Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.)

by Adam Roberts

  He turned, ducked, and ran as fast as he could towards the wreck of the gun, expecting at every step to feel the kick of a bullet in his back. The agony of that.

  At the blackened metal of the gun, he swung himself about, taking cover. He could see the little sparky flames from his troop’s rifles, and just about make out the mass of enemy soldiers, individual bodies collapsing, others pressing on. But it was all misty, a kinematic image not properly focused.

  His breath was dense, loud in his ears.

  He turned again, ducked forward, and hurried out of cover, running northward along the hogsback ridge.

  [sixth leaf]

  He struggled through the mud for more than an hour, as the noise of battle retreated behind him, until he collapsed panting into a puddle-bottomed shellhole. The rain had ceased, and up in the sky snaggle-edged clouds broke and reformed against a deep mauve background. For a long time Polystom simply sat in the hole, until his breathing was under control. He thought about what he had done. For several minutes he peered over the edge of the crater, the direction from which he had come. He could just make out the asterisk of the ruined cannon, on the horizon, but he could see nothing more, and no sound carried. Were they still fighting? Maybe they were all dead. All his men, dead. He slid back to the bottom of the crater, his feet splashing into the warm brown water. Would they come back now, as ghosts, like Beeswing, like Cleonicles? Beeswing had said your uncle wants to see you, to speak with you. The more he thought about it, the more his breathing hurried. He turned and turned, half expecting to see the ghosts of his dead men rearing up from the mud to accuse him. You abandoned us. You deserted us.

  The sun appeared from behind a cloud, and sunlight was everywhere, turning the puddle into glowing copper.

  Polystom slitted his eyes against the glare. Somebody was in the crater with him, indistinct in the wash of light. And, with a shudder, the sunlight drained to grey as another cloud passed before the sun.

  There were three of them. Beeswing and two others. Polystom did not recognise the others.

  ‘You startle me,’ he said, scrabbling halfway up the crater wall. ‘You frighten me.’ His heart was beating palpably in his chest. He reached for his pistol before he remembered he had already discarded it.

  ‘Husband,’ said Beeswing. ‘Husband.’ It wasn’t clear whether she was addressing him, or explaining his relationship to the other dead people present. Polystom looked more closely at them. One was a tall, black-haired man, thin save for a balloon-shaped pot belly. Were all the imperfections of flesh carried into the afterlife? The other was a short woman of indeterminate age, with the curiously glazed polished skin of the dead. ‘You’re all three of you dead,’ Polystom said to them. ‘You all are.’

  ‘We’re all dead,’ agreed Beeswing, as if placating a child.

  The two figures, one on each side, said nothing.

  ‘What is it you want with me?’

  ‘Personally,’ said Beeswing, who – somehow – had zipped through the air in an instant and was now sitting in the mud at his side. ‘Personally I don’t want anything from you.’ Polystom noticed that the mud was marking the pale grey of her trousers, blotching onto the hem of her grey shift. Did the dead go about dressed? Did they have to wash their clothes?

  ‘You need to go further north,’ Beeswing was saying.

  ‘North?’

  ‘To the mountain. Not all the way, necessarily, I don’t know. It really isn’t clear.’ She seemed momentarily cross, but the emotion faded as soon as it appeared.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your uncle. He can’t make it out here to meet you.’

  ‘I need to go further north to meet my uncle?’

  ‘Yes yes yes,’ hurriedly, impatiently.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ask him,’ she said, dreamy now. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Those two,’ said Polystom, indicating the two. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Nobody you know,’ said Beeswing, standing between them again. ‘Nobody you knew, I should say – although, as I mentioned before, from our perspective it is you who are not real, you know.’

  ‘It’s creepy,’ said Polystom. ‘Dead people appearing all over the place.’

  ‘Oh, we’re all around you,’ Beeswing replied. Her voice was smaller now, reducing, as if she were retreating from him, although simultaneously she was standing clearly in front of him, and in fact seemed to be growing, swelling. ‘All the time, all around you. You take us for granted. Like the air,’ she added, putting her head back to stare at the grey sky, ‘like the air, that only sometimes condenses itself into clouds, but which is generally perfectly invisible, and which is purer and purer the further away you go, until it is almost invisible, with only the slightest,’ (very faint, as if she were an enormous distance away, and yet she was still right there), ‘purple in the immensity.’

  ‘Death has changed you, Beeswing,’ Polystom said. ‘You were never like this when you were alive.’ But he was alone in the crater. With a sense of anticlimax, the air shivered into swathes and swathes of warm drizzle.

  Polystom trudged further northward, berating himself as he went for doing so. Following a ghost’s instructions, deserting his post, all his men dead, this was nothing less than madness. The drizzle came and went, interspersed with occasional periods of bright sunshine that made his uniform smoke moistly, clouds steaming off him like pollen. Then the sun would hide again, and the rain would start drifting down again.

  Another hour’s slow progress and he was hungry. He was also thirsty, which surprised and infuriated him, amongst all this water. If he stood with his head back and his mouth agape the drizzle did wet his lips and tongue, but he didn’t seem to get enough inside to count as a really satisfying drink. There were puddles all about him, but he could not bring himself to drink out of any of them: they were all a shitty brown colour. In some of the them oddments of humanity were visible: a leg sticking up like a post, bodies that appeared to be wearing inflated lifejackets that bobbed in the pools, although the lifejackets were just uniforms, their material sealed with mud and the gases collected underneath those layers noxious even from a distance. At one stage the rain intensified, and thunder rumbled in the sky, but a jittery Polystom mistook the noise for ordnance and dived into a shellhole for cover. At the bottom of the hole was a great pile of shoes, half in and half out of the puddle of accumulated water. It bothered Polystom that somebody had dumped so many good shoes, until, looking closer, he realised that every single one of them still contained its owner’s foot. He tried to imagine how so many feet could have been blown off at once, but the more he thought about it the more alarmed and disturbed he became.

  He hurried on. It must have been mid-afternoon, although the cloud cover made it difficult to judge. He saw one huddled group of people, away to the west of the ridge, bent double under the downpour. He could not tell whether they were enemy troops or friendly, but he did not seek to attract their attention.

  The ridge was more or less deserted, with only the scattered fragments of men and machinery to indicate that it had ever been contested. Polystom found himself wondering why he and his men had been detailed to defend the far end of the ridge, and what had stopped the enemy simply coming up onto it further to the north. Then, shockingly, the rainstorm became heavier and heavier, drumming colossally down onto the earth, and Polystom had to bend practically in two. He felt like a nail that the sky wanted to hammer into the earth.

  He took shelter behind the lip of a large crater waiting until the rainstorm lessened its severity. Below him three or four bodies – it was hard to tell how many complete bodies the tangle of mutilation added up to – gripped at one another like drowning swimmers. If anything, the rain was even heavier now. Polystom tried to shift position, to shuffle along the edge of the crater, but the slipperiness of the surface and the force from above betrayed him. He slid, thrashing, kicking out at the bodies below him. They, too, launched into a slide, their l
imbs jerked into ersatz life in a grotesque orgy of dead fumbling and twisting. Polystom could not stop his descent, and went splashing into the mini-lake at the bottom. The water was all around him, up his nose, in his mouth. He waved his arms, with the fear of drowning fiercely in him, knocking aside logs, or whatever obstructions they were that floated and bumped into him.

  His head broke the surface, although the air was almost as wet as the lake. It was hard to keep above water with the weight of his boots, but with a few enormous splashes he felt the slope of the crater’s wall under his feet. It was tricky gaining purchase. He tried levering himself out of the water, but the mud was too slippery. After a deal of effort he worked himself round to a place where a slight ledge underpinned his feet, and there he stopped until he had regained his breath.

  Eventually the rain stopped. The sun came out.

  It was nearly an hour’s labour to work a way up the side of the crater; each handhold, each stepping point, had to be scooped out of the mud. At the top Polystom lay on his back, looking up at the purple-and-white sky.

  Increasingly hungry, he marched further north. He tried to think through the reasons his uncle might want to speak to him. What should he say to him? Would the dead man want to know what had been done to avenge his murder? Would he know? Those two men you executed, they were not the ones who killed me. What could Polystom say to such a thing? I know, Uncle. It was done for show; to encourage the others. Tell me, Uncle, do you know who it was who murdered you?

  ‘I don’t,’ said Cleonicles. ‘I have no memory of that at all. I know it happened, but only because of, what would you say, a sentence? A few words?’

  Fatigue completely filled Polystom now, and he was feeling slightly feverish. Probably shouldn’t have ingested the water from that shellhole. Probably not clean. Still, what could he have done? It had been beyond his control. He fixed his eye straight ahead. The mountain was much larger, and the ridge much wider, more corrugated. I will, Polystom told himself, I will walk as far as that hillock, and there I will rest.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Cleonicles.

  But with his very next step, Polystom felt a savage pain in his left shin, and he tumbled forward. He was face down in the mud. His legs were up in the air, pushing his head down. He tried to push himself up with his arms, but that intensified the sharp pain in his legs. He was making hoarse little noises with his throat, as suggestive of exhaustion and exasperation as pain. Looking behind, he could see that he had walked blindly into a shin-level stretch of barbed wire: that in tumbling forward he had caught his flesh on the metal thorns. With surges of hot pain he twisted a little to one side, and managed to disengage his legs from the barbs, and pull himself round. His shins ached enormously. Stupid of him! Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  He got to his feet with difficulty, and turned north. Now that he actually looked, he could see banks and banks of wire, like petrified heather, parallel to and intersecting his path. He limped onward another twenty yards or so, zigzagging around where the wire was laid. A crater marked the place where a shell had punched a hole in the stuff, and Polystom slipped into this, the weariness coming up through his body in waves. He lay on his back, and slid down, until his feet hit the water. But this was a small crater, and the puddle at the bottom was no more than a foot deep.

  He lay for a while, gathering his strength, whilst the pain throbbed through his legs. ‘Have you,’ he said to the figure beside him, ‘been with me for a while?’

  ‘A while, yes.’

  ‘Walking beside me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Polystom shook his head. ‘I’m so tired,’ he said. ‘I can’t take much more.’

  ‘If I were you,’ said Cleonicles, ‘I’d rest here for a bit.’

  Polystom turned his head. ‘Is Beeswing with us?’

  ‘Beeswing,’ said the ghost of Cleonicles, as if trying the word out. ‘Beeswing. Now, is that your wife?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you know?’

  ‘It’s there somewhere, one of those vague little memories. You must understand, it’s not the sort of thing that is central to my . . . well, what would you call it? My being. My mind. It’s a bit of background description, as far as my character is concerned. It’s not prominent in my mind.’

  Polystom wasn’t following this. He drifted into a dazed sleep.

  He was woken by rain on his face. His legs still throbbed with pain.

  ‘Awake?’ asked Cleonicles.

  Polystom pulled himself into a sitting position, rubbing the rainwater over his face to wake a little more. ‘Uncle,’ he said. ‘You’re the ghost of my uncle.’

  ‘Ghost,’ said Cleonicles. ‘Yes.’

  ‘This world is madness,’ said Polystom, wearily. ‘The war, that’s madness. Ghosts, death, mud, suffering.’

  ‘So, you are my nephew,’ said Cleonicles, as if realising the fact for the first time.

  ‘Beeswing was like this,’ Polystom said, a little sulkily. ‘It’s as if death bleaches out your memory. Don’t you remember me, Uncle? All the talks we had? You lived on the moon of Enting, and I used to fly up to you in my biplane to stay with you.’

  ‘Of course, of course. But it’s one thing to know a fact, something written down, and another to actually encounter it.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Polystom. I wish I had some food.’

  Cleonicles didn’t say anything to this.

  The rain faded from the air. The surface of the pond at the base of the crater went from stucco to plaster-smooth.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Polystom, ‘that I haven’t had a cup of coffee in a week? Even more than food, I think I’d like a cup of coffee.’

  Cleonicles didn’t say anything to this either.

  ‘So,’ said Polystom, turning to the ghost a little. ‘Here I am on this mud-world, having a jolly conversation with my murdered uncle. What would you like, Uncle? Revenge? Beeswing, the ghost of Beeswing, I should say, told me that you wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ said Cleonicles.

  He looked simultaneously as old as, and much younger than Polystom remembered him: his features were as pronounced as the old-man Cleonicles, his eyes as sunken, his nose as beaky; yet his skin had the curiously smooth, bland texture that all the ghosts he had seen shared. And yet here he was, eerily substantial.

  ‘I’ve myself to blame as much as anybody. A spider caught in my own web. The maker snagged in his creation.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Let me explain. I do know you, but not with any great intensity. You’ll pardon if I seem a little distant? I mean, a little more distant than I used to be?’

  Polystom shrugged. ‘You are dead, after all.’

  ‘Dead,’ said the ghost. ‘Yes. You know what’s in the mountain, do you?’

  The bulk of it reared over the opposite lip of the crater. ‘Military Command told me,’ Polystom said, ‘that there was a gigantic Computational Device. They told me to tell nobody about it. I wonder if that interdiction included dead people? Am I disobeying my orders by talking to you about it, you ghost?’

  ‘I – which is to say, Cleonicles – built it. Not alone, of course. But I was instrumental in designing it. What’s crucial, you see, is that there are four major seams of a crystal material, created by the folds of geological activity. This fact, combined with the heat differential under the ground and the abundance of solar energy this close to the sun, made the site ideal. You notice,’ said Cleonicles, smiling slyly, ‘how much more fluent I am with that sort of discourse?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘All that sort of stuff is loaded up very centrally in me. Other stuff, the emotional history and so on, is more difficult to retrieve.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Uncle.’

  ‘More important than the building of this enormous processor, this enormous Computational Device, was the writing of it. This was where I played the most important role of all. We tinkered, for a few months, with writing into the circuitry of the
Device models of reality. Versions, do you see? We’d write in the basic rules, first of all: physics and the like. Then we’d add on detail and layer, modelling a number of things. We produced a very interesting model of the atmosphere on Kaspian, trying to model weather. We discovered that it was possible to produce similar weather patterns, but very hard to predict precisely the way the actual weather might go. We could start with the same initial parameters, and the model would diverge from reality. Or,’ Cleonicles chuckled, ‘reality diverged from the model. Do you see?’

  ‘Not really, Uncle.’

  ‘Well, let me try to explain further. I used my influence to take charge of a very large project, a very large instance of Computational Modelling. I wanted to write into the circuits of the device an entire system, like ours in many ways, but different in crucial respects. You know, I suppose, that I was fascinated for a long time with the possibilities of vacuum physics? Many scientists disagreed with me, about the practicalities of the discipline – they denied that there could be such a thing as “vacuum” except under very particular experimental conditions. But certain observations of mine lead me to the conclusion that outside our own System there exists not only vacuum, but that this vacuum is dotted with stars.’

  ‘I remember many conversations on this subject, Uncle.’

  ‘Do you? I can’t say I do. But anyway. I used the Computational Device to write into existence such a System. I started from the base up. I wrote in a star, burning in vacuum, about the same size as our star; and around it I placed a number of planets. I wanted life on these planets, so around each of them I placed a breathable atmosphere. But in between the worlds I wrote in nothingness. It was fascinating to see what happened. It’s all about a balance of forces: gravity on the one hand, and the dispersing pressure gradient on the other. As had been predicted by some, the vacuum initially pulled the atmosphere clean away from the smaller planets. So then I designed much larger, denser planets, with gravity ten times what it is on Kaspian, and this had the opposite effect; the too-strong gravity compressed the atmosphere into liquid and solid forms. I tried getting the balance exactly right, but it was so precariously balanced that no atmosphere could be retained. And then – because, you see, it is possible to vary the rate at which time passes in this simulation – I let a few thousand years pass. In the system in which I started out, there were a number of rocky airless worlds, and a burning sun: over a few thousands of years this star emitted so much matter in the normal course of its functioning, emitted so much gas, that the System-sized sphere of vacuum filled up. I had started with something radically different from our own cosmos, and it swiftly reverted to our reality. Of course, the gases were not breathable, and my model planets remained lifeless, but I seemed to have defeated my own theories about the possibility of a vacuum universe beyond the boundaries of our own space.’