Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Mero, sir.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Rai, sir.’

  ‘Good. We need a plan. Our numbers are dwindling. Now, we were ordered by Command to hold this ridge, but I suppose that there . . . eh . . . you know. That there’s a level of manpower, you know, below which it’s not practicable to follow such an order.’

  The two men looked blankly at him. With a swallowing sensation in the base of his stomach, Polystom realised that neither of these men had the vaguest clue about the principles of command.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I want your opinion. Does the enemy . . .’ He paused, thinking how best to frame the question so that it didn’t appear he was advocating ignominious retreat. ‘Does the enemy control both the west and east flanks of the ridge? Is there any way we could slip away from here?’

  ‘In the night,’ said the sergeant, ‘they attacked from both sides. I think they’re all around us.’

  Polystom considered his options.

  ‘We could withdraw up this ridge,’ he said. ‘The ridge leads to a mountain, I think.’

  The two men were looking at him.

  ‘I’m certain there’s a concentration of our troops on this mountain,’ said Polystom, trying to make his voice sound as if he were certain. ‘If we can make our way along to them. The Computational Device . . .’ He stopped, unsure if he had said too much. ‘Have you heard of the Computational Device, either of you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You know what a Computational Device is, though, yes?’

  Blank looks.

  ‘We fight where we are placed, sir,’ said the sergeant. Polystom had forgotten his name again, but didn’t want to admit the fact by asking him once more. ‘That’s all we do.’

  ‘Well, a Computational Device,’ said Polystom, uncertainly, ‘is a sort of machine. In this case, an enormous machine. Do you understand? In the mountain. In fact, I think it is the mountain. Now this machine is very important to us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ said Polystom. ‘Well. It can do extraordinary things. It can calculate at a fantastic rate. And if it is written . . .’ He screwed up his eyes, trying to remember what he had been told. ‘If an expert writes into it, in some way, it can think like a person. It can perform any tasks you set it. It is one of the hubs of the war. If we can make our way along to it,’ said Polystom, ‘then things will be much better. We’ll join larger units, and we’ll be safer.’ He stopped.

  After a silence, the sergeant said ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Very well. We’ll need a plan. I think the colonel who visited said something about the ridge being mined and wired. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, well. Go and have your breakfasts anyway, you two. I’ll think about what we are going to do.’

  The men left.

  Polystom retrieved his case of brandy, and drank a long swig straight from the bottle. He settled into his chair with the bottle on his lap.

  There was a shushing sound from beyond the door. It was raining again. Polystom stared at the wall. He told himself that he was thinking what to do, but in fact his mind meandered.

  The sound of a single gunshot banged through the air. Polystom hurried out of his dugout and along the trench, hurrying through the rain with a sick feeling in his gut. He knew what the noise signified. His feet slid unsteadily on the mud at the floor of the trench. Black was draining from a charred corpse in inky rivulets. One of the corpses they had laid there from the night before. Now it was leaking like oil from a faulty auto-engine.

  Polystom had to exert his will to lift his eyes. He stepped on briskly. Past the men, each arrayed on one side of the trench or other. At least the rain had stopped. At the far end of the trench he ducked and stepped inside the lieutenants’ dugout.

  Stet had shot himself.

  Polystom drew his breath deep into his lungs. Horrible. Why would he do such a thing? Unable to endure the pain? Unprepared to face the humiliation of going on with his life facially disfigured? Polystom didn’t know him well enough to guess. But his chair was upended, his body still sitting on it with his back on the floor and his knees up in the air. His arm was limp along the ground, the pistol still in his grip. Grimacing, Polystom stepped closer, peering down at the mess of the man’s face. The old wound was still there, its black-red patchwork tinged with pale green, like the edge of cut ham, along the lines of the exit hole. Despairing, perhaps crazed with pain, Lieutenant Stetrus had put the barrel of his pistol into his mouth and shot himself. The bullet had emerged from his left temple, a thistle-like ring of spiked flesh around a dark red centre marking the place. Stom, his stomach going queasy inside him, tried mentally to plot the path the bullet must have taken: up through the palate of the mouth, parting the wrinkles there and cutting up into the flesh, chopping through sinus bone, liquidising the left eye – Stom could see it still in its socket, black as a cherry – nicking a portion of the frontal lobe and finally bursting out through the bone at the side of the head.

  He stood up and called out into the trench. ‘Sergeant? Anybody?’

  Faces at the door. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Come in here please. Lieutenant Stet has – the lieutenant has –’

  Two men, awkward as tramps in a stylish sitting room, stepped into the dugout. ‘We heard the shot sir.’

  Now that these men were in the space, Polystom wondered why he had called them in. He had half a mind to tell them move the body, but now that he came to think of it there seemed little point in that. Why not leave the two lieutenants in this dugout space, turn it into their tomb? This was as good a place as any. Better that than have them cluttering up the trench. The nearer of the two soldiers was leaning forward a little, craning his head to get a better look at the fallen body. This struck Polystom as inappropriate.

  ‘Alright,’ he said, trying to sound sharp. ‘There’s no need for you, actually. You’d better get back out, back on guard duty.’

  Sheepishly, the two men left.

  Polystom stood for a few minutes more. He felt that he ought to do something, to mark the death of these two men of good family. But the only thing that occurred to him was to take Stet’s pistol. The lieutenant would, obviously, have no further need for it. And Polystom was missing a pistol. The traditional thing would be to assemble a dossier, accounts of his life, to memorialise him. To hold a funeral. Polystom realised he knew next to nothing about his lieutenant – about either of them. None of that civilised marking of a death was appropriate here.

  He hunkered down to uncurl the dead man’s hand from the butt of the gun. Stet’s corpse shuddered, and a faint, rasping noise came from its throat.

  Polystom stood straight up.

  For a moment he just stood, frozen. Then he called through the door again. ‘Back in here! Back in here please!’

  From outside: ‘Sir?’

  ‘Come in here please. Right away.’

  The muddy, sheepish soldier stepped back in through the door. ‘Sir?’

  ‘The lieutenant is – is not dead.’

  The body groaned, shifted a little.

  ‘Well,’ said Polystom. He was sweating. The day was heating up rapidly. ‘Well, what shall we do?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Well – lift him up. Go on, lift him up.’

  A second fellow came into the dugout, and between the two of them Stet was raised up, still on his chair, and then lifted out of it and carried over to his bunk. As they laid him down his breath seemed to catch, whistling in the hole in his throat. His breast shuddered, and his pistol fell from his fingers.

  Polystom ducked and picked it up.

  ‘Now,’ he said, feeling awkward. ‘That’ll do for now. I suppose he’ll need medical attention. Is there anybody in the platoon who would be able to help?’

  Nothing but blank looks.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘That’ll
be all.’

  When the men were gone, Polystom stood, looking over the pistol in his hands, turning it over and over.

  To put a bullet in your own head.

  The figure on the bunk – Stet – seemed to be gasping a little. Polystom took a chair and dragged it over to the side of the bunk, accidentally banging it against the charred legs of Sof’s body as he did so. He started to apologise to the supine body, stopped himself, feeling foolish.

  Sitting brought him closer to Stet’s level. His one seeing eye swivelled, turned, spun up into his skull and came back down again. It was barely visible amongst the puffed flesh.

  ‘Stet,’ said Polystom, not knowing what to say. ‘You’ve made a bit of a mess of yourself, I’m afraid.’

  The eye seemed to settle on him momently, but then went on restlessly.

  The superstitious – and, he rebuked himself immediately, idiotic – sense came over Polystom that it was impossible to die on this world. Impossible to die, no matter how hard you tried to. He had seen the ghost of his wife. Stet had been shot twice in the head, the two trajectories crossing X-fashion through his face, and still he was alive. But it was a stupid notion. Sof, on the floor, was undeniably dead. The bodies lining the trench outside were clearly dead. Polystom turned the pistol over in his hands again, the thought nagging him that Stet had intended this gun to end his life. I am, Polystom thought ruefully to himself, so little a soldier that I have no idea whether suicide is regarded as an honourable or dishonourable action for a serving officer. Perhaps Stet’s roving eye expected him, his captain, to finish the job for him? He hefted the gun in his right hand, aimed the barrel at Stet’s one good eye, toying with the notion of stopping the man’s misery right away. Stet’s eye rested briefly on the gun, but continued its rolling and rolling. His other eye, black-balled, seemed motionless.

  And then, again, shouting from outside. From a hot silence bothered only by the buzzing of insects, the air was filled by the whining of falling shells, the spitting of rifles, the noises of shells detonating.

  Stom hurried outside. They were, it seemed, coming up both sides at once. He ran from trench-side to trench-side, from west to east and back, leaning over and firing his pistol. Stet’s pistol, rather. Figures appeared as if from the mud itself, rearing up and scurrying forwards. The enemy had positioned two cannon in the western dip and was now firing upon the trench, despite the fact that their own men were at that moment assaulting it. ‘Tell the gun crew!’ yelled Polystom. ‘Have them fire upon those cannon!’

  ‘They caught it, sir,’ said one soldier, between firing his rifle. ‘The enemy came,’ crac, ‘out of the ground. That,’ crac, ‘was the first we knew of it,’ crac, ‘the shouts of the gun crew dying.’

  These enemy seemed to have no sense of personal danger. They reared up on the very edge of the trench, silhouetting themselves against the sky. Polystom shot one such figure, and watched as it jerked backwards and fell away. Another appeared almost immediately behind him. Stom was too stunned, or startled, or his brain was not working for some reason or other, and he didn’t raise his pistol. One of his men shot this figure down with his rifle.

  And then, as soon as it had started, it was over. Putting his face over the lip of the trench, Polystom could see the surviving enemy troops running and hopping over the mud, down into the shelter in the valley.

  Polystom’s heart was pumping so hard he could hear it in his ears.

  *

  There were nine of them now; one officer and eight men. The gun was still operational, but none of the survivors knew how to fire it.

  These men were all servants, Polystom knew. But he preferred to think of them as men, as real people. It somehow made it easier. He brought out his last two bottles of brandy and – to the uneasy astonishment of the soldiers – insisted that everybody have a drink. Polystom took one glass, and the other was passed nervously from hand to hand. The liquor gleamed inside him, but the uncertain, unhappy looks on the faces of the men unnerved him a little.

  It was hotter by the minute. The clouds had broken up and dispersed and the disturbingly fat sun thrust its heat upon them. Polystom was sweating, a prickly tickle of dots over his chest and back. ‘Health!’ he called, to the men, tipping his glass into his mouth.

  Insects grumbled through the hot air: thumbsized blue-flies; slender day-flies like floating splinters, and silver-skinned air-ants whose wing-noise seemed to swirl up a semitone, down a semitone, up again, down, in hypnotic rhythm. The mud, too, was speaking, with odd popping and muttering noises as the sunlight dried it out. Looking over the rim of the trench it was possible to see the surface of the land paling and cracking.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Polystom said to the man next to him. He still couldn’t remember the fellow’s name. That blank spot in his memory bothered him, gnat-like. Why couldn’t he hold the name in his head? ‘I’m sorry, man,’ he said. ‘What’s your name, again?’

  ‘Mero, sir.’

  ‘Of course. Of course. Mero – how long have you been here?’

  ‘Sir?’ That distantly panicked expression came into the men’s faces whenever Polystom asked them a question. It was starting to get on his nerves. They were comrades-in arms, weren’t they? ‘Come along man,’ he chivvied. ‘Don’t be shy. How long have you been here.’

  ‘On the Mudworld?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Less’n a year, sir.’

  ‘Under Captain Parocles?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Was he a good captain?’

  ‘Sir?’ Whites visible all around the man’s pupil.

  ‘I mean – did the men respect him? Did he have their respect?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Did he . . . um, did he command well?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘He had a lieutenant?’

  ‘Two sir, and a subaltern.’

  Polystom stopped for a moment, trying to form up in his own head exactly what he was trying to get at. ‘I suppose what I’m wondering,’ he said, taking another swig of drink and watching the flies bounce swarmingly from corpse to corpse, ‘what I’m wondering. Well, sergeant. Did you know that this is my first term of service on the Mudworld?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘My first term of service anywhere, actually. Have another sip of brandy.’

  ‘The cup . . .’

  ‘Use mine.’

  ‘Sir, I don’t think . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  The man gobbled at the lip of Polystom’s glass. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I think what I’m asking you, what I’m wondering, is how typical this – this experience is of warfare. Now you’ve been in the army a year . . .’

  ‘Three years, sir,’ said the sergeant, emboldened by the booze to interrupt his superior.

  ‘You said a year?’

  ‘A year on the Mudworld, sir. But I’ve been in a couple of other engagements. It’s a five-year term, service, for the ground troops, you see. I was considering renewing my term when the five years’re up. Now I’m not sure I will.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not sure, sir.’

  Polystom sipped again at his brandy, pleased that the barriers were coming down a little between himself and his man. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘This last year has not been . . . has been hard, sir.’

  ‘So this is harder than usual service?’

  The sergeant looked sheepishly at the floor, as if he were betraying somebody or something by saying so. ‘Come on man,’ Polystom chivvied him again. ‘It sounds like you’ve had a fair bit of experience, fighting.’

  ‘That I have, sir.’

  ‘Whereas I don’t have any. So if this seems hard to me – I mean, the last few days have been . . .’ He petered out; filled the gap with another drink. The sergeant took the proffered cup, and drank more decorously than before.

  ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘the way I see it is. I’ve seen some hard fighting before. When I joined up, sir, after the basic
training we were taken off to sort out some trouble on Rhum. There was a compound in the mountains, there, where some servants had gone bad, killed their masters and so on. Well, it was difficult to get to, on account of the mountains and snow, and it was pretty well defended. That was some hard fighting: uphill, in the snow and cold, and precious little cover. There were plenty killed those first few days, and it was the shock of it, you know sir? My first experience of the killing and the dying. Training is all very well, but it’s not the same. I remember that well. Then we had several months mopping up in the mountains, and we all grew to hate the cold, the nights especially. Frostbite, misery. Now, when we were told that we were coming here there were men in the platoon who were happy enough. At least it’ll be warm, they said. Warm!’ The sergeant flashed a grin. ‘It’s warm enough.’

  Polystom realised that the man’s name had again slipped from his mind. ‘You mean, hard fighting?’

  ‘I’ll tell you sir,’ said the sergeant. He looked at the floor. ‘It’s not that. Though it’s sorrowful to see the captain – Captain Parocles, I mean – catch one, and we’ve had our numbers cut back pretty bad. But it’s not that. I’ve known fights before where casualties fall as thick as this. It’s not that.’

  He stopped. ‘So what is it?’

  ‘It’ll sound foolish to you, sir.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘It’s this planet, sir.’ ‘Yes? What of it? The mud?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘The sense of it is, sir, amongst the men, that this world is haunted.’

  For a moment Polystom didn’t quite catch the word; then he felt a twitchy shiver run up his back and over the back of his head. Beeswing’s mysterious expression; her lips forming the word, hello. ‘What did you say?’ he asked, a little too sharply.

  ‘Haunted, sir. All the men agree on it.’

  ‘But tell me what you mean by that.’

  ‘Dead people, sir. We’ve all seen them. They come at odd moments. Some of the men say that they get a good look at the people we’re fighting, and they recognise some dead commander or dead person.’

  ‘Dead?’