by Adam Roberts
‘“Those mules,” I said, an answering spark of anger coming into me now, “are both dead.” But he scoffed at that.
‘So he launched himself towards me, and logic helped me obtain a kind of clarity, and the clarity reached out to the whole cool bright sky and the whole blocky polyhedral land. Dallas uttered his war cry, and brought his blade up above his shoulders, and I brought all my logical ratiocination to bear on the immediacy of this moment. One particularised moment, in time. The swarm overhead was twenty feet away, and had spread out into a ceiling that muted the sun, and I could hear the humming of their engines, or motors, or whatever it was that kept them airborne. He ran at me, my friend of fifteen years, my fellow Fan, and he kicked me hard. He lifted his heavy leg and kicked me hard, and I took it in the chest. Bruised me, it did, and I went onto my back. He was standing over me. “You know what these alien races really mean?” he said. “You want to know what this cosplay actually says? You in your pale blue and your reason and logic and cool command – you say middle class. And me, treating every day as if I’m going to die that day. Me with my rage and no way to express it but fighting, I say prole.”
‘“The Federation is a classless society,” I gasped, because it hurt to breathe and it hurt more to speak and I was wondering if he’d snipped a chip out of a rib, with his big hulking foot.
‘“That’s literally the most middle-class thing anyone can say!” he bellowed. He really shouted this time. “You can’t see it, like a fish can’t see water. Your captain owns a vineyard in France! Your humanoid android is a professor at Oxford! Your method of flying about the galaxy is to sit in a comfortable armchair in a suburban sitting room, watching the universe through a high-definition widescreen television!”
‘“It’s us, Dallas!” I pleaded. “It’s not me, it’s you and me. We’re both fans – you are, just as much as I am! It’s where we belong – not as one class and another, but as equals. Not as black and white, but equals. Exploring the universe together.”
‘“This show,” he yelled. “This show! You think they were taken in by our cosplay, even for a minute?”
‘“We are still alive,” I said. “Therefore logic decrees that we have managed to convince them –” I stopped, because I couldn’t be sure what we had convinced them of.
‘“We’re only alive if we get out of here alive, and we’ll neither of us do that. You’re going to tell me every scientist who’s come in here, every soldier and explorer, since the Zone first appeared – you think they didn’t face something just like this? None of them survived, and we won’t. You’re going to tell me why you think we’re not lying there, not breathing, in the foothills face down in the dust, just north of Bagram, whilst some UN observer peers at us through binoculars and tuts sadly to himself and goes back to his cup of green tea? And you know what? That don’t even bother me, May, because today is a good die to die!” And then he started shouting in his native tongue, the guttural language of that faraway planet, and the whole ceiling of locusts convulsed and lifted itself a metre, or maybe two.
My heart was hammering in my chest. I didn’t want to die, I didn’t. “You’ve been a fan for decades, Dal,” I said. “Don’t tell me you hated it, all this time.”
‘“Only look what I became, May! I became the Soviet alien – the Native American alien – the Black-man alien – the violent alien with the ugly face. This is who,” and he swore, “who – I – am!”
And he lifted his blade. Everything became clear to me, then. My thoughts were sharp as white light.
‘That’s when the ceiling descended, like a great mass if black hailstones. And when Dallas looked up there was glee in his face, because, well, you know why. Because he was proving his point to them, and to me, and to you too. That.’
‘So that was when he died?’ I glanced again at the unopened kit-bag.
‘They took his head. They took his head as he swiped at them with his big blade, and then they were all over them – and me too. Me they crucified, or that was how it felt, stretched me out, my hands pierced, and my feet too, and my own clear-thinking head the centre of the hailstorm.’ She stopped. ‘He didn’t really say those things, I suppose. My friend of fifteen years, my friend... I don’t know what he thought. I did not mind-meld with him before he died. I never did such a thing with him. What an invasion of privacy that would have been! Can you imagine what he would have said? The quintessential bourgeois entitlement, that not even the thoughts and inner-feelings of the proles be hidden from them! The essence of all oppression of the poor, that their privacy be perfectly eliminated! Well, no, he wouldn’t have used language like that, would he. That’s the point. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘Stay with me,’ I said. ‘The doctors should be here soon. We can take a full statement – you have amazing things to tell the world. Just hold on.’
‘I don’t know what he thought, as the cloud came down. But I would guess he was happy. He died fighting, and the – and they did more than simply stop his heart, or scorch his cerebral cortex, or whatever they did to those earlier explorers. They treated him as he treated them: with knives. He had one, and they had a million, and just for a moment he was plumb in the middle of dizzy dancing ropes of swarming machinery, curling around him. Then it was: cut through the neck, take the head, slice the body into twenty thousand parts, and it took half an hour, or it took a moment. I had my own worries then. The pain was very bad. My people are supposed to have a high threshold for pain. But, isn’t it possible that I do indeed have a high pain threshold, but that they exceeded it? Do you see what they did to my hands?’ She held her hands out to me. ‘And they did the same to my feet, if you take off these old fur boots you’d see. God knows why they did my feet too. And when they were finished – next day, I felt it was, a miracle that I wasn’t dead – I had been robbed of all my carefully cultivated composure. I writhed in the dust.
‘I saw visions. Dallas came back to me, at the head of an army – an army! Not a human army, mind. Autochthons. Metal. He said, “You know how the holodeck worked? It would create a terrain that moved under your feet, like a gym treadmill, as you walked, and you might trek for weeks through ever changing landscapes and never go anywhere.”
‘“It’s no holodeck,” I said, crying tears with the pain in all the limbs of my body. My face wet and my nose gluey with snot and my diaphragm plunging up and down to force odd emphases onto the words.
‘“It’s no holodeck,” Dallas repeated. He was whole again, and his brown skin was glowing, and there was a halo round his head, and I knew in my gut he wasn’t real. I didn’t know, and I still don’t know, if he was my imagination, or if he was them, somehow. “Doesn’t it make you think of something, though? The holodeck? You don’t move, the universe moves around you? The suburban sofa-chair, planted immoveable in front of the television. Eppur si muove!” There was lots of stuff like this, stuff Dallas himself would never have said. “The people’s flag is deepest red, but what about those characters clothed in this proletarian colour? They are the quintessentially disposable! What greater enemy than the Borg, and what are they but the nightmare libel on collectivisation and communism? No laws for the ruling classes, the captains, if they decide the prime directive ought to be disregarded then disregarded it is; for them the whole cosmos is a playground – alien women to seduce, alien men to oppress. There is even a machine, the replicator, that can make any product, rendering labour itself worthless and so guaranteeing the endless subaltern denigration of that whole class.” There was much more like this.
‘I believe I fell asleep, but the pain in my hands and my feet was such that I couldn’t sleep for long. Then I saw the sky full of craft – vessels – brick-shaped white-silver craft, and much higher up ankh-shaped craft, lampstands standing on their two splayed legs, white flattened sputniks with swollen trailing antennae, and here and there a green metallic gigantic spermatozoon and the anaconda beast I had seen before, I don’t know, but larger than ever, larger than worlds
, than stars, a great stiff hollow tube rumbling overhead and sucking up all the other craft, which were, by comparison, insect-sized.
‘I sat up and dragged myself over to my backpack and ate some supplies, somehow managed to get them to my mouth. There were some painkillers in there and I took them. If I’d had a walking stick I would have used that, but there was nothing save Dallas’s bloodstained and discarded blade; so I wrapped a globe of cloth around the sharp end and plodded away with this makeshift staff. My eye was on the mountains. I could not shoulder my pack, and the sun was out, and I knew I would not last long on the single bottle of water tucked into the back of my pants. But I told myself: the snow on the mountain tops looks inviting. That’s water, isn’t it? I can drink it, can’t I?
‘I don’t remember walking to the mountains. Only – I was there, and the water bottle tucked into my waistband was frozen solid and burning the skin in the small of my back – I have the scar,’ and she tried to turn in the bed to show me, but I pressed her shoulder back down and said I believed her. She took a while getting her breath back, and then went on: ‘It was a cruel bad country, and the cloth came off the top of Dallas’s blade, so I couldn’t grasp it except that it would cut my hand. And I’m sorry to say I left it there, for I would have liked to have brought it back. But there was a blizzard, too. Not like the blizzard we experienced on the way in, but a heap of snow flying up in strong wind. But my old friend and fellow fan and bold goer Dallas walked before and said: “Come along, May, my girl. It’s a big thing we’re doing.” The mountains, they danced at night, and the mountains they tried to fall on my logical head, but Dallas he held up his hand, and I came along behind him, though bent double. She never let go of Dallas’s hand, that logical girl, and she never let go of Dallas’s head, for though I could not bear the weight of my pack I would not leave that small sack behind. It ought to have taken me months to walk that countryside, yet in a twink I was in amongst the snow, and my face went numb and my hair stiffened and broke off; and in another twink I was on the outskirts of Kabul. The sun warmed me then, and the pain was terribly terrible when the feeling came back into my face and hands and feet.’
‘You had some kind of assistance, getting out,’ I said to her.
‘It’s all holding us off with one arm and drawing us on with the other. But isn’t that the logic of the universe? Maybe I should say tentacle, rather than arm. Maybe I should say metal prong. Jesus, I don’t know.’
She shut her eyes, then, and didn’t say any more, and I left her alone. She needed to sleep.
I made myself another tea and sat on the terrace in the dawn-light. A sinking exhaustion took hold of me. I dozed, and when I woke, with a jerk, the sun was two hand spans higher in the sky. Alí was at my side. ‘Sahib, the doctor is here, the doctor has come.’
Four
I went down, yawning, and shook the doctor’s hand, and the two of us went up to where Mabel was. Except that she wasn’t there any more. I searched the whole house in a hurry, but she was gone. I apologised to the doctor for calling her out on a wild-goose chase, and described Chillingworth’s physical condition so vividly that she insisted we had to locate her and get her medical attention.
Downstairs, her kitbag was on the table; when she had gone she had decided not to take it with her. I was still not ready, yet, to look inside it.
With Alí’s help the doctor and I did a quick sweep of the local area, but did not find her. I went to the lodgings she and Dallas had taken in Chicken Street, but there was nobody there. At lunchtime I took a break; Alí fixed me some couscous and fried vegetables, and I discovered I was very hungry. After eating I discovered I was very tired, so I slept for an hour. The ringing of the landline woke me, and I stumbled down to answer it with a gummy mouth.
‘We found her,’ said the doctor, though the whizzing and creaking of the telephone line. ‘But it’s not good news. She was wandering bare-headed in the midday sun for hours, and her face is badly sunburned and blistered. She died almost as soon as I admitted her to the clinic.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
Later the body was shipped, by land, to Peshawar where an autopsy was performed. The strange mutilations to her hands and feet aside, and disregarding the mess that she had made of her ears, there was nothing unusual about the body.
I screwed my courage to the sticking point, and opened her kitbag. But where I expected to find Dallas’s severed head, I found instead a prop, or some kind of object: metal and plastic, head shaped and with rudimentary features and a fuzz of black hair, but with yellow eyes, and pore-marked yellow skin. I handed this object over to the authorities. I’ve no idea what they did with it.
I went to Peshawar myself, and filed as detailed a report as I could manage. It was altogether an unusual case. Some of my superiors were minded to dismiss it: the whole thing a scam, or a mistake. Maybe Chillingworth and Dallas had holed up just outside the zone, conceivably even just inside, where the effects weren’t too bad – or maybe they’d enjoyed a kind of blind luck and that was why they hadn’t died. All the other stuff was too fanciful. None of it matched the satellite surveillance data. But there were people in the higher echelons who were persuaded that this was worthwhile data; or at least were persuaded that it was worth their time coming down in person to question me.
I was in a very nice Peshawar hotel, and three people came to debrief me about the whole thing: two women and one man, both much more senior that the people with whom I was used to interacting. We all sat round a table in the hotel restaurant. Coffee was served. A recording device was placed on the table, and angled to make sure it got a good rep of me.
They had read my account, of course; but they wanted me to go through the whole thing again, the story from start to finish. The man said nothing. The women would occasionally interrupt me, politely enough.
‘This Ms Chillingworth,’ said one, at one point. ‘Was she attractive?’
‘Fairly so,’ I said. ‘At least before she went into the Zone. Her ears looked a little strange. Late middle aged, but you know… handsome, you might say.’
‘You didn’t …?’ When I looked startled at this question, the other woman chuckled and said: ‘Rudy, your reputation precedes you, you know.’
‘Not afterwards, I suppose,’ said the first woman. ‘But you met her several times before she went in, didn’t you.’
‘Nothing like that happened,’ I said, trying, and I fear failing, not to blush. ‘I really didn’t get the vibe that she was interested in me.’ I was going to add I believe she was gay, but there’s no way a straight man can say so, especially after what I’d just expressed, without it sounding like sour grapes, or wish fulfilment: I’d certainly have nailed her, otherwise and so on. I held my peace.
‘Her parents are both dead,’ said the first woman.
‘Cirrhosis,’ said the second, pronouncing the word with medical crispness.
‘There was some difficulty locating next of kin, in fact, to arrange the burial. Go on, with your story, please.’
I went on with my story, took it all the way to the end. The final night, the early morning bombardment – it still wasn’t clear from where the shells had been fired, it seemed – Mabel slipping out of the U.N. House and later being discovered in the Babur Gardens, sunburnt and sunstruck and soon to die. ‘It was a hot day, was it?’
‘Not the hottest,’ I said. ‘But the sun can be deceptive, there. One shouldn’t go out without a hat, not at midday. And sunscreen.’
‘Why was she there, do you think?’
‘I’ve really no Idea.’
‘Tell us,’ said the second woman, ‘about the head.’
‘Well, when she clonked it on the table I assumed it was the severed head of Chillingworth’s companion, Dallas. To be honest, I was not eager to look inside the bag.’
‘Did Chillingworth tell you it was Dallas’s head?’
‘Not in so many words, no.’
‘Not in so many words?’
&nbs
p; ‘I got the strong impression it was his head.’
‘You got this impression from her?’
I thought back. ‘I don’t see where else that impression would have come from.’
‘What we’re trying to determine,’ said the first woman, ‘is whether Ms Chillingworth switched the bag, before leaving. Or whether this artefact is the same thing she carried out of the zone. And presumably into it.’
‘If she ever really went into the zone,’ said the second woman.
‘I don’t know the answer to that question,’ I said. ‘Though, for what it’s worth, I think she did go into the zone.’
‘What do you make the artificial head?’ asked the second woman.