by Adam Roberts
‘That night we slept in the dark, with strange buzzings swirling around and above our cramped little shared tent. The next day there was a strange smell on the breeze, and we loitered, and Dallas practised dead-heading weeds with his blade. But that night the sun seemed not to set, and the whole land gleamed with light – every mountain shining with a pallor like moonlight, but all combined together to make for a neon world. And the land itself shifted – the landscape, I mean. Geometric forms, pushing up from below. We had made our tent on a slope that led down to the river, the easier to fetch water and wash and so on, and on the far side of the stream the land rose again. I sat and watched this ground crumble and reassemble into hexagons, each one three metres across – like the Giant’s Causeway, do you know it?’
‘I know it.’
‘And the following morning, one of the mountains had shucked off its geological rough edges and imperfections and had become as pure a pyramid as if the Egyptians had built it. I suggested to Dallas that we walk to that place, though I conceded it was very far way. The mere suggestion made him very angry indeed.’
‘Angry?’ I looked, once again with unease, at the unopened kitbag on the table.
‘He said, “Woman, no”. This was not his normal manner of addressing me, and I considered it disrespectful, and told him so. He said, “Woman, you have brought me to a land without honour.’
‘“So you wish to return, is that it?” I said. “Empty-handed, back to the mundane world?”
‘“Woman,” he said, and his eyes shone. There were elements within his eyes and they shone out golden-brown. “Where are you from?” There was ferocity in him as he spoke.
‘“The planet Vulcan,” I told him. “As you know very well!”’
‘“Cheltingham,” he barked. “Cheltinghaaam Ladies College.”
‘“Don’t be absurd!” I retorted, although I confess I was feeling scared now. “There is no such place on my homeworld with any such name –”’
‘“But you used to say you were half yooman, yeah? What was it, yooman mummy? Yooman daddy?”
‘“Dah’las –” I tried, but he raised his blade and advanced on me. “Don’t make me nerve-pinch you,” I screamed. I was very afraid. Then, pleading: “Dallas. Stop. We’re friends, remember?”
‘“My kind – friends with your kind?” he retorted, sounding a little more like himself. “Pass the time of day, and that. But friends? Cheltingham Ladies College, and daddy’s little trust fund, was it? And you know where I grew up?”
‘“You grew up as the scion of a great warrior’s family on Kronos.” But I could feel the sense of things starting to slip out of true. It was not a comfortable sensation. It was not –’
Chillingworth stopped, breathing noisily. She said, ‘It was the fraying, of…’ but her voice sounded like a kazoo. She coughed, and coughed, and finally spat out a chunk of something onto the tabletop, where it lay, glistening like eggwhite. ‘I told him, “Don’t be a fool, Dallas. It’ll get us both – it’s not just you. We are each supporting one another in this place”.’
‘“And me?” he bellowed, and he swung his blade through the air. “Dulwich? Dulwich my arse. Called it Dulwich on the signage, but it was Peckham, and a big borg-blocky stack of ex-council flats, with a distant view of Nunhead cemetey.” His native language was deserting him. I could hear it! Ex-Cansel. Nunedd. And though I shouted at him, “Kronos! Kronos! You grew up on Kronos!” the demons were on him then – even I could see them, and to him they were as real as the air he was breathing, and they were as real, too. “Three times a week!” he bellowed, as he cut at the flying creatures singing about his head as he danced back and forth. “Peckham Pentecostals, and my Mum could ’it me with her own air-dryer if I so much as scowled, right in the face. Week in week out.” We were attacked.’
‘Attacked?’ I repeated
‘It came out of the ground – like a dragon-worm, though smaller, I suppose. Big as an anaconda, but once it shook off the dirt and was airborne, its skin gleamed like oiled peacocks, and it had so many teeth they were spilling out of its maw and dotting the whole skull, and it riled out of the dust and reared up over us both. But it was Dallas the beast was after. It took him then. Oh, he roared, he roared, and I screamed, I daresay, though there’s no logic in such a reaction. And when I thought everything was lost I heard him bellow once again in his native tongue, in his warrior’s language, and the blade spiked through the back of the beast in a spurt of purple gore, and then he was slashing and slashing and the monster fell apart like a piñata full of butcher’s leavings, red gobbets and yellow membrane.’
‘He killed the beast? It was – an organic creature?’
‘He was standing there, panting. The demons were retreating, and as I looked up they looked like nothing so much as a flaw in the purity of the sky’s-blue, like a kink in reality. But reason told me that the whole zone was such a place, and the kink had purpose, and the purpose was – I think it was puzzled by us. Maybe it wasn’t quite certain whether it could see us. Or – ’
She stopped. Motionless.
‘Go on,’ I prompted.
Nothing. It was as if a robot had had its switch flicked off. I moved a little closer. ‘Are you all right?’
She looked at me, and for the first time I could see that there was something not right about her eyes. There was an intricate pattern of lines, a sort of radial grid, linking irises and whites.
I really didn’t know what to make of this.
I waited.
‘All right,’ she said, eventually.
‘It feels foolish calling you Chillingworth,’ I told her, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘What’s your first name?’
‘Mabel,’ she said.
‘And Dallas? What was his first name?’
‘Dallas was his first name.’
‘Mabel,’ I said, gently. ‘Can you see me? Are you blind?’
‘He wept,’ she said. ‘After that. You have to understand, the beast he had fought was still there, its remains, its butchered body parts. It stank – I could smell it: an oily, acetone sort of smell, decay and poison mixed with – I don’t know. Chemically stench. It was no hallucination, for he had seen it and I had seen it, and he had cut it to pieces with his blade. Then he stood over me, and sticky shreds of the creature were still sticking to him, draped over his clothing. But why wouldn’t all that please a warrior? Except that then he threw his blade away and sat down beside me, and started to weep. This was the third time he had wept. In that place.’
I tried to picture the big feller I had met crying. Not easy. ‘What was it?’
‘He said to me, “When I became a fan” and then he couldn’t speak any more, because he was wailing like a babby. Like a babby.’ Chillingworth looked around herself with her weird eyes; was she seeing the environment, or something else superimposed upon it? Or was she blind?
‘Go on,’ I urged, again. ‘Fan? Yes?’
‘I knew what he was saying,’ she replied. ‘Because I felt the same way. For him, it was all tangled up with his family life, with being brought up super-religious, his whole community – his world – super-religious. Peace and love and forgiveness, but policed with the sharp tongues of mothers and aunts, and smacks on the head, and mind games and threats and all the weight of the monstrous afterlife pressing down upon him. He realised from an early age, it was war. It was all war, God and Satan, family and individuality, his mother’s will against his. And he realised that he wanted war. But he wanted a clean war. He wanted it to be about bravery and strength, not cunning and shame and psychological pressure and guilt and…’ She stopped to try and get her breath back. ‘And all that.’
‘He told you all this?’
‘I knew him fifteen years. We were friends. He told me a lot. And I know that he floundered, caught in the net, until he discovered Fandom. And there it was! A new community – a new tribe. A new set of beliefs, not about purity and the ten commandments and hate-yourself, but about a fe
deration of inclusiveness. About a future without money and racism and religion, clean and rational and freeing. In his old life, Dallas had to conform. In his new community he could dress up, to play. And he played at his inner truth, which was that he was an honourable man and a warrior and that became his outer truth as well. And then the Zone –’
She was wheezing more now. She paused to scrape together enough breath to continue.
‘The Zone meant that play had to become serious. Had to become work. But then he and I thought we could leverage our passion into something bigger – first contact! Fame for us, fortune maybe. But validation, you know? Validation. All the sneering and the snideness rebutted. So we came here, and Dallas became the warrior he had always wanted to be. He was…’ She broke off.
‘You keep talking about him in the past tense,’ I pointed out.
‘At one point I had to remind him: “We came here to make contact,” I said. “And to take their message back to the world. Don’t lose sight of the mission, Dallas!” And he was scornful. “Why should they be any different?” he said. “Think you’ve escaped class, and then you discover it’s been in your face the whole time. You think they don’t prize aristocracy and despise the poor? Look where we are. You know what Afghanistan was before the Zone.” he said. “It was one of the poorest countries in the world, that’s what. It was the prole of the international community. What chance did it ever have? What chance did I ever have?”’
‘I don’t follow,’ I said.
‘It was the same for me,’ she wheezed. ‘I was cleverer than my…’ and she stopped. ‘All the hysterics and the gin and the family drama. Drama dignifies it: hysteria, rather. But logic was the…’ and she stopped again. She peered at me with her weird eyes.
‘Can you see me, Mabel?’
‘We always have logic,’ she said. ‘Logic and reason and self-control, self-control. Self-control is other-control, but the more crucial thing is. So, at any rate, I got away. I found something else. And friends. These were my people. And then the Zone happened, and it was clear to us that others, that extra-terrestrial. That. That extrasolar others had created it. That reinforced our sense that we knew the truth. Angels and devils – pff. Of course,’ she added, a strange thrum in her voice, ‘I know the truth about the Zone now because I’ve been there.’
I left it for a moment, but when she didn’t say anything else, I prompted: ‘What is the truth of the Zone, Mabel?’
But she was coughing now, not speaking, and there was something different about the noise she was making, a harsher car-engine rattle. She pushed her chair back and put her head on her knees, her whole body shuddered and she coughed, coughed, coughed. I didn’t know what to do. She was changing colour.
‘I’ll get you some water,’ I said.
I stood up, and at that moment heard the sound of an incoming shell. It was a most startling thing, because it brought me back to where I was. Where I had always been. And, a little way to the west, came the crunch of impact, and the shudder that passed through the whole building and made the windows rattle in their frames like packed wineglasses in a shaken box. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. Outside the sound of a car alarm, like a seagull – and how long since I had heard a seagull? Many years. I went to the window, and looked out. Pre-dawn light gleamed in the eastern sky. We’d been up all night. I hadn’t realised that the time had gone by so quickly. From my vantage I could see through the grey: two kinked and puffy pillars of black smoke about a third of a mile away, which meant there had been two impacts. Why hadn’t I heard the first?
I went across the hall and into the office and from there I called again on the city-grid landline – engaged, engaged, and then somebody was there. ‘I need a doctor,’ I said. ‘I have somebody at the UN Mission, and she’s really pretty poorly. I called hours ago and nobody has come.’
‘We’ll get to you when we get to you,’ said the person on the other end. An accent, Scandinavian, perhaps, or German. ‘There have been three blasts, and we’re undertaking triage.’
Three? Why had I only heard one? ‘Where’s the shelling coming from?’
‘We’re not sure. Seems that it might be from the Zone, but of course that is impossible. So perhaps it’s from China? Long-range?’
‘Christ,’ I said. ‘But why?’
‘Why? Who asks that question here?’
‘Please – I have a person here, Mabel Chillingworth, she has been into the Zone and come out again alive. It’s imperative we don’t let her die. For her own sake, of course, but also for what she could teach us about the Zone.’
‘That sounds a pretty tall story,’ said the person at the other end, and hung up.
I fetched a glass of water and got back to Mabel. She was trembling and doubled-over, but the coughing has stopped. She took a sip, took another, and then she slid off the chair onto the floor in a faint.
I am not a particularly strong person, but Mabel, though tall, was very thin, so I was able to lift her and get her up the stairs to a bed on the first floor. Here she lay on her back and moaned. I took a look at her hands. The space between her ring finger and her middle-finger had, on both hands, been opened up, a gash reaching right down, almost to the wrist. The same thing had happened to the gap between thumb and index. The flesh of the wounds was not open, or even scabbed; it was covered with skin. The lines of her palm curved round into the gap. It looked like an old wound, very old and part-healed. The fingers themselves were twisted, corkscrewed and kinked and all but the middle finger on the left hand had no fingernails left on them. They looked very odd.
Her ears were black and rusted with old blood scabs. It looked as though tiny claws had ripped at them over and over.
There was another high-pitched whistle, and I flinched, waiting for the impact; but it passed over head and the crump, when it came, was a long way to the south. The house barely shook.
Medicine, I thought. I didn’t know what, but it seemed a better bet than just sitting helplessly and waiting. I brought the red box – no white cross on its lid, of course, in this country –from the bathroom and rummaged inside. There didn’t seem anything very relevant to her circumstances. Should I bandage her ears? Administer a pain killer?
I went downstairs and rang a person I knew in the Defence Force, to see if there was any news on where the shelling was coming from. Nobody seemed to know anything. So then I went back up again. Mabel was awake.
‘Are you all right? Are you feeling any better?’
‘Hunky,’ she rasped, ‘and dory.’
‘Mabel,’ I said. ‘What happened to Dallas?’
She was lying on her back and staring, I suppose – though I never got to the bottom of what she saw with those strange, grid-overlaid eyeballs – at the ceiling. For a while she said nothing, and then she said, ‘I held him when he wept. We’d been friends for fifteen years. If I were ever to fall for a man it would have been him. When he’d finished crying of course he felt angry with himself. Felt demeaned. That made him cruel. And cruel to me. Before that, though, he was crying like a child and saying, “I’ve brought you to this, pal,” says he. “Brought you out of your happy life to die in Kafiristan.” Which was only half true, since I examined the prospect logically and determined it was worth the risk, and elected to come of my own free will. When his face was still wet he said, “Say you forgive me, May.” ”I do,” I told him. “Fully and freely do I forgive you, my friend.” But the forgiveness, maybe, made him think of his childhood, and the Peckham chapel, and that only pepped up his anger again. So he stopped weeping and wailing and broke off from me. Then he stood up and looked all about him, and put his head back and looked into the sky. Storm clouds were in the middest of the blue, now, only they weren’t clouds filled with rain, they were swarms of – I don’t know what they were, I still don’t know. Insects, maybe. Demons, maybe. Nanobots and miniaturised drones from some future war, manufactured by the million whose interacting perceptions and ordnance had shaken reality free
of its baseline, here, here, now, in Kafiristan.’
‘Drones?’ I pressed. ‘Like – miniaturised drones? Mabel, is that what you saw?’
‘And I tried to reason with him. “Your wrath is not logical,” I said. “Consider the facts and banish emotion from you. Other people have come into this zone and all died. We have survived, at least this far, and there must be a logical reason as to why.” “Hang logic,” he bellowed and took up his blade. “War is not logical.” And that was a puzzler, it truly was, because of course he was right. Diplomacy is logic, and negotiation is logic, and mutual interest and rational discussion are all logic. But war is when logic breaks down. “Why here?” he kept shouting. “You know why it is here of all places? It was war when Alexander the Great marched up on his velociraptor mounts. It was war when the Mughul emperor came with a million men. It was war when the British rode in, Victorians with machine guns, and tried to conquer, and then the Russians, and then the Taliban fighting everyone, and then the Americans, and now – me! It’s always been war. And you’ll say, Europe was always war too, why didn’t the Zone come there? Or Israel, or some Central African republic where they’re always oiling their antique AKs. And I’ll say that in those places you have war and peace, and in this place only war. It’s in the midpoint between Europe and the Far East, because Moscow and Mumbai, between the mountains of Tibet and the flatlands of the Sinai. It’s the centre of the world, and they saw that, and they saw that the meaning of that centre is always war. And that’s why I am here!”
‘“Be careful, Dallas,” I warned him, for the swarm overhead was coming closer, and expanding as it sank towards us.
‘“Shake hands, my logical comrade,” says he. “I’ll shake your hand before I slaughter you – fair fight, mind. Fair fight.” For the second time I was scared of him. For the second time. “If you come any closer I’ll have to nerve-pinch you,” I told him, but my voice was all starlings and wobblings and he wasn’t impressed. “You couldn’t nerve pinch a three-year-old child,” he told me, flat. “It’s always been play-acting with you, hasn’t it? Public-school drama society,” and he said spoke the words mockingly, draw, maw. “Dressing up and what fun what-ho. You think we’re aliens? You think we’re ET?” He wasn’t really shouting at me, you understand. He was yelling at the sky, and the swarm came down lower and by goodness and in all badness it looked mean. It was formed of mechanical locusts, black-bodied future-tech, millions of units. Enough to bring death to the whole world, or that’s what I thought then. “Look at us! Look at us! We’re not aliens,” he yelled. “We’re not even human beings, because human beings are complex, and we are one note. We are simplified human beings. You are what a human looks like when all the other aspects of humanity are reduced to logic. I am what a human looks like when everything is reduced to anger. I reckon I am closer to a regular human than you are, but we’re neither of us that close. You think we are? Look at us. We’re cartoon humanity, the one dimensional woman and the one dimensional man. You think this Zone thinks we’re alien? It didn’t kill us because we didn’t come up to the standard of regular humanity – it didn’t kill us any more than it killed our mules.”