The Man Who Would Be Kling

by Adam Roberts

  ‘That you were still alive.’

  ‘Whatever you may have thought when you talked to us, before our journey, we were not fools. We knew the risks, and how likely it was that our journey would end almost as soon as it began, in death. Yet here we were! Still alive. And then I felt a more complicated, and a more shaming emotion. I do not believe that you Earth people have a word for it.’

  ‘A lot of our emotions are like that.’

  ‘I felt a sense of fear, mixed with a kind of horror of passivity that in turn was blended, somehow, with hope. You see, for my people it is very clear: there is truth, and there is error. There is nothing in between. And yet this emotion I experienced was located somewhere in-between. It was the intuition, I suppose, that we had been spared by the Zone because we were not human – that something, or someone, had recognised us as kindred. And that to remain alive we had to be – how can I say this? We had to be careful about falling back into habits of thought that might bring South Peckham Pentecostal Churches into our minds. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘You had to believe you were what you were pre—,’ I was going to say pretending, but that seemed impolitic, ‘what you were presenting yourself to the Zone as.’

  She nodded, slowly. ‘When Dallas woke me before dawn with shouting and grunting, I first came to consciousness in fear, and then – when I heard that he was barking his native tongue – in relief. I came out of the tent and saw him dancing and swinging his big blade at empty air. The eastern sky was dark but infused with the promise of light: it was just bright enough to see. “Dach’las!” I called out. “What are you doing?” He had shredded his tent, and was whirling like a gyroscope, stabbing and slashing the air. “Angels or Devils,” he howled. “All about me!” I looked, but did not see anything, at first, I mean.

  ‘There was nothing I could do – to go closer would be to invite him to slice me with his blade. I assembled our little camping stove and tried to light the flame, though the sparker wouldn’t spark. So I rubbed one of our six matchsticks against its abraser and lit the stove that way. Then I made myself coffee, and drank it watching my friend dance about. After a while he wore himself out, or else the visions he was fighting departed. The sun came up, sending streamers of light through the sky like whizzbangs and there were haloes, not one but many stacked haloes, around the head of Dallas.

  ‘Eventually he calmed down, and the haloes thinned and departed. “What did you see?” I asked him. “Was it them? We must not assault them, but must instead make overtures. We are diplomats, not invaders.” He scowled and muttered something, but his exercise had made him hungry, so he devoured two helpings of supplies and drank a whole bottle of water. When I pointed out to him that it was not logical to consume all our supplies at once, he swore at me in his native language.

  ‘“Logic is of no use in this place,” he told me. “This is a place of passion, not logic. This is a place of anger.” “I have not found it so,” I replied.

  ‘“It is a killing place,” he said. “It has killed thousands.”

  ‘“Not so many,” I said. “Not nearly.”

  ‘“But it kills!” It was like he was pouncing on me. “They kill!”

  ‘“They haven’t killed us,” I pointed out.

  ‘“Because they have recognised in me a worthy opponent – at last,” Dallas boomed, standing up and shaking his blade over his head. “They are letting me live so they can fight me! But they have underestimated me!”

  ‘“Fascinating,” I told him. “But illogical. They have not killed me either, and presumably do not regard me as a warrior.”

  ‘“Perhaps they consider you my squire,” he laughed.

  ‘“Logic suggests otherwise,” I said. And when he laughed in his face – actually came over to me, and levelled his big face next to mine and laughed, such that spittle landed on my cheeks – he repeated: “logic has no place here. This place is not logical.”

  ‘“The realm of illogic is precisely the place for logic,” I said. “It is crying out for the healing touch of logic! I reason that once we have solved the dynamic of this place, understood it according to the protocols of logic, then they will reveal themselves to us.” “And then I can fight them in single combat!” he said. “No, no, that is not the reason we came to this place. My friend, have you forgotten? We shall bring about a new age for the people of the Earth!” At this he said something that made me afraid.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘He said: “What care I for Earth? What do either of us care for these primitive people? Something grander is happening, and it does not concern them.” I realised then that he was – how can I say this without it sounding offensive? – reverting to a more primitive version of his species. He was no longer the kind-hearted, attentive, dedicated guy I had known for fifteen years… the Federation version of Dallas, you might say. He was now Dah’las, ancient warrior of an alien world.’

  ‘Wasn’t it better for you both that…’ I started to say. But I couldn’t think of a diplomatic way of saying that he was committing so convincingly to the play-acting, so I said nothing.

  I looked again at the kit-bag on the table.

  ‘There was no point in sitting around,’ Chillingworth said, in a thin, wheezy voice. ‘We packed up and continued down the valley, letting the mule drink from time to time. We came to a deserted village: some roofless houses with horizontal and vertical icicles of broken glass in the window frames. We looked into a few but there was nothing much inside. Faded children’s toys, torn rugs, books whose pages melted to crumbs and ashes when we opened them. We found an abandoned false leg in one of the houses: an old-style articulated prosthesis with a shoe on its wooden foot.

  ‘The valley turned left, and we climbed a shallow slope dotted with acacia trees. An empty village, dotted with poplar trees, was silent, Butterflies twitched through the sunlight. Most of the houses here were mud-walled, and several still had their roofs. I looked inside one, and the ceiling was a seething mass of spiders, fat as apples, skin like weather-stained grey leather. We left that place well alone.

  ‘Over the next hill and we found a large field filled with what looked like the broken off stubs of black and khaki columns. They were metal, and somebody had gone to the bother of arranging them in rows. Unexploded bombs, undetonated shells – thousand-pound bombs fat as barrels, thin torpedo-like shells, at the far end of the field slim shells like courgettes – all stuck in the soil as if somebody madly expected them to sprout to life. Some of them had faded Cyrillic letters on their side; some had English characters. “Maybe a graveyard?” Dallas said to me. “Perhaps warriors are buried here, and marked with these weapons.” “Possible,” I said. “But unlikely.” I didn’t like this field, I did not like its atmosphere. You Earth people say “vibe”. I distrusted this vibe. We passed on. Over the brow of the hill we stepped over a low tumbledown wall and found a field full of polyhedra. Deep blue, irridescing faintly with a kind of algae-green and a maple-syrup yellow gold.’

  ‘Polyhedra?’ I said, wondering if I had heard correctly.

  ‘Some were as big as a car. Some were small as those dice tabletop gamers use. Some had seven sides, some eleven, some even had thirteen and seventeen.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Was there writing on any of these poly, er, hedrons?’

  ‘Not that we could see. I wondered if whoever had arranged all the old shells on the other side of that hill – the old missiles from various historical Afghan wars – I wondered if they were in some way imitating these... shapes. But the shells were all in symmetrical rows. These were disposed into no pattern that I could see. Scattered about. Some gleamed with light when touched. Others were inert. And there were odder aspects: the smaller ones were just as heavy as the bigger ones.’

  ‘How heavy are you talking?’

  ‘More than a man. Less than a car. I don’t know. It was strange. Dallas was keen to carry one away as a souvenir, so he chose one of the small ones and heaved it, gru
nting and swearing, up. This he placed in his pocket, but it only ripped through the fabric and bruised his leg as it tumbled again to the floor. He blamed me for that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, there was no logic in the blame. But isn’t that the way with anger? At any rate, we walked on.

  ‘Eventually twilight came, attended by a great many insects, and we pitched our one remaining tent. We used a second match and lit a fire, against the cold of the Afghan night. Dallas grew confidential – though I had known him fifteen years, and attended many cons and events with him, he told me things that night I did not know about him. I am not sure if it would be appropriate for me to reveal to you what he said. It might be a breach of confidence.’

  ‘I understand your scruple,’ I said.

  ‘One thing, conceivably, is relevant. He told me he had been in love only once, and with a human girl. But he was worried that he would hurt her – I asked “emotionally, you mean?” and perhaps there was disdain in my voice. For emotions are a kind of pathology. But he said, “She was small and beautiful and fragile, and I’m a big lunk. A big brute.” Then he told me a story about the genitals of his kind, which are smooth when sex is only for recreation, but when it is for procreation they develop spines along the length of the shaft. “That sounds very painful,” I told him. “We aim to create a warrior in the act of sex,” he growled, “and my culture believes that a warrior is conceived as he is born – in blood.” I confess I had never heard this story before, and I consider myself a true-fan, well versed in all the ins-and-outs of all the different varieties of alien and human life. Besides, it struck me as illogical, and I told Dallas so. “Surely causing tissue trauma in such an intimate place would act against the chance of the fertilised egg successfully implanting?” “Maybe in a human female,” he grumbled. And then he began weeping again, the second time had done so during our time in the Zone.

  ‘There was a bright moon out, as round and white as a starship hull. And the fire radiated a great deal of light. There was no mistaking what he was doing. At first his weeping only embarrassed me. He kept saying this human girl’s name, over and over, and telling the night sky how sorry he was. And crying! And this, you understand, was not true to his species.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘At first I thought there were insects, but the swarm grew very quickly and very dense, and the moon was no longer visible. I grew frightened that we had violated the terms of our passage into the zone, and leapt to my feet. All I could do was slap Dallas, and try to rouse him to anger, but to begin with he was too miserable to react. I called out the few words of his language I had in my memory, and then found a stick and cracked it across his back. Finally he did grow angry, and picked up his blade and threatened me; and I felt the panic recede within me, and the rule of reason and logic resume.’

  ‘What about the swarm? Was it insects?’

  ‘The swarm drew back from us, and I do not believe it was insects. Whatever it was, it had killed our mule, and so we were in a pickle. We squeezed into the one tent, and slept badly, and when the dawn came we sorted through our luggage and reduced it to two carry-able backpacks, and then walked on. When the sun was in the zenith we rested in the speckled shade of some poplars, and Dallas slept. I did not, for I saw movement through the trees, and went off to investigate.’

  ‘Movement? I asked. ‘What – animals?’

  ‘I thought I saw people. I believed I had seen three people, and they were all wearing bright yellow hijabs, which surprised me because I thought hijabs were always black. They were carrying pots, one per person, and were making their way down a path towards a lake. But I was tired, and woozy, and I think I imagined it. At any rate there were no people by the lake, although there were some wild chickens.’

  ‘So you didn’t see any people in the Zone?’

  ‘Not living. We saw corpses. Many corpses. Many. Madness has no purpose. Or reason. But it may have a goal. There were people mummified by light and heat and wind. There were people whose arms ended in poked-out bones as if they had drawn back their flesh as a man rolls up his sleeves. There were many heads. Many heads in heaps and pyramids’

  I looked at the kit-bag, lying unopened on the table.

  ‘Pyramids of, what? Skulls?’

  She shook her head, with a precise motion. ‘There were some birds, but very few, and none flew close enough for me to see if they were biological creatures or – something else. We saw no foxes or jackals. The insects were, I believe, all miniature drones. Logically, there was a paucity of animals who might devour the flesh of the dead. It would decay in time, I suppose; but the actions of the climate tended to mummify it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘A head cannot be a skull if it still has flesh upon its bones.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, understanding.

  ‘Once I saw a machine, very large, many miles distant. It was shaped like a letter, but one of prodigious size. Perhaps a hundred metres long.’

  ‘Shaped like a letter? You mean an alphabetic letter? Which one?’

  ‘I did not recognise the letter,’ she said. And then, immediately, ‘Oh, I do not mean an English letter. A Hebrew letter, I think, with many spars. Or a hieroglyph. It had legs, and so far as I could see from my distant vantage, there were wheels, or caterpillar tracks, on the end of its legs. It had five legs, I think, and swung them round, and made a slow ungainly progress across the landscape. It passed behind a hill and I could no longer see it.’

  ‘How big did you say?’

  ‘It is hard to gauge. Longer than a passenger plane, I think.’

  ‘I have to tell you – the whole area is continually monitored. Nobody has seen any gigantic machines.’

  She nodded, again with a weird, automata-like precision. ‘I understand. There are several possible explanations. For example it might be cloaked in such a way as only to be visible from ground-level. All U.N. surveillance is from high altitudes, I believe.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Another possibility is that we had been transported into some other realm, far from human perception. Perhaps a real world, perhaps a simulation. I suggested this to Dallas, and he grew wrathful. “This is not simulation!” he boomed. “I know the dream from the real life!”’

  ‘Was this before or after you saw the giant, er, moving structure?’

  ‘After. We had spent an uncomfortable night, and we were having breakfast. Dallas was in a poor mood. “Has your so-called logic solved this place, then? Can you explain it?” I told him it was not a matter of explanation, but of theories that fitted the observable facts, better or worse. He mocked this. “Reason is thin, but courage and strength are not,” he said.

  ‘“In what way does your courage explain this place?” I asked him. I confess I was growing angry.

  ‘“We have died, and gone to hell – the hell of my people, where we will eventually confront Fek'lhr, the Satan of my people,” he roared. “And when we do I shall fight him!”

  ‘“Be serious,” I said. “We both know there is no magic or religion at work here. This is the technology of an alien civilisation. Perhaps it is a holographic simulation. Perhaps passing over the mountains, where we saw the giant blocks flying through the air, was some kind of transporter beam, and we have been taken to some other location, perhaps some other world.”

  ‘“That is what logic tells you?” he scoffed. But I could see he was intrigued at the idea.

  ‘“Perhaps,” I said, “the transportation has been not through space but time. Consider the field with the strange polydhera. Consider the insects: might they not be future technology? Maybe the Zone is sparing us not because we are dressed as aliens, but because we are dressed as beings from the future. Maybe the Zone is a time travel artefact, a consequence of something, or some people, in the future…”

  ‘“People?” he said, sharp-like. “You mean, not aliens?”

  A wind burlied down the slope and made the surface of the ri
ver shiver as though it was afraid. The acacias hissed.

  ‘“If humans, then advanced humans,” I said, hurriedly. “From an advanced civilisation capable of time travel.” But I confess I was growing nervous. There were swarms in the sky, away to the north. The quality of the light had become strange. This talk of non-aliens, of,’ she swallowed, ‘of, talk of humans, was making me nervous. As for Dallas, well. It only made him angry. “Cowards from the future,” he snarled. “Hiding. Why won’t they face me?”

  ‘“Whoever they are, violence is surely not the best frame of mind in which to encounter them,” I said. I believe I spoke reasonably! Do you not think so? But Dallas would have none of this. He grew furious, and began tearing branches from a nearby acacia.

  ‘“I’ve seen all the surveillance footage – a wasteland, of course. The whole place! What are we even doing here?”

  ‘“You ask that?” I said, astonished at him. Really he was not like himself. He yelled something in his native language. “You were the one who wished to come,” I reminded him. “You insisted upon it, in fact. I wasn’t even booked-in for this trip, my friend!”

  ‘“You said we would meet them!” he roared. “So where are they?”

  ‘“Let us go and find them, then,” I said. So we packed up and explored, but everywhere was the same: a wasteland. Weeds and dirt. The wind in the leaves. A small waterfall pissing into a pool. An old tarpaulin impaled on the many branches of a tree. A mass of red-black rust heaped into the shape of a car’s chassis.

  The swarm of insects followed us, at a distance. From time to time Dallas would stop and wave his blade at the swarm, and shout at it in his own language. As the sun set the swarm settled into the long grass two hundred metres away from us. Neither of us wanted to investigate.