The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  “If I were to build another machine,” replied the robot, quietly, “it would only be part of me. I could design a brain for it, and program that brain with any persona that it could possibly contain, but it would remain, in some essential sense, me. That isn’t what I need.”

  “You mean that it isn’t what you want.”

  “If you wish.”

  There was a pause. Paul ran his fingers through the grass, and watched a train of tiny ants marching over the baked ground. He rubbed his eyes tiredly.

  “How did you know that I’d returned?” he asked. “I didn’t notice that the La had any telephones to tap.”

  “I knew when you would awaken. I always have. Around the spacetime lesions there is a certain tension. There are measurements that can be made, which reveal the duration of the lesion almost to the hour...sometimes to the minute. The La have not bothered to study the phenomenon so closely—it is peripheral to their interests, and they can be quite obsessive in narrowing down their field of attention. I would have reached you at the prison if it were not for the fact that the detection systems they have there are rather too sophisticated to be cheated.”

  “How did they reach me so quickly?”

  “Hadan’s ornithopter was in the region. There are still people in the northern hemisphere—a few thousand, mostly gathered in the north-western corner of the old United States. They suffer more than most from the dereliction of the environment, and still have to cope with fallout occasionally. The La have no base up there, but they maintain contact. There are still a lot of jumpers in the region as well, and the La and their collaborators like to keep some kind of score.”

  “What have you got against the La? Is it just the fact that they’re your rivals for control of Earth, or is there something more?”

  “They have no future.”

  “No future! They’re technologically capable, spread across dozens of habitable worlds...how can they have no future?”

  “They’re in a state of historical crisis. It’s evident in what’s happened since they came here. The number of their own kind who’ve defected to the cults is greater than they care to think. They’re losing faith in their philosophy, becoming dissatisfied with its perspectives and its prescriptions. Their period of expansion is over, not because there’s no more of the galaxy to explore, but simply because they don’t find many surprises any more. Their mythological schema was devised in other days, and now it’s out of date.

  “They expected to find rather more second-phase life than they have, and rather more symbiosis than they have. They know now, at least subconsciously, that their kind of life isn’t the dominant one within the galaxy. They know now that the evolution of third-phase life from second-phase is possible, and in the cosmic time-scale, anything that’s possible is more-or-less inevitable. The philosophy of symbiosis is no longer fulfilling all their needs in terms of setting goals and providing a viable self-image. They’re frustrated—when there’s no pressure of necessity on a species, it has to invent pressures and ambitions to direct its efforts and maintain the illusion of purpose.

  “The ambitions of the La are no longer adequate to sustain that illusion, and in any case, familiarity has rendered them contemptible so far as a great many of their own kind are concerned. The La aren’t immune to change, and their empire will decay into dust as certainly as any other empire, for all its symbiotic relationships and its governance of a thousand stars. You can outlive their entire species, Paul—if you want to.”

  There was a barely-perceptible hum in the air. It was just sufficient to catch Paul’s attention and make his eyes scan the eastern horizon. The day was not entirely clear, and there was something of a haze, but he had no difficulty in picking out the fluttering shapes in the sky. At this range they looked absurdly similar to flying pineapples.

  “They’ve located us,” said the robot, quickly. “It’s me they want to destroy—they won’t hurt you. Go due west—the road will take you to where you need to go. Go quickly. I’ll go to meet them. They can’t track you on the ground the way they can track me. If they get too close to you, hide!”

  The robot rounded the car and jerked open the door: a real door, not an aperture, because it had to be rigid and it had to contain a window.

  Paul watched, uncertainly, as the robot started the engine. He reached out for the other door, but hesitated. While he hesitated the robot threw the car into gear and jerked it into a tight turn. As it whirred away down the slope, throwing up white dust from its rear wheels, Paul murmured: “The road will take me to where I need to go.” He wished, briefly, that he knew where he needed to go.

  He stood still, watching the car, until it reached the plain and began to accelerate. The flying-machines were still some way off, but they were descending; the car had been seen. Before they could reach it, the car exploded in a ball of flame. Paul felt the shock-wave, although the explosion was several miles away. He knew that the car had not been struck by a missile. The robot was expendable, and had destroyed itself. Whether the aliens would follow the road, looking for him, he did not know and could not really bring himself to care.

  Tiredly, he turned west and began to follow the road.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Evening found Paul very tired, his feet bleeding as he made his way along the roadside. The ornithopters had not followed him into the hills, but whether it was because the La did not know what had happened to him or did not care he was not certain. He met no people and no vehicles.

  At first he was hot, but as the sun dipped before him, often obscured by the ridges of the hills, he grew increasingly cold. The light shirt and trousers were designed to protect modesty rather than to secure the body against the vicissitudes of the environment. There was a wind, which picked up as the light dimmed, and which carried dust from the barren roadway into his eyes, which were already predisposed to aching and watering.

  The land to either side of the road was for the most part derelict, with most of its topsoil gone and only sparse grass to bind what was left. There was some loose scrub, but few trees. The more distant mountains seemed much more verdant, but most of their color was the same frail grass, and the whole region was little better than semi-desert. There were no animals and few birds. There was no way to tell whether it had been like this for centuries or for millennia.

  As dusk approached the green of the mountains seemed to Paul to be dull and unhealthy. There might have been colored blossom on the bushes, but there was nothing. It was easy to imagine that the world was dying.

  His gaze was caught by something that lay beside the road ahead: something that flared briefly red as it caught the waning rays of the setting sun. He could not make out its shape at first, but quickly realized what it must be.

  It was a girl, perhaps sixteen or even less: an Indian, to judge by the cast of her features. She lay beside the road as if, like Paul, she had been walking toward some distant and unreachable destination when exhaustion claimed her and laid her out on the ground in an ungainly heap. She had rolled half on to her back to look up at the sky, and seemed to be lying awkwardly. The clothes had already rotted from her torso, but the remnants of her trousers were still there.

  Paul ran his fingers over the slick surface of her arm, and then touched her frozen face, feeling the needle-points of her eyelashes, which drew blood from his fingertips in little beads, leaving the faintest of stinging sensations. Apparently, she had been there for months—perhaps years. She would not awaken, in all probability, within the span of what would have been her lifetime.

  What would she wake up to now? he wondered. A road that had crumbled, and had been partly reclaimed by the grass, the land having advanced one stage further in its slow regression to desert...the same sun, the same stars, the same exhaustion, the same predicament.

  She might well die where she lay, beside the road with no one to find or help her. She might wake to the fierce cold of winter night, or to the deluge of the rainy season. In the
meantime, she was dreaming a dream that might kill her, or leave her half-mad when it finally spat her out into mundane time and space. She was dreaming of jagged rocks, of caustic sand blown by a terrible wind, and of slithering....

  Paul could not help himself shivering. His heart accelerated a little.

  It’s a cruel joke, he thought. It’s not a miracle, or a means of escape, or a way that the inhabitants of another dimension can fish for human bodies and souls to feed upon. It’s just a practical joke, a trick of stupid fate.

  He sat down beside the girl, too tired to go on, and massaged his bleeding feet.

  As darkness fell he stared up at the glimmering stars, wondering whether there was anything left for him to do but follow the girl’s example and hurl himself once more into the void of time, with nothing but the most forlorn of hopes that there might ever be anything to wake up to.

  Then he heard the engine—the throaty growl of an old truck—and saw the headlights coming along the road, curving round the angle of a hillside from the west. He did not know whether to hide or to reveal himself. The antiquity of the vehicle suggested to him that it was more likely to carry friends than enemies, but there was no logical warrant for the feeling. Indecisive, he stayed where he was, and allowed the headlights to pick him out.

  The truck ground to a halt beside him, and the driver leaned across to throw open the passenger door.

  “Get in, Paul,” said the driver. The voice was harsh and throaty—more like the mechanical voice that Remila had used than the silky tone adopted by the machine. It came from a human throat, though. In the dim light, Paul could see white hair and a white beard, and there was something about the shape of the face, as well as the voice, that seemed familiar.

  He stood up, and grasped the handle of the open door.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  The other laughed briefly, and said: “My name’s Paul, too.”

  “Scapelhorn!”

  “Get in,” said the other. “I’m afraid I’ve aged a little since last we met, but it seems like only yesterday. I suppose that it seems the same way to you, bearing in mind that in your terms it was only yesterday.”

  Paul raised himself up into the cab of the truck and on to the seat. Scapelhorn put the truck into gear and began backing up to a place where there was room to turn round.

  “How did you find me?” asked Paul.

  “Phone call. The angels brought me down here after the jump we all took. I’ve taken one more since then...but I’m too old to go on. I always knew that. I figured that I’d be better employed setting up some kind of station for jumpers up in the mountains—I told you the plan. I’ve been there a long time, now. There are a couple of hundred of us, counting the ones who are standing still. We recruit slowly—maybe it will pick up a lot now the war’s on again.”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  “I knew the machine was still around. I’ve seen the robot a few times—the only reason I got the phone working was to communicate with it. I knew what it was going to do.”

  “And you approved?”

  “I don’t know. Wasn’t much I could do about it if I didn’t, except tell the angels, and I wasn’t about to do that. The machine helped—and still helps. In the long run, it’s going to take over the station.”

  “What’s happening—with the La and the machine?”

  “It’s pretty fierce in the cities the angels built here. Fireworks everywhere. A lot of the people who live in the city have no particular love for the angels, and some of the angels have no particular love for their own kind. The machine liberated some kind of artificial virus that plays hell with the biotechnology, and the aliens are having the devil of a job fighting it. Whole buildings are seizing up and falling down. The communications systems have been put out of commission, and some machinery’s been blown sky high. It’s mostly trivial stuff—annoying more than destructive—but the angels don’t like being annoyed. They over-react. They’ve blasted the main centers that were coordinating the machine’s operations, and put them out of commission, more or less. But they’ve been stung, and they won’t stop at that.”

  “What else can they do?”

  “Pull up stakes and leave.”

  “But they must know that that’s what the machine wants.”

  “They won’t do it to spite the machine. They’ll do it to spite us—unless we beg them to stay. Hadan will, I suppose, but they’ll demand some kind of mass gesture of good intent, and they’re unlikely to get it.”

  Paul watched the headlights play on the makeshift road for a while, uncertain of the best way to carry on the conversation. Finally, he said: “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  “About what?”

  “About what you said in the prison—about investing in the future of the jumpers and the hope of reaching a regenerated world in order to start again.”

  “Should I have?”

  “The argument you used then was that the old world couldn’t be saved—that it was bound to die. Now the La are here that’s no longer true, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Scapelhorn.

  “But you’re doing what you can to set up the same plan—establishing some kind of center for jumpers. Why do that, if you’re no longer so sure that Marcangelo’s way can’t be followed and made to work.”

  Scapelhorn was silent for a few seconds, and then he sighed. “To tell you the truth, Paul,” he said, “I’m old and I’m tired. I’ve given up making plans for the world. What I’m doing is for me. It’s what I want to do. I’ve got some land to work, I’ve got a wife—no children of my own but half a dozen with no parents of their own. It’s a place to live and a place to die, without too much strain. The idea of bringing in the jumpers and making it a way station for them was a kind of excuse, I suppose—a reason for allowing me to do what I wanted to do, without having to feel that I was giving up. After a couple of jumps, I was getting further and further away from anything that meant anything to me, and I guess I was scared. What I’m doing now is, in some sense, going back...not that I was ever a farmer, you understand...just going back to a way of life that seemed comfortable and human.

  “I don’t know that I should be telling you this, because there’s a sense in which I still believe in you, and I still believe that you have to make use of what you can do. I don’t want to make you think that it’s all pointless...it’s just me, and the way I am. I always talked big, and talked a lot, but half the time I didn’t even listen to what I was saying, let alone stop to think how much I believed it, or exactly how I believed it. It’s the how that matters, do you see—because there’s still a sense in which I did and do believe. It’s just that the reasons for choosing what I chose to do now seem simpler. I’m not really too worried about trying to justify myself any more.”

  Paul made no immediate reply. After a long pause, Scapelhorn took up the thread again.

  “You see,” he said, “it doesn’t really matter much to me whether the angels go or stay. I don’t care, as long as they want nothing from me. I want to get on with my own affairs. It used to matter a great deal what was happening around me, and what I was part of, but now it doesn’t seem to count for much being a part of anything. It’s because I’m old, and you shouldn’t take any notice. I just lost my guts when my hair turned from black to white. I hope you can stay with us, any way you want to, and if you want to go for the far, far future, I hope you make it, and I hope that station will see you through.”

  “What about the world?” asked Paul, quietly. “Is it enough simply to leave the people behind, when so many of them are still waiting for the word I couldn’t give them in 2119?”

  “What can you tell them?”

  “I could tell them that there’s a station, a place where they can gather before jumping, to stay together instead of being scattered over the whole damn world. Or wouldn’t you like that?”

  “They want more from you than that. They want more than any human be
ing can give them. You don’t owe them anything. They wouldn’t thank you for any words you can say, no matter how hard they’ve prayed for them. It’s safer to leave them with the hope—that way you don’t expose yourself to their anger when you disappoint them. Let them find their own way.”

  “How can they find their own way if they won’t go until I tell them where to go?”

  He felt rather than saw the perfunctory shrug of Scapelhorn’s shoulders. They swayed in unison as the truck rounded a tight bend, climbing the face of a mountain at such a speed that the engine groaned with the strain.

  “Do you think I could have done what Hadan and Remila wanted me to?” asked Paul. “Could I really have turned the ideological balance in their favor with a few calculated speeches?”

  “I don’t know,” said Scapelhorn. “Maybe. It’s hard to say exactly what the angels want—some kind of oath of loyalty, a decision to report for work to begin clearing up the mess. Sure, you could sway the crowd, probably enough to convince them—for today and tomorrow. But for all time? I don’t think the human race is equipped for the kind of mutual mindfuck the angels have in mind. On the surface, we can go for it, but deep down—it’s not what we are, or anything we could really and wholly become. I’ve never been entirely sure what’s in this symbiosis of theirs except us doing what they want us to and thanking them kindly for it. I don’t know what things are like on other worlds, but I’ve seen the angels here. Co-operation for mutual benefit is a wonderful thing, but it’s the angels who get to say what’s beneficial and what’s not—for us as well as for themselves. Call an angel a parasite and he’s likely to hurt you for it, but that might be because it’s a little closer to the truth than he cares to acknowledge.”

  “In the whole of Earth’s biosphere,” said Paul, ruminatively, “it’s doubtful whether there’s a single relationship that is genuinely symbiotic. Most involve one partner deriving an advantage while the other isn’t affected much one way or another, in terms of its actual survival chances. The reasons for applying the term are actually largely ideological.”