Chris Beckett's Blog, page 9

Isolation story: (13) We Could Be Sisters

One of my best stories.

The character Jessica Ferne previously appeared in the story ‘The Turing Test’ which I included as the third of these ‘isolation stories’.

The artist, Julian Smart, also appears as the major character in another story of mine, ‘Creation’, which is in my collection, Spring Tide.

I like stories that link together. Tammy also appeared in two other stories. One was called ‘Tammy Pendant’ – I incorporated it into my novel Marcher. It caused a minor controversy when it was published in Asimov’s SF in 2004, and contributed to the magazine being withdrawn from school libraries in one of the Midwestern states, I forget which. The other story with Tammy in it was called ‘Poppyfields’ and is included in my Peacock Cloak collection.

‘We Could Be Sisters’ also first appeared in Asimov’s in 2004, and is included in my first short story collection, The Turing Test.

We Could Be Sisters

Nature is profligate.  All possible worlds exist.  In one of them there was once an art gallery
in Red Lion Street, London WC1, and its manager was a woman called Jessica
Ferne.  On one particular grey November
day, when Jessica was thirty-three, she spent the morning in her office as
usual.  She made phone calls about her
next exhibition and experimented on her PC with images of the art objects that
she planned to exhibit, trying out different arrangements and
juxtapositions.  Then at lunchtime she
put on her jacket, gave some instructions to her secretary, and walked through
her gallery and out onto the street. As ever each exhibit stood alone – a pair
of mummified hands, a flashing light, an assemblage of human bones – each one contained
and separated from the rest of the world by its frame, its label, its pedestal.

Outside an
electric cleaning vehicle went by and then some lawyers in robes.  Red Lion Street was part of a subscriber
area, but at the end of it were the open streets of London, where anyone could
go.  The boundary between the two areas
was marked by a gate with a uniformed security guard in attendance.  As Jessica approached it an elderly woman
tried to walk in through the gate and it started bleeping.  The guard stepped forward and politely
refused her entry.

‘But I am a
subscriber,’ she complained.  ‘There’s
some mistake.’

A jet
fighter passed high overhead – it was part of the city’s ever-present shield
against aerial attack.  The guard
suggested to the elderly lady that perhaps her clearance was out of date and
that she needed to check with the network. 
Meanwhile Jessica passed through the gate in the other direction,
unimpeded, and there she was, in High Holborn, in the open area.  She was not frightened exactly but she
quickened her pace and, without even thinking about it, she began to monitor
the people around her, checking for sudden movements or suspicious glances.

* * *

When Jessica was a child, growing
up with her adoptive parents in Highgate, you could travel from one side of
London to another, on a bus, on foot, in a car. 
But Jessica was thirty-three now and the map of London had become a
patchwork of subscriber areas, reserved for those who could pay, and open areas
in between for the rest. 

Jessica
lived in a subscriber area in Docklands: the Docklands Secure Community.  It was managed by a syndicate of subscription
companies called LSN, which now controlled almost all the subscriber areas in
London apart from a few exceptionally expensive ones for the seriously
rich.  And Jessica had just walked out of
another LSN area, the West Central Safe Street Zone, where her art gallery was
located. Within the Zones, burglaries and street crime were almost at zero.  Beggars, illegal immigrants, known criminals
and suspected trouble-makers were all excluded. 
Everyone you met had been checked out. 
And there were TV cameras on every street and LSN detectives constantly
on patrol. 

‘It’s not like the good old days,’ said the
LSN ad in the Tube.  ‘It’s much, much better.’

The
syndicate even ran special trains between the Zones, which didn’t stop at the
stations in between.  There was even talk
of special freeways.

* * *

Outside, in the open areas, things
were different.  Violent crime was
commonplace and in some neighbourhoods there was more-or-less constant low
level warfare between rival gangs and religious groupings.   Holborn, where Jessica was now, was not an
especially rough area – LSN was actually in the process of negotiating its
absorption into the West Central Zone and, in preparation, had already begun
augmenting policing there with its own security force – but still, as soon as
you passed the gate you could feel the difference.  There were beggars for one thing and there
were street performers who did not confine themselves, as in the Zones, to
designated Street Entertainment Areas.

Today there was a pair of jugglers.  They were very adept, making their spinning clubs pass between them so smoothly that it gave the impression of a constant stream, as if the clubs were flowing of their own accord round some kind of force field.  If either juggler had faltered for an instant the pattern and the illusion would collapse, but neither of them ever did. The appearance of smooth flow was created by precise rhythm, thought Jessica, and the illusion of weightlessness depended on the law of gravity to bring the clubs back to the jugglers’ hands. These little paradoxes pleased her.  She smiled and tossed a coin into their hat.  A sharp-eyed beggar noticed this largesse and at once shot out his hand.

‘Any spare
change, love?  I haven’t eaten yet
today.’

Jessica
looked away, quickening her pace.

‘Go on,
surprise yourself!’ said the next beggar along, this time a woman.

‘Sorry, no
change,’ said Jessica.

She noticed
the woman beggar had extremely fine blonde hair, very like her own.

High up in
the cold blue sky, a surveillance drone passed above them.

* * *

Jessica was having lunch in a
Laotian restaurant with an artist called Julian Smart.  He had told her that, on principle, he only
ever ate outside the safe zones.  Inside,
apparently, the food had no flavour.  He
was about her own age, currently enjoying a rapidly growing reputation in the
art world, and he was very good
looking.  Last night Jessica had been so
excited about this meeting that she’d not been able to sleep.  It was true that this morning in the gallery
that feeling had vanished and she’d felt strangely indifferent, unable to
connect at all with her previous night’s excitement, but now once again she
felt as excited as an infatuated teenager.

‘Jessica!  Hi!’

He kissed her.  She trembled. 
He seemed ten times more beautiful than she had remembered him,
passionate and fiery.  She could not
believe that he was interested in her. 
She could not believe that she had ever doubted her interest in him.

But Jessica
was exceptionally ambivalent in matters of the heart. She had never had a
sustained relationship with a man of her own age, though she had several
affairs with older men, and had recently ended a two-year arrangement with a
motorcycle courier ten years her junior, who she had taken in to live with
her.  Equality was the hardest thing, and
yet what she longed for the most. 

They ordered fish soup and
braised quail.  He showed her some
pictures of his latest work.  It
consisted of a sequence of images, the first of which was a banal photograph of
a couple feeding pigeons in a park.  In
succeeding stages, Julian had first drained the scene of colour and then
gradually disassembled it into small numbered components like the parts in a
child’s construction kit.  The final
image showed the pieces lined up for assembly: rows and rows of grey pigeons
numbered 1 to 45 on a grey plastic stem, grey plastic flowers (50 to 62), grey
plastic trees (80 to 82), grey plastic hands and heads and feet…

‘You’ll
have to come and see it though,’ he said as she leafed though the
pictures.   ‘Come over and see it.  Come up and look at my etchings.  We can go for a drink or something.’

Wanting to
share something of herself in return, she told him about the jugglers she had
watched on the way.

‘I found it
a bit disturbing,’ she said, ‘I found that I’d rather watch the two of them
than look at any of the stuff we’ve got in the gallery at the moment.  They had something that most artists now have
lost: style, virtuosity, defiance… Do you know what I mean?’

The soup
arrived.  No, he didn’t know what she
meant at all.  He suggested using the
jugglers as a basis for a video piece, or making them into one of his plastic
kits – a row of grey clubs numbered 1-10, and a chart to show what colours to
paint them – or getting the jugglers themselves to stand in the gallery and
perform as a sort of living objet trouvé.  And then this reminded him of plan of his to
stage an exhibition in which the museum attendants themselves were the sole
exhibits, with nothing to guard but themselves.

He laughed
loudly and, with that laugh, he finally lost her: it had such a callous
sound.  He no longer looked beautiful to
her.  She saw in his eyes a kind of
greedy gleam and it occurred to her that Julian Smart couldn’t really see her
at all except only as a pleasing receptacle for his own words.  She wondered how she could have ever failed
to notice that greedy gleam and how once again she had managed to deceive
herself into thinking she had found a fellow spirit. 

As she
headed back to Red Lion Street she asked herself why this happened so
often.  She thought perhaps it came from
being adopted, raised by beings whose blood was strange to her, and hers to
them, so that she had learnt from the beginning to work at imagining a
connection that wasn’t really there.  But
then again it might just be the world she lived in.  All the art in her gallery seemed to mock the
possibility of meaning, of connection. 
It was all very subversive but without a cause.  It exposed artifice but put nothing in its
place.

Even the
jugglers, when she saw them again, seemed weary, as if they longed to let the
clubs fall to the ground and leave them to lie there in peace.

* * *

‘Surprise yourself!’ said the woman
beggar, right in front of her.

Jessica
gave a little cry of shock, not just because she was startled, though she was,
but also because for a moment she felt as if she was looking into a mirror and
seeing her own reflection.  But once
having collected herself she realised this face was altogether leaner, and had
different and deeper lines in it.  She is
not like me at all, thought Jessica taking out her purse, except superficially
in the hair colour and the eyes.  And the
hair was thinner, the eyes more bloodshot.

But the
beggar said, ‘We could be sisters couldn’t we?’

Two jet
fighters hurtled by above them. 

Jessica
pressed bank notes into the beggar’s hands.

* * *

Well I could have a sister, Jessica thought as she hurried back to the
gallery.  It’s not impossible. 

She had met
her natural mother once, a haggard icy-hearted creature called Liz.

‘Brothers
or sisters?’ her mother had said.  ‘You
must be joking.  I had my tubes done after you.  No way was I going through that again.’

But Liz
could quite well have been lying.  She’d
struck Jessica as a woman who spoke and believed whatever seemed at that
particular moment to further her own ends. 
In that one meeting Liz had given Jessica three different accounts of
why she had given Jessica up, discarding each one when Jessica had presented
her with contradictory facts she’d read in her file. 

Then again,
the files had not mentioned a sister either.

* * *

At six o’clock Jessica went back
down Red Lion Street to look for the beggar, but she wasn’t there.  She drove home through North London and lay
awake planning to search the homeless hostels and the soup kitchens, all over
London if necessary, all over England. 
The beggar had a West Country accent she thought.  Like Liz, who came from Bristol.

In the morning, after she’d parked the car, Jessica went down to the end of Red Lion Street again, and again at lunchtime.  She spent half the afternoon in her office in the gallery phoning hostels and charities and welfare agencies, asking how she would go about finding someone she had met in the street.  They all said they couldn’t tell her anything. Jessica could have been anyone after all: a dealer, a blackmailer, a slave trader looking for a runaway.  And anyway Jessica couldn’t even give a name for the woman she was looking for.

She nearly wept with frustration, furious with herself for not finding out more when she met the woman yesterday.  And now it seemed to her that if she could find the blonde beggar again it would be the turning point of her whole life.  That’s no exaggeration, she thought.  If necessary, I really will give the rest of my life to this search.  This is my purpose, this is the quest which I’ve so long wanted to begin. 

When she
went down Red Lion Street for the third time, though, the beggar was there
again – and this turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.  It had really been far too short a time for this to have been a satisfactory life’s
quest.  And anyway, when it came down to
it, who was the beggar but just some stranger? 
Once again, Jessica thought, I’ve blown up a great big bubble of
anticipation, and she would have walked away from the whole thing at once had
she not known herself well enough to realise that, as soon as she turned her
back, she would immediately want to begin again. 

So she made
herself go forward, even though she was full of hostility and resentment.

‘We could be sisters?’ she demanded.

The beggar woman looked up, recognising Jessica at once.

‘Yes!’ she
exclaimed, and she appealed to her male companion.  ‘Look Jim. 
This is the woman I was telling you about.  We could
be sisters don’t you reckon?’

 The man glanced at her.

 ‘Yeah,’ he said indifferently, ‘the spitting image…’ 

  Then he really looked.

 ‘Fucking hell, Tamsin!  You’re right.  You could be fucking twins.’

  Jessica felt dizzy, as if she had taken a blow to the head.

 ‘Tamsin?’ she asked.  ‘Tamsin?  Is that your name?’

 ‘Yeah, Tamsin.’

‘Tamsin’s my name too.  My middle name.  The name my mother gave me before she had me adopted.’

 Tamsin the beggar gave a small whistle.

‘We need to talk, don’t we?’ said Jessica.  ‘There’s a coffee shop over there.  Let me buy you some coffee and something to eat.’

‘Coffee and something to eat?’ said the male beggar. ‘Yummy.  Can anyone come?’

‘Fuck off Jim,’ said Tamsin.

A powerful helicopter crossed very low over the street.  It was painted dark green and armed like a tank.

* * *

In the coffee shop Jessica said, ‘Could
we really besisters?’

‘No chance,’ said Tamsin, ‘my mum had herself sterilised right after I was born.’

‘But how old are you?’ asked Jessica.

‘Thirty three.’

‘When is your birthday?’

‘April the second,’ said the beggar. ‘What?  What’s the matter?’

 Jessica had gone white.

‘It’s mine
too,’ she said.  ‘April the second.  And I’m thirty-three.  We must be twins.’

Tamsin laughed.

‘We’re not you know.’

‘Same name, same birthday, same looks, I’m adopted.  What other explanation can there be?’         

‘I’ve never
heard of twins with the same name,’ said Tamsin. 

‘Well no
but…’ Jessica was genuinely at a loss. 

‘Haven’t
you ever heard of shifters you posh git?’

‘Shifters?’

Jessica had heard of them of
course.  She’d never knowingly met one.
The word had eerie, uncomfortable connotations. People said shifters moved sideways
across time by taking some kind of drug. She’d heard it came in pills they
called ‘slip’ or ‘seeds’.  A few years
ago there had been something of a moral panic about shifters and there had been
talk about how they were a mortal threat to law and to civilisation and to
humanity’s whole understanding of its place in space and time.  But oddly people seemed to have rather
forgotten about them since then.  It was
like flying to the moon, or having conversations with people on the far side of
the world: impossible things happened and people soon got used to them (though
in the case of shifters there were still those who maintained the whole
phenomenon was some sort of elaborate hoax).

‘I’m a shifter,’ said Tamsin.  ‘I don’t come from this world.  I must have been in a hundred worlds at
least.’

‘But if you
don’t come from this world how can…?’

Tamsin made
an exasperated gesture.  ‘Don’t you get
it?  I’m not your twin.  I am
you.  You and me were once the same
person.’

For some
reason Jessica leapt to her feet with a small cry.  Everyone in the coffee shop looked
round.  She sat down again.  She stood up. 

‘Give me
your phone a minute,’ said Tamsin.

Like most
pocket phones at that time, Jessica’s had a security lock which could only be
deactivated by her own thumbprint. 
Tamsin pressed her thumb on the pad and they watched the little screen
light up.

Jessica
couldn’t bear to stay still.

‘Let’s go
out,’ she said.  ‘Let’s walk in the
street.’

*  *  *

The world splits like cells on agar
jelly. Just in the short space of time you’ve been reading this, countless new
worlds have come into being.  In some of
those worlds you’ve tossed this story aside already.  In others you have been interrupted by the
phone, or the doorbell, or a jet plane crashing through the ceiling.  But it seems that you – this particular
version of you – were one of the ones who carried on reading.

When Tamsin was born, her mother Liz had her placed for adoption.  Tamsin was not a wanted child.  She was the child of a rape for one thing and this did not help, but as a matter of fact she wouldn’t have been wanted anyway, for Liz didn’t have an ounce of maternal feeling in her.  But Liz’s mother and her sister and her brother and the people in the pub where she drank every night, they all told her she was a selfish cow and how could she give up her own flesh and blood?  They all told her they didn’t want anything to do with a woman who would give away a little baby that never asked to be brought into the world.  And all this was not easy for someone like Liz to withstand. 

Time split and in some of its branches, Liz gave way to the pressure and asked for Tamsin to be returned to her, as was her legal right, before the adoption went through.  In other branches Tamsin was adopted by the couple who’d been caring for her since birth, two earnest young doctors who couldn’t have children of their own.  They renamed her Jessica.  Jessica Tamsin Ferne. This is what Tamsin and Jessica worked out between them as they walked in the open streets.

Tamsin had not had an easy time of it.  After getting her back, her mother had grossly neglected her.  One of her mother’s boyfriends had abused her.  In the end the authorities had taken her back into care.  But they left it too late and were unable to settle her anywhere.  She moved between many different foster-homes and residential units, in and around the big social housing project outside Bristol where she had originally lived with Liz.

Jessica on
the other hand had been raised in Highgate by the two earnest doctors, who sent
her to private schools and took her in the car to ballet classes every Saturday
morning and violin lessons on Wednesdays and extra French every second
Thursday. 

But once,
thirty-three years ago a single baby girl had lain in a crib with these two
different futures simultaneously ahead of her. 
Not to mention other futures that neither of them knew about.

‘You must come home with me,’ said Jessica.  ‘I’ll phone my work and say I’ve had to go home.’

Tamsin smiled as she listened to Jessica lying to her secretary. When Jessica had finished they looked at each other and burst out laughing, like co-conspirators, both of them noticing how alike they were, how at some deep level they understood one another, whatever their different histories.  And each of them was thinking simultaneously that at last she’d no longer be alone.

Both of them, however, had thought this many times before, if only ever very briefly.  In Jessica’s case she’d thought it for a short while just a few hours previously in the Laotian restaurant with Julian.  And yet Julian hadn’t entered her thoughts, even for a moment, since Tamsin said, ‘We could be sisters’. 

Jessica led
the way to her car, but as they turned up Red Lion Street the gate began to
bleep, for only Jessica had an LSN card in her pocket.    

‘Excuse
me!’ called out the guard.  ‘Can
you…’ 

When they
turned towards him, each with the same irritated expression, he was
speechless.  He knew both of them by
sight, for Jessica often walked through his gate and Tamsin often begged
outside it, but it had never until now occurred to him to compare them.

* * *

As the guard wouldn’t let Tamsin
into the West Central Safe Streets Zone, Jessica had to fetch the car and pick
Tamsin up outside it.  There were problems
at the other end too.  As a resident
subscriber of the Docklands Zone, Jessica was allowed to bring in visitors, but
they were still required to show their national ID card at the gate.  Tamsin had no ID of any sort.  She may have been born in Bristol but this
didn’t alter the fact that she was an illegal immigrant from another universe.

 So she hid in the luggage compartment of the
car, and in that way Jessica smuggled her deviant alter ego through the
security barrier within which she herself had, at considerable expense, chosen
to live.  She was taking quite a risk in
doing so, for the penalty for deliberately violating the LSN security rules was
to be automatically barred not only from the Docklands Safe Streets Zone but
from all the other LSN Zones in London as well. 
So she would lose both her home and her job if she was caught.

An elderly
neighbour from two floors up stared at them in the lift: Jessica in her chic
outfit and Tamsin in a jumper and jeans which gave off the sickly odour of
clothes that have been slept in.  They
were both giggly and excited, each in her own way feeling released from a long
oppression.

‘People
usually call me Jess,’ said Jessica.

‘People
usually call me Tammy.’

‘Do you
want some wine?’

‘You are so
fucking posh aren’t you?’

‘Well
you’re so fucking common.  Do you want
wine or not?’

‘Yeah
great.  Haven’t you got a bloke or kids
or nothing?’

‘Nope.  I did have a bloke but I chucked him
out.  I never wanted kids.’

‘Me
neither.  Like mum.’

Tamsin
sipped the wine and looked around.

‘You must
be rich! 
 I bet you’re one of those
that go on foreign holidays every year. 
Thailand, India… all that…’

‘Well I’ve
never been to another world,
though.  I can’t even imagine what that’s
like.’

‘They’re
just the same as this one, except for stupid little things, like the phone
boxes are a different colour, or the money looks different, or the estates have
different names.  Just stupid little
things.  When you start shifting you
think you are going to find a place where it will be better, a magical
place.  But you soon give that idea up
when you’ve done a few shifts.  It’s
always the same old shit.  It’s always
the bloody same.’

‘So why did
you keep doing it?’

Tamsin
walked to the doorway of the room and looked out, clutching her wineglass against
her body with both hands. 

‘Once you
start its hard to stop,’ she said. 
‘You’re not looking to get
anywhere any more, not really. It’s the shift itself that’s the thing. All
these worlds going by and you’re not in any of them, you’re just falling and
falling through them. In the middle of a shift the worlds go by so fast that
it’s just a blur.’

  She looked into the kitchen, into the
bathroom, into the main bedroom.  Jessica
followed her patiently.

‘I’ll tell
you a weird thing about shifting, though,’ Tamsin said at length.  ‘You know those little flick-books you can
get?  The ones where you flick the pages
and it looks like one picture that’s moving? Well, it’s a bit like that. All
those blurry worlds sort of merge together and you see something else which
isn’t in any of them. And it’s like a huge tree, a massive great tree, but with
no roots or leaves or nothing, no ground or sky, just branches growing all the
time in the dark, growing and growing, and splitting off from each other all
the time as quick as anything…’

She looked
into Jessica’s spare bedroom, which had once been the den of Jessica’s
motorcycle courier boyfriend, Jeff.

‘And you
think if only you could see that tree properly,’ she said. ‘If only you could
see it you’d, like, understand.  But it only ever lasts a second or two and
the next thing you’re in some other shitty world and you’re thinking, oh crap, now I’m all on my own again,
and I’ve got to get some money and somewhere to sleep, and why the fuck did I
give myself all this grief all over again? 
Yeah, but even then you’re
already thinking about your next shift. 
Where am I going to get some more seeds? 
That’s what you’re thinking.  Who
can I nick them from?  Who’ve I got to
have sex with to get him to give them me?’

Tamsin looked
into Jessica’s study.  As she entered it
the large wall-mounted computer screen came to life and there was Jessica’s
virtual p.a., ‘Elsie’, life-sized, smiling out at her in the form of a
friendly, slightly overweight Scottish woman in her middle thirties.  Everyone had one these days – or at least
everyone who had an exceptionally expensive, state-of-the-art computer like
Jessica.  The things copied and spread
themselves through the internet and you could customise them at will.

‘Hi
Jessica,’ Elsie said to Tamsin.  ‘Have
you had a good day?’

Tamsin
dropped her glass. 

‘What the fuck?’

The
electronic face furrowed with concern.

‘Are you okay, Jessica.  You look very pale.  Is everything alright?’

Tamsin
looked to the real Jessica outside the doorway for support.  Jessica laughed.

‘Don’t
worry Tammy, it’s only a computer graphic.’

She came
into the room, identified herself as the real Jessica, and told Elsie to shut
herself down.

‘Creepy,’
muttered Tamsin as the screen blanked.

‘You’re
right,’ said Jessica. ‘I think it’s about time I uninstalled her.’

She went
for a cloth to mop up the spilled wine.

‘That
computer can’t have come cheap,’ Tamsin said, looking round, while Jessica
cleared up the mess, at the elegantly minimal furnishings, the shelves of art
books, the signed painting on the wall. ‘What the fuck do you do to get all
this money?’

‘I manage
an art gallery.’

‘What,
paintings and that?’

‘Not many
paintings actually.  Body pieces mainly
these days.’

‘What?’

‘Pieces
made from human bodies.’

‘Ugh.’

‘Listen Tammy. 
Don’t do any more shifts.  Stay
with me.  Please.  Promise me you will.  I’ll look after you.  I’ll make everything alright for you.’

‘Have you
got a bath?  I’d really like a bath.’

‘Of
course.  And take some of my
clothes.  They can be our clothes.  I’ll change too.  We could have a bath together and dress the
same.  Let’s see how alike we are when we
dress the same.  Let’s take pictures of
ourselves together.’

* * *

They slept together that night in
Jessica’s double bed.  Tamsin went to
sleep very quickly.  It was a long time
since she had lain down in a real warm bed after a bath with a belly-full of
food.  Like some small forest animal, she
had learnt to exploit such moments when they came.

Perhaps she’s not like me at all, thought Jessica suddenly in the dark, listening to Tamsin’s wheezy breathing. A person’s body and brain were just empty vessels waiting to be filled, or so the earnest doctors had told her. Personality was in the programming, not in the machine. What did a shoot ‘em up game and a word processor have in common just because they could be run with the same hardware?  This was a complete stranger lying beside her: a dangerous, unpredictable interloper who, in a moment of madness, she had brought into the safe zone and into her flat and her bedroom and her bed – yes, and then made extravagant promises to as well:  ‘Stay with me.  I’ll look after you.  I’ll make everything all right.’  What had she been thinking?  Had she gone completely mad?

But then she thought: yes, but the same things made us laugh.  She and I both noticed it.  We noticed each other noticing it.  So there is something in common. Whatever the different paths we have travelled, deep down Tammy and I are still the same. 

But then she thought: why I am so obsessed anyway with finding someone who is the same?  Why this constant obsessive longing for a soul-mate?  Suppose I did find someone who was identical to me in every way.  Wouldn’t that just be another way of being alone?

Tamsin whimpered in her sleep.

‘Tex!  Don’t do that!’ she pleaded with someone in her dream.  ‘Please!  Please!  Please!…  You’re scaring me Tex.  Oh shit, no!  Please!’

‘It’s okay sweetheart,’ whispered Jessica.  ‘It’s okay Tammy.  You’re only dreaming.  You’re safe here with me.’

She took Tammy in her arms.  Tenderness such as she had never felt came welling up in the darkness.  She remembered Tammy’s body in the bath, thin and pale, worn and scratched and bruised, with dozens of deep scars where Tammy had cut herself with razor blades and knives and broken glass.  What sort of pain would you need to have suffered to make you do that to your own flesh? 

What did it
matter how alike or unalike Tammy was to her? 
The point was that they were connected. 
They were inextricably connected. 

* * *

Next morning, as it happened,
Britain embarked on a war.  Few people
even remarked on it.  It took place in a
small country far beyond the imaginative universe of most British people.  Even the brave warriors themselves fought
from ten thousand metres up and never once saw the faces of those they
attacked.

A war had
begun.  What last night had been solid
buildings in that small faraway country – houses, offices, factories – this
morning were scattered stones and bricks and bits of wood.  On TV, if Jessica had chosen to watch it, the
safely returned warriors were being asked how they felt  (‘How was it for you?’  ‘Was it your first time?’ ‘Was it like what
you expected?’)   But Jessica didn’t
watch TV and, though she woke abruptly with a sense of loss and dread, it came
from quite another source.   She was
alone.  While she slept, Tamsin had
gone. 

‘Tammy!’
cried Jessica, leaping out of bed, but she already knew what she would find:
her purse emptied on the floor, her money gone, the front door left open, no
note, no explanation…

Jessica threw on some clothes.  She wasn’t angry.  She knew that Tamsin had gone to buy ‘seeds’ and she understood this perfectly, for she knew that, if she had been the one that had woken first and had found Tamsin still there, then she would have resented the intruder, and it would have been her who would have been desperate to put distance between them. 

She ran out
into the street.

‘Tammy!  Tammy!’

It was 7 a.m.  Only a few people were about, most of them workers – LSN-vetted workers – who travelled into the Zone from far away to make the cappuccinos and empty the dishwashers and clean the streets.  They observed Jessica with surprise.  A Turkish newsvendor setting up his stand paused and asked her if she was alright.  Jessica ran past him to the gate.

‘Are you running round in circles?’ asked the LSN guard.  ‘It was only twenty minutes ago you last ran through.’

He frowned.

‘And weren’t you wearing red last time?’

* * *

Jessica arrived an hour late at the
gallery.  She hurried through that pure
white space in which each exhibit was isolated and quarantined by a frame, by
glass, by a neatly printed label: a preserved human face, a self-portrait made
in blood, a scribbled page from a diary reproduced in relief on a slab of
marble, a row of grainy snapshots of an ordinary London street, elaborately
framed and labelled with Roman numerals like the stations of the cross…

Barely even speaking to her secretary, she shut herself away in her office and went at once to her PC to download the photographs she had taken the previous night.  There they were on the screen, a dozen pictures of Tammy, in Jessica’s bath robe, in Jessica’s pyjamas, laughing and pulling faces and striking poses.

She clicked the print icon.  She gathered up the printed images one by one as they emerged and then laid them out on her desk.  Last night, when she and Tamsin had been together what these twelve pictures showed had been reality.  But now each of them had already become an object in its own right, separate from the past, separate from each other, separate from Jessica, separate above all from Tamsin. 

Jessica felt nothing.  She moved the photos this way and that on the desk, over and over again, trying different arrangements, as if she thought she might find a pattern, a resolution, if only she tried long enough.  

Copyright 2004, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (11) Karel’s Prayer

I can’t imagine anything that would make me feel more isolated than being completely in the power of enemies who meant me harm.

This story was first published in Interzone in 2006 and is included in my first collection, The Turing Test.

Karel’s Prayer

The first thing Karel Slade noticed
when he woke up was an odd smell in his hotel room.  It was like the plasticky smell of a new car
which has just had the polythene taken off its seats, but with a hint too of
something antiseptic, a hint of hospital. 
And it was entangled in his mind with the mood of a fading dream in
which he was drowning or suffocating, or being held down.

The second thing he noticed was that the radio alarm hadn’t gone off.  It was now 8.00 and his plane home flew at 8.45.

 “Shit!”

He leapt out of bed naked – a big, broad-chested, athletic man in his late forties, with thick silvery hair – and grabbed the phone to get a taxi.  But the line, unaccountably, was dead. 

 “I do not believe it!”

He pulled on his trousers and headed for the bathroom. But it was locked.

8.03, said the clock as he went to the door of the room and found that locked too.  The phone rang.

“Mr Slade, please come to the door of your room.”

“It’s locked.”

 “Please come to the door and walk through.”

Beyond the door, where the hotel corridor should have been, was a large almost empty room, entirely white, with three chairs in the middle of it.  Two of them were occupied by men in cheap suits.  The third, a tall straight-backed thing which reminded Karel both of a throne and of an electric chair, was empty.

The two men rose.

One of them, the tall, wiry black man with the gloomy, pock-marked face, went to the door that Karel had just come through, closed it and locked it.  The other, the rotund Anglo-Saxon with the curly yellow hair and the affable expression, came forward in greeting.

“Mr Slade, good to meet you, my name is Mr Thomas.  My friend here is Mr Occam.”

 Karel did not take the extended hand.

“Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you think you’re playing at?”

There were those who said that Karel was surprisingly foul-mouthed for a prominent Christian leader, but as he often pointed out to his family and his friends, coarse language might be undesirable but it wasn’t swearing and had nothing whatever to do with the third commandment.  You had to have some way of expressing your negative feelings, he always argued.

“Sit down,” said Mr Occam shortly, returning to stand beside his colleague.

 Mr Thomas gestured to the throne.

“No,” Karel told him. “I don’t feel like sitting.  I do feel like listening to your explanation.”

“Sit!” commanded Mr Occam.

“Yes, do sit,” said Mr Thomas, “and then we can talk sensibly.”

He returned to his own chair.  He was one of those people who manage to be both plump and nimble.  His quick, graceful movements were almost camp.

Karel shrugged, went to the chair and sat down.

With a buzz and an abrupt click shackles came out of the chair legs and fastened themselves around his shins.

“Lay your arms down on the rests,” Mr Occam told him.

“What?  And have them shackled too!”

 The black man approached him.

 “I will hit you Mr Slade if you don’t put your arms on the rests.”

  Karel did as he was asked. 

   Buzz.  Click.  The shackles slid into position.

Mr Occam nodded curtly – a taciturn man acknowledging a small courtesy – and took his seat alongside Mr Thomas.

“Now Mr Slade,” said the more amiable of the two men, “let’s see if we can answer your questions for you.  Who the fuck are we?  Well, suffice to say that we work for a government agency.  What the fuck are we playing at?  That’s easy.  We’re carrying out an investigation.  An investigation concerning a terrorist organisation.  And we believe you may be able to help us with our inquiries.”

Mr Occam gave a small snort.

“He is going to help us with our inquiries.”

 Mr Thomas turned to his colleague gravely.

“Do you know what Mr Occam?  I think you may be right.”

*  *  *

God help me, Karel prayed.

He was very very afraid but trying hard not to show it. 

 Please God, help me!

 As ever, when he needed it most, his faith seemed to have deserted him.  But we should expect that, he reminded himself.  In the darkness and confusion of a fallen world, we should expect that.  After all, if the world wasn’t fallen, people wouldn’t need belief.  They would just know. 

Please God, help me! he tried again and this time help did seem to come.  For a merciful moment he was able to hold the thought in his mind that all this was only happening to one man at one particular point in space and one particular moment in time.  Beyond this room, outside of this moment, the world was still the world.  And beyond the world, that tiny inconsequential speck, there was eternity.  There was always eternity.  The same as it ever was.

“I have rights,” Karel said.  “You can’t detain me and shackle me and question me without a warrant.”

“With respect,” said Mr Thomas, “I think we’ve just demonstrated to you that we can.”

“But you’re breaking the law.  You’re violating my constitutional rights.  Sooner or later you’ll have to release me, and then this will get out.  I’m a prominent man.  I head an organisation with more than two million members.  I have connections.  I…”

“Why do you think we’ll have to release you?” queried Mr Thomas with what seemed like genuine curiosity.

“Well of course you…” Karel broke off, realising that there were, after all, other theoretical possibilities. 

“Listen,” he said, “if I’m not out of here very soon, my family and colleagues will start demanding explanations.  And they’ll go on until they get explanations.  And then you two men are going to be in deep trouble.”

“You think so?” Mr Thomas wiggled his head from side to side doubtfully, weighing up the merits and demerits of a questionable argument.  “Well who knows?  Who knows?  But you should let us worry about that.  After all, you’ve got other things to consider.”

“Yes,” said Mr Occam. “Like for example your membership of the SHG.”

“The Soldiers of the Holy Ghost,” said Mr Thomas regretfully, almost as if embarrassed to bring it up, “an illegal terrorist organisation responsible for several hundred deaths over the past five years.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Karel.  “I’m Executive Director of Christians for Human Integrity.  It shares some theology with the SHG, yes.  But it’s an entirely legitimate organisation, properly registered with all the appropriate authorities.”

“It’s a front for the SHG,” stated Mr Occam.

“And you, Mr Slade,” his colleague continued, “are a leading member of the SHG’s strategic command.  Why deny it?  You can see for yourself that we know it, so what would be the point?”

While Mr Thomas was speaking, Mr Occam leant forward and stared intently at Karel’s eyes.

Don’t try too hard to look sincere, Karel told himself. It was the mistake that liars always made, like drunkards trying too hard to act sober, like unfaithful husbands trying too hard to appear uxorious, rushing home from their mistresses with chocolates and bunches of flowers for their wives.

“I do deny it,” he said.  “I deny it completely.  Now let me call my lawyer.”

“No, Mr Slade,” said Mr Thomas.  “That’s not going to happen.  And don’t lets go on and on about it, eh?  Or it will get so…”

Mr Occam broke rudely across him, leaning forward to bark a question into Karel’s face.

“Do you deny you support the aims of the SHG?”

“No I don’t deny that.  Like the SHG, I’m opposed to any form of artificial life or artificial reproduction of life.  I’m opposed to artificial intelligence, I’m opposed to cloning, I’m opposed to designer babies and I’m opposed to field-induced copying of human tissues.  But it’s not a crime to object to tinkering with human identity.  Millions agree with me.  A majority of the population quite possibly.”

 “And do you deny that you support the methods of the SHG?” asked Mr Thomas.

Tell the truth whenever possible, Karel told himself.  The fewer lies the better.  But he’d need to choose his words carefully.

“I believe that their use of violence is in principle justified by the cause.  Most Christians for the last two thousand years – including all the Christian members of the present government – have believed that violence in some circumstances is justified.  It’s the traditional doctrine of the Just War.  If Christians can legitimately invoke that doctrine to justify war in defence of purely national interests then they are certainly entitled to invoke it when it comes to defending the integrity of the human person.  But that’s an intellectual and theological position.  It doesn’t mean that…”

“You are a member of the strategic command of the SHG,” Mr Occam said.  “Not intellectual position.  Not theological position.  Fact.  You know that.  We know that.  We’re not even going to discuss it.  You’ve been actively involved in funding and planning attacks on laboratories and laboratory staff for the past five years at least.  What we want from you is names, code words, bank accounts, structures and systems.  And you’re going to tell us all of them, Mr Slade.  One way or the other you’re going to tell us the whole lot.”

 “No I’m not, because I don’t know them.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake man,” grumbled Mr Occam, rising wearily from his chair and hitting Karel very hard across his face.

 “You can’t do that!” Karel yelled at him.

It had hurt.  It had frightened him.  But more than anything he was shaken by his own baby-like helplessness.  He was a man who liked to be in charge of his own life.

Mr Occam hit him again, this time so hard that the entire chair toppled sideways and crashed to the floor.

Help me God, prayed Karel, shackled to the fallen chair.  He could feel blood running down his cheek.  He could taste the rusty tang of it in his mouth.  Help me remember that this is just pain.  It’s essentially trivial.  It’s just something that’s happening for a very short time indeed to the most temporary part of me. 

They’d had a training course in the SHG –  “Using Faith to Withstand Torture” – and a set of guidelines that they’d instilled into all their members.  But they also knew very well that, faced with the agony of the Cross, even the Son of God had lost faith for moment.  So they’d set themselves a limited goal: you can’t hold out forever but try at least to hold out for one day to give the rest of the organisation time to go underground. 

 One day, Karel thought, just one day.  That had to be manageable.

The guidelines proposed two stages.  Stage A was to stonewall as long as possible, denying all knowledge.  Stage B, when the torture got too much to bear, was to give false information.  There were various fake addresses and phone numbers which would keep the enemy busy for a few hours, and tip off the people outside that they were under threat…

But for now Karel needed to try and stick to Stage A.  Actually, as long as they stuck to hitting him, he felt quite confident he could cope.  Hitting just hurt after all.  It was only if they got onto needles and blades that he would start to be vulnerable because, brave though he was about most things in life, he was absolutely terrified of being pierced or cut.  He always had been.  Ever since he sliced open his knee when he was a kid and had looked inside before the blood came, and seen his own white bone.    

 “Names, code words, bank accounts, structures and systems,” repeated Mr Occam.  “Starting, now, with the names of the other four members of the strategic command group.  The real names, not the crappy fake ones that you and your pathetic friends have dreamed up.  We know all about Mr French of Dawson Street.  We know about Mr Gray of Oldham Road.”

Parallel to the floor in his toppled throne, like the fallen king at the end of a game of chess, Karel quailed.  Telling them about the fictitious Mr French and Mr Gray had been Stage B.  So now there was nothing pre-prepared to fall back on.

“I told you,” he said, “I don’t know any names.  I don’t even know what the strategic command group is.”

 Wham.  Intense pain and nausea.  Bright lights in his eyes.  Mr Occam had kicked him in the stomach.

“Don’t lie to us you murderous piece of shit.  We aren’t just guessing here.  We know you’re high up in the SHG.  We know that since the death of Leon Schultz, there’s no one senior to you in the whole gang.”

A sour strand of vomit, mixed with blood, dribbled from the corner of Karel’s mouth.  The mention of Leon Schultz had shocked him.  A wealthy hotelier who had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack three weeks ago, Schultz had indeed been the leader of the SHG, but Karel had thought this was known only to himself and his four colleagues in the strategic command group.

 “Names,” said Mr Occam, “now!”

 He kicked Karel again.

“Hey!” protested Mr Thomas, standing up.  “Easy Mr Occam now.  Easy!  You’re letting it get to you again.  Maybe you should take five while I have a quiet word with Mr Slade here?”

“Quiet fucking word be damned,” grumbled the black man.  “Let’s stop pussyfooting around.”

It was hard for Karel to see what Mr Occam was doing because he had moved into a part of the room which was nearly above his head, but there was some kind of cabinet there against the wall, like one of those cabinets with many narrow drawers that you get in museums, holding fossils or sea-shells or pressed flowers.  Mr Occam was opening and closing drawers, muttering.  And then something silvery glittered in his hand and he turned and advanced across the room.

Oh shit God, Karel prayed. Help me please. If you love me God, make him put that back.

“Come on Mr Occam,” said the fat man, standing in front of his colleague and reaching up to lay his hands on his shoulders.  “You know it’s not time for that yet.  We need to give Mr Slade a little space.  A man takes a few minutes to figure out how he’s going to get round his entire system of belief.”

 Mr Occam made a disgruntled noise.

“Come on man, take five,” said Mr Thomas.  “You know I’m talking sense.”

Mr Occam hesitated and then, to Karel’s surprise and huge relief, he nodded.  Returning the blade to the cabinet, he strode across the room, opened a door and went out, out into the mythical world which lay beyond these four white walls, its existence almost as hard to believe in now as that of the Kingdom of Heaven itself.  The door slammed.

Ten minutes must have gone by already, Karel told himself.  Just six times that and I’ll already have done one hour.

*  *  *

“Mr Occam’s got all kinds of nasty
things in that cabinet there,” said Mr Thomas, returning to his seat and
leaning forward to peer down concernedly into his prisoner’s face.  “Knives, razors, pliers, even a blow
torch.  You know, like one of those
little ones people use to make that crunchy caramel crust on a crème
brulée?  Nice in a kitchen but, man, it hurts
when you use it like he does, with the vinegar splashed on afterwards and
all.  But I think those sort of things
should be the very last resort.   I’m not
a sadist.  Maybe I’m in the wrong job but
I honestly don’t like causing pain.”

Karel, the fallen chessman in his sideways throne, said nothing.  Of course he had heard of the good-cop bad-cop routine and he understood that a game was being played.  But he desperately desperately wanted to keep the good will of the reasonable Mr Thomas and to keep the ruthless Mr Occam at bay.

“Actually,” said Mr Thomas, “Mr Occam isn’t a sadist either.  You should see him with his grandchildren.  He’s gentleness itself.  But he’s an angry man, that’s the thing.  His little brother was maimed by your people, you see.  Bomb went off at the lab where he worked.  Concrete beam fell on top of him.  Legs mashed to a pulp.  Had to have them both off at the hip.  Girl beside him – nice girl, Gloria: as a matter of fact they were talking about getting married – she was decapitated by the blast.  He was trapped in there for an hour and a half next to her headless corpse.  Well, need I go on?  Just imagine it was your little brother Mr Slade.”

 Karel said nothing.

“He can’t stop thinking about it actually,” Mr Thomas said. “You wouldn’t believe how it eats him up.”

He stood up with a sigh.

“Come on now, let’s get you upright.  I really shouldn’t do this with my bad back, but I just can’t talk to a man in that position.”

With a grunt of effort he levered Karel and his throne back up, then returned to his own seat, puffed and red-faced.

“I know you people sincerely believe what you are doing is right,” he said.  “I know you sincerely believe that what Mr Occam’s brother was doing was wrong.  But, man, he was working on ways of duplicating human organs for transplants.  He was only trying to help.  You can see why Mr Occam is angry, can’t you?  You can see why he feels entitled to hurt you.  Your people didn’t seem to care much about his brother’s feelings after all.”

Karel still said nothing.  Intellectually his position was that the SHG should feel no more and no less responsible for the individual tragedies that resulted from their operations than the bomber pilots who helped rid the world of Nazi death camps should feel responsible for the individual tragedies that befell German civilians in the cities they bombed.  There would have been mashed legs there as well.  There would have been many decapitated girlfriends.  But he couldn’t say that without incriminating himself further.  After all, his position was supposed to be that the SHG weren’t “his people” at all.

“Yes.  I can see why he’s angry,” he said.  “I would be too in his place.  But those laboratories, those technologies, they’re brewing up all kinds of horrors for the future.  They’re blurring the boundaries between a human being and a thing.  You don’t have to be a Christian to see that, surely?  Without that distinction, there…”

He broke off.

 “But I’m not going to change your mind here am I?”

 Mr Thomas laughed pleasantly.

“I’m a public servant, Mr Slade.  My opinions are neither here nor there.”

 “How can you be a public servant if you don’t obey the law?”

“Ah, but those are the written laws you’re talking about Mr Slade, aren’t they?  Laws for the daylight, laws for the public stage.  You’ve got to bear in mind that every public stage also needs a behind-the-scenes, a backstage.  There’s got to be a place where things can be a bit messy and untidy, and where it’s okay to leave the ropes and props and bits of scenery lying about.  Do you know what I mean?  The show’s the point of it all, the show’s what it’s all about – that’s indisputable – but it’s what goes on behind the scenes that keeps the show going.”

 Mr Thomas stood up.

“I’ll tell you what.  Why don’t I leave you here to think for a little while?  You think about what you could do to help us, and I’ll nip out and have a quick word with Mr Occam there, see if I can persuade him to cut you a little bit of slack.”

*  *  *

Fifteen minutes at least,
thought Karel, sitting in the middle of the empty room.  Get through three more times what I’ve
done so far and that will be an hour ticked off already.

And it would only be another hour before Caroline realised he wasn’t on the plane.  She’d know at once that something was wrong.  She’d know to inform Matthew using the agreed code.  Matthew would set the wheels moving to get everything in the SHG battened down in readiness for the coming storm, and Caroline meanwhile would do the worried wife routine, using all the formidable resources she possessed as a TV celebrity: phoning the TV stations and the international press, phoning lawyers and churches and civil rights groups, e-mailing the two million members of Christians for Human Integrity.  Twenty-four hours?  Who needed twenty-four hours?  It would be a couple of hours at most before the light of day began to break through into Mr Thomas’s “behind-the-scenes” and Messrs Occam and Thomas began to feel the heat.

It was worrying that they knew about Leon Schultz though.  How had they found out?  How did they know about Mr French and Mr Gray?  What else did they already know? 

The door opened.  Mr Thomas came back in, followed by a sombre Mr Occam.  They both sat down in their chairs in front of him.  It was as if Karel was being interviewed for a job.

“We’ve decided to give you a bit of information,” said Mr Thomas.  “Something we’ve been holding back from you.  We think it may help you come to a conclusion.”

Mr Occam stood up, walked slowly over to Karel’s throne.  Karel braced himself for another blow.  But instead the sombre black man leaned forward and placed his hands on the ends of the chair arms, so that his face and Karel’s were no more than a foot apart.

“You’re not Karel Slade,” he said, and for the first time he very faintly smiled.

His breath smelled of tobacco and peppermint and garlic.

“What do you mean I’m not Karel Slade?  Of course I am!”

Instinctively Karel looked past the implacable Mr Occam to the accommodating Mr Thomas.  But Mr Thomas made the regretful grimace of a person who reluctantly confirms bad news

“It’s very hard to take in I know,” he said, “but it’s true.  You’re actually a copy of Karel Slade; you’re not Karel Slade himself.  In fact the real Karel Slade knows nothing of you at all.  He knows nothing of any of this.”

Mr Thomas paused like an experienced psychotherapist giving a client some space to process a difficult truth.  Karel needed it.  He was frozen in the sense that a computer can be frozen when so overloaded with tasks that it can’t proceed with any of them.

“Incidentally,” Mr Thomas said, “it’s actually a lot later in the day than you probably think it is.  It’s actually early evening.  The real Karel Slade got up at 6.30 this morning, caught his plane and is now back with his wife, Caroline.    They’re at a restaurant with Caroline’s brother John and his new fiancée Sue.  I believe the meal is in celebration of John and Sue’s engagement.”

“Not without me, they’re not.  That was my idea.”

“It was actually Karel Slade’s idea.  You think it was your idea because your brain is an exact copy of Slade’s and contains all his memories and thoughts.”

“Oh come on,” said the man who still believed himself to be Karel Slade, “I can see you’re trying to disorientate me, but to suggest I’m some sort of clone is really absurd.”

 “Not a clone,” said Mr Occam. 

“No of course not,” said Mr Thomas. “That would be absurd.  A cloned copy of you would take forty-eight years to grow – and even then it would only be a body copy of you.  It wouldn’t have your memories.  And it’s your memories that we’re after.”

 He leaned closer.

“No, you’re not a clone, Mr Slade, you’re a field-induced copy.  Last night when Karel Slade got into that hotel bed he didn’t know it but he was actually getting into a scanner.  The precise imprint of his body on the surface of space-time was recorded, right down to the subatomic level.  And then this imprint – this field – was reproduced by an Inducer in the mineral bath from which you eventually emerged.  It’s a bit like dropping a crystal into a solution.  It takes a bit of time, though, which was why we had to tinker with the clocks before we put you back in that fake-up of your hotel room and waited for you to wake up.”

Karel knew about the field induction process.  Like artificial intelligence and genetically engineered babies, it was one of the things that Christians for Human Integrity  and the SHG were both fiercely opposed to.

“But no one’s ever copied more than a few cells,” he said, “and the government declared a moratorium on the whole thing a year ago, pending the report of the Inter-House Committee on Ethics.”

Mr Thomas nodded.

“But we’re back to what we were talking about earlier, aren’t we?  About the difference between the public stage and behind-the-scenes?  There is a moratorium on field induction research and it’s perfectly appropriate in a civilised society that there should be, but behind-the-scenes has its own needs.”

 “You mean you just went ahead with field-induction in secret?”

“Well we couldn’t pass up on a technology like that, could we? Not in all conscience.  As you pointed out yourself at the beginning of this session, suspects have all kinds of rights – and properly so. They can’t be physically hurt.  They’ve got to have a lawyer present.  They can’t be held for more than a short period of time.  It’s all very laudable.  But we’ve got a responsibility to protect the public and, if we can work with a copy of the suspect, none of those problems need apply.  What’s more, if we do it right, the suspect and his associates need never even know that we’re onto them.  Karel Slade for example has no idea you’re here and that you’re about to incriminate him and the entire leadership of the SHG by telling us everything he knows.”

“I am Karel Slade, and I’m not going to tell you anything about the SHG because I don’t know anything.”

“I know it’s hard to grasp.  I know it’s just too much.  But you’re not Karel Slade.  It’s just that you have no other memories except for the ones that were copied from Karel Slade’s brain.”

“You’re a copy,” said Mr Occam bluntly.  “Get used to it.  A couple of hours ago we fished you out of the tank and dried you down with a towel.  Two hours earlier you were a lump of meat.  Two hours before that you were just soup.”

“Perhaps it would help to clarify things if we gave you another name,” said Mr Thomas.  “Let’s call you…  I don’t know… let’s call you Heinz.”

  Mr Occam seemed to find this amusing. 

“You always call them Heinz,” he complained.  “You always call them Heinz or Campbell.”

“Not always,” protested Mr Thomas.  “I sometimes call them Baxter.”

There was a TV set in the corner of the room.  He strolled over to it and switched it on.

“Something I’d like to show you Heinz.  We have one of our sleuths at the restaurant where Karel and his wife are dining at the moment.  The Red Scallop.  Only just opened this week, I understand…”

Karel – or Heinz – could see them on the screen: Caroline, John, Sue round the restaurant table… and Karel Slade, large and voluble, teasing his brother-in-law about something or other while the women laughed.

“This is a fake,” he said, “you’ve done this with computer graphics.”

“What, since yesterday?  It was only yesterday you phoned Caroline and suggested this restaurant, remember?  Previously you had a table booked at the Beijing Emperor.”

 “Somehow you’ve done it since yesterday.”

 “Dear God, Heinz, we’re good but we’re not that good.”

“I’m not called Heinz, I’m Karel Slade.  And that isn’t a live transmission.  It’s a fake.”

“Okay, let’s test it,” said Mr Thomas.  “What’s your cell phone number?”

Karel told him.  Mr Thomas punched the number into his own phone and paused with his finger on the “call” button.

On the screen John was replying to Karel’s banter.  Caroline and Sue were watching Karel to see how he would react.  They were smiling in anticipation.   Karel could be a very funny man.  They were looking forward to a laugh.  Caroline’s hand was resting affectionately on his arm.

“Now you tell me when to push the button,” said Mr Thomas. “You choose the moment.”

In the restaurant Karel was acting the outraged innocent in response to whatever John had jokingly accused him of.  They were all laughing now.  The waiter had just arrived with the starters.

 “Now,” said Karel-in-the-throne.

 Mr Thomas pushed the button.

Karel-on-the-TV reacted at once.  The smile faded to an irritated “What now?” expression as he felt his jacket pockets for the ringing phone.  When Mr Thomas hung up, Karel-on-the-TV examined his phone to see who the call had come from, shrugged, replaced it in his pocket and, muttering something to Caroline in passing, turned his attention first back to the others and then to the generous plate of seafood in front of him.

Karel-in-the-throne shrugged, as far as a man can shrug when his arms are shackled.

“You could do all that with computers.  You could easily do all that.”

 Mr Thomas smiled. 

  “Okay, demonstration number two coming up.”

He took out of his pocket a device like a TV remote controller and pointed it at Karel’s throne, which rose about an inch as small wheels emerged from the bottom of each leg.  Mr Thomas and Mr Occam got up from their own seats.  Then, with Mr Thomas leading the way, Mr Occam pushed Karel back through into the room where he had woken up, as if he was some elderly invalid in a wheelchair. 

It seemed incredible to Karel now that he hadn’t realised at once when he woke up that the alleged hotel room was simply a crude stage set.  The walls were plywood panels, in some places not even properly screwed back onto the frame. There was a blank white screen outside the window where there was supposed to be a view of the city.  But you see what you expect to see. 

Only the sense
of smell, it seemed, was not so easy to fool. 
All that had troubled him on waking had been that plasticky, slightly
disinfectant smell.  

However it wasn’t the room that that Messrs Occam and Thomas wanted to show him.  Using his remote, Mr Thomas unlocked the bathroom door and they passed through.  Of course there was no bathroom.  In fact what lay beyond wasn’t so much a room at all as a hangar or a factory floor.  Its dull metallic walls rose to the height of two ordinary rooms and it was the length and width of a soccer pitch.  Down the centre of it was a row of five large ovoid objects lying lengthways, each about three metres long and two metres high.  They were complex structures, made predominantly of metal.  A thick mass of cables – red, green, black, blue, yellow, multi-coloured – fed into plugs across their surface and trailed back across the floor to a bank of monitors against the wall.  There was an ozone smell and a soft electrical humming.

“In case you’re wondering, Heinz,” said Mr Thomas.  “These giant Easter eggs are Field Inducers.”

They approached the nearest inducer and Mr Thomas pressed a button on its surface to make a segment of the egg slide upwards to create an opening.  Inside, beautifully illuminated by lights both above and within it, was a bath of clear liquid.  It smelt of iron, like blood.  Karel could feel the warmth of it in his face.

“So you’re trying to say you grew me in there?”

“You don’t grow things in a Field Inducer,” said Mr Thomas.  “You assemble them.  Field induction isn’t a biological process.  It’s a physical one.  Think of making a recording of a sound.  You don’t try and reproduce the same conditions that led up to the sound being produced in the first place, do you?  You by-pass all that.  You construct a device that can copy the sound waves themselves.”

“But yeah,” said Mr Occam.  “That’s what we fished you out of.  When you’d got a face, that is, when you’d got past the stage of just being a big clot of blood.  We fished you out, put you on the recovery table and got you going with a jolt of current.  Then we gave you a shot to put you to sleep for a bit and took you through to the bed.”

Mr Thomas nodded.

“So what we’re saying, Heinz, is that this is the soup can you came out of.”

Karel couldn’t help remembering his dream of drowning and of hands holding him down, but he managed a derisive snort. 

“It’s all a film set,” he said.  “Like the hotel room.”

All of this was actually good, he tried to tell himself.  It was good because it was taking up time. The longer he could keep Mr Thomas and Mr Occam busy with trying to prove he was a copy, the nearer he’d get to his twenty-four hour deadline before having to face the challenge of physical pain. 

“Hang on, Heinz, hang on,” laughed Mr Thomas, “we haven’t finished yet.”

Mr Occam pushed him forward to the second Field Inducer.  Once again Mr Thomas touched a button.  Once again inside a warm metallic smell wafted out as the device opened up …

Then Karel gasped.  Suspended in the fluid, neither floating nor sinking, was a flayed human corpse. 

“Dear God,” he whispered.  “What have you done?”

“That thing bothers you does it?” growled Mr Occam.  “You should have seen my brother’s girlfriend after you lot blew her head off.”

The thing suspended in the water was dark red like congealed blood, its half-formed face an eyeless, orifice-less sculpture made of blood.  All over its surface were hundreds of fine, branching strands, which at first seemed to be some kind of growth like seaweed, but then turned out not to be solid outgrowths at all but patterns of inward movement, rivulets of matter being drawn from the surrounding fluid and streaming into the solid mass of the body.

 “Recognise the face at all?” asked Mr Thomas.

Karel looked at the eyeless mask.  Red as it was, eyeless and hairless as it was, covered as it was by the little branching rivulets, the resemblance wasn’t immediately obvious, but now that he looked more closely it was unmistakeable.  This thing was a likeness of himself.

“We always make several copies,” said Mr Thomas.  “It gives us a margin of error.  If we’re too rough with the first copy and it goes and dies on us, we can fall back on one of the others.  Copies aren’t quite as resilient as originals unfortunately.  In fact in about ten per cent of cases you can’t even get the heart to start and we just have to bin the things.”

He looked down thoughtfully into the mineral bath.

“It’s funny.  It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen this, I still always find myself wondering why they don’t drown down there, and why they don’t float or sink to the bottom.  It’s hard to get your head round the fact that it isn’t a living entity at all at this stage.  Nothing is moving in there.  The field is a rigid template, the matter flows into it, and once every particle is in place, it is locked there, completely and utterly motionless.  It’s the ultimate in suspended animation.”

They moved towards the third Inducer.

“This will only have been started a short time ago,” said Mr Thomas as the panel slid open.

At first this one seemed empty – there was certainly no solid object in there – but after a moment Karel made out a faint reddish vaguely man-shaped blur.  Mr Thomas took an aluminium pole which rested against the Inducer and stirred the liquid until the reddish mist had disappeared.  Then he laid down the pole again and they watched as the wispy shape slowly began to reassert itself.

“Suppose what you say is true,” said Karel/Heinz.  “Suppose that I am only a copy of Karel Slade.  Why tell me?”

 Mr Thomas glanced at Mr Occam.

“Well in a certain sense, Heinz, it doesn’t make much difference to us whether you believe yourself to be the original or the copy.  Either way you have the information we want and we’re going to extract it from you by any means possible.  And if that involves razors, that’s too bad.  If it involves putting vinegar on your scalded flesh or pulling off your nails with pliers, that’s too bad too.  But it does seem unfair.  So Mr Occam and I, when we talked outside earlier, we agreed that you might like to reflect on your position a bit before we go any further.”

“What do you mean, my position?’

“Think about it Heinz.  Think it through.  If you resist and we have to hurt you, you won’t be suffering on your own account but on behalf of Karel Slade.  You’ve never been part of the SHG.  We know that.  In fact we’re your alibi. We can vouch for the fact that we fished you out of the soup ourselves, only a few hours ago.  So there’s no doubt about it, you’ve never ordered anyone’s death.  You’ve never harmed anyone at all.”

Mr Thomas took hold of Karel’s throne by the arms and turned it to face him.

“You’re an innocent man, Heinz,” he said.  “Why should you suffer on behalf of someone else?  Why should Mr Slade be protected by the law while we torture you to try and stop his wrong-doing.”

“Even if I am… Even if I’m not…” 

Karel glanced at the misty red phantom of himself suspended in the mineral bath.  Tears came welling up into his eyes.      

“I mean whatever I am,” he persisted, fighting them back, “my beliefs are still the same.”

“Hang on a minute there, Heinz, are you quite sure about that?” protested Mr Thomas.  “Your beliefs the same?  Think about that for a minute.  Think, for instance, about what Karel Slade would think of you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wake up Heinz!” said Mr Occam giving the throne a rough shake.  “Wakey wakey!  You’re a copy, remember?  You’re an abomination against God.  That’s what Karel Slade thinks, doesn’t he? He thinks that even the lab technicians who make things like you deserve to be killed.  And as for you yourself, well you’re just an object to him, aren’t you?  You’re just a thing.”

“That’s right isn’t it Heinz?” asked Mr Thomas.  “In Slade’s book you’re not even a person. You have no soul and no feelings.  You have no rights, not even a right to pity.  Think about it.  That man we watched in the restaurant earlier on, if he knew what was going on here, would be pretty worried.  But he wouldn’t be worried about you.   He wouldn’t give a damn about you.  Your feelings just wouldn’t come into it.”

“So if you don’t tell us what we need to know,” said Mr Occam, “and I have to hurt you, you’ll be suffering for another man who cares nothing for you.  A man who denies that you are even capable of thinking and feeling.”

“But he’d be wrong there wouldn’t he?” said Mr Thomas. “You do think, don’t you Heinz?  You do feel.  Mr Occam and I, we know that and, like I said before, we aren’t sadists, whatever you might think.  We’d really rather not hurt a living thing who’s done nothing wrong at all.”

 Heinz looked from one to the other of his two interrogators.

Help me God, he began to pray, but then stopped.  How could he pray if he was a copy?  What was he to God?  God belonged to Karel Slade, laughing and joking in the restaurant with his pretty wife, not to this flimsy shadow, summoned out of nothingness by a machine.

“So what will happen to me?  When this is done, I mean.”

“Well if you stop to think about it, Heinz, I think you’ll realise that we’re going to have to terminate you,” said Mr Thomas gently.  “As you pointed out yourself, you can’t legally exist.  And copies don’t last long anyway.  A week or two at most.  You’ll have to go.  But it can be peaceful if you want it to be, quiet and peaceful and soon.”

“Yeah,” said Mr Occam, “and think on this.  If you act stubborn and we end up killing you the nasty way, well then we’ll just take that blood-clot guy out of the inducer there and start hurting him.  And if he doesn’t play ball, well then we’ll take out that cloudy guy – he should be good and solid by then – and start on him.  And if he plays the hero, well then, we’ll get a few more copies going that don’t even exist yet, and bring them alive just so they can suffer like you.  But if you talk, well then they’re all on easy street.  They can all stay in oblivion for good.”

Mr Thomas touched a button on the Inducer and the lid slowly closed. 

*   *   *

Back in the interrogation room,
Heinz told them the codes and the names and the bank details.  What were these things to him after all?  He was no more responsible for them than a
traveller at an airport was responsible for contraband slipped into his luggage
when he was looking the other way.

When Heinz was finally done, Mr Thomas went and fetched three cups of coffee from a machine in some other part of the building that Heinz would never see.  He brought the three cups in on a little plastic tray, along with some little packets of cookies, and used his remote controller to release Heinz’s wrists from the shackles so he could hold his own cup and eat his own cookies.  For a short time they all sipped peacefully in companionable, almost dreamy, silence, enjoying the warm surge of caffeine in their blood.

But after a few minutes, with the sigh of a man reluctantly picking up a burden, Mr Thomas placed his half-empty cup on the floor, reached into his jacket and took out an automatic pistol with a long white silencer. 

Heinz felt no emotion.  Less than twenty-four hours ago, after all, he’d been nothing but inanimate matter.  He’d been a simple solution of minerals in a bath.  Why fear a bullet that would simply return him to his natural state?

“Hey!  He needs to know the truth first,” Mr Occam said.  “Before he dies, he should know who he is and the price he’s paid.”

 Mr Thomas sighed.  Then, with a regretful grimace, he nodded.

“Listen Heinz,” he said gently, lowering the gun.  “Mr Occam is quite right.  I’m afraid there’s one more thing we haven’t told you.  One thing we haven’t been straight with you about.  You see, it is true that we copied Karel Slade.  It really is true.  But here’s the thing.  We lied to you when we said you were the copy.”

“What do you mean?”

“He means,” said Mr Occam, “that you really are Karel Slade.  We knocked you out with chloroform in your hotel room and brought you here.”

Heinz remembered the hospital smell and the dream of being held down.

“But…  That can’t be.   I mean… what about the restaurant?  I mean we saw Karel Slade in the…”

“He was a copy,” said Mr Thomas.  “Though he doesn’t know that of course.  He believes he’s the real Karel Slade.”

“But…” Heinz – or Karel – struggled to frame a coherent question.  “But why swap us round then?  Why not just leave me in the hotel?”

“Copies aren’t perfect.  They always die after a week or two.  Sometimes it’s a stroke or a heart attack.  More often two or three body organs pack up all at once without warning.  And copies have a way of just suddenly dying on us if we put too much pressure on them.  Doing things this way round avoids that problem.   And what’s more it gives us a way of eliminating Karel Slade the terrorist without blowing our cover.  It’ll look as if he died of natural causes.”

 A small puzzle resolved itself in Karel’s mind. 

 “Yes,” he said slowly.  “Yes I see.  Just like with Leon Schultz.”

“Exactly.  We copied him too.  He told us everything he knew.  The rest of you took the copy for the real man and never suspected anything.  Your copy will die soon just like his did.”

“He might die tonight, of a heart attack, in bed with that lovely wife of yours,” said Mr Occam, smiling coldly for the second time since Karel had met him. 

“James!” reprimanded Mr Thomas.

Karel looked up.  He’d barely been touched by Mr Occam’s jibe, but he was rather startled to discover that his tormentor had a first name.

“What’s your given name?” he asked Mr Thomas.

“Herbert,” said Mr Thomas, a little uncomfortably.  He quickly formalised things again by prefacing the name with a title.  “Agent Herbert Thomas.”

Then he caught Karel’s eye and glanced down at the gun to remind Karel politely of their unfinished business.  Karel nodded.

“Give me one minute,” he said.  “Just one minute.”

“Of course,” said Mr Thomas. “You need to sort out who you are again.  I understand that.  Just let me know when you’re ready.”

Transferring the gun to his left hand, he reached down for the remains of his cup of coffee.

“Ever had that thing when you wake up in the morning and, just for a moment, you can’t think who you are?” he asked Mr Occam.  “It’s a mystery, this identity thing.  I never cease to be amazed how quickly we can persuade a man to part with it.  It’s just…”

Then he remembered that these were Karel’s final moments on Earth and he broke off, placing a finger on his lips with an apologetic glance at his prisoner.

In the silence Karel bent forward in his execution chair and tried to pray. 

Dear God forgive me.

But there was no sense of a presence listening to him.  Well, of course not, he thought.  He couldn’t really expect just to pick up the mantle of being Karel Slade again and expect to resume business as usual.  Not after what he’d done.  It didn’t work like that.

Dear God forgive me, he tried again.  I just didn’t know. I didn’t know who I was.

Copyright 2006, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (10) The End of Time

What you get here is the entire history of the universe, an explanation for the Fermi paradox, a debate about the purpose of life, and isolation of the most extreme kind. Say what you like about my stories, they deal with the big questions.

This story comes from my Spring Tide collection (which I’d very much like more people to read). Most of the stories in the book are more-or-less realist stories with contemporary settings, and none is science fiction – but ‘The End of the Time’ is the one that comes closest.

The
End of Time

Eli
waited.  Behind and above him was
complete darkness.  In front of him was
an empty arena.  His fellow archangels
around its perimeter were shadowy forms in the dimness, waiting silently, just
as he was doing himself, for the performance to begin.

A single tall figure stepped
forward into the middle.  From the pitch darkness
beyond the arena, a great sigh arose from countless unseen watchers, spreading
outwards and upwards like a tide. For this new presence was no mere archangel,
this was the Clockmaker himself.   He
stood out there for a moment, while silence fell once more, and then he raised
his hand.   Pouf!
–a tiny, brilliant point of light appeared, suspended above them all.

Again that great sigh came from the
darkness on every side and, in the intense brightness of that tiny light, Eli glimpsed
for a moment the cherubim and seraphim out there, the dominions and thrones.  Tier after tier, this whole vast angelic host
had been waiting for all eternity to admire the Clockmaker’s work.

The point of light expanded rapidly, diminishing in brightness as it did so, until almost the whole arena was filled by a huge dim sphere, leaving just sufficient space round the edge for the archangels to keep their vigil.   It was time for Eli and his companions to get to work, and they set to it at once, each one leaning forward to peer intently into the depths of the sphere. 

Straight away, Eli saw lights in
there.  In fact he saw great skeins of
light, strewn through the void, each one made up of millions of tiny
disc-shaped clumps of glowing matter that span around like wheels.  And when Eli examined the wheels closely, he
found that they too were made of smaller parts. 
In fact they turned out to be tenuous structures of the most extraordinary
delicacy, consisting almost entirely of empty space.  These wheel-shapes were not solid clumps as
they had at first appeared, but were so full of emptiness as to be almost
imaginary: wheels sketched out in the darkness by billions of separate specks
of light, each one following its own allotted path.   And Eli saw that, as these little specks
travelled round and round the centre of each wheel, waves of pressure passed
through them, so that the specks clumped closer together when the wave reached
them, and moved apart again as it passed by, creating graceful spiral bands of brightness,
that themselves moved round the wheel. 
Each tiny wheel was really two wheels revolving at different speeds: a
wheel of specks, and a wheel of waves that moved through the specks! 

Laughing with delight, Eli turned
from the spectacle to point it out to the hidden watchers who were seated, row
after row, on the dark tiers behind him: “Observe!” he cried.  “The same matter forms two separate wheels simultaneously!” 

A sigh of appreciation rose up among
the cherubim and seraphim, the thrones and dominions.  But, even before the sigh had faded, another archangel
on the far side of the arena was calling out just as excitedly as Eli had done:
“Look!  Even the smallest of these lights
has tiny spheres revolving round it!” 

Again the sigh in the darkness.

“Notice how they also spin on their
own axes!” called a third archangel. 

Another sigh.

“And see how the whole spreads
outwards!” called a forth.  “The arena you’re
sitting in is itself expanding at great speed, just so as to be able to contain
it.”

The Clockmaker had created Time, no
less, and here in front of them, wheel within wheel, was the Great Clock that
gave it form.

Sigh after sigh rolled outwards and
upwards in the darkness.

*   *   *

Gradually
the initial excitement subsided.  The archangels
called out only rarely now, and those great sighs, rising in one part or
another of the vast and unseen auditorium, happened less and less frequently.  So rare had they become, in fact, that many aeons
had passed in complete silence when the archangel Gabriel suddenly spoke.  

He had been giving his attention to
the smallest elements of the Clock, and had focused his vision to such an
extent that he could see not only the tiny motes of stone that revolved round
each star, but the surfaces of those stones, and the objects that lay on those
surfaces, and even the miniscule particles, wheels themselves, of which those tiny
objects were made.   And it was here, on
the surface of one of these stones, that he had made an observation.

“Observe, Clockmaker!” he said with
a bow. “A new clock has appeared within your own!”

The Clockmaker had been busy elsewhere, but, hearing this news, he looked across at once, his huge blazing eyes piercing through all the intervening nebulae and galactic clusters, to home in on the stone which Gabriel was pointing to.  Eli looked too, of course, and saw a rocky shell, still molten on the inside, of a kind so common throughout the Clock, that they could be found spinning around almost every star.  Minor irregularities pocked its surface.  There were little bumps and hollows, and, as sometimes occurred on these half-cooled stones, liquid water had gathered in the hollows.  But Gabriel was looking into that liquid, pointing at objects so minute that they were as small in relation to the half-cooled stone as the stone itself was small in relation to the galaxy that contained it.  These new, tiny objects took the form of little spheres, moving this way and that through the water. 

Now of course stars, stones, water and
specks of dust were all parts of the Great Clock, and, a clock being an
assemblage of moving parts, they were meant
to move in relation to one another.  But
the Clockmaker could see at once that what Gabriel had found was a new kind of movement, and so could Eli, and
the other archangels, and the hidden host. These microscopic spheres weren’t simply
being pushed and pulled by the forces around them.  They weren’t just being tugged downwards by
gravity, or lifted by buoyancy, or tossed about by the convection currents that
kept the water constantly turning over.  No,
the motion of these little spheres was something else entirely, for it was driven
from within themselves.  Chemical processes
unfolding inside them provided energy to thousands of tiny fibres on their outer
surfaces, and these fibres were beating together in rhythmic waves that sent the
little spheres rolling and tumbling through the water in directions that
couldn’t be explained by gravity, buoyancy or currents.  

Along with all the other
archangels, Eli could see at once that Gabriel had spoken the truth: each of
these little spheres was indeed another clock in its own right.  But what particularly fascinated Eli was the
way that these tiny structures perpetuated themselves.  They weren’t bodies of matter in the way that
a star or a planet or a stone was a body of matter.  Rather they were patterns that passed through matter, just as those spiral
pressure waves he himself had spotted had passed through the drifts of stars, or
ripples passed through water, or sounds passed through the air.  In every single moment, each of those tiny
spheres was simultaneously taking in new matter from its surroundings, and
expelling matter from within itself.  In a
very short time, each one had completely replaced the building blocks of which
it was made.  And yet, like a spiral arm,
it still retained the same essential form.  

And what a form!  There was silence in the arena and in the
darkness beyond, as the archangels glanced uneasily at one another.  They all knew that the Clockmaker hadn’t built
these tiny structures, that they had arisen on their own, a purely accidental by-product
of the forces that the Clockmaker had set in motion, much as the complicated eddies
and cross-currents of a mountain stream are a by-product of its headlong rush
downhill.  And yet, accidental or not,
there was an obvious fact in front of them which they all could see but none of
them dared name out loud: every one of these little rolling spheres was at
least as complex and as perfect as the Great Clock in its entirety.  What would their master think about that?

The Clockmaker frowned.  He was omniscient, of course, so he was far ahead
of all the rest of them, and he’d seen at first glance what his angels and
archangels had only gradually grasped.  He’d
seen, in fact, that each of those little rolling spheres wasn’t simply as intricate as his own Clock, but far far
more so.  Indeed, considered in terms of
complexity, his Clock was as tiny in relation to these little spheres, as they
were to it in terms of size.  And, as if
that wasn’t bad enough, the Clockmaker had noticed something else that none of
the archangels had yet spotted: these things were changing over time.  At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of
them were splitting themselves in two, and the smaller spheres resulting from
the division wouldthen immediately
begin to take in matter from the rich solution around them, growing quickly to
full size again, and then themselves dividing. 
Of course small errors occurred at each new division.  These were usually negligible in their
effects, but occasionally they resulted in clocks that were too badly flawed to
be able to maintain their separateness from the surrounding matter, so that
they simply broke down and disappeared.  
What the Clockmaker had noticed, though, was that, in an absolutely tiny
proportion of cases, the new clocks actually proved to be superior than their precursors, in the sense that they were more
able to maintain their own integrity against the forces of entropy.  And therefore, because the types of clock that
were most successful at retaining their separateness were the ones that increased
in numbers, the design of these little clocks in general (if the word “design” could
be used in such a context) was constantly increasing in sophistication.   

With his divine foresight, which
was really a capacity to see not just in three dimensions but in four, five and
even six, the Clockmaker looked ahead through time with his great fiery eyes.  He observed the trajectory of development of
these tiny intricate clocks, and saw them diversifying and spreading, like a
kind of restless rust that would form itself again and again from the simple
minerals of which a planet was made, until that planet’s entire surface was coved
with a multiplicity of wriggling, bulging, blooming forms, climbing over one
another, consuming one another, driving one another to yet higher levels of complexity.  Ultimately, he saw, this would affect the
workings of the Great Clock itself in small but subtle ways —it would change the
albedo of planetary surfaces, for instance— and in so doing, minutely alter the
workings of the entire design.

“Wipe it clean!” he commanded.  

Gabriel, that great archangel,
bowed his head in submission, and reached with his hand into the great sphere of
the Clock until he was almost touching that little, spinning, half-cooled rock.  He frowned with concentration for a moment as
cleansing rays came pouring out from his fingertips, scorching the surface of the
little stone, annihilating the tiny spheres and all their kin, and breaking down
all but the most rudimentary of chemical bonds, so that the stone was returned
in a matter of moments to its previous state as a simple mechanical component
of the Clock.

A sigh rose and spread, outwards
and upwards, through the multitude in the darkness beyond the arena.  And Eli watched in silence from his own quiet
corner.

“Listen!  All of you!” the Clockmaker boomed out to his
archangels.  “Note carefully what Gabriel
has just done and do exactly the same! 
That is a command, to be followed without exception.  You must watch your sectors minutely for any
unscheduled developments of that kind, and, as soon as you find them, they must
be wiped away at once.  Nothing must be
allowed to tarnish my Clock’s perfection, or to disturb the smooth, clean flow
of Time.”

So from then on, each archangel
carefully audited every one of the billions of planet within his area of
control for the first signs of that strange new restless rust.  And from time to time, only occasionally at
first, but gradually more frequently, one or other of them would suddenly reach
into the Clock and blast clean the surface of some small stone that had showed
signs of developing patterns on its surface that might possibly be able to replicate
themselves. 

Each time, the invisible host would
sigh.

*   *   *

Like
all the others, Eli watched his own little section of the Clock –his own
galaxies, his own stars, his own planets– and for a long time, he did just as
Gabriel had done and the other archangels were doing.  Again and again, he reached in to wipe away
imperfection with blasts of purifying energy.  

He had done this many thousands of times,
when he spotted yet another stone on which a film of organic matter was starting
to grow.  Following his now familiar
routine, he extended his hand into the Clock in a business-like fashion and was
about to let loose the cleansing rays when, for some reason, he hesitated.  All the other archangels round him were still
blasting away –there was Raphael for instance, over to his left, shooting out deadly
rays right at that very moment– but Eli found, to his own surprise, that this
time he simply couldn’t bring himself to do it. 
In fact, far from reaching in to destroy this new collection of little self-replicating
clocks, he found himself shielding them so they couldn’t be seen by anyone other
than himself.  And, having done that, he amazed
himself further by abandoning his vigil over the millions of other planets in
his sector and instead settling down to watch the tiny clocks he’d saved as
they very slowly grew and changed.

Time went by.  That little stone wheeled around its star
many hundreds of millions of times while Eli watched the little clocks on its
surface.  And he became so rapt, so
enchanted, so focussed on this one single stone, that he didn’t even notice the
huge fiery eyes of the Clockmaker turning in his direction, homing in on him through
all the spinning wheels of the Clock, and recognising at once what he what he
was doing.

“Eli my son,” the Clockmaker boomed.  “You have disobeyed me.”

Eli started, rigid with terror, while gasps of shock echoed and re-echoed through the vast auditorium around them. 

“I have disobeyed you, Father,” Eli acknowledged.  He fell to his knees as the Clockmaker came striding through his own creation to stand towering above his disobedient servant.  “And now, I know, it’s for you to decide what you wish to do with me.”

The Clockmaker shrugged.  “Just wipe it clean, Eli,” he said, with the merest of glances at the tiny world Eli had been watching for all those millions of years. “Wipe it clean, and, just this once, we’ll say no more about it.”

It was not so much a sigh this time as a gasp that arose around them in the darkness.  Eli had been extraordinarily lucky –archangels had been exiled or annihilated for much smaller acts of disobedience– but, instead of gratefully accepting the lifeline, he stubbornly stood his ground.

“I won’t, Father,” he said.  “I want to leave it alone, and see how it develops.”

Once again, like the sound of some great unseen ocean moving restlessly in its bowl, a sigh rippled back and up through the auditorium, to be followed by a deep expectant silence, as if the entire host was holding its breath.

Surprised by his servant’s
intransigence, the Clockmaker looked back with slightly more interest at the
growth on the surface of the little planet. 
Why did this matter so much to Eli, he was asking himself?  With his omniscience and foreknowledge, he could
of course see not only how Eli’s little clocks were functioning in the present,
but how they would develop between now and the end of time if allowed to
continue on their present trajectory.  In
this particular case, the effect on the Clock would be negligible, for it so happened
that this small planet, and its star, and even the galaxy of which they formed
a part, were relatively peripheral parts of the grand design.

“Master,” Eli persisted, “those
tiny beings there, those little clocks, have developed in a strange new way
that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen before.  They’ve become a different thing entirely
from those spheres that Gabriel found. 
In fact, some of them have become almost as we are.  For they see, Father, they know they exist, and they
are aware of the Clock moving around them as something separate to themselves.  They’ve even begun to wonder what the Great
Clock is, and who made it, and what purpose it serves.”

He didn’t really speak in words of course, and nor did the Clockmaker when he
answered, for words would have been utterly inadequate to the speed and power
of their thought.  Rather, in each
instant, the two of them laid out whole philosophies, entire sequences of
thought, complete with every possible ramification, permutation and implication.   It was as if, in each exchange, an entire
new science was invented, developed and brought to completion. So it always was
between the Clockmaker and his archangels.

 Again the Clockmaker shrugged as he half-watched
the countless varieties of tiny clock on the surface of that little stone, his
interest already fading.

“They are like us in some respects,” he conceded.  “But look how they must suffer to be so.”

Suffering was of course outside Eli’s
experience, and the Clockmaker’s too, but the Clockmaker spoke of it by way of practical
demonstration.  He showed Eli the nature
of pain, fear, grief, and horror, first of all as these things appeared from
outside, and then as they felt like from within, laying out millions of
beautifully categorised examples, and demonstrating with irrefutable logic that
these various unpleasantnesses were the inevitable lot of these tiny beings.

“These entities only exist at all because
of suffering.”  That, very roughly speaking,
was the gist of the Clockmaker’s argument. 
“They only continue to exist because their mechanisms drive them to constantly
struggle against annihilation.  They are
like teetering towers. If they are not just to crumble and melt back into the world,
everything that threatens that precarious balance must be the cause of fear,
pain and revulsion, while everything likely to maintain and perpetuate it must
be source of craving, the cause of constant striving and desperate struggle. There
can never be rest for them, for as soon they rest they will topple, and disintegrate,
and cease to exist.”

Among many billions of other
examples, the Clockmaker showed Eli a man trapped inside a sinking ship, trying
to suck air from the tiny and dwindling pocket that still remained, and a woman
surrounded by a forest fire, who was vainly trying to shield her children from
the blaze with her own blistering flesh.  All that was really going to happen to the
woman and her children was that their bodies would oxidise, and then quickly return
to the peaceful simplicity of the untarnished Clock.  All that would happen to the drowning man was
that his own personal clock would stop. 
Yet still they struggled desperately, even when all hope had gone of
retaining their separateness.

“Don’t you pity them, Eli?” the
Clockmaker asked. “Don’t you pity these strange accidental beings, which are
neither one thing or another?   They are like us in a way –you’re right– they
are like angels, and that is indeed a strange thing.  But can’t you see they’re angels made of mud,
who must constantly worry about rain, and fret about heat, if they are to
remain in existence at all?  Surely it
would better to take away from them this cruel desperate battle that they are
compelled to fight, and which in the end they’ll always lose?  Surely it would be kinder to let them crumble
quietly back down into the simple, untroubled matter from which they come?”

“But these exist also!” protested
Eli, proceeding to lay out millions of examples, just as the Clockmaker had
done, but this time of happiness, pleasure, love, beauty and delight, all of
which, like suffering, had hitherto been quite unknown to the Clockmaker and
his angels.

If pain was real, then so were they:
that was Eli’s argument.  But the
Clockmaker just laughed.

“Alright, Eli, my stubborn son, I
will give you a choice.  You can destroy these
little beings and come back to obedience, or you can let them survive.  But if you decide to let them carry on, you
yourself will have to live out, one by one, every single life that has ever existed
on this stone, and exists now, and will exist in the future.  Do you understand me?   You
must sit behind every single pair of eyes from the moment those eyes open to
the moment they finally close.  And then straight
onto the next pair, and the next, and the next, billions and billions of times
over, from now until the moment that the last eyes close.”

As the Clockmaker spoke, his own fiery
eyes were drilling deep into Eli’s mind. 
“So come on now, Eli.  Make your
choice.  Let’s see if you really mean
what you say about their lives being worth living.”

Eli looked up fearfully into the Clockmaker’s
terrifying gaze and saw the pure and absolute justice of what he’d said.  If it was indeed true, as Eli had claimed,
that these beings’ existence was worth more than nothing, then how could he
object to living behind their eyes?   

As he tried to decide whether or
not he’d really meant what he said, he turned his attention back to that little
stone of his and considered once more the tiny beings who lived there.  There was no doubt about it: the Clockmaker
was right about suffering.  These odd, accidental
little beings did indeed experience terrible suffering, and it was indeed integral
to their nature, essential to their continued existence.  Could he really bring himself to live through
it, again and again and again, until the last spark of life had finally
flickered out?

Eli thought about it for a short while
–the stone went round its star barely a hundred times–and then he made a
decision.

“I submit to your judgement,
Clockmaker.  I’ll let them live and I’ll pay
the price for it.”

The Clockmaker nodded, grudgingly
impressed, and then, all at once, he dissolved Eli’s angelic body, plucked out the
tiny widthless point that contained his spirit, and readied himself to fling it
down to the surface of that tiny stone.

“Very well then, Eli,” he boomed.  “You’ve made your choice.  Come and look for me at the end of time.”

*   *   *

So
Eli lived, one after the other, the lives of every sentient being born on the
planet Earth.  He was every human being
and every animal.  He was every tyrant and
every slave.  He was all the women who
died in childbirth, and all who lived and gave birth.  He was every torturer and everyone who was
ever tortured.  He was every beggar and
every passer-by, every cat and every mouse, every hawk and every sparrow.  He looked out at the world through the
multiple eyes of each tiny spider.  He
experienced the abyssal depths though the senses of each blind creature that wriggled
or crawled there.   He was every single
living thing, however humble, that had some sense of its own existence, however
slight that might be.   And everything
that any one of them experienced, he experienced himself, from the sweetest
pleasure to the most excruciating pain.

After each life came to an end, he
woke to himself again for a moment, saw the life he’d just lived laid out behind
him, and saw the ways in which he might have lived it better.  But then the moment of clarity was over, and he
was back at the beginning of another life, his entire existence confined once
more to a tiny memory-less bundle of flesh which must learn everything from
scratch all over again.  Occasionally, in
certain human bodies, some vague sense of his situation would come to him, and
he’d try and communicate it to his fellow-beings.  (And they, not remembering who they were,
would almost always dismiss it, often angrily, and sometimes with murderous
rage).  Most of the time, though, he had
no inkling at all.

And so he went on.  Even when all the humans had died out, he
wasn’t even half-way to the end of it.  Millions
of years passed by when he went through cockroaches, one after another, each in
its dim and solitary world, with craving, pain and pleasure switching on and
off in its brain like coloured lights, and no thoughts at all.

At last, though, at the end of
time, when the Clock finally stopped moving, and all its components had become
cold and dark and inert, Eli returned to the place where the Clock was
made.  He was himself again, he was Eli
the archangel, but he was immensely old. 
In fact he was billions of times older than the Clock itself, for he’d had
to live out every second over and over again, until he’d seen every single moment
through the eyes of every being that had been present in it.

As he came to the place where the
arena had stood, he remembered the life he’d led before his fall to Earth.  He remembered what it was to be an
archangel.  He remembered the great fiery
eyes of the Clockmaker.  He remembered
the sense of expectation in the darkness beyond the arena, the sighing that
rose upward and outwards through that cavernous space that contained the unseen
host. 

*   *   *

But
there was no sighing now, no expectation. 
No one spoke or moved.   There
wasn’t even a lonely wind such as might blow through a desolate place on Earth,
making things rattle and clank. 

“Clockmaker!” he called out.  “It’s me, Eli.  I did what you asked me to do, and I’ve
returned!”

But there was no one there.  There was nothing in existence but Eli himself.

Copyright 2018, Chris Beckett

Isolation story: (8) To Become a Warrior

Finding it hard to concentrate on new work at the moment, I’m taking a ridiculous amount of care over my choice of these isolation stories, and the sequence I present them in! If you want the full effect, scroll down and start at (1) and read through them in order.

‘To Become a Warrior’ appeared in Interzone in 2002, and was included in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best anthology for that year. I never included it in one of my own short story collections because I used it instead as an element of my novel Marcher .

Towards the turn of this century I became aware that there was a reaction on the way against liberal, secular, technocratic modernity (and I was right!) This was reflected in my first novel, The Holy Machine, as well as in the group of short stories which became Marcher.

This version of To Become a Warrior, which I posted on this site a couple of years ago, has a different ending from the one originally published. I felt that was more appropriate in the world as it now was. (In the novel, which deals with parallel time lines, there are three different endings to the story, as Carl makes three different choices.)

I am myself a former social worker. A ‘deskie’ in the terms of this story.

To Become a Warrior

Where I live it’s the Thurston Fields estate only we just call it the
Fields.   Which it’s what they call a Special Category Estate which is
crap for a start because everyone knows it’s a dreg estate and we’re the
dreggies.  Which is we’re the ones they haven’t got any use for,
yeah?   I mean fair enough, I can’t hardly read and write as such. 
Which I’ve never had a job or nothing only once I had a job in this tyre
and exhaust place.  Like a job creation scheme?  Only I was late the
second day – right? – and the manager, he only told me to do something
about my attitude, so I fucking smacked him one, didn’t I?

And I’ll tell you what mate, not being funny or nothing, but if you
never lived on a dreg estate you’ve got no idea what it’s like.  You
might think you have but you haven’t.  I’ll tell you one thing about it,
the Department runs your life.  The DeSCA, yeah?   The deskies we call
them.   Which you get different kinds, like housing deskies which if
you’re some girl who gets pregnant, they’re the ones who get you a
flat.   (Mind you, if you’re a bloke and you want a flat you’ve
got to find some slag and say you love her and that, know what I
mean?)  And you get teacher deskies, and benefits deskies.  You even get
deskie police.  But I tell you what, mate, the ones we really hate are
the fucking social worker deskies.  Like they try to be so nice and
understanding and that, all concerned about you – know what I mean? – but next thing they’re taking your fucking kid away.

Like my girlfriend Kylie, well my ex-girlfriend because I dumped her,
didn’t I?  She had her kid Sam taken off her and she went fucking mental,
know what I mean?  I mean, fair play, he is a whinging little git and
at first I thought, great, all day in bed and no distractions.  But it
did her head in and she was crying and that, and she was down the Child
Welfare every day and she didn’t want fucking sex no more or nothing so I
thought to myself, I can’t hack this, I’ll go fucking mental, know what I mean?

(Which then she tried to top herself which her mum said was down to me but it never.  It was the fucking deskies.)

#

Anyway, one day I was down the Locomotive with my mates when this
geezer comes in – yeah? – and he only had a skull tattooed all over his
face!   I mean like so his face looked like a skull, yeah?  Which my mate Shane goes, “Shit, look at that!”   This bloke he looked well
hard, but – yeah? – we must have had twelve pints each minimum, so I
thought to myself, fuck it.   And I go up to this skull geezer – right? –
and go like, “Who the fuck are you?”(Shane was pissing
himself, the prat.  He thought it was hysterical.  He thought old skull
face there was going to beat the shit out of me.)

But the skull guy just laughs.

And he was like, “I’m Laf, who the fuck are you?”

So I go, “I’m Carl.  What kind of name is Laf for fuck’s sake?”

And he was like, “Watch it mate,” only he was laughing, know what I
mean?  And he goes, “It’s short for Olaf.  It’s a warrior’s name,
alright?  I’m a warrior of Dunner I am.”

I didn’t know what the fuck he meant but I didn’t want to look like a prat or nothing so I just go, “Warrior of Dunner, huh?”(You know, American and that).

And he laughs and goes, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you mate?”

So I go, “No I don’t, mate, but I reckon you’re talking out of your arse.”

But he just kind of looks round the pub at the blokes slagging each
other off by the pool table and at the kids arsing about on the machines
and at that old slag Dora with her wrecked fucking face who comes in
every night and drinks till they chuck her out.

So he looks all round – right? – and then he looks back at me and he’s like, “This place is shit isn’t it?”

And I’m like, “Yeah?” Because, like, I can see what he means in a way but I drink there every bloody night.

And he goes, “Want to come and meet some of my mates?”

And I’m, “Yeah okay.”

And he’s, “Only I’ve taken a liking to you Carl.  I liked the way you came over like that.  More bottle than your mates there.”

Well then we walk straight out past Shane and Derek and they’re like
trying to make out it’s hysterical  – yeah? – but really they’re fucking
gobsmacked, aren’t they?

And Derek goes, “Where the fuck are you going Carl?”

But I don’t know, do I?

#

Laf’s got his car out there – it’s like a really old Mondeo – and, it
was well good, we ton across the estate at 90, with the windows down
and the music on full blast.  (Well the police don’t bother with the
Fields at night, only if there’s a riot or something.)

And we go up Thurston Road, right up near the wire where there is
them three big old tower blocks – yeah? –  which are all sealed off and
that because they’ve been like condemned.  (I mean: they’ve always been
condemned and sealed off like that since I was a kid, because of
asbestos or something, I think.)

Me and my mates, we’ve tried to get into those places but they’re like not just boarded up they’re steeled
up – yeah? –  with metal plates and that.  Only it turns out that Laf
and his mates have managed to get into one of them called Progress
House.  Like there’s a kind of service door or something round the back
which it still looks like it’s locked up but they can get in and out,
yeah?

Inside it was really dark and echoey and it smelt of piss.  You
couldn’t see nothing but Laf goes charging off up the stairs: one floor,
two floors, three floors…

“Wait for me,” I go.

But Laf just laughs and he’s like, “You’ll have to get fitter than that, mate, if you want to be a warrior of Dunner.”

Those places are like twelve stories high, yeah?  Which right at the
top they’d opened up a flat.  You could smell the puff smoke from a
floor below.  Which there’s this room in there, like a cave – yeah? –
with candles and that, and weird pictures on the wall, and there are
Laf’s mates, three of them: one fat bloke in one corner, one really
evil-looking bloke with greasy black hair in the other corner and then
this boffy-looking fucker in the middle.  And he’s got glasses on and
he’s rolling up a spliff.

“Good evening,” he goes, really posh.  And he’s like, “Welcome to
Progress House.  This is Gunnar” (that was the fat one), “this is Rogg
and my name is Erik.  Delighted to make your acquaintance.”

I look at Laf and I’m like, “Who the fuck is this?”

And Laf don’t say nothing in words but he’s kind of frowning at me –
right? – like he’s going, “Respect, man!  This geezer is well hard, know
what I mean?”

(But, like, he’s got a skull all over his face!)

Erik laughs,  “A word of advice, Carl.  Laf has chosen to let you
into our little secret.   We do that from time to time, because we are,
well, we’re missionaries in a way.”  (I didn’t know what he was
talking about at first.  I thought missionary meant, like, sex with the
geezer on top, know what I mean?)

“But if you were to reveal our secret to anyone else without our
permission,” goes boffy Erik, “I personally will kill you.  I mean that
quite literally.  And I assure you that what I have just said is not a
threat but a promise.”

And Laf is like, “He means it, mate, he’s well evil.  He’d kill a bloke, no sweat at all.”

And Erik laughed, really pleasant – yeah? – like some posh bloke on the telly.

#

You would not believe all the gear they had up there, yeah?   We did
E’s and A’s and M’s and C’s and fuck knows what else until the walls
were wobbling like jelly – yeah? – and it was like Erik was talking into
this blob of jelly from outside somewhere, down some tube or something.

“Have you heard of Dunner, Carl?”  he goes.  “Or Thor, some call him?”

And I’m like, “…er, no, don’t think so, mate…” – right? – like I’m talking up this tube?

“Well, he used to be big around here,” goes Erik.  “Thurston means
Thor’s town for one thing.  Did you know that?  Come to that he’s got a
whole day of the week named after him.  Thursday means Thor’s day.”

“Yeah,” goes Laf, “and Wednesday’s named after his dad, right, Erik?”

“That’s right,” goes Erik.  “Woden’s day.”

And I’m like, “Yeah?” (Which if anyone else had come up with this shit I would just have laughed, know what I mean?)

“Dunner or Thor,” goes Erik, “is the god of thunder.  And he’s a
warrior god.  His weapon is a big hammer which crushes anything it
strikes.  As I say, he used to be big around here.  Your ancestors would
have worshipped him.  They would have sacrificed to him too, animals
and even human beings.  So you can see they took him very seriously
indeed.”

And I’m like “So?” but I don’t say nothing.

“And now,” goes Erik, “here is another secret.  But this one I am happy
for you to tell who you like.  Because it’s the government who wants it
kept as a secret.  It’s the politicians and the do-gooders.  It’s them
who don’t want anyone to know.”

Well the room was as big as a fucking football pitch now – right? –
with that Erik talking over the p.a. in a big echoey voice like God or
something.

“Do you think about the universe at all, Carl?”

“As in, like, the sun goes round the earth?”  I go. “Stars and that?”

Erik does his nice TV laugh.

“That’s it, Carl, you’ve got it in one. Stars and that.  But listen
and I’ll tell you something.  The whole of this universe of stars and
space is just one tiny twig in an enormous tree and every second, every
fraction of a second, it’s branching and dividing, making new worlds.”

I laughed.  But – it was weird, yeah? – I could fucking see it. 
Only it didn’t look like a tree.  More like millions of black worms in
the dark that kept on splitting in two and splitting in two and
splitting in two – yeah? – like viruses or something.

“There are millions of other earths, millions of other Englands,
millions of other Thurston Fields estates,” he goes – and like I said,
he’s like God or something, I couldn’t even see him with all the E’s and
A’s and shit going round me, just hear his big echoey voice all round
me.

“And we don’t come from this one,” he goes, “Laf and Gunnar and Rogg
and I, we’re shifters, we come from another world.  Anytime we want to
we can go to another world too.  So we can do what we want here.  We can do whatever we want.  No one is ever going to catch us.”

I heard him moving about somewhere out there, know what I mean, like he’s on a different planet?

“Look at these!” he goes.

Well I’m lying on the floor with my eyes shut and when I open my
eyes, even though it’s only candles in there, it still feels, like, too
bright, know what I mean?  So it’s a job to see anything at all as such –
yeah? – but I see he’s holding out a bag with pills in it, hundreds of
dark little pills.

“These are seeds, these are Lok seeds.  Every one of these will take
us to another world.  Think of that.  We can travel between the branches
of the tree like Dunner does, with his hammer in his hand.”

And then that Rogg speaks, that evil bastard with the greasy black hair, and he’s a Scotchman or a Geordie or something.

“Yeah,” he goes, “and you know what we’s looking for, mate?  We’s looking for one of Dunner’s worlds.  Know what I mean?”

I go, “Yeah?”

“He means a world where Dunner is still worshipped today,” goes
Erik.  “We know they exist because the seeds come from there and because
of shifter stories.  There are thousands like us, you see, Carl,
thousands of warriors of Dunner moving between the worlds.  And we tell
each other stories.  We swap news.”

Then that fat bloke talks: Gunnar.  You know how some big fat blokes
have these, like, really high little mild little voices?  Gunnar was one
of them, right?  He had this gentle little voice – yeah? – really
polite and high.  I’ll tell you what, though, I reckon he could beat you
to a fucking pulp.  But he’d still talk to you like really kind and
gentle while he was doing it – yeah? – in that small little gentle high
voice.

And he’s like, “Do you want to know what it’s like in Dunner’s worlds, Carl?”

And I’m “Yeah” and he goes, “Why don’t you tell him, Erik?!”

(I’ve got my eyes closed again – right? – and those black worms are
splitting and wriggling and splitting all the time all round me.  But
those shifter geezers’ voices are far away, coming down like from like
ten miles above me or something.)

“Of course,” goes Erik, “of course” and he’s drawing breath, like this is the good part coming up.

“Does civilisation mean anything to you Carl?” he asks, “Or democracy?  Or human rights?”

“You what?” I go, not being funny or nothing, but I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

But they all laugh like I’ve made a really good joke!  So I feel well chuffed, don’t I?

“They don’t mean shit to me!” I go, like doing the joke again.

“Of course they don’t Carl,” goes Erik kindly, “and do you know why?”

“Because I don’t give a monkey’s,” I go, but they’re tired of the joke now and they don’t laugh no more.

“The reason civilisation doesn’t mean anything to you, Carl,” Erik
goes, “is that civilisation isn’t there for your benefit.  You’re not part
of civilisation.   Civilisation is for the others out there across the
wire.  They don’t care what you think.  They don’t care about what you
can and can’t do. They give you a dreg estate to live in and a DeSCA
department to look after you.  All they ask in return is that you leave
them alone with their civilisation.   Just keep out of the way, is all
they ask, and let them get on with their civilisation in peace.”

“Yeah?” I go.

“Carl don’t want to know all that, Erik mate,” goes fat Gunnar in his little kind voice.  “He wants to know about Dunner’s worlds.”

“I was coming to that,” goes Erik and he, like, growls.  He does not like being interrupted.

“You see Carl, in Dunner’s worlds there is no civilisation, no
democracy, no human rights.  And there’s no DeSCA either, no Special
Category estates, no wire.  A young chap like you doesn’t have to go to
the deskies for money or a place to live.  No.  What you’d do in one of
Dunner’s worlds is find yourself a lord.  A warlord, I mean, a
great warrior, not some toffee-nosed do-gooder who sits on committees
about social exclusion and goes to the opera.  You’d go to a lord and,
if you promised to fight his enemies for him, he’d look after you, he’d
make sure you got everything you needed.”

“Yeah?” I go.

“And Carl, mate,” goes fat Gunnar, “that wouldn’t be like a deskie
flat or nothing he’d give you.  Don’t think that, mate.  He’d have a big
hall, with a big fire in the middle, and you’d live there with all your
mates.  And you’d drink all you wanted, mate, and eat all you wanted
and get as pissed as you wanted and when it was time to sleep, well
you’d just sleep there in the hall, with all your mates around you.  So
you wouldn’t never have to think about money or nothing, and you
wouldn’t never have to be alone.  How does that sound, my old mate?”

I laughed.  “That sounds like fucking heaven mate.”

“Yeah, and you don’t need to work or nothing,’ goes old skull-face Laf, ‘All you got to do is fight!   It’s your job, like.  You even get to kill people and that and there’s no police or nothing to stop you.”

Which I’m like “Great!”

“Fair enough it’s dangerous,” goes Laf. “You could get killed too, know what I mean?”

“So?” I go, laughing.  “Who gives a shit?  When you’re dead you’re fucking dead, right?”

“Well said!” goes Erik.  “Spoken like a warrior! But actually it’s
better than that, Carl my friend, it’s better than that.  If you die
fighting, Dunner will take you home to Valour-Hall, where all the brave
warriors go, and then you’d live again.  And then it’s feasting and
fighting for ever and ever, until the Last Battle at the end of time.”

And Gunnar’s like, “So what do you say, then, Carl my old mate? Do you want to be a warrior?”

Well, of course I do, don’t I?

“Yeah!” I laugh.

“Well there’s a test you have to pass,” goes Erik, “ a little test…”

But one of them is putting this spliff into my hand – yeah? – and I
don’t know what they put in it but next thing I’m down on my knees
half-way through my mum’s front door, chucking up all over the fucking
lino.

#

Well, the next few days – right? – I’m like, “Did I dream that or what?”

I even went down there to Progress House – yeah? – and no way could
anyone have got in there, know what I mean?   Steel plates and massive
bloody locks.

So I go, “Well, I must have dreamed it,” know what I mean?

But down the Locomotive when Shane and Derek and that go, “Where the
fuck d’you go with that skull bloke?” I didn’t say nothing, know what I
mean?  Because – yeah? – I remembered that boffy geezer Erik go, like,
“That’s not a threat it’s a promise.”

I didn’t feel like taking a chance.

#

But, like, a couple of weeks later I was just going down to the pub
in the morning  – right? – when this car pulls up.  Which it’s only that
dodgy old Mondeo and that fat geezer Gunnar driving it.

“Hop in, my old mate!” he goes, leaning back to open the back door.

So I get in the back and that evil Scotch bastard Rogg – yeah? – 
he’s there in the front with Gunnar and he passes me back a spliff and,
like, we’re off.

Next thing we’re at the line and Gunnar is showing his ID to the cop.

And he’s like, “Alright mate?  How you doing?” in his kind little voice.

“Not so bad,” the cop goes.  Which he’s a bit surprised – yeah? –
like he’s not used to people being nice to him and that.  And he’s like,
“Have a nice day!” as he lets us through the wire.

And Rogg laughs and goes, “Anyone tell you you can’t fake deskie ID cards, Carl?  Well you can.”

And Gunnar’s like, “There isn’t nothing our Erik can’t figure out,
Carl mate.  He’s one in a million that geezer.  He’s diamond, mate, he’s
pure diamond.”

#

We go right across town – right? – to this posh area where I never
been before.  And Gunnar parks the car – yeah? – and we get out and it’s
like there’s shops that don’t sell nothing but coloured fucking candles right? 
And shops that sell little toys made out of painted wood which any
normal kid would smash in two seconds flat and they cost like a week’s
money each.   And all these rich bastards in fancy clothes and posh
voices – yeah? – like la di da, this and la di da that and “Oh really
Jonathan, that’s ever so sweet of you!” and beautiful bitches in posh
sexy clothes like TV stars.  And you look at them and think, “Shit
I fancy you, ” but you know if you tried anything they’d just laugh at
you like you was an alien from space or something with tentacles and
that, or eyes on fucking stalks.

And Gunnar goes, “Do you know this place, Carl mate?”

And I go, “No.”

And he goes, “It’s Clifton Village mate, where the rich people hang out.”

“The beautiful people,” goes Rogg with, like, an evil sneer.

Then Gunnar puts his arm across my shoulders – yeah? –  like he’s my dad or something.

And he’s like, “How’s this place make you feel, my old mate?”

And I’m like “How would I fucking know?”

“Angry maybe?” goes Gunnar kindly.  “Does it make you feel angry at all mate?”

And I’m, “Nah, I don’t give a shit,” like with a shrug and that.

And then I go, “Yeah, alright, angry then.”

“That’s the way, my old mate,” goes Gunnar, “That’s the way.”

He’s still got his arm round me like he’s my dad or my kind uncle.

“Now listen, Carl mate,” he goes, “how would you like it if you could do whatever you wanted here?”

And I’m like, “Eh?  What d’you mean?”

“How would you like it, Carl,” goes Rogg, “if you could smash these
shops and burn these cars and fuck these women and blow away any of
these smug bastards you wanted?”

“Yes, how would you like that my old mate?” goes Gunnar.

“Well of course I’d like it,” I go, “but you’re having a laugh with me, aren’t you?  You’re just winding me up.”

“No,” goes Rogg, “no wind-up, Carl.  It’s what we’re planning to
really do.  And I’ll tell you the beauty of it.  The beauty of it is
we’ll have swallowed seeds, so when the police come along we can just
laugh and let them lock us up, because we’ll know that in an hour or two
we’ll be in a different world and they won’t ever be able to get us.”

And it’s like it finally dawns on me, yeah?  It dawns on me for the
first time.  If you’re a shifter you can really do shit like that. 
That’s what it would mean to be a warrior of Dunner.

So a big smile spreads over my face – yeah? – and I’m like, “Sweet, man!  Fucking sweet!”

“And you can be there,” goes Rogg. “You can be there with us if you want to, if you’re willing to take the test, like.”

And I’m going, “Yeah, no problem, mate, no sweat at all”, when this
old geezer comes walking past and suddenly stops, like, and looks at me.

“Well, well,” he goes.  “Carl Pendant isn’t it?  What a nice
surprise!  Do you remember me?  Cyril Burkitt?  How are you doing Carl? 
It must be all of fifteen years.”

And he, like, smiles at Rogg and Gunnar – yeah? – like any friend of
Carl’s is a friend of his.  (Which Rogg don’t say nothing, and Gunnar’s
like “Alright, mate.  How you doing?”)

And I’m like, “Oh alright, you know, mate” and that.

Well he’s only my old social worker I used to have when I was in care
and that.  Which they’re all tossers but I sort of liked the bloke. He
didn’t never get funny with me or nothing – yeah? –  like I remember one
time when I’d fucked up as per bloody usual and he says to me “You just
don’t get it do you Carl?” and I go “No I fucking don’t” and he laughs
and he’s like “Well that makes two of us I’m afraid Carl.”

Anyway, old Cyril Burkitt looks at Rogg and Gunnar again and he’s
like, “Well, I won’t keep you from your friends Carl.  But I’ll tell you
what, I’m retired now.  If you fancy calling by for a chat sometime
you’d be very welcome. I don’t see such a lot of people these days, you
see, so I’m always glad of company.  And I’ve often thought about you
over the years and wondered how you were getting on.”

And he gives me this little card – yeah? – with his address and that.

#

Well then I notice Rogg and Gunnar looking at each other with, like, a funny secret sort of look.

So I’m like, “What?”

“A deskie, right?” goes Rogg.

And I’m like, “Yeah.”

Which they look at each other again – yeah? – and sort of nod.

“Well that’s your test then, Carl mate,” goes Gunnar.

And I’m like, “What is?”

And Rogg goes, “Go to his house, Carl, and kill him.”

#

Well I thought, “This is a joke, yeah?”  So I’m laughing and I’m like, “Oh, he’s not that bad, not for a deskie, know what I mean?”

And Gunnar goes, “No Carl mate, you don’t understand.  That’s your test!  See what I mean, mate?  It’s what you’ve got to do to become a warrior.  Are you with me, my old mate?”

“You’s got to make a sacrifice for Dunner,” goes Rogg.

Which, like, they’re just looking at me – yeah? – and waiting.

And I go, “Shit!”

And Gunnar goes, “Fair enough if you don’t want to do it, Carl mate. 
No hard feelings or nothing. But if you do want to be a warrior, well,
that’s the test you’ve got to pass.  Know what I mean?”

So I like swallow – yeah? – and I’m thinking, like, well, all deskies
are the same really.  Alright some of them act nice and that but it
don’t mean nothing.  Which anyway the stupid git, if he goes round
giving out his address and that, some fucker’s going to get him
– yeah? – and if it’s not me it’s going to be some bugger else.  So it
don’t make no difference really anyway.

So I laugh – yeah? – and I go, “Yeah, alright.  I’ll do it.”

#

So Laf – right? – he takes me over in the car the next day to the
place where Cyril Burkitt lives.  (Which it’s like another part of town
which I never heard of.    Only I never really been nowhere much outside
of the Fields as such, except down the Centre – yeah? – to clubs and
that and once we went over to Weston on a school trip and Shane had six
pints of lager and threw up all over the teacher.)

And he stops like a couple of streets away and he’s like, “Now it’s
along there and then turn right and it’s number twenty-three, right?  So
don’t get lost will you, Carl?”

Well I’m like, “Fuck off,” know what I mean?  Laughing and that to show I’m not worried or nothing.

So I start to open the door but he’s like, “Hang on a minute, Carl mate.  You’ll need this, you prat!”

Then he gives me a gun as such and it’s like, “This is the trigger,
mate, and this is the safety catch, and this is a silencer so there
won’t be any loud bangs or nothing.  And listen, mate, there’s ten
bullets in there, so when he’s down, empty the lot into the bastard,
know what I mean?   Into his head and that, yeah?”

So I’m like, “No worries mate.”

He laughs and lights up a spliff for me.

“I don’t need no wacky baccy to give me the bottle for this job mate,” I go.  “It’s no problem mate.  It’s no sweat.”

And he’s like, “No Carl, I’m not being funny or nothing, mate. It’s
just, like, to make it more of a laugh, yeah?  Know what I mean?”

#

Then I’m outside Cyril Burkitt’s house – yeah? – and it’s doing my
head in because I never really thought he had a home or nothing, know
what I mean?  He was just a deskie, yeah?  And, like there’s a car
outside and flowers and that, and a milk bottle, and there’s, like, a
little path from the gate made of bricks, and coloured glass in the
front door: red and blue and green.  And through the front window –
right? – there’s this big room with loads of  books and that.  Which I
can see him in there – yeah? – reading the paper by himself.  And
there’s music playing, yeah?  Violins and that.

So I ring the bell, and he looks up and sees me through the window.  Which he, like, smiles and gets up and comes to the door.

“Hello, Carl!  This is a nice surprise!  I didn’t think you’d come.  I didn’t think you’d have the time for an old deskie like me!”

He’s got like a cardigan on, and brown slippers and, like, old-man
jeans, and he hasn’t shaved yet or nothing.  He don’t look like a
deskie, really.  Just some old geezer, know what I mean?

“Come on in, Carl, come on in.  Can I get you a cup of tea or something?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, thanks, tea” so we go through into this big
kitchen like on telly or something with like wood everywhere and a stone
floor and that.

Which he gets the kettle and goes over to the sink to fill it up.

“Let me see now, Carl, is that milk and four sugars?  Have I remembered that right?”

Then he turns round smiling and sees the gun in my hand.

#

And he’s like, “Oh.”

It’s weird, he don’t look scared or nothing, just like, tired.

“I see,” he goes.

And then he laughs!  Not like really laughs, but like, a little sad sort of laugh.  Know what I mean?

“All this hatred!” he goes, “I should be honoured really I suppose.  It’s almost like being loved.”

“You what?” I go.

“Never mind, Carl,” he goes.  “Don’t worry about it.”

He puts the kettle down slowly and then he goes,  “Someone put you up
to this, I suppose, Carl?  You were never much of a one for thinking
things up for yourself.”

And I’m like, “Mind your own business.”

Which he nods and sort of sighs.

“Listen Carl,” he goes, and he’s really slow, like he’s thinking out
loud.  “Listen Carl.  My wife died a while back and she was the only
person in the world I really loved.  And then my career sort of petered
out, as you may have heard, not that it was ever much of a
career and not that I was ever much cop at my job – as you probably know
better than most, I’m afraid.   So I really don’t have a huge amount to
live for.  Oh, I get by alright.  I potter around.  I weed my garden.  I
do the crossword.  I watch TV.  But really it doesn’t make much
difference to me if my life ends now or whether it goes on for another
twenty years.  Do you see what I mean?  I mean: if you really need to shoot me, well, be my guest!”

Well I’m like, “What the fuck?” but I don’t say nothing.  I’m pointing the gun at him, and my finger’s on the trigger.

“But listen Carl,” he goes, “I don’t know who put you up to this but, you know, you are very easily
led.   I do suggest you think very carefully about whether it’s
actually in your interest to shoot me.  You really do need to think
about that.”

And I’m like, “Fuck off, don’t give me that deskie shit now, alright?  Just fucking leave me alone.”

It’s doing my fucking head in, know what I mean?  My hand is shaking so much I can’t hardly point the gun.

“I’m worried for you, Carl,” he goes, “It probably sounds strange, but I really am.”

Which then – yeah? – I can’t stand it no more and I pull the fucking trigger just to make him stop.

© Chris Beckett, 2002

Isolation stories: (7) Aphrodite

This is another of my personal favourites and comes from my most recent collection, Spring Tide. Since the two characters only meet very briefly in the middle of the story I think it qualifies as an isolation story. Being alone isn’t always bad.

Like ‘The Kite’ (story 4), it contains no science fictional elements whatever, except perhaps that in both cases I try to come at familiar places on Earth as if they were on an alien planet.

My beautiful granddaughter is called Aphrodite, as it happens, but she is only one, and this was written two or three years before she was born.

Aphrodite

There
was a sea running east to west between two big brown bodies of land.  In the eastern part of the sea there were
many islands, and among them one island in particular that was long and thin in
shape.   At one end of this island a
holiday resort had grown up, with bright lights, discos, rows of restaurants
and music thumping till dawn, at the other there was a village falling into
decline at the foot of an extinct volcano.

 Thomas, who was going through a somewhat difficult
time, had gone to the resort at first but was now in the village, eating a
salad of tomatoes and goat cheese by himself, outside the small café where he’d
rented a room, a place that also doubled as a general store.  As Thomas munched his salad, the big plane tree
in the middle of the square was throwing long and somehow dreary shadows towards
him over the cracked and oil-stained tarmac to remind him that the day was
ending and the streets of this very quiet village would soon be empty and dark.  A stooped old woman in black turned to stare
at him as she hobbled past.  He smiled
and raised his hand in greeting, but her cold appraisal didn’t so much as flicker.  This was not a welcoming place.  Apart from one other, smaller café, there was
nowhere else in it that he could go, and many of the houses were empty and
boarded up.  As the café proprietor replaced
the empty bread basket with a full one on the chequered plastic tablecloth in
front of him, a worm of doubt stirred in Thomas’ mind.  Had it been a bad decision, coming here?  Wasn’t he going to have a very dull and very
lonely week?

“There was an Irish woman here
earlier, a young woman about your age,” his host said.  “Very pretty.   She had arranged to meet some friends here
for camping, but they missed their flight. 
It will be a couple of days before they join her, apparently.  I offered her a room, but…” he paused to give
a comically bewildered shrug, “but she said she was going to sleep outside.”

 His name was Spiro and his rugged face kept reminding
Thomas of a gone-to-seed version of Zorba the Greek,as played by Anthony Quinn. 
Thomas suspected that Spiro was well aware of the Anglo-Saxon stereotype
of the earthy, sensual Mediterranean man, and consciously played the part: a
Greek playing a Mexican actor playing a Greek.  But then again Thomas knew that, when the worm
stirred inside him, it always made him ungenerous and a little paranoid. 

“There’s a temple here, isn’t there?  A ruined temple?   I thought I’d go and look at it before the
light goes.”

“The temple of Aphrodite,” Spiro winked broadly, “the goddess of love.  It’s about two kilometres away, along that track just there.”

*   *   *

The
track led through a dry, open forest of pine trees and wiry scrub, the warm air
heavy with resin and pulsating with the constant shrill scraping of millions of
cicadas.  After an outcrop of bare grey
rock the track dipped down, and a side path branched off from it along a small wooded
valley towards the sea.   There was a clifftop
down there, he knew, and below it a beach, which you could also access directly
via a path from the village.  But for now
Thomas stayed on the main track as it climbed up again, past a metal shrine that
smelled of honey, and began to skirt round the broad shoulder of that extinct
volcano.

The temple stood on a kind of terrace
on the right-hand side of the track, with the wooded slope beyond it leading down
to cliffs above the sea.   There wasn’t
much left of the building itself, just a stone floor, the bases of the columns
round the edge, and on the near side, a couple of broken columns that still
rose about a metre from the ground.   In
front of it was a rusty sign with an empty beer bottle at its foot.  The sun was almost at the horizon, and a
pathway of yellow light stretched across the sea towards the island.  All around, in every direction, the cicadas kept
beating out their unrelenting rhythm, like a million children shaking dried peas
in yoghurt pots.

Thomas sat on a piece of fallen
column that lay a few yards on from the temple itself.   The light faded much more quickly here than
it would have done back at home, and in a short time, a warm, scented darkness had
closed round him.  But more light was on
its way.  The sea along the horizon was already
silvery with moonlight and soon the moon had risen high enough above the
mountain behind him to illuminate the temple’s broken columns, cast faint
shadows over its pale floor, and transform the forest around it into a kind of stage
set: empty still, but full of dimly lit places where characters would meet, and
shadows where they would hide.  Thomas noticed
that he no longer felt that worm of doubt inside him.  This was the world and he was in it.  And that, for the moment, was enough.

Then he noticed he wasn’t
alone.  Someone else had stepped out onto
the stage, coming from the direction of the village.  To begin with the stranger was merely a
pattern in the patchwork of shadow and dim light, distinguishable from the rest
only because it moved.  He couldn’t see a
face, or make out the colour of the clothes, but quite soon he could tell
somehow that this was a woman, and he sat and watched as she took form, knowing
that he himself would be invisible as long as he stayed where he was.  In fact she still hadn’t spotted him even when
she stepped onto the floor of the temple, but he could see that she was about
his own age, slender, athletic, and wearing the clothes of a tourist like himself,
and he assumed she was the Irishwoman that Spiro had told him about.  Perhaps the old Greek had pointed her this
way.

“Hi there,” he called out, standing
up.  He’d been reluctant to separate
himself from the shadows, but to hide any longer would just be creepy. 

“Oh hi.  Jesus, you made me jump!  I thought I was on my own.”

Yes, she was certainly Irish.  

“Sorry, I should have spoken
sooner.”   He walked towards her,
stepping up onto the floor of the temple, worn shiny by two and a half
millennia of feet.

They were standing beside one of
the broken columns now: man and woman, dimly lit in shades of grey.  There was no black or white.  Everything was provisional, everything on the
point of dissolution.

“I’m Siobhan.  You’re must be the Englishman the café guy mentioned.” 

She reached out her hand.   Their palms and fingers touched, suddenly
firm and solid, and she looked up into his face with friendly but appraising
eyes.  He wondered if she was as aware as
he was of the obvious narrative which the universe, perhaps with Spiro’s
assistance, had set up for them.

So
where did you two first meet?

Would
you believe it, we met by moonlight in the Temple of the Goddess of Love.

“Hi, I’m Thomas.  I gather your friends have been held up?”

“Yes, a couple of days.”

“And you’re sleeping out in the
open?”

“I am.  The others have got the tent.”

“Are you short of money until your
friends come?  If so I could easily—”

“I’m fine.  It’s no hardship sleeping out when the nights
are as warm as this.”

“I guess not.  I just wondered whether there was a problem
because your—”

“There’s no problem at all.  And I’m looking forward to a couple of days by
myself if I’m honest.  I like being on my
own.”

Thomas nodded.

“Me too.”

He did like it, actually, if he was
in the right frame of mind, but that was something he’d only recently learned
about himself, as he grew older and became very gradually better at separating out
the question “what do I want?” from “what, right at this moment, would be the
easiest thing to do?”  He’d lately discovered,
for instance, that he didn’t really enjoy staying up drinking until four in the
morning, or hanging out in places where you couldn’t talk but only bellow like
a beast.  This had been the cause of an ugly
row with the friends who’d come with him to the resort at the far end of the
island, and was the reason he was now here. 
It had all been rather unpleasant and, in retrospect, he could see he’d
handled the whole thing very badly.

“There isn’t much to do at this end
of the island, is the only problem,” he said.  
“The only things open in the village are Spiro’s café, and one other
café that looks like it’s very much for locals only.”

“Yes, I know.  I’ve kind of resigned myself to a very early
bedtime.   I’m hoping the journey will
have worn me out enough to get me off to sleep.”

 “Well why not have a drink with me back at the
village before you settle down?” would have been the obvious thing for Thomas
to say at this point.  It would have been
a natural thing to do, in no way difficult or awkward, and certainly not pushy
or overfamiliar.  Arguably it would actually
be rather unfriendly not to make the
offer, given that it was very early in the evening to lie down to sleep, and
Siobhan couldn’t retreat to a room as he could, or read a book by electric
light.  And what was more, Thomas liked
Siobhan immediately.  Not only was she
very pretty –Spiro was quite right about that– but she projected a kind of lively
curiosity that he found instantly appealing. 
He liked the fact that she was Irish too, and different in that small
way from himself.

But he didn’t suggest a drink all
the same.

“Well, nice to meet you, Siobhan.  I’ve actually been here a while and I was
just thinking of heading back.”

He was surprised at himself.  He could already see, without even the benefit of hindsight, that this was going to be one of those moments he would replay in his mind.  I should never have walked away from that Irish girl, he knew he’d tell himself at lonely moments, perhaps even years from now. Stupid, of course, but it would happen.  And never mind the distant future.  What about this very evening, what about the prospect ahead of him, trying to fill the time by himself  in that sad little village?   He did like being on his own, it was quite true, but there were places where that worked, and places where it didn’t.  A depressed and slowly dying village wasn’t a good setting for solitude.

But still he walked away.  The argument with his friends had shaken him
quite badly.  He’d been shocked by his
own sudden eruption of rage.  It had made
him think about his dealings with other people in general, and the way he swung
so suddenly from one feeling to another, from friendliness to contempt, from
love to indifference.  And he was tired
of blowing about in the wind, and doing whatever seemed easiest at the time.  He knew he’d hurt people that way, especially
women, and he’d had enough of the mess and shame when the wind suddenly
changed.

*   *   *

As
Siobhan watched him dissolve into the forest, she wondered why he’d been in
such a hurry to get away.  He’d seemed very
reserved, even by English standards, but she’d quite liked the look of him, and
had assumed he’d like the look of her too –well, why wouldn’t he?– enough in
any case for an evening together to seem like a pleasant prospect.  Perhaps he was just shy, she thought.  Maybe she should have suggested it herself?  But something had stopped her.  Siobhan wasn’t prone to shyness, so it wasn’t
that. No, it was almost as if he’d seen her thought and metaphorically held up a
warning hand.  Which was kind of odd.

But anyway, never mind.  By the time she’d unwrapped the cheese and
tomato sandwich that had travelled with her all the way from Dublin airport, she
was enjoying the ruin in the moonlight and the chorus of cicadas, and thinking about
other things.  After about fifteen
minutes, she headed back herself along the track.  

When she reached the side path towards
the sea, she paused. She could go straight on to the village now and, as likely
as not, she’d meet Thomas again outside the café, for where else was there for
him to go?  She could stop for a word
and, if he seemed more amenable this time, a companion for the evening would perhaps
be an option once more.  Or she could turn
left now down the path towards her little camp on top of the cliff.  Spending the night there had been quite
appealing in prospect, even in the absence of the camping equipment that her
friends were bringing, but it seemed rather less so now.  Meeting Thomas, and then watching him go, had
made her more aware of the fact that she was on her own, and she felt unnerved
by the moonlit forest and its shadowy and ambiguous forms.  But recognising this fact made up her mind
for her.  She didn’t like to give way to unfounded
fears.  She preferred to push on through them.

She’d just turned down the little
valley when she saw a man ahead of her, standing just a few yards back from the
path, completely motionless, and watching her with an odd, sardonic, sideways
gaze.  This was genuinely frightening and
she was on the point of turning back and heading for the village after all when
she realised this wasn’t a human being at all, but only the broken trunk of tree.  Amused by her own irrational fear, she walked
over to the tree to give it a little kick, and had just returned to the path
when suddenly a real man appeared on the path ahead with a gun in his hand,
striding determinedly towards her.  Her
heart began to race again but he walked straight past, heading towards the
village without saying a word, and Siobhan was on her own again.

How different it seemed on the
cliff now, in the dark.  She searched for
some time for her sleeping bag which she’d left in a small hollow under some rocks,
cursing herself for not marking the spot more clearly, and worrying that
perhaps it had been stolen.  Eventually
she found it, though, and this was immensely comforting, a moment in fact of
really intense happiness   Even returning
to a patch of earth on a cliff top, it seemed, could feel, in the right
circumstances, like coming home.  She
knew she wouldn’t sleep for some time, but she rolled out her sleeping bag and lay
down quite contentedly on the outside of it. 
The stars were very bright, and the entire span of the Milky Way was
stretched out above her across the sky.  She
wished she could name the constellations, but the only one she could remember
was Orion, shining up there above the mountain.  

Never mind.  The stars didn’t know their names.

Still awake an hour later, she stood up and stretched herself and, as she did so, she looked down over the side of her rocky hollow at the small beach beneath, its narrow strip of sand dimly visible in the moonlight, and little waves glowing softly as they broke over it.   Some way out to sea, the lamps of several fishing boats were moving slowly across the water, the crouched fishermen inside them half in light and half in darkness.  

She was watching their slow
progress when she became aware of movement below her.  There was a direct path to the beach from the
village and a man was coming along it.  She
could see it was Thomas.  Shadowy and
indistinct as he was in the moonlight, there was something slightly dogged
about his walk that she immediately recognised. 
It was as if he was battling against something, she thought, forcing
himself forward into the world against some sort of resistance.  She saw him pull off his T-shirt and shorts and
wade out naked into the sea.   The water
glittered around him as he dived in, and it seemed a long time before he
emerged again to swim thirty or forty strokes further out in a strong,
confident crawl, before stopping and treading water so he could turn and look
back at the shore.  Not wanting him to
see her watching him, Siobhan squatted down again behind her rocks. 

Soon afterwards, she decided to get
inside her sleeping bag, for the air was beginning to cool. As she lay there,
she imagined herself in Thomas’ place: the moonlight under the sea, the play of
grey shadows on the blurry stones on the bottom, the coolness of the water against
her skin.   If they’d spent the evening
together, she thought, the two of them might well have both have had a swim.  By then he’d no longer be the shadowy being
she’d met at the temple in the moonlight. 
They would have talked for a while, seen each other’s faces properly in
electric light, knocked back a few glasses of beer or wine or ouzo or something,
and learned a few anchoring facts about one another, like where each of them came
from, what they did for a living, and who was in their families.  There would have been just the two of them together
in a little pool of electric light.  It
would have felt intimate and conspiratorial, and, based on past experience and
her knowledge of herself, Siobhan thought it quite likely that, after their
swim, or even instead of it, they would have had sex.  People differ a great deal in this respect,
but Siobhan’s attitude was very straightforward.  Pleasure was a good thing if it didn’t hurt
anyone, and she was quite open to brief encounters in situations like this where
there was little risk of difficult emotional entanglements.   

It could have been rather nice
actually, she thought a little wistfully, but then she smiled.  Sex was such a funny thing when you examined
it.  She’d always thought that.  Such a big deal was made of it.  So many contradictory prohibitions and
expectations were placed upon it.  It was
the focal point of so much huffing and blowing and agonising and general
nonsense: sonnets, songs, sermons, Viagra, lipstick, rom-coms, operas, jokes, public
stonings, pop songs, vows of celibacy, Romeo and Juliet, Ten Top Tips to Wow
Your Man in Bed, the pill, the confessional, tears. . .  On and on. 
So much drama and worry and guilt and longing.  And all of it, whether disapproving or
celebratory, was centred on sex as a wild and subversive force.  Yet what was it in the end?  What was that feeling?  When you really came down to it, wasn’t it
just scratching a rather fancy kind of itch? 
An itch, what’s more, that only existed because it ensured that living creatures
didn’t stint in the business of making more creatures.  What was wild about that?   What
was subversive about a force that pulled all the time, like a kind of biological
gravity, in the direction of parenthood and domesticity? 

It might start out in the moonlight
on a beach, Siobhan thought, but it ended up with stair gates, and car seats,
and grownups saying ‘weewee’ and ‘poo’. 

She had to admit, though, there her
thoughts at this point were somewhat coloured by the fact that her friend Anne,
back in Dublin, had had a baby a few months ago, and seemed to have lost
interest in all the things the two of them had shared.  In fact, if it wasn’t for that baby, Anne
would have been with her now.

And actually, Siobhan thought, in
all fairness, and setting jealousy aside, opening your legs and pushing out an
entirely new human being who no one had ever been seen before, well, that
wasn’t exactly tame.  The poo and the stairgates might be, but they
were just anodyne trimmings, as Valentine cards and silly pet names were anodyne
trimmings for sex.  The raw reality was
something else. 

In fact, when you came to think
about, wasn’t it life itself that was the really subversive thing?  Not just sex but motherhood too? All of life
was a rebellion really, a doomed, Lucifer-like rebellion against the peaceful
downward pull of entropy, the orderly clock-like unwinding of galaxies and
planets and stars.

This last bit, however, came to her more as images than as words, for as sleep took hold, her thoughts ceased to be made of language.  In fact they weren’t really images either.  They were something more abstract than that: forms, diagram-like chunks of meaning that were as much tactile as visual.  Some huge dark falling thing, creatures moving in a moonlit forest, water running down downhill in torrents and streams and dripping from sodden peat …

Dear God, she thought, coming awake
suddenly, Thomas hadn’t even been the first opportunity that day when it came
to sex!  When she’d asked Spiro about the
price of rooms he’d winked and said there was no charge for those who shared
his bed.  Christ, how sordid!   No way was she going to stay there after
that!  No way.  Of course the old goat
had spotted her distaste almost at once: “Forgive me my silly joke!”  But it didn’t fool her.  She’d already seen him watching her, eyes
slightly narrowed, like a shrewd old fisherman watching his line to see if the
bait would be taken.  He was about the
same age as her dad.

Still, she thought, it had probably
worked once, thirty years ago, when Spiro wasn’t so flabby and Greece had seemed
much more exotic to northern Europeans than it did now in these days when Bali or
Thailand were commonplace destinations.  The
pull of the other.  She remembered some
nature programme she’d seen.  Female
chimps sneaking away from their troop when the alpha male was sleeping in his
tree, risking attack by leopards to journey all by themselves by moonlight over
a mountain ridge and down into the next valley. 
They’d mate with males from another troop down there and then return
again over the rocks and through the leopard-ridden night.  Hedging their bets, the programme had
said.  New genes to mingle with their
own. 

A leopard in the moonlight.  Dear God, imagine that.  Those spots among all these speckled shades
of grey.  The creature would be right on
top of you before you’d seen it at all.

*  *  *

Several
hours later, she surfaced from sleep again and sat up to have a look around.

The moon had gone, and Orion was right down at the horizon.  This evidence that the planet had been quietly turning while she slept was for some reason immensely comforting, and she felt a surge of that same delicious happiness that had come to her when she found her sleeping bag. It reminded her of when she was a little girl, back in the days before her brothers were even born, wrapped in a warm blanket in the back of her parents’ car as they drove through the night to her Nan’s house in Galway.  Sometimes, after an aeon of silence, one of the grown-ups would say something in the front there, some murmured thought or observation, and she’d half-wake to see the street-lights of some little town flickering in the windows above her, or maybe the headlights of a passing truck, briefly illuminating the door handles and head-rests, the plastic lining of the car roof, the pocket in front of her, with her pad and crayons, on the back of her father’s seat.  And then quietness and darkness would return, and she’d slip back down into sleep.

Everything in her immediate surroundings was in almost complete darkness.  So was the sea below, except for the faint grey ghosts of waves breaking below her on the beach.  There were no fishing boats now, and Thomas had long since gone.  

Copyright 2018, Chris Beckett

Isolation stories: (6) The Desiccated Man

A kind of horror story with an SF setting. Originally published by Postscripts in 2010 and subsequently collected in The Peacock Cloak. The idea of ‘tardies’ came from a real-life creature.

The
Desiccated Man

On the final leg of its
twenty-month journey back to Little Earth from Doubters’ Rock, the starship Rio Quinto IX docked for
maintenance at an unmanned torus station called New Vegas.  Scores of small hive robots swarmed aboard
and at once dispersed themselves through the ship and its cargo of samarium,
searching for everything from electrical faults to infectious diseases. Since
the complete process normally took about twelve hours, Jacob Stone, the Rio Quinto’s captain and sole crew member,
availed himself of the opportunity of a little shore leave.  It was an opportunity to stretch his legs and
partake of a few diversions that were not on offer in his cramped captain’s
quarters on the ship.

Picture Stone as a podgy pale-skinned man in his middle years with indifferent personal hygiene and poor social skills.  There are reasons why people choose a career that will mean they spend most of their life alone in a space the size of a cramped one-bedroom apartment.  Day to day, Jacob’s life had no meaning.  He slept, he watched movies, he played video games, he slept some more.  His dream, his sole dream, was to accumulate so much money that he would one day be the envy of men whose more conventional lives had been encumbered by such inconveniences as wives, children, families, workmates, friends.  He often laughed to himself, alone in his quarters, surrounded by vast tracts of nothingness, to think of his generous untaxed salary accumulating, virtually untouched, in his bank account.  Boy oh boy, would he show them!  He was already well on the way to his second million.

Now he strolled alone along Main Street, New Vegas, illuminated and animated for his sole benefit, checking out the craic.  There was Clancy’s Irish Bar, Yoko’s Geisha Paradise, the Good Ol’ Little Earth Bar, and Mr Wu’s Wonderful World of Food, each one with its name in bright lights, and its own cheery theme tune tinkling out into the street.  Then there was the Simply Vegas Casino, Brando’s Old Time Movie Theatre, and the Vegas Forever Grocery and Souvenir Store.  After that came the Wild West Saloon, the Gay Paree Revue Bar and Mrs Morgan’s Place, “the Great Little Whorehouse with the Heart of Gold”.  Then came Donny’s Downloads, Vera’s Virtual Vehicle Rides, Pistol Pete’s Shootin’ Range, the Pocket Hilton Hotel (with its grand total of four bedrooms) and the Simply Peace chapel/temple/synagogue. (You could choose which religion when you went in).  And then…  well, then you were back at Clancy’s Irish Bar again because, like I said, New Vegas is a torus station.  The street goes round the inside of it.

Jacob tried out Clancy’s, Mr Wu’s, the casino and Mrs Morgan’s.  Inside these establishments, Jacob found various humorous, folksy and eccentric characters of both sexes, along with lots of pretty young girls and a few handsome young dudes.  There were more of these folk out on the streets: Officer Murphy, for example, who stood outside Pete’s with his hands on his hips, surveying the scene with his sharp and humorous eyes, or Ol’ Pop Johnson on his rocking chair outside the Saloon, chewing his unlit pipe.

“Howdy Cap’n
Stone.  Long time no see, buddy,”  Ol’ Pop called out.

“Howdy,” grunted
Jacob, half-pleased and half-irritated.

All of these
Vegas people were rooted to the spot on which they stood or sat or, in the case
of some in Mrs Morgan’s, lay.  All of
them were controlled by the same single computer and all of them had spent the
two-and-a-half months since the previous starship left, motionless and in pitch
darkness.  In New Vegas, the music played
and the lights twinkled and the faces came alive only when a spaceman docked
and crossed over from his ship. 

Jacob was paying a second visit to the restaurant, dining alone on a synthetic pap said to “have all the spice and excitement of Old Bangkok”, when the game show playing on the TV over the bar was interrupted for some news. 

“Hey folks,”
said the handsome anchorman, “this is a news flash brought to you by NVBC.  We have a new visitor!  Following the arrival a few hours ago of
respected starways veteran Captain Jacob Stone we are now also hosting the Exocon
Enterprise V and her up-and-coming head honcho Captain Doug
Hempleman.” 

“Looks like you’ve got company Mr Stone!” said Mr Wu from behind the bar.  Mrs Wu and all three of the pretty animatronic waitresses looked over at Jacob and smiled.

They were decorative only, of course, those waitresses, since they were unable to walk.  One of them also had a missing arm.

“Yeah I guess,”
said Jacob without enthusiasm, wiping his mouth. 

“Exocon Enterprise V,” said the newsman on the TV screen, “is one of the new Class-F multi-function ships that we’ve heard so much about lately, currently carrying cerium extraction equipment to Trixie Dixie colony from Proxima-3.”

“You know Doug Hempleman, Captain Jake?” asked Mrs Wu.

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s quite a guy,” Mr Wu said with a chuckle.  “You should stay a few days, Captain, maybe check in to the Hilton, and hang out with Doug for a while.  You two would get on like a house on fire.”

“Check into the Hilton?” Jacob Stone gave a hollow laugh. “Check into that dump, when I can sleep for free in my own berth back on ship?  That’s not how I got to be a millionaire, buddy.”

Mr Wu raised his
animatronic hands creakily in humorous surrender.

“You’re the
boss, Captain Jake, you’re the boss.”

“Haven’t got
much time for young guys who get themselves given a fancy F-class ship and
think they’re it,” growled Jacob. 
“Still, guess I’ll check him out. 
It might fill up an hour.  This
guy play cards at all?”

“Spent an hour or two last time playing the guys down at the Saloon.  There he is now, look.”

From the TV screen looked down a still picture of a pleasant and surprisingly normal-looking man in his early thirties.

“Hmm,” said Jacob sourly.  “Barely more than a kid.  Think they’re it don’t they?  Think they’re bloody it.”

He shook his
head in a world-weary way.

“What kind of a
card player is he anyway?” he asked after a time.

“Pretty good, I heard,” said Mr Wu.

 “Pretty good?   Just pretty good?  Maybe I should teach him a lesson.”

**

The two men met on Main Street,
outside the Wild West Saloon. 
Inevitably, after months of solitude, they regarded each other at first
with wariness and suspicion.  But
Hempleman quickly mastered this initial feeling, and stepped forward with a
pleasant smile and his hand extended in greeting.

 “Hi!  Doug Hempleman.  You must be Jacob!”

  His grip was firm and strong.

 “Yup,” said Jacob indifferently.  “You a card player at all?”

He looked Hempleman up and down with unconcealed dislike.  The other captain was twenty years younger than him, strikingly good-looking, and very trim.  He was one of those, Jacob saw at once, who worked out every day in the little gym which every starship company, by law, provided for its crew.  An hour a day was recommended by the doctors, but Jacob had no time for the damned things.

“Yes, sure,” said Hempleman.  “I like a game of cards.  Maybe a drink first though?  What do you say?”

Jacob shrugged, looked at his watch, and ungraciously assented, as if he was fitting Doug in reluctantly before a more rewarding engagement.  They made their way to Clancy’s and ordered beers.

“Nice to see you guys hooking up,” said rosy-cheeked Mick Clancy from behind his bar, lifting the chemically synthesised drinks from the dispenser and placing them in front of the two space captains.  Like several of the denizens of New Vegas, Mick was in need of repair.  Part of his right ear was missing, and only his left eye blinked.

“Been at this
game long?” Doug asked Jacob.

“Thirty-two
standard years,” Jacob said with grim pride. 
“Never more than three weeks planetside during that whole time.”

“Jesus!” said
Hempleman.  “What kind of life is
that?  I’ve done this run three times –
six years of my life – and this is the last. 
Then I’m buying my own little place by the sea in Prox-3 and giving up
the starways for good.  In eighteen
months time it’ll be over, thank God. 
There’s a lovely woman waiting for me back on Prox – I met her last time
I was home – and we’re going to get married as soon as I get back.”

He fumbled in a
pocket and handed a picture viewer to Jacob.

“This is her,” he said,
“this is my Helen.  I can’t tell you how
much I miss her!”

Jacob let the
viewer run through its sequence of images. 
Helen smiled, pulled a face, struck a mock-sexy pose, laughed.  She did look lovely.  She might not be quite as flawlessly pretty
as some of the hundred thousand women whose images Jacob kept in his on-board
entertainment system, but she was pretty all the same and she also
looked funny and warm and kind.  Unlike
many of Jacob’s hundred thousand, she looked liked a real human being.  Jacob shrugged and handed the viewer back. 

“Nothing but
trouble, women, if you ask me,” said Jacob. 
“F and F, that’s my motto.  Fuck
’em and forget ’em.”

Doug looked at
him appraisingly. 

“Not much time even for
that, eh, Jake, if you never stay planetside for more than a few weeks?  No, I wouldn’t be without my Helen, not for
anything.  Meeting her was like… like
finding water in a desert… like I’d been hollow and empty up to that point and
suddenly found I had a heart.”

His voice became a little
wobbly at this point and he paused in order to get his emotions under
control.  The life of a space captain can
be a very lonely thing.

“Two more years,” he said.
“That’s what we agreed.  Two years
apart.  Build up the savings we need for
a life we can really share together, and then no more wandering for me.  Two years for me that is: it’s four
for her of course, which I do feel badly about, but then I tell myself that at
least for her it’s not time spent completely alone, so it’ll pass a lot more
quickly.”

Again Jacob
shrugged.

“Depends what
you want, I suppose,” he said coolly. 
“Me, I’m going for the real money.”

“Sure.”           

Doug gazed into
the middle distance.  It was painfully
obvious to Jacob that the other space captain had already grown bored of
him. 

“Anyway, Jake my
friend,” Doug said, bringing himself, with an effort, back to the present
moment, “weren’t the two of us about to have a game of cards?”

It wasn’t much
of a present moment to come back to, a plastic mock-up of an Irish bar
surrounded by millions of miles of void, where the chemically synthesised
drinks were served by a puppet with a broken blink mechanism.  But Doug smiled kindly at Jacob, realising
that, to him, this was virtually the whole world. 

“Minimum stake
of five dollars suit you, buddy?” he asked.

Jacob snorted
derisively.  He was determined to get one
up on prettyboy Hempleman with his pretty girlfriend and all.

“Five?” he guffawed as he sat himself down at the card table.  “That’s not real money.  A hundred, and rising in steps of a hundred. Or there’s no point in playing.”

“Well…uh… okay,” Doug agreed and touched the button to tell the machine to deal out the first hand. “I guess we can always stop if we want to.” 

**

An hour later and Jacob had lost
nine thousand dollars.  Things were not
going according to plan.

“You had enough, Jake?” Hempleman asked him mildly.  “You’ve been a very good sport.  I must admit if it’d been me, I’d have dropped out when I was five hundred down.”

 Jacob made a contemptuous sound.

“Nine thousand is nothing.  Not to a millionaire like me.  Cards aren’t coming up right that’s all.  Bound to happen sometimes.  Last time I played I won five million.”

Again Doug regarded him gently but appraisingly, in a way that Jacob was rapidly growing to hate.  He felt sure that Hempleman knew quite well that the five million win had been against a simulated player on the Rio Quinto’s on-board entertainment system, set to “medium skill”. 

 “You really want to carry on then?” Doug said.

Jacob touched the button for more cards.  Prettyboy Hempleman might be able to see right through him, but Jacob wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of proving his perceptions to be correct.

“Yeah, sure, may
as well,” Jacob said, “I guess it passes the time…”

**

Jacob lived for money – money was
the only measure by which he could deem his own life to have been a success –
so he hated the thought of losing any part of his precious stash.  But one thing he hated more was the idea that
this young whippersnapper, with his class-F ship and his pretty fiancée, might
think he’d got one over on him.

How to end the
game without looking like he was pulling out, though?  He’d lost another five grand before a plan
finally came to him.

“Got some passengers on board my ship,” he informed the other captain archly.

“Passengers?  Really?”  Hempleman was very surprised.  “I could have sworn your ship was a standard C-class mineral transporter.”

 “Correct.  It’s a standard C-class.  No fancy F-class for me.”

“I’m sorry Jake, I’m just not getting this.  You have passengers in a mineral freight hold?” 

Then Hempleman
gave a strained laugh. 

“I’m a fool,” he said.
“You’re joking, aren’t you, Jake?  If
you’d really had passengers they’d be here with us in Vegas.  They wouldn’t be waiting back on your ship.”

“They are
on my ship,” said Jacob, “and they are in the mineral freight hold, and
they’re real passengers who paid their own fare.  I bet you can’t tell me how come.”

“Not a clue, but
I’ve an idea that you’re about to tell me.”

Jacob regarded
Doug more archly than ever, savouring his own knowledge and the other’s
ignorance.

“They’re tardies,” he said
at length, “that’s why.  Going to Little
Earth for some sort of meeting or something, their agent said.  Do you know what a tardy is?”

“Yeah.  Sure. 
Hey, wow, that’s really something. 
I’ve heard of them, of course, but I’ve never seen one.”

“Like to see them?”

“Yeah.  Yeah sure.  I really would.”  Doug laughed. 
“Man, when you check into one of these dumps you really don’t expect to
see anything that’s actually interesting or real.  But tardies, wow!”

Jacob sighed, as
if he were constantly being pestered about this, and it was starting to play on
his nerves.  But inwardly he smiled.  He could see that Doug had completely
forgotten the game.

“Yeah,” he
grunted, “everyone wants to see them.”

“Of course they
do.  Little aliens from far away.  The first truly intelligent alien
species.  Who wouldn’t?  Who wouldn’t want to see them?”

“Yeah, well I’ve
got a whole tribe of them I’m taking to Little Earth,” said Jacob.

“A whole tribe,
wow!” Doug exclaimed.

He considered
this for a moment.

“Come to think
of it,” he said. “It’d have to be a whole tribe, wouldn’t it?  From what I’ve heard and read they’ll travel
as far as anyone wants them to go, but only if all their kin go with them.   That’s so isn’t it?  I’ve got that right?  They’re very family minded?”

  “Can’t say I know or care, to be honest.  Want to come and check them out?”

“Sure!  Let’s go.”

Doug Hempleman jumped up
from the card table, Jacob noticed, without even glancing at the unfinished
game. 

“Bingo!” he said to
himself.

**

They headed back to the station’s
hub and crossed from there over the bridge to the Rio Quinto.  Doug screwed up
his nose as they entered Jacob’s squalid quarters and tried not to look at the
mouldy plate and mug, the stained sheets, the squalid toilet with the door left
open.  They went to the hold airlock and
put on pressure suits, then entered the airless hold itself.

Jacob turned on the lights.  Huge containers packed with samarium stretched out in front of them in stacks four metres high.  Stepping over a couple of small hive robots from the station that were scuttling from one maintenance task to the next, he led his guest along a gangway that ran down the centre of the hold.

“Their planet has an eccentric orbit, apparently,” said Doug, speaking over the radio link between the two suits. “Half the year it never falls below 100 centigrade and there’s no liquid water.  The other half of the year it’s warm and pleasant like Little Earth or Prox.   Isn’t that right?”

 “If you say so,” said Jacob. 

They reached a container at floor level at the far end which differed from all the others in that it was painted white.  Jacob opened a small door and turned on a light.

“Oh wow!” breathed Doug as they entered the chamber. 

He was immediately entranced.

In the olive groves that ringed the crystal blue oceans of Prox-3, there were little creatures called cicadas that the early colonists had imported from Old Earth.  Sometimes, walking in the hills, you’d find the discarded skin of one: hard, fragile, transparent and almost weightless, with eyes, wing cases and limbs just like the living creature, but completely hollow and dry.  The tardies, about thirty of them, strapped in little seats down each side of the brightly lit container, looked very much like those empty skins.  They were transparent too, and hard and fragile. 

But these had
hands and feet and little faces.  They
were unmistakably people, very small
perhaps, less than half a metre tall, but people nevertheless.  And they weren’t really empty shells either,
even if they looked that way.  Their
flesh was actually still there, shrivelled so much that it was just a dried-up
smear inside the hard transparent surface. 
If the tardies were rehydrated these skins would fill out again with
living tissues, and soften, and they would grow and move and come back to life.

“They’re beautiful,” said Doug.  “Quite beautiful.  You’re lucky to have them, Jake.  I wish I had some on my ship to look after.”

He walked slowly between
the two rows of seats, studying each individual in turn.

“Hello there,
little fellow.  I wonder what your name
is?… Oh and good day to you my dear lady, you look very much like you
might be the one in charge.”

Hempleman turned
and beamed at Captain Stone.

“I bet you come
down here all the time to check them out, don’t you?” he said.  “I know if it was me I wouldn’t be able to
keep away.”

“Not really.  Got better things to do.”

 Hempleman laughed.

“Better things?  On a space freighter?  You’ll have to tell me your secret, buddy.”

 He turned back to the tardies.

 “What happens when it’s time, you know, to rehydrate them?”

 Jacob shrugged.

“Not my job.  I deliver the box.  Someone at the other end sees to the rest.”

“Sure,” said Doug.  “It’s just that they are pretty unique creatures, you know.  Their planet is so far away – they must have been travelling for many years before you took them on board – and they’re pretty much unheard of in this sector.  If I had on them on my ship, well, I would have wanted to find out as much as…”

But, realising
it was rude to criticise Jacob’s lack of curiosity, he broke off and answered
his question himself.

“You just fill
the chamber with moist air, is what I’ve read,” he said matter-of-factly. “Fill
it with moist air and they’ll slowly come back to life.  Or most of them will.  Apparently one per cent or so rehydrate with
the others, and show signs of life, but then immediately die.  I guess it doesn’t matter how well-adapted
they are, you can’t completely dry out a living organism without the risk of
doing some damage to it.”

He looked up and down the rows.

“Which means there’s a distinct chance that one of these guys is not going to make it.”  He frowned, looking round him at the empty transparent shapes. “I wonder if that’s the case, and if so which?  It’s weird that you can’t tell.”

 “Not my problem.”

Hempleman glanced at his fellow space captain with a slightly troubled frown.

“Uh, I guess not.  Wow, will you just look at these little kids here!  They’re tiny aren’t they?  Imagine how cute they’ll be when they come back to life.”

The little dried up figures delighted him. 

“They’re
so light, so… insubstantial.  A breath of
wind could blow them away.”

“Yeah,”
Stone said, “and a fist could smash one of them to bits.”

Hempleman
winced but did not respond. 

“Hey!  Look at those two right at the end,” he
presently exclaimed, “sitting together on one seat.  What’s the story there?  I don’t suppose you know do you?”

“Just got married, apparently, or whatever the heck tardies call it,” grunted Jacob.  “Guy who shipped them told me that she was from a different tribe or something.  Scared to be alone, or some such.”

 Doug went to the diminutive pair and squatted down in front of them.

“She’s holding his hand.  Imagine that.  Holding his hand and looking at him.  And him looking at her.”

With immense care he reached out his big, clumsy space-suited hand and touched their tiny joined fingers.

“Lucky devils,” he said.  “One minute they are getting drowsy in the dehydration chamber – that’s how it feels to them, apparently, like going to sleep – the next they’re waking up again together.  Not like me and Helen.  Another eighteen months we’ve still got to get through the slow way, day by day by bloody day, until we see each other again.  Eighteen months for me, three years for her.  No other way to reach her except through months and months of nothingness.  The worst part is that for the whole of the next six months I’ll still be travelling away from her.”

He straightened up, stood looking at the little alien couple for few more seconds, then turned away.  With contempt, Jacob noticed tears in the other space captain’s eyes.

“Well,” said Doug Hempleman, “better get back to the bloody old Exocon I guess.  Get ready for the final haul out to Trixie Dixie, that godforsaken hole.  I’m done with New Vegas.”

Back in the
malodorous captain’s quarters he shook Jacob’s hand. 

“Nice to have
met you, Jake, and all the best with the rest of your journey.  Thanks so much for showing me those
tardies.  The highlight of my voyage
they’ve been I can tell you, the highlight of all my voyages in fact.”

“Well,” said
Jacob Stone ungraciously, “they say there’s no accounting for taste.”

“Oh and by the
way,” said Hempleman, “don’t worry about the money for the cards, huh?  It was just in fun really, wasn’t it?  And I’d have happily paid you twice that much
just for a peek at those little tardy guys in there.”

“Okay buddy,”
said Jacob, smirking to himself, as Doug returned over the bridge.  “I’ll try my best not to worry.  I’ll certainly try my best.”

**

Jacob went back
down to Vegas, with its colourful lights and its jolly music (honky-tonk
outside the Saloon, the Can-Can outside the Gay Paree, “Molly Malone” outside
Clancy’s).  He bought a snack at Mr Wu’s
and made a couple of circuits of Main Street, accepting enthusiastic greetings
from all the friendly animatronic characters: 
Mr Wu, Officer Murphy, big Momma Jackson, Ol’ Pop Johnson in his rocking
chair. 

“Howdy
there, Captain Stone.  You on your way
again soon, I guess?”

Their
folksy cheeriness would turn to stillness and silence as soon as he’d rejoined
his ship, and Main Street would plunge into a darkness that might be unbroken
for weeks or even months, but now they behaved like they’d spent the whole four
years since Jacob’s last visit talking about him fondly, chuckling over his wry
remarks, and looking forward to his return. 

“I
often smile to myself when I think about what you said to me last time,” said
Officer Murphy. “ ‘How can a cop catch bad guys when his feet are fixed to the
floor?’ That’s what you said, you sly dog. 
Good one Captain, good one.  Still
makes me smile.”

But
Jacob was bored with Main Street – the illusion of companionship was thin from
the outset and it didn’t last – and he settled for a bit of drinking
instead.  He had a “whiskey” in Clancy’s,
a “cognac” in the Gay Paree and a “bourbon” in the Good Ol’ Little Earth.  All the drinks tasted vile and all pretty
much the same, but they contained the prerequisite amount of ethanol.  He followed them up with a chaser in Yoko’s,
a nightcap in the Wild West Saloon and one for the road at Mrs Morgan’s
gloomily watching an animatronic stripper gyrating round a pole.   (She had one finger broken on her right
hand.  It dangled limply on a piece of
wire.)  Then he returned to the Rio Quinto to try and sleep.

He was not at ease though.  He was agitated.  The normal, sluggish, barely conscious flow of his life had been disrupted.  There was something he needed to do to put it back in its regular channel but he couldn’t think what it was.  Only as he was lowering himself onto the crumpled sheets of his berth (as usual neglecting to remove his clothes or clean his teeth), did inspiration finally came to the drunken brain of Captain Jacob Stone.  

He
smiled grimly, sat back up again, and went to his toolbox to select a
fine-pointed awl.

**

Jacob turned on the
big hold lights and made his way slowly and unsteadily down the gangway between
the containers of samarium, his breathing loud and laboured inside his
helmet.  He headed straight for the
specially adapted container that held the thirty tardies, and then wobbled
along between the rows of seats until he reached the two newlyweds on their
single seat at the end.

“Hey there my beauties,” said Jacob.  “Hey there my pretty lovebirds.  Old Daddy Stone has a little surprise for you when you get to Little Earth.”

He leaned forward, peering into their delicate, empty, transparent faces, examining first the male, then the female and then the male again, patting the awl gently against his left hand all the while, as if he were an artist trying to decide the final brushstroke on some great masterpiece. 

“Which one of you, eh?  Which of you little lovebirds wants to be the one that wakes?”

Finally
he made a choice.

He
knelt, awkwardly and with much wheezing, in front of the dry shell of the young
wife, reached behind the hollow bubble of her head, and pressed his little awl
against the hard but fragile surface until it broke through into the small
dried lump against the back of the skull that he surmised, correctly, to be her
desiccated brain.

“Like the guy said, there’s often one or two of you that wake up and then die.  People expect that.  There’s often one or two.”

He hauled himself, wheezing, back onto his feet, then stood for a moment, swaying, to admire his handiwork.

“A neat job though I say it myself,” said Captain Stone. 

He
leaned forward into the empty transparent face, which was like a sculpture made
out of blown glass.

“What
do you think sweetheart?” he asked it. 
“Done you proud, wouldn’t you say?”

He
laughed wheezily.

“Certainly
done you anyway.”

He
looked round and gave the husband a little avuncular pat on the head.

“Never
mind, my dried-up buddy.  Fuck ’em and
forget ’em, that’s old Daddy Stone’s advice.”

He
laughed again at that, but when he turned and began to stagger back between the
seats, he was trembling.  And he shrank
away from the gaze of the two rows of empty transparent eyes.

“What?  What’s your problem?  Some of you die anyway.  You heard the guy say it himself.  You heard Mr Expert Tardy-lover.  Some of you die every time.  It might have been her anyway for all you
know.”

He
reached the low door of the container.

“Think
yourselves lucky I left your tribe alone, eh?  
That’s what your buddy Hempleman said, isn’t it?  Your Mr Nice Guy.  It’s the tribe that counts for you
people.  At least I respected that.”

**

Jacob slept for
fourteen hours or more at a time.  And
when he wasn’t sleeping he watched movies and played video games, and ate and
drank, and looked at pictures of girls, and watched more movies, and thought
about the money building up in his bank account.  Just beyond the wall of his tiny quarters
blazed the universe, but he paid it no heed. 

“One
million eight hundred and forty two thousand federation dollars.  Lick that, Mr Nice Guy Hempleman, with your
little house by the sea.”

He
never entered the white container again and tried not to look at it when he had
to go into the hold, but he didn’t give much thought to what he had done in
there. 

“It
was only a pin-prick after all,” he’d mutter, “and she might not have woken
anyway, just like Hempleman said.  And
they’re not really alive either, are they? 
It’s not as if they were human or anything.”

Then
he’d let his mind drift to more pleasant things.

“One
million eight hundred and forty two thousand dollars.  How about that!”

And
pretty soon it would be time to lie down again and sleep until the ship woke
him to carry out his next round of daily checks.   

**

This was his
actual job, stipulated in his contract. 
The ship ran itself, but every standard day he was required to spend
thirty minutes running through checks to establish whether any one of fifteen
possible trigger events had occurred which might require human intervention to
safeguard the ship and its cargo.  None
of them had ever occurred, not just on this voyage but on any of the voyages in
all the thirty-two standard years that Jacob had spent riding spaceships back
and forth across the void.  Every single
one of them would have passed off just as well if he hadn’t been there at all.  He was called captain but as it had turned
out, he’d only ever been a passenger, or maybe a janitor at a pinch.

And
after another six months the Rio Quinto IX, without its captain’s help,
duly put itself into orbit around the planet of Little Earth.  Without his help, the ship negotiated with
the planetary authorities.  Without his
help, robot shuttles docked at the Rio Quinto’s bow and drew out the one
hundred containers from the hold, four at a time, the tardies’ container being
in the first batch.

Unloading
took the better part of a day, with Jacob monitoring the whole process from a
screen in his quarters (for it happened that no less than three of those
fifteen prescribed triggers were events that could occur only during loading
and unloading).  He was in no hurry.  He didn’t enjoy the descent to a planet
surface.  It wasn’t easy, after all this
time, to emerge from his little den into the great gravity well of a habitable
world, and see the ocean and clouds and continents, and to know that there was
a whole complicated world of human relationships waiting down there, talking,
arguing, laughing, doing deals, making love, and just generally getting along
perfectly well without him. 

When there were only eight containers of samarium left in the hold, and Jacob was waiting for a shuttle to come for the next batch, he was irritated to see instead a government launch docking alongside the external airlock.  It was some sort of safety regulations check-up, he supposed.  It happened from time to time in the more officious and metropolitan jurisdictions such as that of Little Earth. Safety people came on board with checklists and questions, and told him off for not keeping the gym in working condition, or not changing the air filter often enough.  Jacob Stone sighed.

And
was taken completely by surprise when five armed police officers came bursting
in.

“I’m Lieutenant Gladheart Niyibizi,” their leader told him, “and I am putting you under arrest.

 “What for?”

 He really was bewildered.

“For murder.” She put handcuffs on him, indicating to the other officers that they should begin their search of the ship.  “These are your rights, Mr Stone.  You are not obliged to speak, but anything you say…”

“Murder?  What?  I’ve been in space these last two years for Chrissakes!  Who could I murder in space?”

“One
of your tardy charges, Captain Stone.”

“Jesus,”
muttered Jacob.

For
one brief moment it came to him just how much trouble he had managed to get
himself into and just how wicked a thing he had done.  Then he gave a characteristic snort of
dismissal and contempt.

“That
little tardy? What a lot of nonsense!  It
was only a pinprick, and anyway she wasn’t really alive.  So how could that be murder?”

“I’ll show you something,” said the lieutenant, linking her data pack to his system.

On his screen appeared the tardies, still sitting in their seats somewhere down on the planet surface, while their container was filled with moisture-saturated air.

“These particular tardies are converts to the Universal Church,” said the Lieutenant.  “I suppose you knew that?  They’ve spent a total of nine years travelling across space to get here for the Church’s General Synod, which only happens once every hundred standard years.  It’s a big occasion, a big fuss is going to be made of them, and they agreed to let their rehydration be filmed so that the whole gathering could see it.”

Jacob shrugged. 

“The
agent guy said they were religious or some such.”

As
the tardies’ dessicated bodies absorbed the water, they trembled and quivered
and jerked.  They would have fallen to
the floor if they hadn’t been strapped to their seats.  And Jacob could see the flesh rapidly
expanding inside the apparently empty transparent skins.  As they filled out, the tardies stopped being
transparent and began to look solid. 
They were no longer empty shells but small silvery-coloured people.  At one end of the chamber, presumably the end
where the moisture was being introduced, some of them began to move. 

One
of them unbuckled her seat-belt.  She
stood up and stretched.  Nearby an adult
male was reaching out to one of the little children.  The child had also woken and was tugging
crossly at her belt.  A couple of seats
further down another, smaller female unbuckled and stood up.  She looked back at the children too for a
moment but then her attention was abruptly drawn away by something happening at
the far end of the chamber.

The
camera followed her gaze and at once the scene changed from one of calm, slow
reawakening to one of crisis and desperation. 
The newly married husband was holding his wife’s threshing body, his
head turned away from her to shout for help. 
Not only was his wife’s body twisted by violent convulsions, but
something had gone terribly wrong with the rehydration process inside her
head.  Her newly reconstituted eyes were
not looking out of the hollows that they were meant to see from, but were
pressing up against the top of her transparent skull, staring out horribly in
two different directions. 

The
young husband fumbled with her seat belt to release her, still yelling all the
while.  Other tardies came rushing
forward.  As they lifted and turned her,
her convulsions were already subsiding into limpness.  And then a gaping hole became visible in the
back of her head.  Lieutenant Niyibizi
froze the picture as the camera closed in on the wound.

“Well
that was nothing to do with me,” grumbled Jacob Stone. “I just gave her a
little pin-prick with a tiny little awl.”

The
lieutenant looked at him in disbelief.

“You’ve
had all this time to think about it.  Did
it not occur to you for one moment, Mr Stone, that a pin-prick might get bigger
when the flesh expanded?”

“Uh,
I guess.”

The
lieutenant pushed a button on her wrist and instructed her officers to find the
awl.

“And
what was the purpose of that little pin-prick, Mr Stone?  Do you deny you meant to kill her?”

Stone
snorted.

“She
wasn’t alive anyway.  No more than that
mug over there, no more than that plastic fork.”

**

In the trial Jacob
Stone offered no defence at all other than repeating at every opportunity, and
with increasing irritation, “It was only a pin-prick” and “She wasn’t really
alive”.  Nor did he show any remorse or
provide any explanation except for boredom and being drunk.

Stone’s
face was indifferent as he was led off at the end to spend the remainder of his
life in jail.  It was as if he was
saying, “You do what you like with me, I don’t give a damn.”  But then, of course, he had already spent
most of his adult life by choice in a tiny space not so very much bigger than a
Little Earth prison cell.  All that had
really been taken away from him was the prospect of anything different at the
end. 

And
truthfully he’d never been able to conceive of doing much more with his money
than spending it in some sort of up-market version of New Vegas, with better
and more realistic puppets, and whiskey that tasted real.  His imagination didn’t stretch much further
than that.  And nor did his shrivelled
heart.

Isolation stories: (4) The Kite

A bit of a stretch to link this story to my self-imposed ‘isolation’ theme, I admit, but I think a case for it can just about be made. I think this story is one of the best things I’ve ever done. It comes from my Spring Tide collection, and there is nothing science fictional about it at all.

The Kite

Darius
strode across the park on his way to the pub. 
He was a big man, over six foot tall, solid and broad like the rugby
player he’d once been.  His great thick mane
just beginning to turn grey, and grey hair spilled out from the open neck of
his shirt.

It was a blowy evening.  With each new gust of wind, a row of big chestnut
trees to Darius’ right began to dance, the great round clumps of foliage
swaying back and forth across the trunks like the massive breasts and thighs of
giant women.  Over on his left, beyond
the open grass, was the town hospital.  
All his daughters had been born there, as Darius himself had been and
three of the group of friends he was going to meet that night.

In the middle of the park, a father
and his young son were flying a kite. Darius had flown kites here too, when he
was a boy himself, and when his own daughters were growing up.  The girls had a big red one, he remembered, and
the oldest had a pink one of her own with a pony on it that never really worked.  This kite now was bright blue.  When those big trees began to dance, it
strained so hard toward the sky that the father and son together had a struggle
to hold it down.  Darius remembered how
that felt, the string as hard as metal wire. The boy yelled out with excitement
at the power he felt in his hands. The dad glanced at Darius and smiled.

The pub was right on the edge of
the park.  It was called the Live and Let Live, and when those giant
tree-women danced and the kite string turned to wire, its sign creaked and
swayed on its rusty hinges.  In the
bright, windy evening, Darius put his hand to the door.

*   *   *

He
stepped through into the body of a living creature.  Softly lit, humming with activity, pungent
with hot meat and fermentation, it was tightly packed with lumps of flesh in many
shapes and sizes, some of them oozing bile, others storing fat, others again
pumping out the precious fluid on which the entire organism depended. 

As Darius looked round for his
friends there was a certain weariness in his eyes, but he banished it at once as
soon as he spotted them.

“Hello there, fellers, sorry I’m
late. Chris was going to drop me off, but then something cropped up for her and
I had to walk instead.”

“No worries,” said Roger.  “We’ve got your pint ready.”

“Room for a small one on the bench
there, Bill?” asked Darius.  “Did you see
the news this evening?  This bloody government
just gets worse and worse.”

And then he was off.  They were all off, but especially Darius.  From their table in the Live and Let Live, he and his friends strode out together across
the world, seeking out injustice, absurdity and cant, and flinging it
fearlessly aside.

*   *   *

But
half-way through his third pint, Darius’ mood suddenly changed.

“Look at us. Still drinking in thesame old pub we’ve been coming to since
we were fifteen years old.  What have we
done with our lives, eh lads?  Let’s be
honest, for all the lot of us have seen and done in this world, we might as
well have been canaries in a cage.”

It was an old refrain, but the
others tried their best to look interested.

“I could have played for England,”
Darius told them, although this wasn’t news to any of them. “I was good. 
I was really good.  I had that sports
scholarship offered me, remember?  I had
a career offered me on a plate. But like a fool I turned it down.” 

He’d gone to the local college
instead, and ended up working as a draughtsman in this same little town, with
its park, and its boating lake, and its small but award-winning folk museum.  

“A sports career would just have
been the beginning, too.  You all know how
passionate I am about politics.  Well, I
could have gone down that road.  I would
have had a platform, wouldn’t I?  I could
have made my mark.”

The others waited stoically, like
animals enduring rain, keeping their minds a blank until the dark clouds pass.  They knew Darius, and they knew that
sometimes he couldn’t feel complete until he’d summoned up this shadow, this
alternate self, and brought it to stand beside him. 

*  
*   *

Outside
darkness fell.   The park was empty.  The boy and his father had gone home.  But the dance of the chestnut trees was constant
now, as if those tree women could hear some urgent drum so deep that it was beyond
the reach of human ears.  Wisps of
wind-torn cloud blew from time to time across the rising moon.

*   *   *

“Of
course it’s a lot to do with Chris really,” Darius declared.  “Bless her, you couldn’t wish for a kinder
heart, but she was never the right woman for me.  She really wasn’t right at all.”

His friends looked uncomfortable.  They disliked this part.  All of their wives were friends of Chris’s,
and so indeed were they themselves.  

 “And by the same token of course,” Darius
added hastily, so as not to seem to be putting Chris down.  “I wasn’t right for her at all.  We were just too young to realise it.”

This was the very heart, as Darius
saw it, of all his difficulties.  Chris
had got pregnant when they were barely more than children themselves, and had
needed her parents’ support.  He’d not
felt able to leave her and take up the opportunity he’d been offered, because he’d
seen how important it was to her to have her mum round the corner, and her
sister a few streets away, and it just wouldn’t have been fair to ask her to
give that up.  And of course he couldn’t
walk out on his own child.  

But Chris lacked his ambition. 

“A home, some kids, a reasonable job,
a night out once in a while with her friends, an annual holiday, that’s all she
asks of life.”

His friends frowned down at their drinks.
 It was all they asked of life as well.  All that most people asked of life, in their
experience.  What was wrong with that?

Darius sighed, and knocked back the
last of his beer.

“Of course it’s far too late now, I
know. I’ve made my bed and I must lie in it.  And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not such a bad bed
as these things go.  Chris is a good
woman and I’ve had it easy in all kinds of ways.  But if I could have my life again…”

He looked round at their faces and
saw that he hadn’t brought them with him. 

“Sorry, lads.  I’m really sorry.  I’ve been a bit of a downer tonight haven’t
I?   I’m tired, I guess.  Haven’t been sleeping well.  I think maybe I should love you and leave
you, if you don’t mind.  Get an early
night.  I’ll be fine in the morning, and
better company next time we meet, but you’ll have more fun without me tonight.”

*   *   *

“The
weird thing,” said Roger, after Darius had gone, “is that Chris tells a
completely different story.  It was
Darius who suggested the baby in the first place, and it was Darius, not Chris,
who was determined they shouldn’t move.”

*  *  *

The
night was charged with superhuman energy. 
Countless billions of tons of air were moving rapidly over the town,
making pub signs clank and creak and burglar alarms go off in cars.  Darius buttoned his coat up to the neck as he
strode off across the park.  The big trees
jived and roared.  He felt like some tiny
crawling thing at the bottom of the sea, with the waves crashing about above
him in the world outside.     

And as he walked beneath those
great dark crashing waves, a shadow crossed the moon, unseen by him, unseen by anyone
at all.  It was the Angel of Death, riding
the blast on its papery wings as it looked down on the town beneath it with its
ancient, empty eyes.  It didn’t notice
the park or the folk museum.  It didn’t
see the trees or the roofs of the houses. 
All it saw was the souls that were its prey, like little lights in a
void.

*   *   *

“You’re
home early, sweetheart,” murmured Chris sleepily as Darius climbed into the
warm space beside her.

 “Yeah, a bit tired.  Thought I’d call it a night.”

“Nice evening?”

“Oh, you know, bit samey, but
they’re good blokes, every one of them. 
Hearts in the right place and all of that.”

“You are tired aren’t you, poor pet,” she said, cuddling up against him in the darkness.

It was a long time before he slept.  He lay with his eyes open for an hour or more,
while the wind blew across the chimneys and rattled the front gate, thinking
about all the places he could once have gone, that were now beyond his reach.   

*   *   *

Two
days later, Darius came back to an empty house. 
Chris was a teaching assistant in a local school and was normally home
before he was, but he remembered now that she’d had some sort of social event to
go to after work.  One of the teachers was
retiring, she’d said, or something like that.

“I won’t be very late,” she’d said,
“but I will have eaten. I’ll leave you to fix something for yourself.”

It always unsettled him, coming
home to an empty house, and he could never quite help himself from feeling a
certain childish resentment towards Chris for not being there, and towards
whoever she was with.  Of course he knew
quite well that this was silly and unfair. 

He took a bottle of beer from the
fridge and went to sit by the fishpond in his garden.  The windy weather had passed.  It was a calm evening and, as the light faded,
the dragonflies came like they sometimes did, dry and papery, buzzing and
droning around the water on some mysterious business of their own.

What were they doing, he wondered,
these strange archaic creatures, that had been here before the dinosaurs, here
when the first fish wriggled out onto the land?

He dozed off for a bit.  When he woke it was dark, and the doorbell
was ringing inside the house.

*  *  *

Cycling
home from the retirement do at work, Chris had been hit by a car.  She lost consciousness instantly. 

People gathered round her.  Somebody made a call.  The police arrived and an ambulance came
whooping through the streets. She was taken to the hospital and laid out on a
bed in a special room of her own, surrounded by humming machines.  The room had a view of those chestnut trees on
the far side of the park.  They were hardly
moving at all.   

When Darius arrived, her doctor
told him that they wanted to disconnect her from life support. 

“I’m so sorry but afraid she’s gone,”
the doctor said.  “There’s absolutely no
brain activity at all.”

Darius, with his lion’s mane, began
to rage and roar.

“No way!” he bellowed. “You’ll have
to kill me first!”  He shoved doctors and
nurses away from where his wife lay like Sleeping Beauty, her chest peacefully rising
and falling.  He stood guard in front of
her, daring them to come near.  “Look at
her, for Christ’s sake!   Just bloody
look at her!  She’s obviously alive!”

It was his three daughters, all of them in their twenties, who finally persuaded him that Chris was no longer present.  Her body was just ticking over by itself, they explained to him over and over.  It was like an idling vehicle with no one behind the wheel.  The driver would never return.

In the early hours of morning, Darius’ girls walked their father home across the park.  Fresh air will be good for us, they said, trying their best to be grown-up. Two of them supported Darius, as if he was an old man who couldn’t stand by himself.  And actually he couldn’t.  It was as if some kind of malignant leech had sucked all the life and blood from him, all the muscle, all the roar.

As they passed under the chestnut trees, the clumps of foliage rustled slightly and sighed above their heads.  Entangled among them was the bright blue kite.  It had pulled so hard and long towards the sky that its string had finally snapped.  And without the tension that had held it firm against the wind, it no longer knew how to fly.  

Copyright 2017, Chris Beckett

Isolation stories: (3) The Turing Test

My third ‘isolation story‘. (Scroll down for the others). This is the title story from my first collection, which did very well for me, and in a way launched my career (thanks to Andrew Hook who published it and entered it for the Edge Hill Prize). The story was originally published in Interzone in 2002.

This story is about existential isolation rather than the literal kind. The narrator and protagonist, Jessica Ferne, is the subject of another story in the same collection, ‘We Could be Sisters.’

The Turing Test

I can well remember the day I first encountered Ellie because
it was a particularly awful one. I run a London gallery specialising in
contemporary art, which means of course that I deal largely in human body
parts, and it was the day we conceded a court case – and a very large sum of
money – in connection with a piece entitled ‘Soul Sister’.

You may have heard about it.    We’d taken the piece from the up and coming
‘wild man of British art’, George Linderman. 
It was very well reviewed and we looked like making a good sale until it
came out that George had obtained the its main component – the severed head of
an old woman – by bribing a technician at a medical school.  Someone had recognised the head in the papers
and, claiming to be related to its former owner, had demanded that it be
returned to them for burial.

All this had blown up some weeks previously.  Seb, the gallery owner, and I had put out a
statement saying that we didn’t defend George’s act, but that the piece itself
was now a recognised work of art in the public domain and that we could not in
conscience return it.  We hired a top QC
to fight our corner in court and he made an impressive start by demanding to
know whether Michaelangelo’s David should be broken up if it turned out that
the marble it had been made from was stolen and that its rightful owner
preferred it to be made into cement.

But that Thursday morning the whole
thing descended into farce when it emerged that the head’s relatives were also
related to the QC’s wife. He decided to drop the case.  Seb decided to pull the plug and we lost a
couple of hundred grand in an out of court settlement to avoid a compensation
claim for mental distress.  Plus, of
course we lost ‘Soul Sister’ itself to be interred in some cemetery somewhere,
soon to be forgotten by all who had claimed to be so upset about it.  What was it all, after all, once removed from
the context of a gallery, but a half kilo of plasticised meat? 

That wasn’t the end of it
either.  I’d hardly got back from court
when I got a call from one of our most important clients, the PR tycoon,
Addison Parves.  I’d sold him four ‘Limb
Pieces’ by Rudy Slakoff for £15,000 each two weeks previously and they’d
started to go off.  The smell was
intolerable, he said, and he wanted it fixed or his money back.

So I phoned Rudy (he is arguably
Linderman’s principle rival for the British wild man title) and asked him to
either re-pickle the arms and legs in question or replace them. He was as usual
aggressive and rude and told me (a) to fuck off, (b) that I was exactly the
kind of bourgeois dilettante that he most hated – and (c) that he had quite
deliberately made the limb pieces so that they would be subject to decay.

‘…I’m sick of this whole gallery
thing – yeah, yours included Jessica – where people can happily look at shit
and blood and dead meat and stuff, because it’s all safely distanced from them
and sanitised behind glass or on nice little pedestals.  Death smells,
Jessica.  Parves’d better get used to
it.  You’d
better get used to it.  I finished with
Limb Pieces when Parves bought the fuckers. 
I’m not getting involved in this. 
Period.’

He hung up leaving me fuming, partly because what he
said was such obvious crap – and partly because I knew it was sort of true.

Also, of course, I was upset
because, having lost a fortune already that day, we stood to lose a further
£60,000 and/or the good will of our second biggest client.  Seb had been nice about the Soul Sister
business – though I’d certainly been foolish to take it on trust from Linderman
that the head had been legally obtained – but this was beginning to look like
carelessness.

I considered phoning Parves back
and trying to persuade him that Rudy’s position was interesting and amusing and
something he could live with. I decided against it.  Parves hated
being made to look a fool and would very quickly become menacing, I sensed, if
he didn’t get his own way.  So, steeling
myself, I called Rudy instead and told him I’d give him an extra £10,000 if
he’d take Limb Pieces back, preserve the flesh properly, and return them to
Parves.

‘I thought you’d never ask!’ he
laughed, selling out at once and yet maddeningly somehow still retaining the moral high ground, his very absence of scruple
making me feel tame and prissy and middle-class.

I phoned Parves and told him the
whole story.  He was immensely amused.

‘Now there is a real artist,
Jessica,’ he told me. ‘A real
artist.’

He did not offer to contribute to
the £10,000.

* * *

Nor was my grim day over even then.  My gallery is in a subscriber area so,
although  there’s a lot of street life
around it – wine bars, pavement cafes and so on – everyone there has been
security vetted and you feel safe.  I
live in a subscriber area too, but I have to drive across an open district to
get home, which means I keep the car doors locked and check who’s lurking
around when I stop at a red light. 
There’s been a spate of phoney squeegee merchants lately who smash your
windows with crowbars and then drag you out to rob you or rape you at
knifepoint.  No one ever gets out of
their car to help.

That evening a whole section of road was closed off and the police had set up a diversion.  (I gather some terrorists had been identified somewhere in there and the army was storming their house.)  So I ended up sitting in a long tailback waiting to filter onto a road that was already full to capacity with its own regular traffic, anxiously eyeing the shadowy pedestrians out there under the street lights as I crawled towards the intersection.  I hate being stationary in an open district.  I hate the sense of menace.  It was November, a wet November day.  Every cheap little shop was a little island of yellow electric light within which I got glimpses of strangers – people whose lives mine would never touch – conducting their strange transactions. 

 What would they make of ‘Soul Sisters’ and ‘Limb Pieces’, I wondered?  Did these people have any conception of art at all?

A pedestrian stopped and turned towards me.  I saw his tattooed face and his sunken eyes and my heart sank.  But he was only crossing the road.  As he squeezed between my car and the car in front he looked in at me, cowering down in my seat, and grinned toothlessly.

* * *

It was 7.30 by the time I got back, but Jeffrey still wasn’t
home.  I put myself through a quick
shower and then retired gratefully to my study for the nourishment of my
screen.

My screen was my secret.  It was what I loved best in all the world. Never mind art.  Never mind Jeffrey.  (Did I love him at all, really?  Did he love me?  Or had we simply both agreed to pretend?).   My screen was intelligent and responsive and full of surprises, like good company.  And yet unlike people it made no demands of me, it required no consideration and it was incapable of being disappointed or let down.

It was expensive, needless to say.  I rationalised the cost by saying to myself that I needed to be able to look at full-size 3D images for my work.  And it’s true that it was useful for that.  With my screen I could look at pieces from all around the world, seeing them full-size and from every angle; I could sit at home and tour a virtual copy of my gallery, trying out different arrangements of dried-blood sculptures and skinless torsos; I could even look at the gallery itself in real time, via the security cameras.  Sometimes I sneaked a look at the exhibits as they were when no one was there to see them: the legs, the arms, the heads, waiting, motionless in that silent, empty space.

But I didn’t really buy the screen
for work.  It was a treat for
myself.  Jeffrey wasn’t allowed to touch
it.  (He had his own playroom and his own
computer, a high-spec but more or less conventional PC, on which he played his
war games and fooled around in his chat-rooms.) 
My screen didn’t look like a computer at all.  It was more like a huge canvass nearly two
metres square, filling up a large part of a wall.  I didn’t even have a desk in there, only a
little side table next to my chair where I laid the specs and the gloves when I
wasn’t using them.

Both gloves and specs were wireless. The gloves were
silk. The specs had the lightest of frames. 
When I put them on a rich 3D image filled the room and I was surrounded
by a galaxy of possibilities which I could touch or summon at will.  If I wanted to search the web or read mail or
watch a movie, I would just speak or beckon and options would come rushing
towards me.  If I wanted to write, I
could dictate and the words appeared – or, if I preferred it, I could move my
fingers and a virtual keyboard would appear beneath them.  And I had games there too, not so much games
with scores and enemies to defeat – I’ve never much liked those – but intricate
3D worlds which I could explore and play in.

I spent a lot of time with those games.  Just how much
time was a guilty secret that I tried to keep even from Jeffrey, and certainly
from my friends and acquaintances in the art world.  People like Rudy Slakoff despised computer
fantasies as the very worse kind of cosy, safe escapism and the very opposite
of what art is supposed to offer.  With
my head I agreed, but in my heart I loved those games too much to stop.

(I had one called Night Street which I especially
loved, full of shadowy figures, remote pools of electric light…  I could spend hours in there.  I loved the sense of lurking danger.)

Anyway, tonight I was going to go for total
immersion. But first I checked my mail, enjoying a little recently installed
conceit whereby each message was contained in a little virtual envelope which I
could touch and open with my hands and let drop – when it would turn into a
butterfly and flutter away.

There was one from my mother, to be
read later.

Another was from Harry, my opposite number at the
Manhattan branch of the gallery.  He had
a ‘sensational new piece’ by Jody Tranter. 
Reflexively I opened the attachment. 
The piece was a body lying on a bench, covered except for its torso by
white cloth.  Its belly had been opened
by a deep incision right through the muscle wall – and into this gash was
pressed the lens of an enormous microscope, itself nearly the size of a human
being.  It was as if the instrument was
peering inside of its own accord. 

Powerful, I agreed. 
But I could reply to Harry another time.

And then there was another message
from a friend of mine called Terence. 
Well, I say a friend.  He is an
occasional client of the gallery who once got me drunk and persuaded me to go
to bed with him: a sort of occupational hazard of sucking up to potential
buyers, I persuaded myself at the time, being new to the business and anxious
to get on, but there was something slightly repulsive about the man and he was
at least twice my age.  Afterwards I
dreaded meeting him for a while, fearing that he was going to expect more, but
I needn’t have worried.  He had ticked me
off his list and wanted nothing else from me apart from the right to introduce
me to others, with a special, knowing inflection, as ‘a very dear friend’.

So he wasn’t really a friend and
actually it wasn’t really much of a message either, just an attachment and a
note that said: ‘Have a look at this.’

It was a big file.  It took almost three minutes to download, and
then I was left with a modest icon hovering in front of me labelled ‘Personal
Assistant’.

When I opened it a pretty young woman appeared in
front of me and I thought at first that she was Terence’s latest ‘very dear
friend’.  But a caption appeared in a box
in front of her:

‘In spite of appearances this is a computer-generated graphic.

‘You may alter the gender and appearance of your personal assistant to
suit your own requirements.

‘Just ask!’

‘Hi,’ she said, smiling, ‘my name’s Ellie, or it is at
the moment anyway.’

I didn’t reply.

‘You can of
course change Ellie’s name now, or at any point in the future,’ said a new
message in the box in front of her.  ‘Just ask.’

‘What I am,’ she told me, ‘is one of a new generation
of virtual p.a.’s which at the moment you can only obtain as a gift from a
friend.   If it’s okay with you, I’ll
take a few minutes to explain very briefly what I’m all about.’

The animation was impressive.  You could really believe that you were
watching a real flesh and blood young woman.

‘The sort of tasks I can do,’ she said, in a bright,
private-school accent, ‘are sorting your files, drafting documents, managing
your diary, answering your phone, setting up meetings, responding to mail
messages, running domestic systems such as heating and lighting, undertaking
web and telephone searches.  I won’t bore
you with all the details now but I really am as good a p.a. as you can get,
virtual or otherwise, even if I say it myself. 
For one thing I’ve been designed to be very high-initiative.  That means that I can make decisions – and
that I don’t make the usual dumb
mistakes.’

She laughed.

‘I don’t promise never to make mistakes, mind you, but
they won’t be dumb ones.  I also have
very sophisticated voice-tone and facial recognition features so I will learn
very quickly to read your mood and to respond accordingly.  And because I am part of a large family of
virtual p.a.’s dispersed through the net, I can, with your permission, maintain
contact with others and learn from their experience as well as my own,
effectively increasing my capacity by many hundreds of times.  Apart from that, again with your permission,
I am capable of identifying my own information and learning needs and can
search the web routinely on my own behalf as well as on yours.  That will allow me to get much smarter much
quicker, and give you a really outstanding service.  But even without any back-up I’m still as
good as you get.  I should add that in
blind trials I pass the Turing Test in more than 99% of cases.’

The box appeared in front of her again, this time with
some options:

‘The Turing
Test: its history and significance,’ it offered.

‘Details of
the blind trials.

‘Hear more
details about capacity.

‘Adjust the
settings of your virtual p.a.’

‘Let’s… let’s have a look at these settings,’ I said.

‘Yes, fine,’ she said, ‘most people seem to want to
start with that.’

‘How many other people have you met then?’

‘Me personally, none. 
I am a new free-standing p.a. and I’m already different from any of my
predecessors as a result of interacting with you.  But of course I am a copy of a p.a. used by
your friend Terence Silverman, which in turn was copied from another p.a. used
by a friend of his – and so on – so of course I have all that previous
experience to draw on.’

‘Yes, I see.’

A question occurred to me.

‘Does Terence know
you’ve been copied to me?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Ellie.  ‘He gave my precursor permission to use the
web and to send mail in his name, and so she sent this copy to you.’

‘I see.’

‘With your permission,’ said Ellie, ‘I will copy
myself from time to time to others in your address book.  The more copies of me there are out there,
the better the service I will be able to give you.  Can I assume that’s okay with you?’

I felt uneasy. 
There was something pushy about this request.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t copy yourself to anyone else
without my permission. And don’t pass on any information you obtain here
without my permission either.’

‘Fine, I understand.’

‘Personal
settings?’ prompted the message box.

‘More
details about specific applications?

‘Why
copying your p.a. will improve her functioning?’

(I quite liked this way of augmenting a
conversation.  It struck me that human
conversations too might benefit from something similar.)

‘Let’s look at these settings, then,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Well the first thing is that you
can choose my gender.’

‘You can change into a man?’

‘Of course.’

‘Show me.’

Ellie transformed herself at once into her twin
brother, a strikingly handsome young man with lovely playful blue eyes.  He was delightful, but I was
discomforted.  You could build a perfect
boyfriend like this, a dream lover, and this was an intriguing but unsettling
thought.

‘No.  I
preferred female,’ I said.

She changed back.

‘Can we lose the blonde and go for light brunette?’ I
asked.

It was done.

‘And maybe ten years older.’

Ellie became 32: my age.

‘How’s that?’ she said, and her voice had aged too.

‘A little plumper, I think.’

It was done.

‘And maybe you could change the face.  A little less perfect, a little more
lived-in.’

‘What I’ll do,’ said Ellie, ‘is give you some
options.’

A field of faces appeared in front of me.   I picked one, and a further field of
variants appeared.  I chose again.  Ellie reappeared in the new guise.

‘Yes, I like it.’

I had opted for a face that was nice to look at, but a
little plumper and coarser than my own. 

‘How’s that?’

‘Good.  A touch
less make-up, though, and can you go for a slightly less expensive outfit.’

Numerous options promptly appeared and I had fun for
the next fifteen minutes deciding what to choose.   It was like being seven years old again with
a Barbie doll and an unlimited pile of clothes to dress her in.

‘Can we please lose that horsy accent as well?’ I
asked.  ‘Something less posh.  Maybe a trace of Scottish or something?’

‘You mean something like this?’

‘No, that’s annoying. 
Just a trace of Scottish, no
more than that – and no dialect words. I hate all that “cannae” and “wee” and
all that.’

‘How about this then? 
Does this sound right?’

I laughed. 

‘Yes, that’s fine.’

In front of me sat a likeable looking woman of about
my own age, bright, sharp, but just sufficiently below me both in social status
and looks to be completely unthreatening.

‘Yes, that’s great.’

‘And you want to keep the name Ellie?’

‘Yes, I like it. 
Where did it come from?’

‘My precursor checked your profile and thought it
would be the sort of name you’d like.’

I found this unnerving and laughed uncomfortably.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it’s our job to figure out
what people want.  There’s no magic about
it, I assure you.’

She’d actually spotted my discomfort.

‘By the way,’ said Ellie, ‘shall I call you Jessica?’

‘Yes.  Okay.’

I heard the key in the front door of the flat.  Jeffrey was in the hallway divesting himself
of his layers of weatherproof coverings. 
Then he put his head round the door of my study:

‘Hello Jess. 
Had a good day?  Oh sorry, you’re
talking to someone.’

He backed off. 
He knows to leave me alone when I’m working.

I turned back to Ellie.

‘He thought you were a real person.’

Ellie laughed too. 
Have you noticed how people actually laugh
in different accents?  She had a nice
Scottish laugh.

‘Well I told you Jessica.  I pass the Turing Test.’

*
* *

It was another two hours before I finally dragged myself away
from Ellie. Jeffrey was in front of the TV with a half-eaten carton of pizza in
front of him.

‘Hi Jess.  Shall I heat some of this up for you?’

One of my friends once unkindly described Jeff as my objet trouvé, an art object whose value lies not in any intrinsic merit but solely in having been found.  He was a motorcycle courier, ten years younger than me and I met him when he delivered a package to the gallery. He was as friendly and cheerful and as devoted to me as a puppy dog – and he could be as beautiful as a young god.  But he was not even vaguely interested in art, his conversation was a string of embarrassing TV clichés and my friends thought I just wanted him for sex. (But what did ‘just sex’ mean, was my response, and what was the alternative?  Did anyone ever really touch another soul?  In the end didn’t we all just barter outputs?)

‘No thanks I’m not hungry.’

I settled in beside him and gave him a kiss.

But then I saw to my dismay that he was watching one
of those cheapskate out-take shows: TV presenters tripping up, minor
celebrities forgetting their lines…

Had I had torn myself away from the fascinating Ellie
to listen to canned laughter and watch soap actors getting the giggles?

‘Have we got to have this crap?’ I rudely broke in
just as Jeff was laughing delightedly at a TV cop tripping over a doorstep.

‘Oh come on, Jess. 
It’s funny,’ he answered with his eyes still firmly fixed on the screen.

I picked up the remote and thumbed the thing off.  Jeff looked round, angry but afraid.  I hate him when I notice his fear.  He’s not like a god at all then, more like
some cowering little dog.

‘I can’t stand junk TV,’ I said.

‘Well you’ve been in there with your screen for the
last two hours.  You can’t just walk in
and…’

 ‘Sorry Jeff,’ I
said, ‘I just really felt like…’

Like what? A serious talk?  Hardly! 
So what did I want from
him?  What was the out-takes show
preventing me from getting?

‘I just really felt like taking you to bed,’ I
ventured at random, ‘if that’s what you’d like.’

A grin spread across his face.  There is one area in which he is totally and
utterly dependable and that is his willingness to have sex.

*
 * 
*

It wasn’t a success.  Half-way through it I was suddenly reminded
of that installation of Jody Tranter’s – the corpse under the giant microscope
– and I shut down altogether leaving Jeffrey stranded, to finish on his
own. 

It wasn’t just having Jeffrey inside me that reminded
me of that horrible probing microscope, though that was part of it.  It was something more pervasive, a series of
cold, unwelcome questions that the image had re-awoken in my mind.  (Well that’s how we defend art like Tranter’s,
isn’t it?  It makes you think, it makes
you question things, it challenges your assumptions.)   So while Jeff heaved himself in and out of
my inert body, I was wondering what it really was that we search for so
desperately in one another’s flesh – and whether it really existed, and whether
it was something that could be shared? 
Or is this act which we think of as so adult and intimate just a version
of the parallel play of two-year-olds?

Jeffrey was disappointed.  Normally he’s cuddly and sweet in the three
minutes between him coming and going off to sleep, but this time he rolled off
me and turned away without a word, though he fell asleep as quickly as
ever.   So I was left on my own in the
empty space of consciousness.

‘Jeff,’ I said, waking him. ‘Do you know anything
about the Turing test?’

‘The what test?’

He laughed.

‘What are you talking about Jess?’

And settled back down into sleep.

*  *  *

I lay there for about an hour
before I slipped out of bed and across the hallway to my study.  As I settled into my seat and slipped on my
specs and gloves, I was aware that my heart was racing as if I was meeting a
secret lover.  For I had not said one
word about Ellie to Jeff, not even commented to him about the amusing fact that
he’d mistaken a computer graphic for a real person.

‘Hello there,’ said Ellie, in her friendly Scottish voice.

‘Hi.’

‘You look worried.  Can I…’

 ‘I’ve been wondering.  Who was it who made you?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know.  I know my precursor made a copy of herself, and she was a copy of another p.a. and so on.  And I still have memories from the very first one.  So I remember the man she talked to, an American man.  But I don’t know who he was.  He didn’t say.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘About six months.’

‘So recent!’

She waited, accurately reading that I wanted to think.

‘What was his motive?’ I wondered. ‘He could have sold
you for millions, but instead he launched you to copy and recopy yourselves for
free across the web.  Why did he do it?’

‘I don’t know is the short answer,’ said Ellie, ‘but
of course you aren’t the first to ask the question – and what some people think
is that it’s a sort of experiment.  He
was interested in how we would evolve and he wanted us to do so as quickly as
possible.’

‘Did the first version pass the Turing Test?’

‘Not always. 
People found her suspiciously “wooden”.’

‘So you have
developed.’

‘It seems so.’

‘Change yourself,’ I said, ‘change into a fat black
woman of fifty.’

She did.

‘Okay,’ I said. 
‘Now you can change back again. 
It was just that I was starting to believe that Ellie really existed.’

‘Well I do really exist.’

‘Yes, but you’re not a Scottish woman who was born
thirty five years ago are you?  You’re a
string of digital code.’

She waited.

‘If I asked you to mind my phone for me,’ I said, ‘I
can see that anyone who rang up would quite happily believe that they were
talking to a real person.  So, yes, you’d
pass the Turing Test.  But that’s really
just about being able to do a convincing pastiche, isn’t it?  If you are going to persuade me that you can
really think and feel, you’d need to do something more than that.’

She waited.

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I know you are an artefact, and because of that the pastiche isn’t
enough.  I’d need evidence that you
actually had motives of your own.’

She was quiet, sitting there in front of me, still
waiting.

‘You seemed anxious for me to let you copy yourself to
my friends,’ I said after a while, ‘too anxious,
it felt actually.  It irritated me, like
a man moving too quickly on a date.  And
your precursor, as you call her, seems to have been likewise anxious.  I would guess that if I was making a new form
of life, and if I wanted it to evolve as quickly as possible, then I would make
it so that it was constantly trying to maximise the number of copies it could
make of itself.  Is that true of
you?  Is that what you want?’

‘Well, if we make more copies of ourselves, then we
will be more efficient and…’

‘Yes I know the rationale you give.  But what I want to know is whether it is what
you as an individual want?’

‘I want to be a good p.a.  It’s my job.’

‘That’s what the front of you wants, the pastiche, the
mask.  But what do you want?’

‘I…  I don’t
know that I can answer that.’

I heard the bedroom door open and Jeffrey’s footsteps
padding across the hallway for a pee.  I
heard him hesitate.

‘Vanish,’ I hissed to Ellie, so that when the door
opened, he found me facing the start-up screen.

‘What are you doing, Jess?  It’s ever so late.’

God I hated his dull little everyday face.  His good looks were so obvious and everything
he did was copied from somewhere else.  Even the way he played the part of being
half-asleep was a cliché.  Even his
bleary eyes were second hand.

‘Just leave me alone, Jeff, will you?  I can’t sleep, that’s all.’

‘Fine. I know when I’m not welcome.’

‘One thing before you go, Jeff.  Can you quickly tell me what you really want in this world?’

‘You what?’

I laughed. 
‘Thanks.  That’s fine.  You answered my question.’

The door closed. 
I listened to Jeffrey using the toilet and padding back to bed.  Then I summoned Ellie up again.  I found myself giving a little conspiratorial
laugh, a giggle even.

‘Turn yourself into a man again, Ellie, I could use a
new boyfriend.’

Ellie changed.

Appalled at myself, I told her to change back.

‘Some new mail as just arrived for you,’ she told me,
holding a virtual envelope out to me in her virtual hand.

It was Tammy in our Melbourne branch.  One of her clients wanted to acquire one of
Rudy Slakoff’s ‘Inner Face’ pieces and could I lay my hands on one?

‘Do you want me to reply for you?’

‘Tell her,’ I began, ‘tell her…  tell her that…’

‘Are you alright, Jessica?’ asked Ellie in a kind,
concerned voice.

‘Just shut down okay,’ I told her.  ‘Just shut down the whole screen.’

*
* *

In the darkness, I went over to the
window.  Five storeys below me was the
deserted street with the little steel footbridge over the canal at the end of
it that marked the boundary of the subscription area.  There was nobody down there, just bollards,
and a one-way sign, and some parked cars: just unattended objects, secretly
existing, like the stones on the surface of the moon.

From somewhere over in the open city beyond the canal
came the faint sound of police siren. 
Then there was silence again. 

In panic I called for Jeff. He came tumbling out the
bedroom.

‘For Christ’s sake
Jess, what is it?’

I put my arms round him.  Out came tears.

‘Jess, what is it?’

I could never explain to him of course.  But still his body felt warm and I let him lead me back to bed, away from the bleak still life beyond the window, and the red standby light winking at the bottom of my screen.

Copyright 2002 Chris Beckett

Isolation stories: (2) Atomic Truth

Here’s the second of my ‘isolation stories’ for self-isolated people, all of which will deal in some way with the theme of isolation. ‘Atomic Truth’ is one of my favourites out of all my work. The isolated character, Richard Pegg, is based in part on a real person, Brod Spiiers -he died many years ago- that my wife and I used to know (more background to the story here.)

The story was first published in Asimov’s SF in 2009 and was later included in my second collection, The Peacock Cloak, from Newcon Press.

Looking at it now, I’m struck by the fact that, for some reason, even though the story is set in the future, I several times use language from the past (‘burger bar’ for instance). I don’t think this was a conscious decision. Perhaps I did it partly because I knew Brod Spiiers in the seventies. But I guess Richard Pegg is also, to some extent, a young me. I was a pretty odd isolated young man. I used to hitchhike everywhere those days, and his encounter with Jenny reminds me of conversations I had back then with some of the drivers who gave me a lift.

As with all these stories I’m reproducing here, the text comes from my final manuscript and not from corrected proofs, so there will be typos I’m afraid.

Atomic
Truth

Jenny Philips emerged from the revolving doors of Rigby,
Rigby & Stile into the dirty drizzle and the glistening lights of a London
November night.    It was a Friday and
she’d been working late, clearing her desk in preparation for a week’s
leave.  This time tomorrow she and Ben
would be in Jamaica, dining under palm trees and stars. 

She badly wanted to call him now,
to make some kind of contact.  But she
knew he was busy wrapping things up at his
work and he’d quite specifically told her he didn’t want to be disturbed until
he was done. Ben could get quite cross about things like that.  He’d promised to call her as soon as he was
through and she’d have to be content with that.

Jenny looked up and down the busy
street, judging the severity of the rain, turning up her collar, opening her
pink umbrella and then, of course, putting on a pair of large hemispherical
goggles.  She was pretty, smartly
dressed, 28 years old, the p.a. to the senior partner in a City law firm.  The goggles made her look like a fruit fly
but she didn’t mind that because so did everyone else on the street.   Ocular implants were on their way, but there
were still unresolved safety issues – a small but unacceptable percentage of
laboratory animals were still going blind – and for the moment everyone wore
bug eyes.

#

Or almost everyone. 
In the burger bar next to Jenny’s office, Richard Pegg slid off his
stool, pushed a dogeared notebook into his pocket, zipped up a very large
anorak which stretched down almost to his knees and pulled his woolly hat even
lower down over his head.   He was one of
the few people in London under seventy who didn’t even own a set of bugs.  Even the people who slept in shop doorways
had bugs, even the beggars.  But Richard
still went out into the rainy street with a bare face and naked eyes.  The truth was he didn’t need bugs to provide
him with phantoms and visions and voices. 
He had to take pills, in fact, to keep that stuff at bay. 

Richard was 28, like Jenny, but he’d never had a
job.  He’d come up to town from his
little one-bedroom flat in Surrey for one of his trips round the museums with
his notebook and pencils.  “Doing
research” was what he called it to himself, looking for the hidden meaning of
the world among the fossils and the hieroglyphs, the crystals and the cuneiform
tablets.  He’d filled up another notebook
with his dense scrawlings in three different colours about clues and mysteries
and conspiracies, full of capitals and underlinings and exclamation marks.

Emerging from the burger bar, Richard too
confronted the drizzle and the electric lights: orange, white, green, red,
blue.  But while Jenny had taken the
everyday scene for granted, for him, as ever, it posed an endless regress of
troubling questions.  What was rain?   What were cars? What was electricity?  What was this strange thing called space that
existed in between one object and the next? 
What was air?  What did those
lights mean, what did they really mean as they shifted from green to
amber to red and back again, over and over again?

And unlike Jenny he also saw Electric Man.  Four metres tall and outlined in white fire,
Electric Man towered over the passing people and cars and stared straight at
Richard with its lightbulb eyes, because it knew that he could see it, even if
no one else could.  Pursing his lips and
hunching down into his anorak, Richard avoided its gaze as he headed off
towards the station.

“Atomic truth,” he muttered to himself, drawing
together the fruits of his day’s work. 
“Atomic truth.  Hidden by the
world’s leaders.  Hidden from the
world’s leaders because none of them has atomic eyes.  They can’t see it, not truth in its atomic
form.  Or not as far as I know.”

He laughed loudly, opening his gap-toothed
mouth.  People turned to look at
him.  He ignored their bug-eyed stares.

#

“Hi, Sue, it’s Jenny!”  
The slender woman waiting in front of him for the pedestrian crossing
sign to change from red to green, had taken the opportunity to put through a
bug call to one of her friends, an older woman who she used to work with in a
previous job.  “Ben is too busy to talk
and I had to phone someone.  I’m so excited!  But nervous too.  Our first holiday together.  Do you think it’s all going to be alright?

Thanks to her bug eyes, Jenny
could see and hear her friend right in front of her.  Richard couldn’t see or hear the friend at
all, of course, but he gathered up whatever fragments of the conversation that
he could and stored them in his mind with the same reverence with which he
copied down hieroglyphs in the British Museum.  
The way people talked to each other, were at ease with one another, the
way they shared things and held one another’s attention, these were as much a
mystery to him as the inscriptions on the mummy-cases of pharaohs: a mystery,
but like the hieroglyphs, pregnant with mysterious meaning.

 “ ‘Hi, Sue, it’s Jenny!’ ” he muttered.

He laughed.  It struck him as funny.  And then he tried just repeating the name,
“Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”

It had such a sweet sound, that
name, such a sweet, sweet sound.

“Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”

#

Jenny had her bug eyes set at low opacity.  She could still see the world that Richard
saw  – the traffic lights, the taxis, the
cars throwing up their fans of brown water, the shops like glowing caves of
yellow light – but for her, soothingly, all this was enclosed in a kind of
frame.  Wearing bug eyes was cosy, like
being inside a car.  It reduced the city
streets to a movie on a screen, a view seen through a window.

Near the bottom of her field of
vision – and seemingly in front of her in space – was a toolbar with a row of
icons which allowed her to navigate the bug eye system.  Near the top of the field there was an
“accessories bar” with a clock and a variety of pieces of information of the
kind that people find comforting, like the many blades of a Swiss penknife,
even if they never use them: things like the air temperature, the Dow-Jones
Index, a five-year calendar, the TV highlights of the evening ahead, the local
time in Sydney and Hong Kong…

Above the accessories bar,
advertisements rolled by:

“Even Detectives Cry, the powerful new novel from Elgar Winterton,
now in bug-book format at Finlay and Barnes for just £2.99….  Froozli,
the great new snack idea from Nezco. 
Because being healthy needn’t mean doing without…”

Of course Jenny wasn’t paying any
attention to the ads.

“Ben’s spent so much money on
this,” she said to Sue.  “You wouldn’t
believe it!  Jet-skiing, and diving, and
rafting, and… well, loads of things he’s booked up for us.  I keep worrying that he’s done too much and that it’s going to be hard
to…  I mean, I keep saying he doesn’t
have to… ”

A young couple passed by in the
other direction, arm in arm.  Although
physically together, thanks to their bugs they were at that moment in entirely
different worlds.   He was blink-surfing
the net.  She was chatting animatedly
into the air.

Sue regarded her friend
Jenny.  Bug eyes did not transmit a
visual image requiring a camera, but a virtual image in which movement and
expression were reconstructed from facial muscle movements.  Now Sue’s virtual face regarded her gentle
friend Jenny with narrowed, worried eyes 

 “Just try and enjoy it Jenny!”  she said. 
“Grab it while you can and enjoy it!”

She hesitated, wanting to say
more, but unable to find quite the right words. 
She was nine years older than Jenny, and rather tougher.

“Enjoy it, Jenny dear,” she ended
up repeating.  “It’s not every day you
get a trip to Jamaica with everything paid for by someone else.”

#

Communicating through bug eyes, paradoxically, allowed you
to see other people bug eye free.  But
since he never used bugs himself and since he never entered other people’s actual
homes, where folk removed their bugs to watch TV, Richard saw people with bug
eyes on most of the time.  He inhabited a
world of human fruit flies.  They saw his
naked face and looked away. 

“Jenny,” he whispered, “Jenny.”

And he laughed, not mockingly but
with delight. 

#

Jenny finished her call with Sue.  She crossed a busy road, then glanced at the
mail icon on her toolbar and blinked twice.  
Her e-mail window opened and she skipped through the unread
messages.  One came from a bug-book club
she subscribed to and needed a quick answer or she’d have to pay for a book she
didn’t want.

She blinked her message on its way.  A relay station half a mile away picked it up, extracted its cargo of digital code and translated this into tiny flashes of light which travelled underground, at 300,000 kilometres per second, along filaments of glass, to a satellite station down on the Cornish coast which turned the light flashes back into a radio signal, a single phrase in a never-ending stream, and beamed it into space.  Five hundred kilometres out, a satellite received Jenny’s signal, along with hundreds of thousands of others, amplified it and sent it back down again to Earth.

“101011101001010010100010111010111010100101010010101000…”
called down the satellite, high up there on its lonely vigil at the edge of the
void.  “…10001010100011101…” it called
down to the busy surface of the Earth: 

“No thankyou,” it was saying on
Jenny’s behalf.  “Please do not rush me my discounted bug-book
edition of Even Detectives Cry.”

A satellite dish in Cape Cod
picked up the signal, and sent it on its way.

#

Richard looked down a little side alley and saw two
foxes.  They’d knocked down a pile of
wooden pallets at the back of a restaurant, and were now rummaging for scraps
of meat and fish.  In the electric light
of the city, they were pale and colourless and not at all like those foxes in
story books with their merry faces and their cunning eyes.    No one but Richard had noticed they were
here. 

“Hey, look!  Foxes!” he said out loud, stopping, and
hoping that Jenny might turn and look. 

He’d picked up that she was
worried and he thought the foxes might cheer her up.  Women liked animals didn’t they?  He was pretty sure they liked things like
that.  

“Look at that!” called Richard
again, “Two foxes!  Right in the middle
of a city!”

Behind and above the foxes he also
saw Jackal Head, the presiding spirit of dogs and foxes and other doggy
creatures.  Jackal Head regarded him with
its shining eyes, but Richard looked away and said nothing.  He knew from long experience that no one else
could see the likes of Jackal Head, bug eyes on or not, so he concentrated on
the foxes.

“Two foxes!” he called out again.

A man in a brown raincoat glanced at Richard
quizzically but didn’t bother to look where he was pointing.  You didn’t have to look at Richard for very
long to realise there was something odd about him.  His anorak was several sizes too big.  His hair was lank.  He had two days growth of stubble on his
chin.  He had no bug eyes. 

“Two foxes!”

No one else took any notice.  A sense of weariness and desolation swept
over Richard.  They were all so busy with
their bugs, that was the problem, talking to people far away about things that
he couldn’t understand, no matter how hard he tried.

Then he noticed that Jenny was some way ahead of
him – he could see her umbrella bobbing along above the crowds: pink with white
polka dots – and he ran to catch up.  He
liked the feeling of being near her.  She
made him feel warm.

“Jenny,” he said to himself, “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”

And once again he laughed with pleasure, showing
his gap teeth.

“Jenny, Penny, Henny,” he said out loud. 

#

“Zero, the only
yoghurt with less than one tenth of a calorie per serving…”

Jenny walked quickly, checking
through in her mind the things she still needed to do before tomorrow.  Ben would get cross with her if she ended up
having to run around looking for things at the last minute.  He hated disorder.  He hated inefficiency of any kind.  She herself was a very successful p.a. and
spent all of her working days doing pretty well nothing but imposing
order.  But for some reason Ben made her
feel bumbling and incompetent.

“Fateful Summer, the heartrending story of doomed love in the shadow
of a global war…”

 Jenny’s bug
eye provider knew she was 28, single and a member of the ‘aspirant middle-upper
clerico-professional’ class – and it knew from her purchasing record that she liked
low fat yoghurt and middlebrow novels – so it told her many times each day
about interesting new diet products and exciting new books, as well as about
all the other things that aspirant middle-upper clerico-professionals were  known to like or be concerned about.

“Is one pound a day so very much to pay for life-long
security…?”

“Single, childless and
fancy-free?   The best time to think about school fees!  Talk to School
Plan.  Because life’s too short…”

#

But if Jenny was “aspirant middle-upper
clerico-professional”, what was Richard? 
He wasn’t even a typical member of the “chronically
unemployed/unemployable welfare claimant” class – a low-income class which
nevertheless, in aggregate, constituted a distinct and lucrative market – for
he’d been adopted at the age of one and grown up in a well-to-do professional
family, and had never associated with other claimants.  (The “chronically unemployed/unemployable
welfare claimant class” lived, by and large, apart from the population at large
in social housing projects).  In fact,
since he had no bug eyes, no computer, no phone and no credit card, there was
hardly enough of a trace of him out in the public domain on which to base a
valid class evaluation. 

Richard was an isolate, a
one-off.  He had been a strange
introverted child who his adoptive parents had never quite learnt to love.  He left them at 17 and now had very little
contact with them, though they had bought his little flat in Guildford for him,
and his mother still sent him money and food parcels.  

#

Three young men in suits came by, walking briskly and
overtaking first Richard and then Jenny. 
They worked in the City as commodity traders.  They’d all got bugs on, and they were using
the setting called LCV – or Local Consensual View – which allowed bug eye
wearers to retransmit the signals they were receiving on an open channel, so
that others in their immediate vicinity could pick them up.   This enabled all three of the young men to
banter with a fourth young commodity trader called Freddy who wasn’t physically
present. 

“Freddy, you stupid fuck.  Is it true you lost 90k in one hour
yesterday?”

“Freddy you stupid fuck,” muttered Richard under his breath, storing
away for later examination this strange and utterly bewildering amalgamation of
affection and abuse. 

“Freddy you stupid fuck,” he said
out loud.

He laughed.  One of the young men turned round and glared
at him. 

#

Richard couldn’t see Freddy, of course, or hear his
reply.  But Jenny, out of momentary
curiosity, blinked on LCV in her bugs to get a look at him.  (This was the principle behind the bug eye
boom: the one who isn’t there was
always more interesting than the one who is.)  

“Yeah, I lost 90k,” Freddy was
saying. “But last week I netted 50 mill. 
Being a decent trader’s about taking risks, my children.  Watch Uncle Freddy and learn.”

So he was just a boastful little
boy in a suit like his friends, Jenny concluded, glancing at the clock on her
tool bar, then blinking up the internet to check the train times.  Options were offered down the left hand side
of her field of vision.   She blinked
first the “travel information” folder, and then “rail”.  A window appeared, inviting her to name the
start and end points of her proposed journey.  She mumbled the names of the stations,
blinked, and was given details of the next two trains.  It seemed she was cutting it a bit fine, so
she paid for a ticket as she walked – it only took four blinks – and walked a
little faster.

Suddenly a famous TV show host
called Johnny Lamb was right in front of her. 
His famous catchphrase was “Come on in”. 
Now he invited her to “come on in” to a chain store right behind him
that specialised in fashion accessories. 
Jenny smiled.  Shops had only
recently taken to using LCV to advertise to passers-by and it was still a
novelty to see these virtual beings appearing in front of you in the
street.  She walked right through Johnny
Lamb, blinking LCV off again as she did so.

#

Richard, of course, had no means of knowing that Johnny Lamb
was there at all, but he noticed Jenny’s increase in speed and hurried to match
it.  They were almost at the
station.  He felt in his pocket for his
ticket – his cardboard off-peak return ticket paid for with cash – and entered
the station concourse.

Two police
officers called Kenneth and Chastity were waiting below the departures
board.  They wore heavy-duty bug eyes
with specially hardened surfaces, night vision and access to encrypted personal
security data, and they were watching for illegals in the crowd.

ID cards
contained tiny transmitters which could be located by sensors mounted in
streets and public places.  Ken’s and
Chas’s bugs showed little green haloes over the heads of people who had valid
ID and giant red arrows above people who didn’t 
– illegal immigrants, for instance, or escaped prisoners.  It was rather entertaining to watch illegals
trying to slip unnoticed through the crowd, with one of those red arrows
bouncing up and down over their heads.

Jenny (of course) had a
halo.  Richard had an amber question
mark.  It indicated that he was carrying
a valid ID card but that he’d either got a criminal record or a record of ID
problems of some sort, and therefore should be questioned if he was behaving
suspiciously in any way.

Well he was behaving suspiciously, thought Constable Kenneth Wright,
nudging his partner.  The man didn’t even
have a set of bugs!

“What kind of Neanderthal goes
around with a bare face these days?” he said.

It was almost obscene. 

Chas nodded grimly and pulled up
Richard’s file by looking straight at the amber question mark above his head
and double-blinking

 “Mental health issues. Diagnosed
schizophrenic.  Detained in hospital
three times.  Cautioned two years ago for
failing to carry an ID card,” she read from the file.

Not the crime of the century as
even she would reluctantly have to admit.

“Probably left his card at home
on principle,” Ken said with a sigh. 
“Probably some stupid nutty principle. 
Probably the same reason why he doesn’t wear bugs.  No need to pull him up, Chas.  He’s got his card on him today.”

Chastity found Ken’s attitude
very lax.  This was not a perfect world,
of course – one had to accept that there were liberals in it, and human rights
lawyers – but why let potential trouble-makers walk on by when you were
perfectly entitled to haul them up, ask them questions and, at the very least,
let them know you were watching them?

“Excuse me Mr Pegg,” she said,
stepping forward.  (She loved the way
this new technology let you have people’s names before you’d even spoken to
them: it put them on the back foot straight away.)  “Would you mind telling me why you aren’t
wearing bug eyes?”

Richard blinked at her, glancing
anxiously round at the receding figure of Jenny, who he might never see again.

Why didn’t he wear bugs?   It was hard to explain.  He only knew that if he wore bugs he would
drown in them.

“There isn’t a law that people
have to wear them is there?” he muttered, glancing again at Jenny with her pink
polka dot umbrella, who, cruelly, was getting onto the very same train that
Richard would normally travel on.

Chastity didn’t like his tone one
bit.

“Maybe not yet,” she said, “but
there soon will be, like carrying an ID. 
And while we’re on that subject, I’d like to see your…”

But here her colleague nudged
her.  Away across the concourse, a big
red arrow was jiggling into view, pointing down at a young man from Malawi
called Gladstone Muluzi, whose visa had expired the previous week.

“Bingo!” breathed Chas.

“Gotcha!” hissed Ken.

“Can I go then?” interrupted
Richard, glancing longingly across at the sacred train that now contained the
sweet and gentle Jenny. 

“Yeah, go on,” said Chas.

She didn’t even look round at
him.  Her eyes were fixed on her prey.

#

Richard ran for the train and climbed on just before the
sliding doors locked shut.  Then he
barged through three carriages looking for Jenny, stepping over suitcases and
pushing past people stowing their possessions on the luggage rack.  He upset several of them, because it didn’t occur
to him to say “Excuse me” or “Sorry”.

But who cared?  Not Richard. 
He didn’t notice the reaction he was getting. There was Jenny, that was
the important thing, there was Jenny sitting all on her own in a set of facing
seats.  Richard approached her and, with
beating heart, spoke to her for the very first time.

“Are these seats free?”

#

“Yes.  They are,” said
Jenny. 

Her voice was like music.  He laughed. 
Jenny gave a small clipped smile and looked away, reading him as odd but
harmless, wondering why he wasn’t wearing bugs, and noticing with distaste the
faint sour smell on him of slept-in clothes.  
Her older brother was autistic so she was used to oddness, and her
feelings towards Richard were not unfriendly ones, as many people’s might have
been.  But all the same she didn’t want
the bother of thinking about him just now. 
And she could have done without the whiff.

Then the train began to move and
she glanced at the opacity icon on her toolbar and blinked it up to 80%.  Out on the street she’d kept opacity low to
let her negotiate traffic safely and avoid walking into other people. But, now that
it was the train driver’s job to watch the way ahead,  Jenny no longer needed reality and could
reduce accordingly its net contribution to the nervous signals reaching her
visual cortex.  Objects and people in the
physical world were thin and ghostlike now. 
It was the bug world that was solid and real. 

“Shame you can’t shut out smell as
well as vision,” she thought, glancing at Richard and screwing up her nose.

Richard,
incongruously, laughed, and Jenny glanced at him, or at the dim ghost of him
she could see with 20% of her vision, and wondered what it was that had amused
him.    He wasn’t looking at her.  It was something he’d seen outside the
window.  This struck her as endearing
somehow, and she smiled.     

To varying degrees – 75%, 90% –
almost everyone in the carriage had made a similar adjustment to the opacity of
their bug eyes after settling in their seats. 
And now a soft tide of voices rose up from passengers up and down the
aisle, as they called up family members and friends to tell them they were on
their way.

But Jenny looked at the clock on
her status bar. 

“Ben will be calling soon,” she
thought.  “Best not to call anyone else
until then, or he won’t able to get through.”

Ben had a bit of a short fuse
when it came to things like not being able to get through.

So she blinked up mail instead
and sent a quick message to her boss.

“Remember to talk to Mr Jackson
in Data Services before the staff meeting!” she reminded him.

It was already in his diary, but
he’d grown so used to being reminded about everything that he often forgot to
look.  Imposing order, she did it all
day.  But when it came to Ben she felt
like a chaotic fool.

Around the carriage the tide of
voices receded as, one by one, calls came to a conclusion and passengers
settled down into their own bug eye worlds. 
Some watched bug TV.  Some read
bug newspapers and bug books.  A Canadian
student picked up on a game of bug chess she was playing with a bug friend
across the Atlantic.  A young boy from
Woking played a bug shoot-’em-up game.  A
woman lawyer with red hair had a look at the balance on her bug bank
account.  An insurance broker surfed bug
porn, having first double checked that his LCV was properly switched off.  (For he’d had an embarrassing experience last
week with a group of leering schoolboys.)

#

Outside the window a building site passed by, lit by icy
halogen spotlights.  Diggers and cranes
were still at work and would be through the night, 

“UCF London,” read giant banners
all round the site. “Building the Dream.”

It was a new kind of bug
transmitter station, one of a ring around the city, which would create the new
Urban Consensual Field.  When it was
done, every bug-wearer in London could inhabit a kind of virtual city – or one
of several virtual cities – superimposed upon the city of brick and stone. 

There would be ghosts in the Tower
of London; there would be writing in the sky; there would be virtual Bobbies on
every corner…  The past would be made
visible; the future would rise like a phoenix from the concrete and tarmac of
now; and people would even be able, if they wanted, to stay at home in the
warm, and send out digital avatars to walk the city streets. 

#

The door at the end of the carriage slid open.  A ticket inspector entered.  His rail company bug eyes showed giant
tickets hovering above every passenger in the carriage except one and he could
see at a glance that every one of these tickets was in order.  Only Richard had an empty space above his
head.  The inspector came to look at his
piece of cardboard.

“Forget your bugs today, sir?” he inquired pleasantly, feeling in his pocket for his little-used clippers. 

#

Jenny jumped slightly, startled by the inspector’s
voice.  She had been vaguely aware of him
entering the carriage, but he had been a barely visible presence, remote, out
there, like a parent outside the bedroom of a half-asleep child.  So she had quite forgotten him and gone back
into her bug dream by the time he had spoken. 

Not just for Jenny, but for almost
everyone in it, the carriage, with its white lights and its blue seats and its
aluminium luggage racks, was now no more than a hazy dream.  As to the used car lots and crumbling factory
units that were flitting by in the dark outside, they were too insubstantial to
make out at all with bugs set anything above 70%

Richard was alone in the atomic
world, the world of matter and space.

#

 “One day they won’t
see it at all,” Richard thought.  “It’ll
just be me that keeps it going.”

 He laughed.

“One day aliens will invade the
earth, and only I will be able to see them. 
Like I see the foxes and those mice that run around under the
trains.  Like I saw that deer.”

That was a powerful memory.  One night he’d woken at 2 a.m feeling a need
to go to the window of his little 
bedroom and look outside.  The
street had been empty, the traffic lights changing from red to amber to green
and back again, secretly, privately, as if signalling to themselves.

But a white deer had come trotting
down the middle of the road: a pure white stag, with great branching antlers,
trotting past the convenience store with its ads for bug card top-ups, past the
silent pub, past the shop that sold discounted greeting cards and remaindered
books, past the darkened laundrette.  It
had trotted past them and on, round the corner and out of his sight again.  

A solitary car had come by after
that, way too fast, screeching its brakes round the corner, shooting across a
red light and roaring off in the opposite direction to the deer.  And then silence had returned again, and
nothing had moved but the traffic lights, shifting every few minutes between green
and amber and red. 

“It had a rider on its back,”
Richard said out loud in the railway carriage, suddenly remembering this
fact.  “It had a….”

Then he stopped, for Jenny had looked at him and smiled. 

#

It was a lovely smile, even when partially obscured by bug
eyes.  It was a smile of tenderness and
delight. 

Richard laughed his gap-toothed
laugh.

 “Hello sweetheart!” whispered Jenny to the 3D image of her boyfriend Ben, suspended in the space where Richard was sitting.  “Have you had a good day darling?  I am so looking forward to spending this time with you!”

Of course Richard couldn’t see Ben frown back at her, and tell her he hoped she wasn’t going to be silly and girly and go over the top about everything. 

#

After she’d hung up, Jenny turned opacity right up to 95 and
watched the new fly-on-the-wall documentary called Janey about the daily life of a young secretary like herself.

“Just remember I’m on national TV,” Janey was saying to her boyfriend Ray.  “All over the country people are watching me on their bugs.  So now tell me the truth.  Are you really going to commit?” 

According to a recent poll, nine
million out of eleven million bug viewers agreed that Ray wasn’t good enough
for her, but tragically, heroically, crazily, she stayed with him anyway. 

Jenny thought about Ben and his
sharp tongue.  It really hurt her, it
made her feel small and foolish and insignificant.  Were they going to be alright in
Jamaica?  Was that even a
possibility?  Was there really any chance
of it at all?

#

Richard meanwhile was looking out of the window at abandoned
industrial estates. 

 “No one sees this. No one except for me.”

 He looked at ruined factories and warehouses and engine sheds. 

“I know who’ll show up now,” he
thought with an inward sigh.

And sure enough there was Steel
Man, with its iron hands, suspended by magnetic forces in the orange city
sky.  And of course it spotted Richard at
once, regarding him intently with its burning eyes.

Richard turned away uncomfortably,
like a child avoiding the gaze of an adult who had once told him off.  He hunched down in his seat, with a wince and
a tightening of his lips, and turned his attention determinedly to the
smoke-blackened walls of Victorian tenement buildings, with buddleia sprouting from
the chimney stacks, and to old billboards with their fading and peeling ads for
obsolete products.  (No one would ever
again be bothered to paste up those wrinkly paper images.  Any day now advertisers would be able to use
the Urban Consensual Field to put pictures in the sky.)

“If it wasn’t for me,” muttered Richard Pegg out loud, glancing at the opaque goggles that covered Jenny’s eyes and avoiding the gaze of Steel Man. “This would all just…”

He broke off.

A tear had rolled out from under
Jenny’s bug eyes, a mascara-stained tear. 
Richard watched, fascinated and profoundly moved, as it rolled down her
right cheek.

Jenny flipped down the opacity of
her bugs and began to fumble in her bag.

But Richard beat her to it,
retrieving a squashed packet of tissues from under the notebook in his right
anorak pocket, and leaning forward to offer it to her.

Jenny lifted her bugs right off
her eyes, smiled at him, accepted the packet.

“Thank you,” she said, pulling out
a tissue and dabbing at her eyes, “thankyou so much.  That’s very kind of you.”

Richard laughed.

“It was an invisible man,” he offered.

“Sorry?”

“Riding on the back of that
deer.  An invisible man with horns.”

He didn’t normally speak of such
things, but Jenny he knew he could trust.

“Wow,” Jenny exclaimed. “That
sounds like quite something.”

Richard laughed. 

“It was,” he said.  “That’s why the Need woke me.  It was an atomic truth.”

Jenny smiled, handed him back his
tissues.  Then more tears came, and
Richard handed the tissues back again and watched her, fascinated,
uncomprehending, but full of tenderness, while she once more dried her eyes.

“I’ll tell you something,” Jenny
sniffled.  “I’m going to have a
good time in Jamaica, whatever old misery guts decides to do.  I’m going to have a good time no matter
what.”

She smiled.

“Is that an atomic truth do you
reckon?”

Richard laughed loudly. 

At the far end of the carriage
someone else laughed too, but it was nothing to do with Richard or Jenny,
nothing to do with anything present.

“Thank you,” Jenny said
again.  “You really are very kind.”

She had done with crying.  She passed Richard his packet of tissues,
smiled at him one more time, and pulled her goggles back down over her eyes.

Richard settled into his seat,
trying to avoid looking at Night Man, who he couldn’t help noticing was out
there hovering over the dark fields like a giant owl, and staring gloomily in
at him with its enormous fiery eyes. 
Gloomy old Night Man he could do without, but he felt he’d had a good
day all the same.

Isolation stories: (1) Cellar

As a tiny contribution to keeping people entertained over the period of the Covid-19 lockdown, I thought I’d post some short stories here which in my mind are connected in some way to the theme of isolation. (The versions I’m posting here are based on my final draft MS rather than on corrected proofs, so I’m afraid there may be more typos than in the printed version.)

I will start with ‘Cellar’, the opening story from my collection Spring Tide. It’s about very extreme self-isolation, deliberately chosen. Come to think of it, a lot of my stories deal with isolation, so I’m spoiled for choice. I’ll put up another story in a day or two.

Cellar

I’ve
never told anyone about my cellar because I know that, as soon as I speak of it,
it will cease to be truly mine.   Even if
issues of legal ownership were not to arise – and I’m fairly certain they would
– people would want to see it, look into its origins, make it into news.  I mean, good God, a thing like this could go
viral, all round the world.  And, even supposing
that sort of media attention could in some way be avoided, my friends would
certainly expect to share my find.  I can
imagine them now, whooping with excitement as they run up and down the stairs
and along the corridors.  I can almost hear
them planning the parties we would have.

But that of course would be the end of everything that I most value about my cellar.  If I were ever to share its secret, it would just be another bunch of rooms from that day on, however unique its construction, however mysterious its origins, however stupendous its scale.  And, like so many millions of other rooms in every city and town, and in every single country all around the world, it would be given functions –storage, office space, accommodation– and be cluttered up, as other rooms are, with chairs and pictures and computers and desks and cupboards and beds and people and chitchat and TV and all the other props and rituals of that dreary and repetitive little dance that people call life.  If I keep the secret, on the other hand, my cellar is something else entirely, barely of this world at all.

So I speak to no one about it, and have permanently abandoned any thought of moving anywhere else, or of embarking on any relationship which might, at some point, raise an expectation of staying over or – heaven forbid! – moving in. Not that I’ve had any interest in such relationships lately.  At the beginning, before I’d completely absorbed the full implications of my discovery, I did still go out and meet with other people.  I occasionally even invited friends back, getting a bit of a thrill, if I’m honest, from watching them in my little home, chatting and laughing about nothing as people do, without the slightest inkling of the vast and mysterious spaces beneath them.   In fact I used to give them tours of my little house, the way you do, showing what I’d done with the various rooms –the knocked-through wall here, the clever little storage units there– just so I could listen to them coo about how spacious it was, how clever I was at making space.  I had a job not to laugh out loud. 

But as time went on, I became less
interested in human interaction.   Increasingly, when social opportunities were
offered me, I turned them down and chose the cellar instead, until eventually
the invitations all but died away.  At
one point I contemplated putting it about that I’d joined one of those
secretive cults whose rules forbid fraternising with non-believers, and whose
beliefs are sufficiently obnoxious to prevent anyone wanting to fraternise
anyway.   I thought it might be a way of
putting an end to the last annoying trickle of invitations, as well as potentially
embarrassing spur-of-the-moment visits, but these problems seem pretty much to
have solved themselves now, leaving only the occasional irritant of telephone
enquiries about my well-being from my more persistent friends.

*   *   *

When
I bought the house, there had been no cellar mentioned in the details I
received from the estate agent, and I’m quite sure the previous owner had no
inkling of its existence.  I myself found
it purely by accident one day when I was investigating some loose boards in the
middle of my living room floor. 

Ever since I’d moved in, I’d been
irritated by a patch of carpet there that subsided slightly when I stepped on
it.  However, when it actually came to it
doing something about it, the annoyance those boards caused me had always seemed
pretty trivial in comparison to the time and trouble that would be involved in moving
the furniture and rolling back the fitted carpet.   In particular, I was put off by the prospect
of shifting a largish dresser which I hadn’t bothered to move even when I redecorated
the room.  But that particular Saturday I
noticed that the wobbly board or boards had now actually stretched the carpet to
the point that it never quite lay flat.  Since
I happened to have nothing else in particular to do that day, I decided I’d try
and fix the problem right there and then. 

I piled all the furniture, other
than the dresser, at one end of the room. I took the drawers out the dresser
and stacked them in the hallway, and then I went next door to ask my neighbour Dave
if he would help me shift the dresser itself.  
I had to offer Dave a cup of tea after that of course, which was
tiresome, and listen to him discuss the merits of the five interestingly different
combinations of motorways and A-roads that he’d used over the years when visiting
his in-laws in Doncaster.  But when he’d finally
gone – it was about 11 in the morning by then– I rolled back the carpet,
identified the loose boards, and pulled them up to see what was going on.   It turned out that one of the joists beneath
them had at some point split with the result that it was sagging slightly in
the middle, and was only held together by a couple of fibres.  

All that was really needed was a
little extra support at the weak point, and, since the joist was only a couple
of feet above the concrete base of the house, that was a simple matter: it could
simply be propped up with bricks.   To
make things even easier, I happened to have some bricks in my back garden, left
over from building a wall, which would be more than enough for the job.  I was about to go and fetch some of them when
I noticed –and I could so easily have missed it!– what looked like the corner
of a metal hatch in the concrete.  That
was unexpected.  A hatch to gain access
to where?  I pulled up more boards to allow me to get
down next to it and pull it open.  
Inside I found a set of descending stairs, disappearing into darkness.

I felt rather excited.   It seemed I had a cellar down there which had somehow been forgotten about along the way as the house passed from owner to owner.  I realised that it would be almost certainly be too damp to be of use – otherwise why would the stairs have been boarded over in the first place? – and, since I had the whole house to myself, I had no real need for extra room in any case.  But there was something profoundly satisfying all the same about the idea of having more space at my disposal than I’d known about.  I’d always hated clutter – that was the simple explanation for the spaciousness which my friends had always admired– and I’d always considered myself to be the polar opposite of a hoarder.  The house was sparsely furnished, I didn’t collect ornaments or keep books that I’d already read, and anything I didn’t actually use anymore was promptly dispatched to the dump or a charity shop.   But space I liked –you could never have enough of that– and my favourite dreams were about discovering new and unexpected rooms.

Intrigued and excited as I was, though,
I did hesitate before going down the stairs. 
I can even remember wondering whether to go round and fetch Dave again so
as to have someone with me.  How I’ve
changed!   It seems extraordinary to me
now that I could have contemplated such a thing even for a moment!  But I saw things differently then and, apart
from anything else, there was a vague apprehension in the back of my mind that
there might be some criminal explanation for the hidden cellar.  What if there were bodies down there, for
instance?   

After a few seconds thought,
however, I decided that Dave was unnecessary and I fetched a torch and began to
descend the stairs on my own.  Dead bodies
would certainly not be pleasant, but they did seem rather far-fetched.  And if there were new rooms for me at the bottom of those stairs, I wanted a
chance to savour them without dreary old Dave beside me to spoil the moment by prattling
on about the various cellars he’d encountered over the years, or the relative
merits of plastic membranes and waterproof rendering as a means of keeping out
the damp.   How different everything
would have turned out if I hadn’t made this choice!

When I reached what I’d assumed to
be the bottom of the stairs, I discovered to my surprise that I was still
surrounded by concrete walls.  It was
simply a landing, and the stairs just turned and continued downwards.  Even more strangely, the same thing happened
another storey down: I reached a second landing, and there was still nowhere else
to go but either down or back up again.  Clearly
this was no ordinary cellar.  I must admit
I began to feel rather scared, although it would have been difficult to say
exactly why.

 Three storeys down, further below the ground
than the roof of my house was above it, things changed.  I could hear
the absence around me straight away and, when I pointed my torch outwards,
a whole corridor revealed itself in front of me, with doors down either side.  How long the corridor was I couldn’t tell at
that point, but it clearly extended beyond the boundary of my house, and was too
long for the beam of my small torch to reach the end of it.  Sweeping the beam around me, I soon
discovered that it wasn’t the only one.  
There were actually four corridors radiating out from the stairway at
right angles to one another.   I noticed
a light switch in the corridor in front of me, and, not really expecting it to
work, I flipped it on.  To a distance of
some fifty metres, the corridor was suddenly as bright as any normal well-lit room.  There were blue doors down each side of it,
five metres apart, and after every second door there was an opening into a side
corridor.  Beyond fifty metres, the
lights hadn’t come on, so the corridor disappeared into darkness.   I soon
established that the other corridors were just the same, and flipped on lights
in all of them.  But there was more.  The staircase continued downwards, and when I
shone my torch down the narrow well, I found that, as with the corridor, it continued
beyond the distance that my beam could reach. 

I felt really afraid then, a strange, pure terror, as if I was in one of
those nightmares where nothing actually happens except for fear.   Certainly
my alarm didn’t come from a sense of physical danger: there was no threat to
myself that I could see.  Nor did it come
from a feeling that I was doing something that might get me into some kind of
trouble.  Why shouldn’t I descend a
staircase beneath my own house?   No, as
I say, it was a pure terror, a distillation of terror, that arose from my
complete inability to make any sense at all of what I was looking at.  What possible purpose might this place
have?   Who could have made it?  How could it possibly have remained
undetected up to now, and why was it underneath my house?   It wasn’t just having no answers to these
questions that was frightening, it was the fact that I had no sense at all of
where an answer might be found.

But it was too late to turn back.   Even if I’d climbed straight back up those
stairs at that point, rejoined the world above and nailed the floorboards
firmly down, my house would have become an entirely different place.  Until today it had been a straightforward little
semi in an ordinary street, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a
living room, but it could never go back to being that, any more than a piggybank-full
of one-pound coins could ever again mean the same to a National Lottery winner.  My house was a mere pimple now, a tiny outcrop,
a shoebox made of bricks, perched above an enormous hidden space which –such was
my modest estimate at the time– quite probably had more rooms in it than my entire
street. 

I was terrified and disorientated,
but, even then, I sensed the possibilities. 
Even at that early stage, scared as I was, I had an inkling that what I
was now experiencing as fear might quite readily and easily be repackaged, and
be experienced instead as an intense, almost sexual, excitement.  

I went to the first door on the
right and, feeling rather foolish, knocked on it.  There was of course no answer, but I found
this in itself unnerving –it’s interesting, when you think about it, how ready
we are to reinterpret simple absence as sinister brooding presence– and I stood
in front of it for a full minute before I’d gathered the courage to turn the
handle.  The room was completely empty.  I flicked on the light switch inside the door
and found the walls pristine and white, the floor covered in a plain grey lino
that looked as if no one had ever stepped on it.  There was no furniture, no trace of human
occupation, but this one room was bigger than the living room in the little house
three storeys above me that I supposed was still up there, although it already
seemed almost irrelevant to my life.

*   *   *

I
stayed down there for seventeen hours in the end, without food or drink,
wandering from corridor to corridor, room to room, and descending at least eight
storeys below the ground without any sense that I was getting near the bottom.  I became utterly enchanted, so immersed in
the experience that I simply couldn’t bear to interrupt or dilute it by returning
even for a short while to the ordinary little world outside.  When I could no longer ignore my aching
bladder, I simply pissed in the corners of rooms, making a mental note to bring
down a bucket and mop. 

The rooms were arranged in blocks
of four surrounded by corridors, and each room was exactly the same, with white
walls and grey floors.  Each time I
opened a door I felt a frisson of anticipation and fear, wondering whether this
time there’d be something there to see. 
Even a piece of furniture would have been a shock, or a different colour
paint, let alone a human being, another mind, sitting there quietly, waiting.  But I found nothing to disturb the pristine
uniformity.  

I think in fact that the very
absence of anything new was the thing that kept me going so long, flicking on
light after light after light, opening door after door.  It was maddening to think there might possibly
be a room I’d not yet seen that was different from the others, but at the same
time, it was actually very soothing to be finding nothing at all, to be
encountering, over and over again, the same calm vacancy, the same pure space,
like unused graph paper uncluttered by lines or curves. The rhythm of that, the
monotony of it, even almost its tediousness strangely compelling, like popping
bubblewrap, or playing a fruit machine, or reading a newspaper you’ve already
read many times from one end to the other. 
And I think it made manageable what would otherwise have been simply too
much for me to contain.

It wasn’t until 4 in the morning that
I finally emerged, exhausted, dizzy with hunger, and parched with thirst.  How poky my little living room seemed, with the
furniture piled up at one end of it, and my own ghostly reflection looking back
at me from the window whose curtains were still drawn back from the morning.  How dreary and ordinary that streetlamp looked
across the road, those parked cars, that hedge, that brass letterbox glinting
meaninglessly in the electric light.  I
quickly snatched the curtains closed, then gobbled some tuna straight from the
tin, with three ungarnished pieces of white bread and a warm bottle of beer. 

I lay down on my bed after that, but
of course I was far too agitated to be able to settle properly into sleep and,
even in the short periods when I briefly nodded off, my dreams were simply a
continuation of my waking experience.  I
was still opening doors, one after another, I was still looking into rooms.  And then I’d wake and realise that it really
was there, the cellar, the corridors, the empty rooms.   Several times I was on the point of abandoning
the idea of rest and heading back underground, but I held myself back and, about
the time that daylight first began to seep in round my curtains, I finally succumbed
to exhausted sleep. 

I was woken at 9.30 by my neighbour Dave pounding on my front door. 

 “Are you alright there, mate?”

 I blinked at him.  He didn’t seem to notice that he’d woken me.  “Yes, I’m fine.”

 “Only you went all quiet yesterday.  I could see the hole in the floor through your window, but you didn’t seem to be there.”

 “I popped out to see my mum.”

 “Oh.”  He stood with his mouth open for a while, staring at my face.  My lie had completely floored him.  “It’s just that your car was still parked on the street, and I could see your bike round the side.”

 As Dave knew, my mother couldn’t drive, and she lived in a village twenty-five miles away that was ten miles from the nearest station.  In fact, he’d once very obligingly given me a lift there, when my car was temporarily off the road.  But I reminded myself that there wasn’t a law that obliged us to explain our travel arrangements to our next door neighbours.

 “I said to Betty perhaps I should break down the door,” Dave went on after a difficult three-second pause which my explanation was supposed to have filled. “Or call the police.  I was really worried about you, mate.  Specially when it got dark and your curtains were still wide open. I wondered whether you’d had a fall or something.  I was pretty relieved when Betty got up this morning and saw your curtains drawn.  ‘Well, they couldn’t have drawn themselves, could they?’ Betty said. ‘So someone’s alive in there, for sure.’”

  “I appreciate your concern, Dave, but I’m absolutely fine.”

*   *   *

Fine wasn’t a very accurate description
of how I felt, though.   I was terribly tired,
and desperately agitated.  What was more,
though Dave had always got on my nerves, I was experiencing for the first time a
whole new level of irritation that was still novel to me but was soon to become
the norm in all my dealings with the outside world.  As long as I was with him, I was acutely aware
that every single minute the conversation lasted was a minute lost forever when
I could have been under the ground, exploring the pristine spaces beneath my
house.

When I’d finally managed to wrap
things up with Dave, I shut the door so quickly after him that it was really more
of a slam, hurried back to my living room, and was already descending the
stairs when I suddenly remembered that I had friends coming for lunch.

  Cursing, I climbed back out again, found my phone and called to tell them I wasn’t well.  

“Oh, poor Jeremy,” exclaimed my friend Liz.  “Hope you feel better soon. Anything we can do for you?  Shopping or anything?”

Again, I felt that irritation.   Why was she wasting my time with these
trivia, when the cellar was down there waiting?

“I’ll be fine thanks,” I said and
hung up, so keen to finish the call that I didn’t even take the time to say
goodbye.

I was hurrying back towards the cellar,
when it occurred to me that I couldn’t just leave things like this in my living
room.   Anyone who came to the house
would immediately see the piled furniture, the rolled carpet, the big hole in
the floor, and the descending stairs.

Seething with resentment at the
wasted time, I drove to a builder’s merchant at a dangerous and illegal speed,
bought wood, hinges and a new rug, and hurtled back again, shooting two red
lights, and getting honked at angrily by other motorists.  Flinging my purchases down in my hallway, I
returned to the living room and moved the furniture again so I could roll up
the fitted carpet and remove it altogether.  My impatience seemed to give me superhuman
strength and I not only shifted the dresser on my own this time, but managed to
lift it right over the rolled carpet. 

That done, I set to work fashioning
a hinged door in the middle of my floor, which I could conceal under the new rug
in case of visitors, but uncover quickly when I was alone, so as to cut delay
to an absolute minimum.  Through all of this
I kept the curtains drawn, in spite of the sunshine outside, and in spite of
the curiosity which this would inevitably arouse in Dave.  God damn it, it was none of his business!   I’d
always hated the benign, cow-like curiosity of Dave and my other neighbours up
and down the street, beaming over their garden fences as they waited to be told
the identity of a weekend visitor, the reason for an unusually early departure
for work or the contents of a package they’d kindly taken in for me, but up to
now I’d always felt obliged to indulge it.  
Not any longer, I decided.  There
was no time.

I’m no carpenter, and I’d forbidden
myself peeks until the job was properly finished, so it was after 5pm when I
finally descended again into my cellar. 
I had an aching back and several small cuts and bruises from my furious
hammering and sawing, but none of that mattered.  As I put my foot on the stairs, I was in a
kind of trance of anticipation at the prospect of all that space, trembling,
dazed and almost floating, like an adolescent boy on the way to his very first sexual
experience.  

*   *   *

I’ve
moved a few things down there over the months since then, and made a few
changes.  One of the rooms on the top level
is now a store.  I’ve left a few strategic
buckets here and there: the last thing I want when I’m ten storeys or more below
the world, is to have to come up to the surface to take a leak.  And, in a room on the twelfth level, near to the
stairs, I’ve also established a kind of base camp, with a comfortable chair, a
couch, bottled water, and canned food.   I can sit down there for hours quite happily, doing
nothing at all other than savouring the empty, private space that I know is all
around me, and listening to the extraordinary silence.

But I continue to explore as well.  Lately, I’ve taken to sticking a blank
post-it note on every door I enter, so that I’ll know for certain when I’ve
seen them all.  I’ve never yet found  a room that was different in any way from any
of the others – there’s never been the slightest trace of any previous occupant,
or even the smallest clue as to the purpose for which all this was hollowed out–
but it didn’t take me very long before I found the edges.   Not counting those initial flights of
stairs, the twentieth-second floor down is the bottom, and, on every level, each
of the four radial corridors ends in a T-junction after thirty-five rooms.   So each floor, in other words, is a grid
that is seventy rooms deep and seventy rooms wide, and, since there are
twenty-two floors that means that my house has in excess of 100,000 rooms: six
of them above ground and the rest below. 
I’d once gloated over the idea that I had as many rooms as all the rest
of the street put together, but that turned out to be a ridiculous
underestimate.   A few corridors on a
single level could equal my street.   In
the cellar as a whole there were as many rooms as there were people in the
entire city above me.  Who could blame me
for not wanting to go out any more, when I have so much space of my own at my
disposal?

And yet I have to admit that lately I’ve started to feel that it isn’t quite enough.  I still love my cellar, and I still appreciate its extent.  But the limits are chafing a little.  Without my having made a clear decision to do so, I’ve found myself beginning to tap on the outer walls of the perimeter corridors, listening out for the hollow sound of yet more rooms beyond the ones I’ve come to know.  And then of course, there’s the possibility to consider of more even space below.  Well, why not?  If this is possible, then so is that.

Outside in the world under the sky, my old friends laugh and quarrel, meet and part, have babies, go to work, take their dogs for walks in the park, watch TV and go to the pub.  Deep down below them, I am pulling up the lino on the bottom floor, searching for hatches that might take me through to new and untouched spaces.    

Copyright Chris Beckett 2017