidays in Tartary, perhaps?’

He held his hands out wide in a gesture of helplessness.  Even Accuser, it seemed, with all his wisdom and experience, was still dumbfounded by the flimsiness of these people’s excuses.  Even Accuser shared the bewilderment of ordinary decent folk.

‘Do we need to hear more?’ he asked

‘No!  No!  No!’ hollered the crowd, for it was anxious to get on. 

And it trusted
Accuser, it knew it could rely on everything he said.  His job was to expose these wretched Welfare
Officers, and lay bare their craven willingness to be led and misled by others.  There was no need for anyone else to try.

**

As he walked away from the lynching
with the rest of the crowd, Johnny felt a little… strange.  Not that he didn’t felt cleansed, not that he
didn’t feel uplifted.  But yet all the
same he did feel just a little bit uneasy. 

And actually
people in general were quite quiet as they trailed out through the grey old
streets.  A few enthusiasts were chanting
and shouting – ‘Well!  Well!  Well! Welfare!’ – but on the whole most
people were quiet.

‘It was for
Jenny,’ Johnny reminded himself.  ‘It was
for little Jenny Sue, and to make sure it never happens again.’

And even as he
thought this to himself he heard a woman nearby saying the very same thing to
her friend.

‘We had to do it
didn’t we?  For Jenny Sue.’

 Everyone talked about that little girl as if
they knew her.

‘It’s not like
we want to do stuff like that,’ the woman told her friend.

 ‘Of course not,’ her friend agreed. ‘It’s the
last thing we’d want to do if there was any choice in the matter.’

Soon afterwards
Johnny ran into some people he knew from the factory, Ralph, Angela, Mike and a
few more, who were going to get a drink. 
Johnny had always been a bit of a loner, a bit on the edge of things,
and people like that wouldn’t normally have thought of asking him to come
along, but at a time like this you stuck together.

‘You coming for
a jar Johnny, my old mate?’ said Mike. 
‘I think we deserve one after all that, don’t you?’

They found a big
bar in the city centre and began to drank quickly, their thirst not easily
quenched.  And while they drank, Screen
gave out more news.  There would
definitely be more Names, it seemed. 
More would be announced next week. 

‘Well,’ grunted
Ralph, who’d been near the front when the Price was paid. ‘I just hope they get
it right when they name these Names.’

Mike looked
sharply up at him.

‘What do you
mean?’ he demanded.

‘Well, if they
Named the wrong people, it would…’

Ralph’s voice
tailed off.  Everyone looked at him, dismayed.

‘What exactly
are you saying Ralph?’ asked Mike coldly.

His voice had a
warning edge and he looked round significantly at everyone there to confirm
that he was speaking for all of them and that he counted on all of them for
support. 

‘You want to be
careful, Ralph mate,’ Mike said.  ‘If I
didn’t know you better I’d think you didn’t care about Jenny Sue.’

‘Yeah that’s
right!’ said Johnny, seeing a chance to establish himself.  ‘You want to watch what you’re saying,
Ralph.  If we don’t go after the bastards
that let her die, that poor little girl will have died for nothing.’

Ralph looked a
bit scared.

‘Of course I
care about Jenny Sue,’ he said indignantly. 
‘I’d lay down my own life if it would bring her back.’

‘Oh that’s a
lovely thing to say,’ exclaimed Angela, who liked to make the peace.

‘And anyone who
let her die,’ Ralph went on, ‘deserves everything they get.’

Mike was
mollified.  He reached out and warmly
grasped his friend’s hand.

‘That’s better,
Ralph my old mate.  That’s the good old
Ralph we know.’ 

**

But here’s the funny bit of the
story.  When Johnny was staggering home
with seven pints inside him, he ran into six big blokes with shaven heads,
stripy tops and cudgels.  They came
straight at him and he tried to run but he just couldn’t manage it with all
that beer in him.

‘Steady!  Steady!’ they told him, laughing as he
wriggled and squirmed in the grip of two of them.

There was a law
man over the other side of the street and he was laughing too.  And even Johnny gave a rueful smile, because
of course he knew these blokes were government men and were only doing their
job.

‘You don’t need
me to tell you who we are do you, son?’ asked the chief of them, a great
neckless barrel of a man.

‘No you don’t,
mate,’ Johnny said.  ‘I know who you
are.  You’re the press gang and it looks
like you’ve got me fair and square.’

‘That’s right
mate,’ said their leader, ‘we’re the press gang alright, and my name’s Bobby
Grab.’

He put on his
special electric glasses and reached out his fat hand so that Johnny could give
him his government card.

‘Johnny,’ Bobby
Grab read out, ‘Johnny Jones.  Works in
the blanket factory for two hundred crowns a week.  Well this is your lucky day Johnny Jones,
because in this job we’ve got lined up for you, they’ll pay you twice that.’

‘Oh,’ said
Johnny, very surprised, ‘so what service is that?’

‘The Welfare,
mate.  They’ve had a bit of a recruitment
problem lately for some reason, so they’ve had to get us on the job.  Which means you’re pressed mate.  Five years national service in Welfare.  Could be the making of you.’

Johnny’s face
was white.

‘The
Welfare?  You’ve got to be kidding
me.  I don’t want to be in Welfare!’

‘Why not
mate?  Why on earth not?  The money’s good and you’d be doing important
work.  Protecting children, protecting
innocent little ones.  What could be
better work than that?’

‘But… But look
what happened to that Welfare today…  I
was there… They… We…’

At this Bobby
Grab’s face grew dark.

‘What are you
saying Johnny boy?  Are you saying that David
Simpson didn’t deserve what he got?  I
find that hard to believe, I must say, after what happened to that poor little
Jenny Sue.’

‘No, mate. of
course not. ‘

‘Would that
little girl have had to suffer if he’d done his job?’

‘No, mate.’

‘You sure?’

‘Of course I’m
sure.’

‘I should hope
you are.  Otherwise what were you doing
there, as I could see on your card, helping out at Lavender Grove this
afternoon?  What were you doing there if
that was a man who didn’t deserve it?’

‘I’m not saying
that.’

‘Well I’m
relieved to hear it, mate.’

‘But… I might
not be any good at the job.  That’s what
I mean.  I might not know what to do,’

The gangman
laughed indulgently.

‘You’re
forgetting something, mate.  You’re
forgetting what always happens when a little child dies like Jenny Sue.  First the Public Accuser does the Naming and
sees that the Price is paid.  But what
comes next, eh?  What comes next?’

‘Um… I…  er…’

‘Then comes the
Healer, doesn’t he?’ the gangman reminded him, as if he was talking to a child.
‘The Healer comes in, dressed in white, just as Accuser comes dressed in
black.  And Healer looks into it all
doesn’t he?  And he listens to those who
know about these things, and he makes new rules to ensure that it will never
ever happen again.  You must know that,
mate!  He does it every time!’

Johnny nodded
yes, he supposed so.  Truth be told, you
didn’t pay so much attention to these things after the Naming and the Price
were done.  And it wasn’t on the Screens
much either.

‘Trust me, my
lad, that’s how it works,’ said Bobby Grab, indulgently pinching Johnny’s cheek
between a fat finger and a fat thumb, as if he was a kind old uncle and Johnny
was a little boy.

Bobby turned his
neckless head to look at his men.

‘I’m right boys,
aren’t I?’ he asked.

‘Spot on, boss,
spot on.’

‘So what I’m
saying,’ the gangman went on, ‘what I’m saying is that by the time you start
work as a Welfare Officer, Healer will have come, and he’ll tell you just what
to do, and then all you’ll have to do is do what he says and you’ll be fine.  Beats working in a blanket factory every time
if you ask my opinion.  And it’s not as
if you’ve got the build for oursort
of work.’

He beamed round
at the big men around him.  All the
gangmen laughed.

‘Just listen to
the Healer, Johnny, and you’ll be fine,’ advised Bobby Grab, and he nodded to
his men to let Johnny go. 

‘Take the week
off,’ he said.  ‘That’s the law.  A week on full pay.  And then you’ll get a letter telling you what
to do. Alright?  You won’t play silly
buggers will you?  You know that we’d
only come and find you?  ’Course you
do.  And anyway when you think about what
I’ve said, you’ll realise that this could be just the chance you need.  After all a fair-minded young fellow like you
wouldn’t have gone to the lynching if you didn’t know perfectly well that any
half-decent human being could do a better job than Officer Simpson.  It wouldn’t really have been right.’

He gave Johnny a
hearty slap on the back to send him on his way, and then the gang headed off
into town looking for more young men and women. 

**

Johnny headed home.  But all the way he kept noticing the Screens with their promises of new Names next week. And he dreamt that night that he was alone at the bottom of a well, like poor little Jenny Sue.

Copyright 2010, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (15) The Gates of Eden

Nothing whatever to do with my Eden books, this is a short, non-SF story from my Spring Tide story collection. The only connection is the myth of ‘the fall’ itself.

‘The Gates of Eden’ qualifies as an isolation story, I’d say, simply on the grounds that there is only one person in the whole story: a middle-aged businesswoman on her way to a difficult meeting.

The Gates of Eden

I
made a mistake at work.   I got a large
order completely wrong, costing the company a great deal of money, and losing
us a particularly valuable customer at a difficult time when our profit margins
were at rock bottom and we were struggling to keep our market share.  There was no real excuse for my blunder, and,
as often seems to happen, I compounded my original mistake by making other secondary
errors as I struggled to put things right. 

I’d been summoned to Head Office down in Bournemouth to explain myself.  There was a very good chance of losing my job and I was terrified.  I’d been part of the sales force of this same company for over twenty years.  I knew I wasn’t as sharp and energetic as I once had been, and that my value to the company, such as it was, lay in my knowledge of the company itself and the people it dealt with.  I very much doubted I could find another job on anything like the same money, or even another job at all, but I had a big mortgage to pay and two teenaged kids, who I’d brought up by myself since their father’s death ten years previously. 

“You’re amazing, Jenny,” my friends
used to say to me back in those early years.  “Full time work, kids.  None of us know how you hold it all together.
 We know we couldn’t.”   And of course, I’d brush this off, as you do
–“Nonsense, you’d do exactly the same as me if you had to.  I just didn’t have a choice”– but actually it
had been very important to me, and a source of great pride.  I felt bitterly ashamed that I’d not lived up
to it, and at the same I felt resentful, because actually, whatever I said to
my friends, most people couldn’t do
what I had done, most people would have stumbled, and that being so, it seemed very
unfair that I should have this shame to deal with, and they should not.   Most of all, though, I felt afraid: afraid
of what faced me in Bournemouth, and afraid of what lay beyond: telling the
kids that we’d have to move somewhere smaller for instance, stirring up
memories of that old catastrophe of their dad’s suicide.

It was a beautiful September day
when I drove down, with air as clear as newly cleaned glass, achingly blue sky,
and trees just lightly brushed with gold, but I saw all of this through a
complicated cage of painful feelings which had the effect of setting it beyond
my reach and denying me the solace it might have given me, just when I needed
it most.  I was terrified of being told
off.  I was dreading the humiliation of being
cross-examined and found incompetent or unprofessional, after so long in the
job.  I worried that perhaps I never
really had been any good at this job
I’d done all these years, and that my bluff had finally been called.  I rehearsed every small mistake I’d ever made,
every embarrassing gaffe.  And over and
over again, I imagined having to tell the kids that the life I’d given them was
going to have to be dismantled.   Without
the job, we couldn’t keep the house.  We
couldn’t even live in the same area.

Worry comes readily to me.  I can put on a good impression of being calm
and unflappable but the truth is that, even on an ordinary day, there are
always a lot of things niggling away inside of me, and I often find it hard to sleep.
I guess when your husband suddenly kills himself, it does sap your confidence
in your ability to control events. But actually I think I’d always been the
worrying kind, even as a kid, and there were plenty of more recent things to
worry about: Ben’s difficulties at school, for one, and my friend Carrie’s
cancer, and my relationship with Harry that hovered all the time between being
on and being off, and never quite settled either way.  I worried a lot, but it was bad this
time.  This was the bedrock of everything
that was under threat, and as I drove through the New Forest, I felt quite sick
with fear.

All around me, the warmth of the sun
was making the heather steam.  A herd of
deer were grazing peacefully by a stream. 
But that was out there.  That was for
the happy people.  It gave me no pleasure
at all, no respite.  It had nothing to do
with me.

*   *   *

As
I do when I’m anxious about a meeting, I’d set off ridiculously early so as to
be absolutely sure of not arriving late. 
As a result, when I reached the far side of the forest, I realised I was
only twelve miles from my destination with nearly two hours to fill before the
meeting.  To kill some time I pulled over
at a Little Chef place, sat at a window table, and, after ordering a coffee,
began to read through, yet one more time, the various papers that I’d brought
with me: the documents from HR, my own statement setting out the somewhat
flimsy extenuating circumstances I’d been able to scrape together, and a list
I’d compiled of some of the important deals and contacts I’d secured for our
company over the years, by way of demonstrating that there was a positive side
to my balance sheet.

When the coffee arrived, I took a sip and, for a while, carried on looking through the papers.  But I was getting quite panicky now, feeling that I could no longer remember anything.  I really wasn’t taking in what I was reading, and I realised I’d just get myself into even more of a muddle if I went over it all any more.  So I pushed the papers away and I took another sip of my coffee.  I’d barely noticed the first sip, but second time round I felt the warm buzz as the caffeine entered my bloodstream .

I put the cup down again and, as I
did so, I noticed how the steam rising up from it caught the sunbeams streaming
in through the window beside me, and it suddenly struck me, for no particular
reason, that the sunbeams and the steam each made the other visible.  I was sufficiently intrigued by this, that I
began to experiment.  When the steam rose
through them, the parallel sunbeams that were revealed were as firm and steady
as bars of metal, but if I gently blew the steam away, they disappeared
completely into empty air, only to reappear when I stopped blowing and let the
steam rise from the mug once more.  I
blew again, very gently –it only took the smallest puff– and watched the steam
and the sunbeams vanish again, and then rapidly reassert themselves as the
temporary agitation settled down.   Then
I stopped interfering, and just sat and watched the play of steam and light over
my coffee, enjoying the sensation of the sun warming my skin as I sat by the
window with the bright world outside.  It
was several minutes before I noticed I was completely at peace.

At peace?  Me? Surely not!  But I prodded my feelings carefully, and it
really seemed to be the case.  The things
I’d been worrying about hadn’t vanished, the dreaded meeting still lay ahead of
me, the future was still full of uncertainty and threats to myself and the ones
I loved, but even so, right then, I felt entirely content.  It may seem an odd thing to say, but it was
as if I’d suddenly remembered an ancient deal that was the basis of my
existence, and could see that it was necessary and fair.  You can have no mind at all and be completely
at peace, as sunlight is, or steam, and that’s always an option, as my husband Dick
proved: you can always revert to being inanimate matter.  Or you can have a mind that knows it’s alive
and is capable of pleasure and delight. 
But if you choose the latter, you have to pay the necessary price for it
in vigilance and worry and suffering.  No
one can live in the Garden of Eden, even though it’s where we come from and
where we will return.  That’s why it’s so
peaceful. 

*   *   *

Of
course, there is only so much time you can spend watching steam and sunbeams
and thinking profound thoughts.  After a
time, I got out my pad and occupied myself with emails until it was time to
go.  I still felt quite cheerful, though,
and, as I drove off I decided that, if I ever took it into my head to found a
religion –if religions are ever founded by middle-aged sales managers with two
kids and a boyfriend who won’t quite commit himself– the Little Chef restaurant
on the A338 would definitely be one of its holiest shrines.   People would come on pilgrimages there, so as
to stare at the spot where the prophet Jenny experienced enlightenment.  The area round the window would be roped off
to ensure no one could sully the holy Formica table, or steal the sacred sauce
bottle.  The blessed laminated menu would
have to be chained down.

None of those pilgrims would
experience what I’d experienced, of course. 
Not in there.  Not with pilgrims
and tourists pushing and shoving for a view under the watchful and suspicious
eyes of the official guardians of the shrine: 
“No photography please.  You can
buy a picture in the shop, if you want one!” 
But the funny thing was that they’d experience similar moments in other
places, quite frequently most probably, and yet barely even notice them.  So they’d still keep coming to look at the sacred
sauce bottle in the hope of some kind of salvation.

I was quite entertained for a while by these thoughts.  I even imagined a Great Schism, when two rival Jennyist churches would fight for control of the Little Chef, while members of a small breakaway group insisted that the moment of enlightenment had actually occurred in the Burger King down the road.  Next thing they’d be burning folk at the stake for denying that the beverage I drank here had, in some wonderful and inexplicable way, been quite literally transformed as it touched my lips, so that it ceased to be mere Little Chef coffee and became the elixir of eternal life.  And then, of course…

But now worry was starting to intrude again.  I would soon be at company headquarters, parking my car, checking my hair and makeup, and gathering my things together for that lonely walk to reception and the dreaded waiting area.   I’d had my interlude of peace, and now I had to deal with a threat to the conditions of my existence, as living creatures must.  Fear began to gnaw inside me as I approached the outskirts of Bournemouth.

*   *   *

As it turned out, the meeting didn’t go anything like as badly as I’d thought it would.  My argument about all the business I’d brought in proved to be more persuasive than I’d dared to hope.  We agreed that I had indeed made a very bad and costly mistake, but it wasn’t characteristic of me, and that I’d contributed a good deal to the fact that our company was still afloat at all, in a difficult market, with new global competitors emerging all the time.   We decided that I still had a lot to offer, but that perhaps my moment of carelessness was a sign that I needed a change.   A different role was suggested to me, a more strategic role, but on the same pay as I was receiving now.  

There were still Ben’s problems at school to worry about of course, there was still Carrie’s possible cancer and all the clumsy heartache of my relationship with Harry.   There was still even the distinct possibility that the company itself would founder.  But one threat, at least for the moment, had been warded off.

*   *   *

The sky had clouded over a bit by the time I headed for home, as is often the case on autumn days which start out sunny.  As I drove back up the A338, I passed the place where I’d stopped for coffee, but it was just an ordinary Little Chef now, like all the others, with the usual angel standing guard outside it, wielding a sword of fire.

Copyright 2018, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (14) The Land of Grunts and Squeaks

Something happens which means that people can no longer relate to one another as they used to do, and have to find new ways of communicating.

The stories I’ve been collecting together here all deal with isolation of some kind or other, but this one is surely the closest analogue of the isolation we’re currently experiencing.

This story was written for a recent anthology called Once Upon a Parsec , published by Newcon Press, and edited by David Gullen, who had the brilliant idea of ‘fairytales told by aliens’ as a theme. Do check it out. There are stories by Jaine Fenn, Una McCormack, Kim Lakin-Smith, Paul Di Filippo, Adrian Tchaikovsky and many others.

My thanks to Ian Whates of Newcon Press for permission to use the story here.

The Land of Grunts and Squeaks

A long time ago, in a
country across the mountains, a great queen displeased a spiteful witch. No one
knows what the queen did to offend her – witches are easily slighted – but the wicked
woman was so enraged that she placed a curse on the queen and all her people. “When
this night is over,” she told them, “you will all be strangers to one another.”

It
was a truly dreadful curse. It was worse than stealing their hearing from them,
or shutting down their tingle sense. It was worse even than depriving them of the
darkfeel, on which we rely so much as we move about our tunnels and chambers. Those
would all be calamities indeed, but this was far more terrible. For when they
woke the following morning, the people of that unfortunate country discovered
they could no longer reach each other’s minds.  

Think
for a moment, dear ones, what that would be like. Spread out your antennae to
their full extent and notice what it is that you receive through them.  You can feel my love, for one thing, and the
love you have for one another. You receive this story I’m giving you now, and a
thousand others. You know the thoughts of all your friends. You can tell who’s
happy and who’s sad, here in this chamber and out in the world beyond, and you
know exactly why. And behind all these things, you feel the love of our mother,
the queen, reaching out to all of us, caressing us, nourishing us, making us
feel safe and cared for.  

And
now imagine what it would be like, my dears, if all of that was gone  —every single bit of it— and all you could
know of the world around you were the fragments that came through your senses. Oh,
you would still know that we others were here, you would still be able to hear
the sounds we made, you could still darkfeel our presence or see us if we were
under the sun, but you couldn’t know what we were thinking, you couldn’t tell us
things or receive our news, and you would have no way of connecting with how we
felt. As to the queen, well, she’d be far away in her palace, and you’d know
nothing of her at all. For all you knew, she might be dead.

Dreadful
to think of, isn’t it? And yet, for those poor people in that land across the
mountains, that was their fate for ever more.

How
lonely life must have become. Children were left alone with fears which no one
else could see. Lovers could no longer feel each other’s love. A woman would
look at her life’s companion and think, ‘I’m sorry about those angry feelings I
had earlier on. I truly love you with all my heart’, but her friend would have
no idea she’d had that thought. Tender caresses lost their meaning, becoming no
more than one skin touching another. People were prisoners inside their own
heads. Many went mad with grief.

And
yet loneliness was by no means the whole of it. The work of the queendom came almost
to a standstill, because no one could ask or tell each other anything. First
thing of a morning, farm workers would stand in bemusement in front of their forewoman,
with no idea what she wanted them to do. The forewoman could think and think
with all her might, but she may as well have whistled or made a face for all
the difference that made. The workers just shuffled about embarrassedly until
eventually, feeling like a fool, the forewoman picked up a scythe and, making
the motions of cutting something, pointed and nodded in the direction of a
nearby tunnel.

“You
mean, cut the mushrooms?” the workers would ask her, but of course she didn’t
know what they were thinking. She could only see their bewildered faces. And so
she’d carry on with her strange performance until at last, embarassed and
uncomfortable, they’d pick up scythes and trudge off, hoping they’d understood
correctly, some up the tunnel to the mushroom caves (which was what the
forewoman intended) and some outside to harvest leaves (which wasn’t necessary
that day at all).

That
forewoman was at least able, by her clumsy performance, to show some of her
labourers what she wanted, but cutting mushrooms is a simple action, easy to
demonstrate. How would the administrator of a province learn from her people
about a shortage of grain, and, even if she could learn of it, how would she
convey the need to sow more to all the thousands under her authority, spread
out through countless tunnels and chambers? Yes, and for that matter, why would
workers want to work at all, if they had no sense any more that what they did
was appreciated, and no information as to what purpose it served?

Most
dreadful of all, though, deep down in the warm depths of her palace, the queen,
with her lovely huge soft yielding body, had, only a day before, been able to
share her thoughts with every one of her subjects, just as our own queen does
to this day,  but now she reached out
with her mind and found nothing at all beyond the confines of her own head and her
brood chamber. She couldn’t tell any more how many eggs were needed across the
queendom, she didn’t know how many workers to make, or how many farmers and
administrators, or how many guards.  She
couldn’t direct folk to move from one place to another. She couldn’t relay news
about opportunities here and shortages there. And above all she couldn’t
comfort her people with that sweet warm radiance that up to now had sustained
them all, just as you and I are sustained by our own beloved queen.

As
to the young princesses and the men, those beautiful, gentle, idle creatures who’d
basked their whole lives in the full intensity of that radiance, they now gathered
helplessly around her in the chamber, their antennae waving uselessly about, their
hands pawing at her enormous body, their mouthparts nuzzling her soft skin in
the hope of finding at least some tiny remnant of the bounty that had been
theirs until now. But they found nothing. Nothing came back to them. Her skin
was just skin, her face was just a face, her antennae were as silent as their
own. The despair of that was so great that some of them cracked open their own
heads on the walls of the chamber, while others pulled at their antennae until
they were torn and bleeding, in a vain effort to bring some life back into
those suddenly useless organs. And some grew wings, so it’s said, though this wasn’t
the season for it, and none of them were ready for mating. They had no plan in
mind, no idea how flying might make things better, no notion of how they could
even feed themselves with no workers on hand to tend them. But I suppose doing
anything at all­, going anywhere but where they were, seemed preferable to
simply enduring their loss. In any case, whatever the reason, they flew up into
the sky and were never seen again. Most probably they were gobbled up by the
sky monsters.

*
 *  *

But there was one
person from the queen’s chamber who’d kept her head. The captain of the royal guard,
braver and more purposeful than men are, wiser and more disciplined than naïve
young princesses yet to swell with eggs, had taken it upon herself to go out
and search for the witch, in the hope of forcing her to reverse the spell. She’d
gone to the witch’s chambers and to all the places she could think of that the
witch might frequent, but she’d found nothing. After a certain point, she’d
decided there was no sense in carrying on searching, for how can you search for
someone if you have no means of conveying to others who it is you’re trying to
find, or what they look like, or what kind of darkfeel surrounds them? And even
if you could convey those things, what would you achieve if you had no means of
receiving answers?

But
the captain didn’t panic and she didn’t hurry back to the brood chamber.
Instead she stopped and thought. She was a brave woman. (I would tell you her
name, dear ones, if I knew, but a name has no purpose when it can no longer be told,
and the captain herself soon forgot it.)  She thought and thought until finally she remembered
a certain wise woman who lived in a forest some way from the palace, and was reputed
to be the cleverest person in the whole queendom.  

The captain longed, as anyone would, to return to her rightful place in the warm moist darkness beside her mother, but she knew the queendom itself was in danger unless something could be done. So she steeled herself against the loneliness and grief, and hurried as fast as she could along tunnels, out under the sun, and back into tunnels again, until she reached the wise woman’s home.

*
 *  *

Of course the wise
woman knew at once what the captain had come about, for like everyone else she’d
woken up to the sudden absence of the thoughts and feelings of others. But she was wise and so, instead of bewailing
her misfortune, she’d tried to understand what had happened. “It’s as if we had
been surrounded by light, and suddenly we were in darkness,” was her first
thought, but that didn’t really capture the nature of the calamity, for who
wants the harshness of light anyway if they can have the warmth and the comfort
of darkness?  “It’s as if we’d been
surrounded by pleasant sounds, and suddenly we were in silence,” she had
thought. Ah, now that was more like it!  For everyone knows the pleasure of sound, the
hum of a busy tunnel, the cheerful click and clatter of a meeting between friends,
the slow drip drip of a moist mushroom cave. Everyone enjoys hearing sound in
the background, behind our thoughts and feelings.

“It’s
as if we are suddenly in silence,” the wise woman had repeated to herself, “and
we long for sound to return.”

She
knew what had brought this about because, like everyone in the queendom, she
had been aware of the quarrel between the witch and the queen, and had picked
up the witch’s angry threat. What was more, she knew something that most people
didn’t know. For it so happened that, going up to the surface to harvest leaves
for compost, the wise woman had seen the witch herself flying overhead on the unnatural
wings – they were like the wings of a young princess – that she’d grown by
magic. The witch was laughing up there, halfway between the sun and the soil,
laughing with wicked delight at the harm she’d done to the queen, and the
misery she’d caused to the whole queendom.  But the wise woman had seen something else
which the witch had not yet spotted. There was a sky monster diving down from
the blue on its enormous wings and heading straight for the witch, its horrible
hard mouth opening as it came near. Dear ones, we should always be on the watch
for sky monsters when we’re outside under the sun, but the witch, in her glee,
had quite forgotten to take care.

Only
in the last second did she suddenly sense its presence behind her, but by then
it was too late. In one single gulp the witch was gone and, while no one
perhaps would grieve her passing, she’d taken with her the secret of the spell.
It was inside the belly of the monster as it soared up towards the sun.

So
there was no going back now. Never again in this queendom would people be able
to hear each other’s thoughts.

“Somehow
we’ll have to manage without,” the wise woman thought. “Our thoughts will always
be ours alone, but we must find some other means of giving each other a sense
of what we know and what we want.”

She
paced back and forth along her tunnels, absently tending her mushrooms, turning
her compost and checking her stores of grain.  

“If what
has happened is a bit like the absence of sound,” she said to herself, “does
that mean that a sound can be like a thought?”

And
at that moment, the captain arrived.

*
 * *

Out of politeness, they
kissed and stroked each other’s antennae although, without the shared feelings
that should have gone with these gestures, the contact was comfortless to them
both.  Then, stepping back, the captain
spread her arms in a gesture of helplessness. What are we to do?

To
the captain’s surprise and bewilderment, the wise woman responded by pointing
to herself and making a strange grunting sound with her mouth.  She repeated this whole performance several
times, and then she did something different. She pointed to the captain and
this time made, not a grunt, but a funny high squeak.  

The captain
was very embarrassed and wondered if the wise woman had lost her mind. But the
wise one persevered. Once again, she pointed to herself and grunted, and then
pointed to the captain and squeaked. After that, she stopped and looked at the captain,
holding out her arms as if she expected to be handed a large fruit, or a tasty carcass.

But the
captain had no fruit with her, and no carcass, and it came to her that perhaps what
the wise woman wanted from her was to repeat what she’d done. She could think
of no good reason for that at all – it seemed a silly children’s game – but she
told herself that, after all, the wise woman was very clever, and perhaps had
reasons she didn’t understand. More embarrassed than ever, the captain pointed
to herself and made a grunt, just as the wise woman had done.

At
once the wise woman stopped her by putting her hand over her mouth. She pointed
to the captain again and made a squeak.  The captain’s antennae were fairly quivering
with embarrassment now, but she thought that perhaps what the wise woman was
saying to her was that the squeak was in some way to be connected with her, the
captain, and the grunt with the wise woman herself. So she pointed to herself
and squeaked, and then to the wise woman and grunted. At once the wise woman
began to leap about the chamber, rattling her antennae together in glee.  

Still
the captain was puzzled, but she was at least beginning to understand the game
that the wise one wanted her to play. When the wise woman pointed to a pile of
grain in the corner and made two short squeaks in succession, she too pointed
to the grain herself and made the same sound. When the wise woman pointed to
the dried mushrooms hanging from the ceiling and grunted and squeaked, she grunted and squeaked herself. And so it went on. A
dried carcass, a bale of leaves… the wise woman attached a sound to every
single object in her chamber, and made the captain memorise each one. And then
she began to make new sounds to convey for example that the mushrooms were above the grain, the grain was below the mushrooms, the chamber was below the ground.

“These
sounds are a bit like names,” the captain thought to herself. “Only they don’t
just apply to people but to things and to ideas which have never needed names
before.”

*
 *  *

Ten days later, the
captain returned to the palace with the wise woman, both of them skipping and waving
their antennae as they entered those deep tunnels. It had been a hard and even
dangerous journey, for the whole queendom was in chaos. Workers who should have
been toiling underground were running back and forth aimlessly under the sun
until thirst and exhaustion overcame them. Guards who should have been
protecting workers were fighting one another. Mushrooms that should have been
spread out to dry had been left to rot in piles.

When
they reached the brood chamber, the captain and the wise woman found the surviving
men huddled in a dejected heap, and the surviving princesses huddled in
another, while women of many ranks and kinds came in and out, banging their
heads on the walls, hitting at their own antennae with their hands, jumping up
and down in agitation, as they vainly tried to receive some message from their
queen, or convey to her their own distress and helplessness. Nothing was
getting through.

But all
the women stood still when the captain and the wise woman arrived, and even the
men and the princesses lifted their heads sorrowfully from their miserable heaps.
For the captain and her companion seemed hopeful, somehow. They seemed to think
they had brought something with them which would be of use. Perhaps they’d
found a cure!

The
captain approached the queen, and respectfully licked her soft warm flesh.  Then she pointed to the wise woman and grunted.
All the people in the chamber looked at each other –the princesses, the men,
the servants and advisers and guards­­– hoping to see some gleam of
understanding. But no one had any idea what was going on. The captain pointed
to herself and squeaked.

*
 *  *

Dear ones, it was a
slow business, and several times the wise woman and the captain worried that
the people were going to attack and kill them in their frustration, but slowly
slowly – it began with the queen and spread gradually through the ranks to the
humblest workers and the most dejected men– the people in the chamber got hold
of the wise woman’s idea. These sounds, these grunts and squeaks, these clicks
and rumbles, were a bit like names. Each sound conveyed a certain object, or a
certain idea, or a certain action, and you could convey news, even if only very
slowly and imperfectly, by arranging the sounds in a row.

So that
was it, was it? It was a bitter seed to swallow, that this clumsy game was the
wise woman’s substitute for knowing one another’s thoughts. It was obvious to
everyone that, even if you could memorise ten thousand different sounds, a
hundred thousand, a million, you would only ever be able to convey the tiniest
fraction of your own experience, and even that in a dreadfully slow and
plodding way that would always be open to misunderstanding. They would all still
be alone inside their heads and, where once they’d been able to bask in the
love of their queen, now they’d have to be content with hearing her make the
sound which represented the idea of love, and even that only when they were in
her physical presence. But as the queen herself put it: Click-click-high squeak, short grunt, rumble, low squeak-click-middling
squeak, whirr. Which was her way of saying that this was better than
nothing at all.

And they do say, my dear ones, that to this day, if you go to that country far away over the mountains, they still can’t hear your thoughts or know your feelings. So if you want to tell them something, or ask which road to take, or convey that you like them, the only way you can do it is by making funny noises with your mouth and hoping they understand. That’s just how it is in the land of grunts and squeaks.

Copyright 2019, Chris Beckett