by Henry Gee
Chapter 22. Soldier
Tibesti Massif, North Africa, Earth, December, 2032
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley—Ozymandias
In the lee of the erg the winds slowed to an eddying lull just enough for their words to be heard, were anyone there to hear them. A small group of tall figures gathered round another, who, though kneeling on the ground and virtually inaudible, appeared to be leading what passed for the chant:
Jjeshmaii Zraal!
Jjeshmaii Zraal! came the response, a dismal blizzard of guttering croaks as of the last autumn leaves cracking in the grate.
Ajjhnaai ajjhnaai’hnuu! Ajjhnaii Hjajhaad!
The kneeling figure now fell full flat on its face, a flutter of dirty robes not quite disguising the extreme etiolation of its form. Two other figures stepped in, and, stooping low like a pair of ungainly cranes, helped the central figure to its feet. Surprisingly, it towered a head above all the others. So high, in fact, that even in the shadow cast by the colossal ruined sphinx behind them, the rays of the afternoon sun crowned its head with fire, illuminating its leonine mane. As if refreshed, the figure took the ram’s horn proffered by another and blew three mighty blasts. Blasts that would once have caused walls to totter and empires crumble. But the last such walls had been ground to dust thousands of years before, and these wanderers were the last of their kind. The raucous notes on the zjhjfaar seemed as futile as the croaks of vultures over long-abandoned skeletons.
Life had not always been so desperate.
Long ago, when the Annakhnu came to this region, it was a promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Or, at least, waving with endless prairies of windblown grass for grazing, and rippling with immense lakes full of fish. Ostriches, elephants, giraffe and other animals, nameless by virtue of their later complete extinction, were chased by cheetahs and lions in abundance seemingly without limit. The Annakhnu looked at this immensity of plenty, and settled down from wanderings soon much magnified in myth.
Many hundreds of years passed.
The Annakhnu replaced their grass and wattle huts with more imposing structures of mud-brick. Their villages became towns and then cities, each guarded by demon-headed sphinxes, avatars of their Goddess HaShekhna. The greatest city, famed in legend, was the blessed City on the Heights, with its grand courts, its splendid temples and palaces faced with ivory, silver and gold; its impenetrable walls, its fountains, and towers that stretched to heaven.
The people changed, too. After further uncountable years, they became tall, Kings among Men, taller than the other Men who appeared at the margins of a vast empire—and themselves featured in the marginalia of a dozen cultures. The Atlanteans. The Titans. The Nephilim.
But with cities came war, and slaves, and tribute, and flames, and destruction. With cities came the dwindling of the ostriches, elephants, giraffe and the other large, nameless animals. They became less common, and then rare, and eventually the day came when even the eldest sage could not recall having seen such beasts at all, not even as a small child—images for such elders being as bright as gems, even when the drifting years had dulled the immediacy of more pressing concerns.
And with cities came the taming of the great grasslands, the trammeling of the vast lakes to feed fields of wheat and barley, sorghum and tef that stretched from sky to sky. Nobody could quite recall the precise year when the smallest of the great lakes dried out completely (smallness being a relative thing—this lake had been as large as the glacial wilderness which would, one day, be called Scotland). And nobody could recall the precise year when that lake failed to be completely replenished by the rains of winter. And as more time passed, nobody could recall the year when the rains of winter failed to arrive, and turned instead to storms of choking dust.
The toll of years built like the grains of sand left to accumulate to windward of the cities as they died, one by one, toppling the towers and burying the majestic walls as if they had never been, but leaving a few monuments exposed, a few isolated pillars, as enigmatic remembrances of glories past. The Annakhnu remained tall, but gaunt and weathered as they dwindled from conquerors to a tribe of herdsmen like any other, managing to hang on in remote canyons of the Tibesti Massif—mountains echoing their once-great cities standing amid the fertile plains, now dry and barren rock.
And yet in caves bored within the rock they maintained their ancient religion, itself wearing away at the corners but keeping its core essentially unchanged, the Way of Goddess HaShekhna.
After dozens of centuries, the Way had become nostalgic. The shaman would talk of a blessed future when the Goddess would forgive them their trespasses, the Annakhnu would regain what they had lost, when they would return to their blessed City on the Heights. Every year, to mark the fall of what passed for the first droplets of spring, they prayed for the imminence of this last journey—next year, maybe.
And, one day, just in time, when almost all they had ever had was lost, that day dawned.
The Elders of the very last settlement of the Annakhnu convened in the lee of a Sphinx believed by the more credulous to represent the artistic peak of their ancestors, to discuss the latest in a long litany of bad news. Even though adapted to aridity to a degree not seen elsewhere, the tribe had to move on. The other tribes in the lands round about could not weather the Tibesti like the Annakhnu had through long usage, but these others did have a new and deadlier advantage: automatic weapons. The Annakhnu would have to move on before they were flushed out and slaughtered.
That they had to move on no-one could doubt—but where, then, could they move? Their enemies surrounded them on all sides. Straitened in their last redoubt, they had recourse only to prayer, and to fast-vanishing hope. Hope that the great prophet would appear from the skies on a flaming chariot as was foretold, and smite their enemies. Hope sustained by the comfort of ritual. But the tallest Elder had blown his last: the shrill notes of the zjhjfaar resounded among the rocks and died away.
At last, the silence of the desert, eternal and without reproach. The Elders remained still, poised, waiting for deliverance, or for the end. After some minutes came the sound not of fiery chariots but of bullets, the answers to the horn-blasts.
Hope died.
Careering up a slope and over the jagged horizon came a technical—a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back—driven crazily by bandits in green and tan fatigues. The bandits, hanging over the sides of the technical, whooped in devilment, firing their guns into the arcing sky.
Even from a distance of a thousand yards the keen eyes of the Annakhnu could see the bandits’ bandoliers rise, sway and flop around their ragged bodies, the menacing gleams of white teeth in black faces, the glimmer of machetes and the pitted barrels of machine guns. The Elders were all that separated the coming onslaught from their last village, their skeletal flap-breasted women, their starving, bloated children.
The Elders stood fast and began again to chant as one—Jjeshmaii Zraal! They closed their eyes, waiting for the end: but were surprised by a second noise, a deeper, constant thrum imposed on the staccato stutter and crazily slipping clutch of the technical.
The Elders opened their eyes once again and faced their foes, only to see, rising behind the jeep, the promised deliverance. Not chariots of fire from the sky, but something else equally wonderful for all that it lay beyond their experience: a flotilla of ten, vast, Chinook helicopters.
The first helicopter let rip its judgment. A pair of rockets scythed away from the fuselage and smacked into the technical, which vanished in a dull rumble and a ball of grey smoke. Shards of metal and scraps of human flesh spattered the Elders standing at the feet of the sphinx. A head, removed by the blast, rolled and stopped by the feet of the eldest Elder, looking up at him as if in surp
rise. This is not how things were meant to turn out, it seemed to say. This is not how the story ends.
One of the Chinooks picked its way over the wreck and landed delicately a few yards away, close enough to the astonished watchers—but too far for them to be discommoded by the down-draft. The breeze was, however, sufficient to lift and make flags of their ragged robes, marking their otherwise silent stillness all the more starkly. The other nine sky-chariots roared overhead, looking for the village.
Two people in fatigues (much like the bandits,’ but more recently cleaned and pressed) alighted and ambled towards the Elders, chatting with each other as if this were an afternoon stroll, as if the Elders were not there at all.
Ho hum, thought the eldest Elder. Not quite how he had imagined it, but the Prophet had come, nonetheless, with chariots in the sky, with fire to smite their enemies, who now lay thoroughly smitten. How could one possibly complain?
As the two newcomers came closer, it became clear to the silent watchers that they were as stocky and dark as the Elders were tall and pale. One, a woman, with very long, black hair, cleared her throat, and looked to her brawny male companion and said:
“Hey, Avi, help me out here, big boy. Much as I hate to admit it, I never know what to say on such occasions.”
“You want I should do this?” Avi Malkeinu smiled his best ladies’-man smirk. Always a danger with this particular ball-breaker, but, hey, nothing ventured.
Commander Rivka Mizrahi of the Israel Defence Forces (Covert Aliyot Operations) narrowed her coal-black eyes. “Of course—you’re the Digger,” she spat. “You’ll know what to say to… to… Lost Tribes. That’s an order, soldier!”
Avi wondered (not for the first time) whether his commanding officer would be as fierce in the sack as she was out of it, but decided (wisely) to put that thought aside for later. So he simply smiled at her, gave a casual mock-salute and moseyed towards to the tribesmen, all of whom had remained completely silent and still, except for their shreds of robes swaying in the light breeze.
Avi stopped, wondering which one of these nearly-dead skeletons he should address first. Nobody had said anything at all about this before the mission—comparative anthropology, cultural sensitivities, even future shock. The terms of reference for Operation Elijah had indeed occupied a lengthy pamphlet written in Old High Military Jargonic, but the semantic content could have been boiled down to read: “go there, pick ’em up, get the hell out.”
This directness, this simplicity—this matter-of-factness of things—would not normally have worried Avi in the slightest. He was just a regular guy, after all. But when he’d returned to his homeland, just after Le Dig had wound up, his luggage contained more than clothes and after-shave. There were memories, too, especially of that dinner, when he’d had Faye and Primrose practically eating out of his hand. And when Jack had told them the tale of Gaston de Bonnard; and when Domingo had bowled them all over with his amazing tales of de Bonnard’s desert journeys in which he’d met Les Prètres du Sable, but nobody had believed him, especially when he’d said they spoke ancient Ivrit (Avi had perked up at that).
But some legends turn out to be as plainly reported as de Bonnard intended. The Abbé’s engravings of these creatures looked exactly like these ragged sticks standing motionless before him, and lived in the same places. In fact, it was Avi who’d casually mentioned the legend to a fellow soldier-archeologist who—to Avi’s consternation—had taken it all extremely seriously, and so Operation Elijah had got started.
Avi now stood equidistant between Rivka and the tribesmen. He looked back at Rivka, who waved him on, crossly. It was all very well for Rivka to say that she never had suitable words for such things, after all, she was the kind of girl who let her uzi do the talking (and what a girl was that!) but she’d never thought to ask Avi if he could do any better. And all Avi knew were chat-up lines. My God! At times like this you really needed to have rehearsed your Neil-Armstrong moment. And if women were challenging and unpredictable creatures, what about these poker-faced statues—these aliens? But there was no more time to lose. He could feel Rivka’s eyes drilling holes in the back of his skull, so he stepped forwards, looked up at the tallest of the tribesmen, cleared his throat, and, in his best Voice-Of-Israel Ivrit, said:
“Boker tov, chevrai. Ever hear about ‘Next Year in Jerusalem?’”
He could hear Rivka trying not to laugh—an effort that failed catastrophically a moment later, for what happened next took their breath away. As soon as he had uttered, all the tribesmen had, as one, prostrated themselves before Avi’s feet, mumbling what he swore was a prayer in Ivrit, for all that it sounded so odd and distorted. Jjeshmaii Zraal, these weird, stretched creatures seemed to say.
Shema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is One.
No doubt about it. They had come to the right place. Surrounded by quivering white masses and unable to move his feet without inadvertently kicking one of the supplicants in the face, Avi turned on his hips to throw Rivka a shape of perplexity, miming—like, what the fuck do I do now? But Rivka’s expression, a mixture of ferocity, wonder and mirth, sliced through Avi’s heart.
He’d seen that face only once before, when Jadis and Jack had returned from Aurignac, after their first scouting trip to Souris Saint-Michel, and before that dinner when Jack had revealed all. It was the unfathomable expression in Jadis’ eyes whenever she’d looked at Jack. Lucky old Jack—but whew! The intensity of it! He wondered what Jadis would look like in battle-dress and toting a machine gun. No, don’t even go there, at least, not in working hours. Jadis was a honey, no doubt about it, but you never crossed her on Le Dig. No way! For sure, she and Rivka might be sisters, and at that thought, he started to laugh, and found himself saying the standard response:
Baruch Shem K’vod Malchuto L’Olam Va’ed
His Glorious Majesty Be Praised for Ever.
At which utterance the tribesmen rose as one and marched, calmly, and without once looking at either Avi or Rivka, to the waiting helicopter.
Avi had much to think about on the long flight home. Strapped onto a bench seat on one side of the helicopter, looking across at the Tibestian tribesmen webbed into the other side—unspeaking, unsmiling and, remarkably, uncomplaining—his mind was cast back to the long, long conversations he’d had at Le Dig with Domingo, ever needling at him about religion, the sinewy twang of Jagger and Richards ever in the background.
Religion, he thought. I need it like a hole in the head. Religion, he’d said to Domingo, has caused far too much trouble already. True enough, said Domingo, but that’s because people really care about it. Even more than sex. Even more than life or death. And why?
Avi had been unable to answer.
Because, said Domingo, it’s what marks us out as human beings. It stems from the same impulse as love—and is therefore as unreasoning, as passionate. It sustains us, it defines us. Without religion, said Domingo—and without the love of God—we are no more than beasts.
But: humanity? He looked across at the Tibestian Prètres du Sable—Sand-Priests. They were Jews, maybe, perhaps, and their religion had sustained them through many ages of adversity, but were they even human?
Okay, he admitted to himself, ruefully, most human beings thought of Jews, most of the time, as a race apart, perhaps not even proper humans, either. But more seriously, he continued, thinking mostly about the conversations he’d had with Domingo, perhaps religion transcended and even antedated humanity. Perhaps (now, here’s a thought) humanity evolved because of religion. And as Domingo had said, don’t forget love. It was part of his own Catholicism, it was true, and (he said) he wouldn’t want to push it too much, but as far as he was concerned, he’d said (and the big man’s eyes seemed to mist over, looking inward) love and faith are inseparable.
Avi was not sure whether his conversations with Domingo had had any single, marked effect. For sure, he hadn’t dropp
ed everything and become a yeshiva bocher like his grandfather had, but it had made him reassess his own place in the great scheme of things.
Avi’s grandfather had started as a market trader in Tashkent, in central Asia, and after many long years had made it to the status of middleman in the Chinese textile import-export trade. As such he was simply a facet of a tradition that had endured for millennia, part of the great Silk Road, the mercantile artery that had traversed Eurasia since before the dawn of history. And where there was trade, there had always been Jews.
But the resurgence of Islam in central Asia had made things hard for the Jews, who had, first in ones and twos, then whole families, made their way to Israel. Perhaps none too soon, thought Avi. Tashkent was now just one part of the seemingly unstoppable Khalifa that would, he thought, soon stretch from Indonesia to the Atlantic Ocean. The reason why the Chinooks had been able to fly without hindrance across the Sahara was because the secular governments of Egypt, Libya and Chad were deeply distracted, fighting their own, hopeless wars against the revivified Legions of the Prophet.
Avi’s grandparents settled in Israel, traded Uzbek for Hebrew and started again. They lived in a tiny flat in a scruffy neighborhood of Tel Aviv, a part of town where sand poked through the cracks in the neglected roadbeds and sidewalks, creating tiny dunes. By dint of working hard—and, as his grandfather had emphasized, praying hard—they managed to make a modest living and raise a family, which, in time, dispersed. Avi’s own parents, raised in the new country and unencumbered by the traditions of the old, were uncomfortable about religion, and he dimly remembered the arguments between his father and grandparents when they visited the flat for Shabbat or Pesach.
The grandparents had never approved of Avi’s mother, an outspoken, blonde American feminist Avi’s father had met while studying at the Technion in Haifa. She may say she’s Jewish, they said, but does she keep a kosher home? Shabbat? Festivals? No! This presumptious shiksa wants to work, be an engineer, and not be a good Jewish wife and mother, staying home and keeping kashrut. We managed it, said the grandfather, so why can’t you?
By this time Avi’s grandfather was spending less and less time working, and more and more at a small synagogue with other Uzbek Jewish emigrés, thinking about old times while studying Talmud, and returning home, head full of religious zeal and pockets empty.
Avi had been far too small to remember the arguments, the recriminations and the final break, when his parents abandoned religion altogether, although he did remember moving to the Marxist kibbutz within sight of Mount Carmel, the mountain continually riding high on the horizon of his thoughts. It was at this kibbutz where he’d grown up, where he’d had lots of fun with the other kids, and where God was only ever mentioned as a profanity.
But now… well, Army life is mostly a lot of boring hanging around, during which his mind became less and less occupied with girls, and more towards turning over everything Domingo had said to him, about religion, and his heritage as a Jew, and, very slowly, the long-buried thoughts of Friday nights at his grandparents’ flat came back. The rich, spicy smells of chicken and lamb, rice and couscous as his smiling-eyed grandfather had opened the door, lifting his squealing grandson in his wiry, brown arms (“shabbat shalom, little Avi!) The solemnity of the moment when his grandmother lit the Friday-night candles, how she filled the wine goblets and broke the freshly-baked chollah; how, as a four-year-old, he was always asked to say the age-old blessings (he winced inwardly at the thought, but it was a sensation mixed with the pleasure of nostalgia); and how lavishly his grandparents praised his lisping, uncertain efforts. And how this—this holiness—blended with the cosy family atmosphere.
His later experience backfilled these memories, enriching them with the thought that Domingo had, after all, been right. This is how religion must have started, with a human family gathered round a fire in some cave-mouth to thank God (or whatever) for bringing them safely together. Families, thought Avi, were more than a way for a species to propagate—they were a uniquely human invention, bound together by gratitude for divine providence.
Fuck me, he thought, I’m getting old. I’ll be joining Likud next.
But he reflected on his own expression of religion, his search for God, as it were, which had become directed into the search for the very beginnings of human culture. Which, he supposed, was how he’d come into Jack’s orbit, and then Jadis’.
The chatter of the soldiers and airmen, the hum and chop of the big helicopter’s twin engines continued, but Avi was oblivious, thinking once again of Jadis, his doctorate supervisor, and a woman who’d gone so much further in his estimation than a barrack-room pin-up. Okay, okay, he thought, backtracking—what a sap he was!—in mitigation, he’d met Jadis for the first time when he was at a very impressionable age, having only just arrived in the maelstrom of Cambridge. And so, of course, she’d made an impression.
But even afterwards, when he’d got to know her well—when he’d been her pupil, and when they’d worked so hard together at Saint-Rogatien, and had stayed late into the night poring over their findings, systematizing them—she seemed to exemplify for him the very essence of what fascinated him about women. It was the contrasts: between softness and steel, between acquiescence and determination, between a skittishness that only ever lived for the moment, and depths of experience winnowed by a drama that seemed to go back to the beginning of time, and in which poor hapless men had arrived relatively late, to be dazed and startled by what they found.
Jadis had been playing on his mind more than usual (and no, you schmuck, not because Rivka looked like her) but because of the reports from Souris Saint-Michel she’d been sending by emails so well encrypted that they’d baffled the IDF censor (something he was very proud of, having installed her encryption programs himself).
They’d started in March, with a brief and breathless report on what they’d first found inside the cave, and continued in length and frequency ever since. Although Jadis never wrote anything other than clear, plain facts, unencumbered by anything superfluous, he could read, between the lines, a steady increase in intensity, excitement—and desperation.
There’s so much here, the messages seemed to say. So much to tell—too much—I wish you were back here to look at it—can you come?—what are we going to make of it all?—Help!
The news that Jadis had to tell, buried in stray bits, would blow the lid off the world, and suddenly Avi was conscious that of all the human beings (and other people) in this Chinook, only he had any idea of what Jadis was about to unleash. He wondered why his head wasn’t glowing like a distress flare, and why nobody seemed to be taking any notice of him whatsoever.
The latest email had contained two lengthy attachments. The first was the paper that she intended to send to Nature (‘Subterranean Palaeolithic settlement at Souris Saint-Michel Rock Shelter, France,’ by Jadis L. Markham, with Jack, Faye, Primrose, Mathilde, Eric, Balthazar, Domingo and a dozen other names he didn’t recognize). The second, much longer attachment was the more monographic treatment she’d send to Antiquity, pending the deliberations of Nature’s editors.
The email’s covering letter, written in her own words, not in the careful, measured understatement of a scientific report, had made his blood run cold. He’d read and read and read it again, until he’d known it by heart, even more thoroughly than the standing orders of Operation Elijah. The Nature paper is a stop-gap (she’d written):
The Antiquity paper has a lot more analysis. After all your help with data analysis you deserve a co-authorship on both papers, if you’d like.
He’d agonized over this but decided to decline, as he’d never been to the site himself, and there were too many authors on the paper already.
For now, just to sum it up
(she continued)
what we’ve found goes like this. The city covers about thirty square kil
ometers. All of it consists of buildings in a pristine state. There are no ruins. We have found no art work, nor any sign of writing, but there are Remillardian artefacts everywhere. At first we did not know what they were for.
Then we discovered the cemetery—that’s what we’re calling it for now—just below the western side of the Great Pyramid (that’s what Balthazar called the largest structure. You can see it in Fig. 2 of the Nature paper as Structure SSM-255-9-1). We have not so far been able to do more than a pilot excavation in one corner of this area (this is locality 255-9-2), but so far we have found 86 Neanderthal skeletons. All are complete. Some seem to have been dressed in Remillardian artifacts. Mathilde thinks that each artifact is a small plate in a suit of armor that would have been held together by leather, but we are not sure yet. At any rate, we now know who made the Remillardian artefacts, which is great news.
How typical of Jadis, thought Avi, not to have mentioned that this one fact alone—the discovery of so many pristine Neanderthal skeletons in one place—would be enough to turn anthropology on its head, quite apart from the other findings. These now came thick and fast, wave after wave of startling revelation, until Avi had to take a breath, to pause, to allow him to come to terms with it all.
When Jack and Faye went to the top of the Great Pyramid they found it did not taper to a point, as we had first thought, but was flat. On the flat surface, a square platform about five meters on a side, they found several other structures. One contained skeletons of what seem to be anatomically modern humans. Some of these are pristine, but others have been decapitated. A preliminary analysis of cut marks suggests that this mutilation was deliberate. In a nearby structure they found what look like the skulls from the mutilated bodies. The tops of the skulls had been removed. Some of these calvaria have a kind of resinous deposit inside and there are signs of burning.
Even in the cramped, hot fuselage of the Chinook, Avi’s blood chilled every time he replayed that particular detail.
What’s really puzzling is a gravitational anomaly that we’ve picked up right in the center of the pyramid’s summit platform. There’s something down there, buried within. We haven’t been able to explore that further yet, so we don’t mention it in either of the two papers.
The email went on for a while in this vein before concluding:
Thanks again for your help, Avi, we couldn’t have done it without you. So until we see you—I hope it won’t be too long—everyone on the team sends their love, Faye and Primrose especially, and Jack of course, and Domingo reminds me to tell you that you are in his prayers. Fairbanks sends a bark and a lick, and Horrible would probably send you a dead dormouse if she could(!). With love—
However, at this point, Avi had always drifted off, because he couldn’t help remembering something his father had shown him when he was a teenager on the kibbutz. In his quest for a perfect socialist Zionist utopia, and a world in which there would be no borders and in which Jews would never again be persecuted, Avi’s father had read up on some of the older ideas of world government. Perhaps inevitably, his reading had drawn him to H. G. Wells. Although Avi’s father had found Wells’ idealism rather hard going, he was instantly sucked into the power and drama of his fiction, and it was this that he shared with his son. His father had read him The Magic Shop and from there it was only a short hop to The Country of the Blind and—what had the most lasting impact—The Time Machine.
Avi wasn’t sure if Jadis knew any Wells or had caught the parallels. In any case, literary allusion wasn’t really her style. But he couldn’t help thinking of the subterranean city as a landscape that Wells would have recognized. Not in The Country of the Blind so much, but in the future landscape of England that greeted the Time Traveler, who found the Eloi living witlessly in a sylvan idyll, unaware of the technically advanced Morlocks dragging them down to a horrific, subterranean fate. His father read in this story a parable about revolution and class warfare. But for Avi, now, it had taken on an additional, grisly reality.
A gear-change in the helicopter, betrayed by a slight shift in the ceaseless rumble of its engines, indicated that they were about to land at the desert air base, and de Bonnard’s Prètres du Sable would take their first steps on what everyone hoped they’d regard as hallowed soil. But even in the hot Negev sunshine, Avi felt his blood run thick and chill.
-=0=-
To be continued in SCOURGE OF STARS, Book Two of The Sigil Trilogy...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Henry Gee was born in London in 1962. He received his B.Sc. in Zoology and Genetics from the University of Leeds, and his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Cambridge. Since 1987 he has been on the editorial staff of Nature , the international weekly science magazine, where he is now Senior Editor of Biological Sciences, and was the founding editor of Futures , Nature ’s award-winning SF column.
He is the author of several works of nonfiction including The Science of Middle-earth , In Search of Deep Time and Jacob’s Ladder , and a novel, By The Sea .
He lives in Cromer, Norfolk, England, with his family and numerous pets.
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