To End All Wars

by David Tallerman

  “Good, isn’t it? ”

  “Very good,” Forrester confirmed. The port, in fact, was excellent. If Forbes had purloined it from Sherston’s stocks, he had pilfered wisely.

  “A toast, then. To our Guest.”

  Forrester hadn’t anticipated the first test of whether he could hide his revulsion at Forbes’s scheming to come so quickly. “Our Guest,” he said, and was pleased by how genuine he sounded.

  It still wasn’t enough for Forbes. “I see your enthusiasm doesn’t yet match mine. Well, I can’t blame you. You haven’t had so long to digest the ramifications of just what has fallen in our laps.”

  “It’s a lot to take in,” Forrester confessed.

  “More, perhaps, than you’ve begun to grasp. As an example, have you considered how significant it is that the Guest can interact with us, however imperfectly? That it possesses defences against a species it has surely never previously encountered? The only implication can be that there are certain absolutes in the universe, or else repeating patterns, templates of organic life that recur again and again.”

  Before this week, Forrester had never contemplated the possibility that there might be other life in the universe. Now he was certain that there was, had even witnessed its existence from its own perspective, and here was Forbes expecting him to envisage a multiplicity of species out there in the illimitable dark. The mental leap was too great.

  Fortunately, Forbes chose not to press his subject. Instead, he took another lengthy sip from his port and said, “Do you know where we are, Forrester?”

  Forrester would have liked to resist the obvious answer, but he had no alternative. “We’re in a wine cellar.”

  “We are. We’re also directly above our Guest, as much as is feasible given the layout of the house. I can’t tell you how far removed we are exactly, except that the mines don’t run deep. It’s less than you might think.”

  Forrester tried to picture the layers of foundation and rock beneath them, and somewhere under that, the hollow within the earth—the alien being bound there. That at least was a task his ingenuity was capable of. Indeed, the image came with surprising ease.

  “What we’re going to do, here in this room,” Forbes said, “is to find a way for you to communicate with the Guest. No more threats or cajoling, I promise, just you and me working together for as long as needs be.”

  Probably Forbes didn’t appreciate quite how that sounded like a threat in itself. With a part of Forrester incessantly remembering Abhaya’s bruised face, even tolerating the man’s presence was a challenge, let alone remaining civil.

  Partly to distract himself, Forrester asked, “But why here? Why can’t I simply be near it? You know I can make contact if I’m close.”

  “What I know,” Forbes said, “is that you’ve been in contact since the moment you arrived. Your dreams prove that, as does your immunity during the blackouts, and the fact that our experiment succeeded, that the Guest could react at a distance to your pain.”

  And I felt its pain , Forrester realised. That burst of agony before the blackouts. “How did you hurt it?” he enquired, purposefully keeping his voice level. “I mean, how precisely did you manage that? It might be useful for me to understand the details.”

  “I suppose you do have a valid ‘need to know’,” Forbes agreed. “We used explosives. So long as separate men placed the charge, laid the detonating cord, and prepared the detonator, and so long as a fourth who wasn’t informed of what the other three had done set it off, our Guest’s influence was considerably diminished. All four still kept getting confused, though. They were easily distracted. Finally, I introduced a fifth man, ignorant as to what any of it was about, whose order was to harry them along. They all complained afterwards of headaches and nausea, but they got the job done. The trick was to pick men with a particular lack of imagination. You’ve spent enough time at the front to know the sort.”

  Yes, Forrester had known the sort. Poor, damned souls, he’d watched them die in their droves. “Sealed orders for each man, I assume?” he said, before he could stop himself.

  Something shifted behind Forbes’s eyes. He had caught the intimation. “That’s correct.”

  Forrester was already being more confrontational than he’d intended. He wrested his focus back to the original question. “So the idea is that I learn to contact the Guest remotely. All right, I see that it’s no use if I have to be close enough to touch, but you know I’ve tried. Wouldn’t I have done better at escaping if I was able to communicate with it at a distance?”

  “Not at all,” Forbes answered, and there was an edge of warning in his inflection. “That would have made no difference, and certainly wouldn’t help you now. The guards around this place, outside of the Guest’s sphere of influence, have been doubled.

  “But I take your point,” he granted, jovial once more, “and I’ve been giving the topic some thought. The issue, I think, is one of susceptibility. We know you can communicate with the Guest, and that proximity makes the communication easier. My theory is that the farther away you are, the weaker the connection, and the more your conscious mind is getting in the way.”

  “My conscious mind?” Forrester echoed. It was true that his encounters with the Guest had occurred on a level that might be called subconscious, at first in dreams and then with the visionary experience in the mines. “You want me to sleep?” he queried, not without a note of incredulity.

  “Sleep? No. That would not be productive. But I’d like to mitigate the stranglehold your conscious mind has on the rest: to bring your subconscious to the fore without shutting out your awareness to such an extent that it can’t still be useful to us. No, what I’m talking about is meditation.”

  “Meditation?” Forrester had an image of robed monks kneeling upon stone floors.

  “Are you familiar with Buddhism?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Forrester decided, endeavouring to recall where—a fad from his university days, perhaps.

  “I came across the philosophy when I was in India,” Forbes said. “Mostly stuff and nonsense, inevitably, but there’s always a little sense to be found in things, isn’t there? The thinking man picks and chooses. Anyway, it was Buddhism that introduced me to meditation. I’ve been wanting to try it with you ever since I first heard of your situation, but there was never a right time. Now, however, I don’t see what we have to lose. Would you be willing to indulge me?”

  Forbes was insane. There in his eyes was the stuttering spark of mania, and Forrester was astonished it hadn’t been obvious to him from the start. “Of course. Nothing to lose, as you say.”

  “Good man!” Forbes got up and walked to the nearest corner, where a stub of candle had been placed upon a cask. Forbes lit the candle from a box of matches and then continued around the room, lighting others he’d positioned. Having completed his circuit, he turned off the electric bulb, and Forrester found himself encapsulated in a bubble of shifting amber.

  Forbes moved next to the coffee table. Beside the bottle of port sat a columnar brass ornament, open on one side. Forbes reached inside with another match, and Forrester’s nostrils were assailed by an odour unlike anything he was accustomed to. The scent was sweet, slightly acrid, almost sickly, and pleasant nonetheless .

  Lastly, Forbes knelt down. Forrester hadn’t noticed before, but there was a portable gramophone beneath the table. Forbes toyed with the needle a while, until the contraption gave a monstrous hiss. Then music rose from amid the interference—and the music was equally singular.

  “An anthropologist friend of mine made this recording,” Forbes said. “Quite the rarity.”

  Forrester could largely recognise the instruments—a guitar here, pipes there, and pattering drums beneath—but their particular sounds were idiosyncratic. The music was slow and arrhythmic, practically tuneless. Yet the more he listened, the more stirring it became, devoid of either the sentimentality or the bombast of the popular songs he knew.

  Forbes resumed
his seat. “I believe we’re ready,” he said softly. “What I want you to do is to relax, without letting your attention go. Relax your mind but don’t rest, do you see?”

  Forrester didn’t, but it seemed he must play along. “I think so.”

  “Concentrate on your breathing. Breathe slowly, deeply. Feel the air go in and out.”

  He did as instructed. The music helped. He’d been wrong to regard it as without rhythm, though its tempo was subtle and ever-changing.

  “Got that? Good. Whatever happens, keep it up. Now, Forrester, I want you to feel your body. Be aware of it from the inside, as you’re aware of your breathing. Begin with a part, a foot or a hand, and work from there. Can you do that?”

  Feel his body? How could he not? But Forrester tried anyway, starting, since it seemed appropriate, with the foot damaged by Forbes’s trick with the iced water. The blisters had all hardened to calluses; they barely pained him. He moved on to the other foot, and then to his legs, noting his wound, the indentation in the meat—examining calmly. Then onwards again, to his groin, his stomach, his torso, his arms. He felt healthy, he discovered. Good food and exercise had finally managed to outweigh the hardships he’d endured.

  “That’s it.” Forbes’s voice was distant. “Keep breathing steadily. Stay aware of your body. We’re going to fix our thoughts on the Guest, do you hear? It’s below us, right below us. Picture it in your imagination. Remember how it looked, remember it outside and in.”

  This time, Forrester hardly needed to be told. His mind, without effort, had already begun turning toward the Guest. Forbes was correct about one thing: it was close. Closer than mere physical proximity, closer than the barrier of earth and rock between them could rationally allow. He perceived it in the depths of his consciousness, accompanied by a susurration like waves lapping some impossible shore.

  When he opened his eyes, it was to darkness, and for an instant he was afraid. Then he realised that his eyes weren’t open at all. His eyes weren’t his eyes. His mind—

  Was experiencing a different darkness. Boundless, incredible. There were lights, far off. He remembered.

  Like a dream. Except that he didn’t dream. Past and present were interchangeable, that was all. The present was intolerable, so he retreated into the past. In the present, he was trapped, impenetrable matter to every side. He cried out and wasn’t heard. In the present, he was alone.

  No. Not alone.

  “Forrester?”

  Forrester opened his eyes—his own eyes, in his own body. The candlelight appeared unreasonably bright. Forbes was gazing at him, and there was concern in his expression, but also anticipation. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.” Forrester’s own voice seemed booming, unfamiliar.

  “Only, you were talking.” Forbes sounded genuinely excited .

  Forrester didn’t want to ask, but there was no avoiding it. “What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘not alone.’”

  “Ah.”

  “That’s it? Ah?”

  “I’m tired now.” Indeed, that was an understatement. He was virtually exhausted.

  “You were in contact with it, weren’t you?”

  “I’m tired,” Forrester repeated.

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Forbes gave a brief, high chuckle. “Oh, my dear chap—“

  “It’s scared,” Forrester said.

  “Yes? Well, it would be. But you reassured it.”

  “I tried to.”

  “And next time you’ll do better still. All the same, this is an auspicious start.” Forbes rubbed his palms together, apparently without registering the motion. “Oh, but you said you were tired, didn’t you?” he added—the invented personality of Major Forbes, concerned medical professional, descending like a veil. “Well then, we’d best get you back to your room.”

  Forrester slept for an hour, dreamlessly.

  He woke abruptly, feeling utterly refreshed, as though in that short spell he had attained some ultimate limit of repose. His mind, too, was livelier than ever, brimming with an almost childlike enthusiasm.

  Abhaya brought him lunch, but they spoke little, deciding by unspoken agreement to postpone their colloquy to the evening. Forrester made a point of adhering to his exercise regime in the afternoon, then read and washed. With an hour at least before dinner, he accepted that he would have to do the task he had been putting off. He wouldn’t be able to face Abhaya without having given it a go.

  He began by lying on the bed, but somehow that was too comfortable. He transferred to the floor and sat with his legs out straight, a pillow supporting his hurt thigh. He closed his eyes. He lacked Forbes’s music and his incense, but he sensed that those had been distractions anyway. Every resource he needed lay within him. If Forbes had shown him anything of value, it was the breathing, and the awareness of his own body. Those were the key. He must appreciate what he was before he could confront what he was not.

  He was disturbed by knocking at the door: hurried, nigh on frantic. Then it occurred to him that the sound had been going on for a while. Come in , he intended to say, but the words wouldn’t arrive. He required a moment to remember where his mouth was and how lips and tongue were meant to work. The first noise he produced was a slack-jawed murmur, and only on the second attempt did he croak the syllables he’d been aiming for all along.

  When Abhaya opened the door, she stared at him anxiously. Then she put the dinner tray on the chest of drawers and knelt in front of him. “Are you sick?”

  “I’m fine,” he mumbled.

  “You’re very pale.”

  Forrester made an effort to gather himself. His body still felt remote, more than the numbness of sitting could explain. “Really,” he said, “I’m fine.”

  He forced himself to stand and flopped onto the bed. There, he caught the odour of cooked meat from the nightstand and was at once ravenous and faintly queasy. He almost asked Abhaya to bring the tray, but it wouldn’t do to let her keep playing the role of menial. As an experiment, he tried getting to his feet without the stick. He managed to shuffle to the drawers and return with the tray .

  Abhaya watched him, keeping silent until he’d settled. Then she said, “You’re stronger.”

  “Much.” No need to mention that he couldn’t have gone a great deal farther.

  They both let the conversation lapse while he ate. He found that he couldn’t touch the meat, though his appetite more than warranted it. He made do with the accompanying vegetables. To be consuming food of any sort was peculiar; a part of him, a part he understood wasn’t him at all, balked at the notion.

  He would have to be careful. Whatever relationship he was cultivating with the Guest worked both ways and on a level infinitely deeper than speech. He was exposing the core of his being, and he suspected that, of the two of them, his was not the stronger identity. Nothing had led him to suppose that the Guest would, or even could, harm him intentionally, yet he was beginning to recognise that there were intrinsic risks to their communion that perhaps neither of them fully grasped.

  Some of this he told Abhaya once he’d finished eating—some, but not all, for he didn’t wish to alarm her. He described his bizarre session with Forbes too, including the details he’d withheld then, the intimacy of his union with the Guest.

  Finally, he shared an insight he had only just come to. “I don’t know that it had entirely realised I was another intelligent being,” he said. “We’re so unlike it, so unlike everything it’s encountered. And most of the minds the Guest sought to reach that night at the front were closed to it. When I came near, in the mines, you might say that it was simply thinking out loud.”

  Abhaya, who’d been listening patiently, nodded. She seemed to instinctively fathom what he was striving to explain.

  “This time was different,” he went on. “For the first time, it was actively trying to communicate with me. That was actually worse, in a way, like being locked in a room wh
ile someone shouts at you in a foreign language, except that the room was my own head. But it did make establishing contact easier. So long as we’re both trying, distance isn’t quite the factor Forbes reckons it to be.” Forrester considered. “Better to let him keep surmising that, though, the fallacy may prove useful.”

  “Does the Guest understand that you want to help it?” Abhaya asked.

  “I think it understands that I don’t want to hurt it.”

  “And could it be persuaded to help us?”

  Forrester shook his head. “I haven’t a clue. There’s such a gulf, so much that’s incompatible. I’ll have to work out where to start, see if I can find some common ground, if that’s possible, and then introduce a few basic concepts, one by one.” He sighed, wearied by the very prospect. “Good god, this could take weeks.”

  Abhaya offered a tentative smile. “Perhaps not. Look what progress you’ve made in a single day.”

  Forrester did his best to return the smile. “That’s true.” Then another misgiving immediately soured his mood. “But I can’t have Forbes getting wind of what I’m up to. I don’t even want him knowing what I’ve managed today. He needs to believe I’m convincing the Guest to go along with his plans, and he needs to believe that doing so is one hell of a chore.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re exhausted,” Abhaya suggested. “A headache maybe?”

  “Yes, that’s an idea. Will he swallow it?”

  “I think so.”

  Suddenly Forrester felt exceedingly glad to have her there, and on his side. Her bruises, he noticed, were beginning to fade, black and raw red flesh softening to purples and browns. Whatever happened, he must make certain she wasn’t hurt again, not for his sake and not for the Guest’s. He had both of them to look out for now, a responsibility that meant more than his own wellbeing, and somehow that made matters easier rather than harder .

  “Then you should get going,” he proposed. “One thing’s for sure, Forbes mustn’t suspect that we’re in cahoots.”