Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Some who died a long while ago, some who died more recent, but here they are, walking over the mud, sitting in the trench below the wall smiling. Raising a rifle and aiming it at you. Dead people all around.’

  Polystom felt a rushing sensation inside him, in his heart, as if the world were pouring through him. ‘Have you seen the dead?’ he asked. ‘These dead, these – ghosts?’

  ‘Yes sir, many times. Before I was in the army, sir, I worked on the estate of the horseman, Huperbolus. You heard of him? Famous equestrian trainer and rider, marvellous master, just marvellous. Anyway he died, fell off a horse on jumping practice, and his son took over the estate, and that’s when I was offered the option of joining the army. No disrespect to his son who’s a fine master, but I thought I’d rather not be around the estate with the old master dead. So I joined up. Now, Huperbolus was a distinctive-looking man, very tall, pure triangular nose. I know I saw him yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘In the first attack on the hogsback. Captain Parocles took us up to the base of the ridge before we were turned back, and that’s where I saw him.’

  ‘You’re sure it was him.’

  ‘Plain as daylight, sir. He came up out of the mud, smiling. There was no mistaking him. Ask any of the men, sir. They’ve all seen dead people.’

  Polystom was close to saying something about his encounter with his dead wife, but something held him back. Battlefield intimacy was one thing, but this sergeant was, for all that, a servant, and Stom’s mind rebelled against the idea of sharing details of his marriage with such a person. But ghosts! It was the plot of an opera, not real life.

  He thought back to the night before, to Beeswing’s appearance. He had not seen her on the battlefield; she had come to his door and peered inside.

  Flies shuddered up through the air. The day was getting hotter and hotter.

  ‘Sir!’ called somebody from the far end of the trench. ‘Sir!’

  *

  They had called him over because, inside the dugout, Stet had started moaning. It could be heard clearly from outside, a weirdly musical and pure line of sound. Polystom waved the men back, and stepped into the dugout. The stench was horrible.

  ‘Stet,’ he called, covering his own mouth against the smell. ‘Stet, dear fellow. What’s wrong?’

  The figure of the lieutenant was shuddering on the bunk, the whine broken only when he sucked in breath, beginning again straight afterwards. Polystom sat in the chair beside the bed, looking down on the ruined figure of the man as if examining a scientific specimen through a microscope. He complained like a child. His body shook, as if feverish. Perhaps he was feverish. The wound on his right cheek was starting to look a little rotten.

  ‘What’s wrong, man?’

  Only the wailing. Polystom wondered if the problem was one of water. Perhaps Stet was thirsty. The lieutenant’s jacket was hanging from a pole by the entrance, and Polystom located the water bottle easily enough. Back at the bunk he offered it to Stet’s shaking head, and when this got no response he held the man’s mouth and poured the fluid in. The flesh felt as slick and cold as a fish. Stet’s moaning stopped; he started choking, then swallowed deeply. The water gurgled at the gap in his throat, and dribbled down the sides of his neck. When Stom took the bottle away, Stet’s hand lurched up and gripped his shoulder, until he poured more water down.

  After a drink, Stet seemed calmer.

  ‘I’ve some brandy,’ Polystom said.

  Did he shake his head at that? Or had his tremor returned? The head lurched from side to side for several moments, and then subsided.

  Feeling awkward, Polystom didn’t think he should leave his lieutenant’s side. He sat for a while, looking around himself at the dugout. He ought to have Sof ’s burnt corpse moved out of here; it probably wasn’t hygienic. Not that Stet would live much longer, he thought. But still. Or perhaps it would be better to have the men carry Stet down the trench to the other dugout? But he shied away from that idea. He couldn’t quite rid himself of the thought that his own dugout was haunted. Like the sergeant had said. That the ghost of his dead wife lurked in that underground mud-cave. He looked at Stet, who appeared now to be sleeping.

  Ghosts?

  Did ghosts change the apprehension one felt about death? The lieutenant had hurried to embrace his own demise. Did he know that the planet was haunted? Did he hope to slip off his painful flesh in the expectation that he would return to the world in smiling, spectral form?

  Outside again it was enormously hot. The men, some languidly in position along both lips of the trench, some lolling in the path of shadow underneath the eastern wall, looked dead themselves. Polystom stood for a while staring up into the violet sky. He half expected the noise of the colonel’s plane: Well done, captain, your men are relieved, the battle is over. But nothing happened.

  The heat drew out the buzz-stained silence, lengthened the hours.

  He tapped a soldier on the shoulder. ‘Any action down there?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Come with me: I want to have a look.’

  Soldier first, captain after, they mounted the steps and huddled over to the burnt wreck of the northernmost gun. From there Polystom peered as far north as he could. The shouldered hunch of the mountain loomed, brown and white, just visible over the horizon. Mines and wire, the colonel had said, between this ridge, this prong of the mountain’s base, and the mountain itself. He had no idea, although clearly a captain ought to know – no idea how to traverse mines and wire. Perhaps the sergeant would know.

  Why were things so quiet?

  Back in the trench Polystom drew the sergeant with him into his dugout. It was cooler, and the air did not stink the way the lieutenant’s dugout did, but Polystom was uncomfortable, nonetheless. He turned round, and turned round again, like an arachnophobic checking for spiders, except that it wasn’t spiders he was checking for.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sergeant, my judgement is that we’re pretty much understrength here.’ He paused, maybe hoping that the sergeant would confirm his judgement, but the soldier stood passionless, expressionless. Waiting for commands. ‘Look,’ said Stom. ‘If they attack again – when they attack again – I think it’ll be best for us to withdraw. Strategically withdraw, you know. Along the ridge. Yes?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Now, I know there’s some wire, and some mines, along the ridge. Do you know how to deal with those?’

  A fraction of a pause. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Have you never encountered them?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But I don’t know how to deal with them.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Polystom, hoping that the colonel would fly in and relieve them, hoping that there would be no further attacks, hoping for any sort of release. ‘Ah, well. I suppose we deal with that eventuality when it arrives. If it arrives.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  Polystom tipped his chin up, and the sergeant started turning towards the door. ‘Oh, sergeant,’ Stom said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘When you said . . . you know, earlier.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘About the haunting. About the ghosts. Is it, you know, generally known? Is it general knowledge?’

  ‘Official? No sir. The men talk about it, of course, swap stories, that sort of thing. But not an official thing.’

  ‘This whole war,’ said Stom, waving vaguely with his right arm. ‘It started as a servant insurrection, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose, sir.’

  ‘What I’m trying to say,’ said Stom, falteringly, ‘is that – I don’t know – do you think this planet was, ah, haunted before the war? Or is it haunted because of the war, you know?’

  ‘I don’t know sir.’

  Polystom dismissed his man, and rustled through his box until he found his very last bottle of spirits. A wheat whisky from his homeworld. Would he ever see his homeworld again? He unstoppered the bo
ttle and took a swig. A more disturbing question occurred to him. Say he died, here, in battle; say the enemy put a bullet through his very heart. Would he return as a ghost? Would he, like the villain from some second-rate opera, be condemned to walk this world for ever?

  Behind him, a female voice. ‘Stom?’

  His face chilled; he felt the tiny hairs that lined his cheek bristle and move. It crossed his mind: it’s as if my thinking it has summoned her up. He didn’t want to turn around, but with the inevitability of a dream he knew he must.

  Beeswing was at the door again. No, it wasn’t Beeswing, but a young soldier. Polystom’s heart hammered. What did you say?’

  The soldier looks startled. ‘Sir?’

  ‘I said what did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me!’

  ‘I said sir, sir,’ squealed the soldier, his boyish voice rising even higher. For a moment Stom hovered on the edge of rage, then toppled back into rationality. He was breathing deeply. A stupid misunderstanding.

  ‘Well,’ he gasped. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the lieutenant, sir.’

  Stom made his way along the trench again. The men seemed to have formed a near-superstitious fear of going into the lieutenant’s dugout, but even from outside Stom could hear the whimpering of the injured man. What is it now?’ he called, stepping through the entrance.

  Lieutenant Stetrus’s bashed face looked weirdly contorted, his one good eye bulging like a tongue in a cheek. He had pulled himself halfway into a sitting position in the bunk, and a doubled gasping sound was emerging from him, once from his mouth and once from the sagging hole in his throat. Stom faced him, caught his eye, followed its glance, and turned.

  Beeswing was sitting, looking comfortable, in a chair behind the entrance.

  Polystom didn’t call out, didn’t swear. The inside of his mouth felt like dried leather. He backed a step, and another. Then he stopped.

  ‘You see her too?’ he said, huskily, to the figure on the bed.

  ‘Oh, of course he does,’ said Beeswing. ‘Are you Polystom?’

  ‘I,’ said Stom. ‘I. I’ll sit down.’

  The seat by the bed was pressing at the backs of his knees. He sank into it. Should he call in the men from outside? What good would that do? He could, he thought with a vivid, sudden flash of inspiration, he could take out his revolver and shoot her straight away. But almost as soon as the inspiration came on him it drained away again. Shoot a ghost? Ridiculous!

  What had she said? Are you Polystom?

  ‘Don’t you know me?’ he said.

  Beeswing frowned. Wrinkles appeared on her clear brow like ripples in a pond.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I think so. We were married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not clear. It’s vague. Like a baldly written outline, not like the real thing at all.’

  ‘This is extraordinary,’ Stom muttered.

  ‘Is it?’ said Beeswing, with a more characteristic insouciance.

  ‘Of course it is! You do know you’re dead, don’t you?’

  ‘Dead?’ she said. ‘You mean – you are. If by dead, you mean not real, not alive. Or maybe you’re right,’ she said, her gaze wandering along the walls, past the lieutenant’s half-unpacked boxes. ‘Maybe I’m the one that’s dead. It’s not very nice in here.’

  ‘No,’ conceded Polystom. The shock of her appearance was dissolving itself into a series of tremors running up and down his arms and legs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, sharply.

  ‘I’m having,’ he said, as he unstoppered his bottle, ‘a drink. I need a drink. This is most disconcerting.’

  ‘If you were really married to me, once upon a time,’ said Beeswing languidly, ‘you might be pleased to see me again.’

  ‘To see the dead?’ he snapped, emboldened a little by the drink. ‘To see a ghost?’

  ‘Am I a ghost?’ said Beeswing, examining the back of her hand, as if the answer were written there. ‘How strange.’

  ‘You were always strange,’ he muttered. ‘Why are you bothering us now? What is it about this world, that the dead don’t stay where they should be, but come bothering the living? Is it the war? Did the big guns wake you?’

  Beeswing was looking intently at him as he said all this. ‘I don’t understand any of that,’ she said. ‘Or very little. It’s clearly unpleasant for you to see a ghost.’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘If that’s so, then it’s equally unpleasant for us to see you. Don’t you think it works both ways? Don’t you think you are as uncanny for us as we are for you?’

  Polystom hadn’t considered it in that light before. He took another long swig from his bottle, scowling as it burned its way down the back of his throat. Ghosts scared by the living, eh. People terrified by ghostly apparitions, ghosts scared by living apparitions. It went round his head. The alcohol made the heat worse, but it dampened the sense of stink in the oven-like dugout.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is something.’

  ‘Well,’ she echoed.

  ‘You came to see me before.’

  ‘Last night,’ she said. ‘It was tricky, then. It’s easier now. It’s a sort of knack, you know.’

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘Haunting, a knack. If you say so.’ He laughed, briefly, abruptly.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.

  ‘To be holding a conversation, like this, with my dead wife! I don’t know, it seemed funny somehow.’ Polystom swivelled in his chair, and looked at Stet. The lieutenant had calmed himself since his captain’s entrance, had lain down again, and was now breathing heavily but steadily.

  ‘Funny,’ said Beeswing, distantly.

  There was a pause. Had they run out of things to say already?

  ‘So,’ said Stom, with slightly forced conversational effort. ‘What is it like being dead?’

  ‘Like being alive,’ said Beeswing, distractedly. ‘Only less so. We haven’t really got time to chat, you know.’

  The fear, dormant for several minutes, leapt up again in Stom’s chest. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How frightened you look!’

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ he said. ‘I think I should ask you to go and leave me in peace.’

  ‘Your uncle,’ said Beeswing’s ghost. ‘I think that’s who he is. He wants to see you, to speak with you. Come along!’

  ‘My uncle?’ But that made sense too, to Polystom’s slightly drink-furred brain. In the kingdom of the dead there would be promiscuous social interchange. In the kingdom of the dead corpse would tangle with corpse, ghost swap ectoplasmic wisp with ghost. Alive his uncle had never liked Beeswing, Polystom knew. But maybe everything changed after death.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, exhaling a sudden disappointment. ‘Oh no. Another time.’

  ‘What?’ asked Stom. ‘Am I saved? Have you decided not to drag me down into the lands of death today?’

  ‘Silly!’ she said. ‘It’s not that. Only I can hear the rain starting again. And I can hear the guns firing, which means you’re under attack outside. No, my one-time husband,’ she said, suddenly on her feet, somehow instantly by his side, bending over him so that her hair flopped down and brushed near his face with ticklish intensity. ‘No I’ve not come to drag you down to death. That’s not the arena in which your uncle wants to meet with you. In fact,’ she added, whispering now, her lips touching the lobes of his ear, tinglingly, ‘if you die in this attack then it won’t be possible to set up the meeting. Bye bye.’

  ‘Sir! Sir!’

  Shouts from outside the dugout.

  Stom was alone, save only for the ruined body of Lieutenant Stet, who seemed now to be asleep.

  Stom rushed through the door, and out into flashing silver strings of rain. Almost at once, like thunder and lightning, he heard the detonation of the shelling. His men, all eight of them, were leaning over the east side of the trench, their guns sounding and sounding.
Stom, rushing, tried to stop, but the gooey, slippery new mud at the bottom of the trench wrongfooted him and he slipped down. Falling down.

  ‘What about the west flank?’ he bellowed, getting to his feet.

  One of his men peeled away and slammed himself against the west side of the trench. ‘Nothing down there, sir! They’re massing in the east,’ he said, tearing himself away, mud smeared down his front, and dashing against the east side again. ‘Coming up!’

  Stom took up position on the east, leaned as far over the trench as he could, and fired his pistol again and again. He fired, wildly, into the blurring of the rain, aiming at shadows and nothing, until all the bullets in his slot were discharged. His finger kept beckoning at the trigger, even though the mechanism could only cluck emptily like a hen.

  A rank of figures swarmed up through the rain. They were going to reach the trench easily. The shots of his eight men were hardly dropping any of them. In an ecstasy of panic, Stom threw his pistol from him, dropped to the trench floor, searching for a rifle from one of the rotten corpses. drowning in the puddles there. He couldn’t find anything.

  ‘Men!’ he bellowed, standing up. ‘Sergeant! Up the west side, and to the gun. Now! Now!’

  He scattered down the trench, slipping and kicking in the water, the rain tapping hard into his face. He was up the stairs and on top of the west side of the ridge before he realised that nobody was following him. Maybe they hadn’t heard his orders. ‘Hey,’ he bellowed at the backs of the men, now a little below him. ‘Hey!’ Trying to make his voice carry over the clatter of the rainstorm. ‘This way! Sergeant! Sergeant!’ What was the man’s name? ‘We’re retreating up the ridge, a tactical retreat.’

  The enemy swept up the far side. He could see several of them taking aim at him – exposed, above the level of the trench. One went onto a knee to steady his rifle. Another simply hoisted the weapon to his shoulder and fired. A bullet whistled past him. Another hit the mud at his feet.

  Polystom had just been talking to his dead wife.

  Everything was pressing upon him, terrifying, overwhelming.

  I can hear the rain starting again, Beeswing had said. He had felt her lips, her dead lips, against the skin of his ear.