The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Well, Easter’s not for a month, yet but…”

  He shrugged, casting off all the complex ecclesiastical negotiations that had placed Easter where it was in the year. “Death and renewal,” he insisted doggedly. “The year, your saviour’s sacrifice, is all from the same thoughts.”

  I wondered then, and not for the first time, just what brand of religion Kevin espoused. I had always assumed some splinter of the Orthodox Church, some offshoot of Slavic Christianity with its own proud and almost extinct traditions. His words suggested otherwise. “So what is it that you celebrate now?” I asked him. In truth I had never seen anyone less celebratory.

  “It is to do with the land we have left, and the land we will go to,” he told me, quite seriously, leaving me quite at sea, wondering, Is he Jewish, then? This promised land business? Or does he mean an afterlife? He watched me try to assimilate this, and touched my arm slightly, more human contact than either of us had initiated during the year. “You are aware we have enemies, and that we are fleeing them.”

  Have, or had? Fleeing or fled? But all I did was nod, and he seemed satisfied.

  His compatriots arrived then, and all at once, a little band coated and scarfed against the chill of the early year. Kevin let them in without comment, without introduction. They did not seem surprised to find me there, although their gazes were narrow and suspicious. There were half a dozen of them, and they had heavy duffel bags and rucksacks, bulging awkwardly with rigid contents. Their manner, entering, was less celebrants and more tradesmen here to perform some task with the minimum of fuss. With their coats off – and meticulously hung up – they were a strange spectrum of humanity, none of them seeming to have much ancestry in common with Kevin or each other. A broad-waisted man wore overalls, a woman in a skirt suit, a dark man in shirtsleeves, an elderly lady in woollens, a broad-shouldered man with a gym-toned body. One was a young man with a strange caste to his face who had the most striking snake-eye contact lenses I had ever seen, or at least I hoped that was the case. There seemed nothing to connect them, save that they moved with a uniform efficiency and determination, exchanging barely a word as they followed Kevin into the museum, with me trailing behind.

  Our museum was fitted around other rooms, a meagre T of galleries with an open space in the centre that was the only place that a group of any size could possibly gather. One gallery of the T’s long crosspiece was currently devoted to a time-ordered display of fossils from the Cambrian to the Cretaceous, while its opposite hall had a presentation on continental drift, climate change and sea levels. The spur of the T had been given over to Pliocene and Pleistocene exhibits, mostly early hominids, and a little set of stone tools. All Kevin’s work, of course, and now I began to wonder whether there was some deeper significance to it all, invisible to the uninitiated.

  “What now—?” I whispered but, even as I began to speak, they were in motion, setting down their bags, pulling zips, releasing ties, revealing a variety of pieces, fragments – components might have been nearer the mark. Each neatly-packed container held rods and wheels and clips, and dozens of pieces of metal and glass that I could not even comfortably categorise.

  They set to work with the careful speed of professionals – professional what, I could not say, but still there was nothing of the sacred in what they did, merely a complex practical task that they were plainly all very familiar with. As they assembled their shrine or idol, whatever it was, they spoke to each other, not conversation nor catechism, but something that was plainly technical instruction and interplay. None of it was in English, but neither was it anything that would have fit Kevin’s accent or the Eastern Europe that I had assumed for him. This was when I started wondering about the wisdom of staying on at the department that night, but by then it was too late to back out.

  The language they spoke was comprised of strings of hard monosyllables interspersed with slurred sibilants, a weird agglutinative speech that made me think of old Sumerian, that proto-language from the dawn of human civilisation which seemed to spring into and out of history with neither heir nor ancestor. Aside from a tentative reconstruction of that ancient tongue I had never heard anything like the language those men and women used between themselves. It was as distant from me as the speech of stars, of bees.

  Occasionally one of them directed a brief string of sounds at Kevin, who replied effortlessly in the same manner, with none of the awkwardness he showed with English.

  I had thought they were constructing some art deco altar or reliquary at first, but then as their quick work progressed I guessed that it was some sort of three-dimensional model representing some religious truth, for the internal construction was complex but ordered, and yet not merely symmetrical. That there was a functional plan was plain, what that plan was eluded me.

  “You don’t…” I gestured at the work, voice hushed.

  “Last year, other years, I did,” he told me. “Tonight is … my night. Tonight it is my turn. I am spared this.” His body language had not changed, nor his voice, but something beyond these overt tells communicated to me that he was sad, and perhaps a little frightened.

  “Kevin, tell me what this is about,” I hissed.

  “It is about our people,” he replied, plainly including everyone in that room except me. “Where we were, our enemy, whom we once cast down, rises up. Our stay there comes to an end. We move on to where we will be. Each year, at the year’s turn, we must … the phrase ‘test the waters’ is good.” I thought at the time that stress was bringing the worst of his grammar to the fore, his tenses hopelessly muddled.

  “You believe in a promised land?” I pressed.

  “There is such, and that is where we will go, where we have gone,” he told me, sincere and baffling in equal quantities.

  The construction was nearing its close, the end result a far smaller assemblage than I would have dreamed possible from all the parts – a loosely cuboid structure of glass and metal rods dominated by a great curved lens.

  “It looks like the time machine,” I said wonderingly, and then stopped, for the complete and combined attention of all of them there, motionless and silent, unnerved me more than I could tell. “Like in the film, or the Wells book,” I managed, my voice abruptly hoarse with the perception of some hidden danger, and a little tension leaked out of the air, and then went back to work.

  By then, though, I knew I had hit on at least something – it was a machine. I could see no moving parts, nothing that would hint at any technology I ever saw, but everything about it, every line and piece, insisted on function and functionality.

  Were they some sort of spiritualists? I remember thinking. Are they going to try and speak to the dead?

  Up until that point I was still clinging to the idea that, any moment, they would begin some service or invocation, or gather around and join hands. Even fits and speaking in tongues would have fallen within the bounds of my expectations. Then one of them turned the machine on.

  I thought all the lights had gone out, at first, although I could still see. The bulbs in the ceiling were still glowing like embers, but they illuminated nothing but themselves, nor did the machine appear to shed any radiance. Instead there was simply a brooding, undersea light that had no origin at all, but hung in the air and touched everything with an unhealthy pallor.

  At the same time, something happened to the ends of the three museum galleries. From being some twenty feet distant at most, their ends receded abruptly and then were gone, lost in a kind of creeping mist that seemed less an obstruction in the air than a limit to my meagre human perception. There were shapes, though, backlit by a silvery light and only dimly perceived in the fog. I had been looking down the fossil gallery when the machine came on, and what I saw finally convinced me that there were more things in heaven and earth, as the man wrote, than are covered in my philosophy.

  The shapes themselves did not stir overmuch alarm. I saw structures, or what I thought were structures at first: great conical forms with n
ebulous, shifting caps – or then I thought they must be plants, for there seemed to be some manner of branches growing from their narrow points. They were still, though, wreathed in the unnatural mist, mere silhouettes against the deadening white glimmer. The movement that claimed my attention was not theirs, but resided in the exhibits of our museum for, where the mist touched, I saw flickers and shapes, and then more than that, clear glimpses of our little relics of stone coated over with flesh: a trilobite waving its whip-like antennae, an ammonite shell buoyed up in an invisible medium, tentacles emerging tentatively from within. When the mist touched the partial plesiosaur skeleton that Kevin had mounted on the wall, I saw the marine behemoth twist and writhe, the reconstructed head rolling its yellow eyes and baring needle teeth.

  I backed up, mind devoid of anything so substantial as a thought, and ran into Kevin, who steadied me with a firm hand. His expression was fiercely engaged, as I had never seen it, and I remembered his words of months before: They are there, in the Then, alive, all of them.

  “That is the Then,” he told me, as if reading my mind. “My people are in the Then, under threat from the resurgence of our great enemy.” And he gestured towards the far gallery, where climate change and global warming had been consumed by mist that was enlivened by a thousand scuttling, shelled things so that I could only parrot, in my mind, an inordinate fondness for beetles. “That is the Yet to Come, when our enemy, though they are the child of three hundred million years, have ceased to be.”

  My asinine words recurred to me. Time machine. “Will they come…?” I waved towards the great conical shapes, the moment-to-moment animation of the fossils, imagining some stream of refugees like Kevin, stepping out onto our museum floor en route to some unguessable refuge.

  “All that is flesh, there, shall perish,” Kevin said. There was fear and mourning in his voice. “Only our minds, the most gifted of our minds, can leave the Then and escape that ending. Only those few minds shall find new homes in the Yet to Come.”

  “And…?” I could only point down the spur of the T, where the hand-axes and ancient human detritus had been swallowed by a limitless dark abyss, where a fickle, reddish light touched on great tumbled stones of black basalt. Not for one moment did I doubt him, or think him mad or misled. He spoke the words as they were unshakeable fact. Any scepticism in me died before that certainty.

  “That is the Now,” Kevin explained gently. “That is the Now, in the last places of our enemies, their deep strongholds at the edge of their time.” He looked at me searchingly, seeking that kinship we had pieced together over the year, and he must have felt that he found it, because he was moved to try some few more words to enlighten me. “We are not safe in the Now, my people. Only we few conduct our experiments at the turn of each year. A time for resurrection that predates any reason your people might assign to it. Resurrection and sacrifice.”

  “Your experiments?” Each answer had only spawned more questions. I could not stretch my mind far enough to understand him. I expected more of the same, every word a cipher, but this time his response was such that even I could comprehend him.

  “Each year we must test to see if our great enemy has succumbed to time. Each year one of us must journey to their haunts in the Now.”

  He had taken a few steps away to me, towards that dark, far place, where the ancient, vast stones lay, and I remembered him saying, This year is my ceremony.

  Although the half-life of the fossils, the Then of Kevin’s people, was at my back; although that dreadful, beetle-haunted Yet to Come chattered and thronged at the far end, it was that offshoot, that sideways glimpse into the Now that truly chilled me. Those stones had been worked, no natural formations, and yet the scale and the aesthetic were something inimicable to me, far beyond anything else that I had seen that night.

  “You have to go…?” My hands made inconclusive gestures at it. “But what if these … enemies are still there.” I knew beyond doubt that the nemesis he spoke of was not simply some other tribe or religion of man; far more than ethnic differences lay behind the enmity.

  “They are,” he told me softly. “They are not gone yet, nor for many of these years to come. They are tenacious of life, while they wait for our return. In the Yet to Come, we know to the year when their last scion shall fade and decay.”

  I did not understand, as with so much else. “But if you know, then why go now? Why not just wait?”

  His face creased, and I saw there his fondness for me, shining from an expression that there were no human names for. I saw also that he was very afraid of those black stones and what lay behind them, far more than I. As loathsome as I found them, my ignorance was yet my shield.

  “How else will we come to know the extent of their time, unless we experiment? Without our ritual of the years, where would our minds in the Yet to Come find the knowledge that they have? We do what must be done. We do what we know we did. The turn of the year demands it: for resurrection, there must yet be sacrifice.”

  He was past the machine now, standing at the mouth of that spur gallery, the stalk of the T, and I saw a wind start up, amongst the black stones, swirling the dust into unwholesome patterns.

  “You’re going to die?” It was a fool’s question to ask anyone, save someone whose life, and the ending of it, was apparently already written in the histories of the far future.

  “Something will die,” he replied calmly. “But I shall live on.” The thought seemed to sadden him, but then he gathered his resolve, and was walking away into darkness. Now I could hear the moaning of the wind out there in the lightless reaches, hungry, strung with wordless sounds that yet promised meaning, for anyone mad enough to listen for it. I started after him, just one step, feeling the tensing of the machine-builders as I did so. You must promise not to interfere, he had said. In truth, it was my own fear that stopped me, more than obedience to his wishes.

  His walk seemed to take far longer than was possible, passing down and down into that place, far beyond the museum’s walls, until the true size of those great basalt blocks became apparent, and he was just a tiny form moving amongst them, as the wind whipped at his clothes, growing stronger and stronger, its unseen voices raging and fluting.

  He turned about one block, lost to sight on the instant, and a moment later I heard the scream that has stayed with me ever since, and lurked in every dream I have had. It did not seem, to me, like a sound Kevin would ever have made, but it was human, without doubt, lost and alone and in dreadful fear, and then gone, cut off and silenced by some invisible stroke.

  The machine-builders showed no discernible emotion, simple scientists whose experiment has demonstrated some unfortunate but undeniable conclusion. They looked towards the Yet to Come, as if confirming that whatever lurked there, amidst the hints of mandible and carapace, had made its own record of the result, and then they looked back to the Then, and I did too.

  One of the cone-shapes, those hazy-edged silhouettes, had moved, come closer until it seemed almost within the confines of the museum. Seeing it, I saw something living, but of no classification of animal or plant that Linnaeus had ever known. Even so, some part of my mind was instantly casting my thoughts to odd, strange fossils I had seen, unnamed and indecipherable, curious relics that seemed to match no known phylum, incomplete fragments that might, yet, had once belonged to this: a great cone-shaped thing, with four snaking limbs sprouting from its top, one of which terminated in a nightmare bundle of tendrils and eyes, for without doubt it was looking at me.

  I saw something, then, that I have tried to deny to myself ever since, but the sense of it was so strong that even now I cannot dissuade myself from it. Staring into that alien gaze I touched a spark of something I recognised. No expression, no stance, nothing of the man I knew could have shown itself in that huge, unthinkable form, and yet I knew instinctively that what I looked on had last spoken to me with Kevin’s voice.

  Only our minds, he had said, and if they could send them forth, why not dra
g them back as easily, to mount another expedition at some later date, to some later date. What limits could a race know, for whom time was a road they could travel at will?

  Then Kevin’s compatriots did something to the machine, and the world I had known sprang back, leaving me blinking in the electric light as they dismantled what they had built. None of them had anything to say to me, and I knew that, Kevin gone, they would find some other suitable place for their tasks next year. My mayfly part in their aeons-long story had come and gone.

  And now Kevin is gone, too, and the department decays in a hundred subtle ways without his constant attention, and despite everything I saw that night, despite everything that I know, about him, about the world, I would welcome him back, if I saw him again.

  And I have faith, atheist as I am, that I will see him again.

  Some days, when visitors come, or when I must travel amongst strangers, I find myself watching their faces, looking for that spark of kinship that was enduring enough to cross the boundaries of species and ages to make itself clear to me. He is out there, in the Then, living amongst the living, breathing exemplars of the fossils I have loved all my life. He fights his peoples’ enemies and plans their exodus, and one day, I am sure, he will find the Now again. Any man, any woman, no restrictions on colour or creed or country. Sacrifice and resurrection: Kevin is gone, but Kevin may yet return.

  Prospero and Caliban by Adam Gauntlett

  Professor Extraordinarius Paulinus Sigurdsun, whose ears were badly burnt by the sun, searched the deserted pleasure yacht hoping to find a replacement for his hat, now lost somewhere in the weed. The yacht, the Agamemnon, late of New York, had been adrift in the green for a little under a year, Sigurdsun judged, and though her decks were beginning to feel unfirm, and her superstructure was pregnant with mould, she was still in good shape. A testament to her builder, not that whoever it may have been would care to see her now. A fine example of Victoriana was the Agamemnon. Sigurdsun looked forward, past the smut-spreading smokestacks, for her master cabins, and was not disappointed.