by Adam Roberts
‘It’s a puzzle. It looked to me like a prop. Yellow skin and yellow-tinted eyes. Speaking as, what would you say? One of their fellowship – as a fan, I mean – I should add: you might expect it to resemble an old TV actor called Brent Spiner. But it didn’t look like him. I suppose, if pressed, I would have to say it looked a bit like Dallas. Not much, but a bit. It has a similar head shape, I guess: wide and quite round. And the features on the artificial head are more, what’s the word…? Generic than were Dallas’s. Plus it obviously didn’t have his colouration, or any of the modifications to his teeth or forehead. The thing was heavy, all metal and plastic. I heard there was some kind of gel where the brain should be?’
Nobody replied, so I prompted them. ‘Was there?’
‘There was,’ said the first woman.
‘And?’
‘You saw them going into the zone?’ the second woman asked. ‘Chillingworth and Dallas both?’
‘I saw them riding out of Kabul on mules. But I understand surveillance followed them into the zone, and a little way into the mountains too. Isn’t that true?’
‘Two people on two mules,’ said the second woman. ‘Maybe that was Chillingworth and Dallas. Maybe it was Chillingworth and some kind of crash-test-dummy, of which the head is the only part she brought out again. Maybe two different people altogether.’
‘Rudy,’ the first woman put in, ‘you believe Chillingworth’s story.’
‘I believe that she believed it,’ I said. ‘And I suppose I believe that some of it happened. Yes.’
‘That she actually went into the Zone? And came out again?’
‘I do believe so. On balance, yes.’
‘In which case,’ the second woman asked me, ‘how do you think she managed it?’
I’d been expecting this question, of course; but that didn’t mean I knew how to answer it. ‘Well,’ I said, and looked at the silent man. He did not return my gaze. So I looked around the hotel restaurant, plushly empty at that time in the morning, and then through the room’s tall windows across the buildings and gardens of Peshawar. The peaks of the mountains – different mountains to the ones Chillingworth had crossed, of course – rose over the tops of the town, a stone tsunami poised ever to fall and falling never.
‘Well?’
‘Well let’s say she did go in. And Dallas, too. She told me some pretty far-fetched things, which may or may not have been hallucinations – I mean, she was perfectly aware of the possibility of hallucination I’d say, and took what steps she could to check the veracity of what she was seeing. Some of what she saw may have been figments of her imagination, perhaps under unusual conditions. But the fact that she saw weird stuff shouldn’t phase us. The Afghanizone is all weird, wouldn’t you say? Weird is the height and the breadth and the depth of that zone.’
‘It’s not the things she says she saw,’ said the second woman said. ‘It’s that she survived. Forty-one people, I don’t need to tell you, have gone into the Zone, and all of them died or lost their minds. Why should she be the one person not to suffer that fate?’
‘We know the zone is capricious,’ pointed out the first woman. ‘Maybe this is just another caprice.’
‘With respect,’ said the second woman, ‘insofar as capricious implies a governing intellect, we don’t know anything of the sort.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it, obviously,’ I said. ‘Chillingworth believed that the zone is something caused by extra-terrestrial activity. I know that’s not a theory with a lot of official traction …’
‘Indeed,’ said the second woman, in a deep voice.
‘But she believed it. And she believed that by dressing up as a science fiction alien she would placate whatever powers were behind the zone.’
‘It’s hard to credit that she really believed that,’ said the second woman. ‘As if there’s a little green person, sitting in an invisible surveillance bubble over the middle of Kafiristan, who is saying, oh, that human being is dressed in standard twenty-first century clothing, she must die, ah, but these two are dressed as characters from an old science fiction television show – they get to live.’
‘Presumably that’s not how it happened,’ I said. ‘But, you know. Who knows? Chillingworth strongly suggested that her survival, and Dallas’s survival, depended upon the strength of belief with which they inhabited their roles. If they genuinely believed themselves alien, they did better. When their faith faltered, the Zone began to turn on them. The way Chillingworth told it, Dallas died because he went full meta on his role-playing, starting critiquing the underlying show… He lost the purity of faith that inhabits true cosplay.’
‘Play,’ said the second woman. ‘Like children?’
‘Children have an unexamined wisdom about play,’ I said. ‘They don’t self-consciously pretend to play; they just play. They enter wholeheartedly into the role, the game. Kids are better at play than adults. Maybe that’s what this is about.’
‘Doesn’t seem very likely,’ said the second woman. And the first added, ‘It would be hard to justify sending volunteers into a probably fatal environment with the advice that they should play their way through, like little children.’
‘Well, when you put it like that,’ I agreed.
At this point the man made his one and only contribution to our discussion. He spoke, with a higher-pitched, rather more flute-like voice than I would have expected from his long, seamed face. He said, ‘I say to you, except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’
The women ignored this. ‘Maybe the zone was placated, as you say, or otherwise bamboozled by these two pretending to be alien life forms,’ said the first. ‘Or maybe it was something else.’
‘Or maybe it was nothing,’ said the second woman.
‘Maybe the zone is more interested in stories than science,’ I offered. ‘The other observers who have tried to penetrate it have been scientists, yes? Well maybe that’s where we’ve been going wrong. These two were dressed as characters from a TV show first broadcast forty-and-some years ago. So what if the Zone is the product of aliens, from a world forty-light-years away and they came here not to meet us but because they were really big fans of …’
‘I don’t believe this to be a fruitful line of enquiry,’ said the second woman, briskly.
There was an embarrassed silence. Then the first woman said, ‘Is there anything else?’
‘There’s one other issue,’ I said. ‘The zone Chillingworth says she passed through was uninhabited, which is what we would expect. Uninhabited by human beings, I mean. Corpses, yes; but no live people. Then again, she was clear that there were other… things. Some of those were, she said, like flying demons or monsters. But many more were tech. She was clearly talking about really high-spec technological devices – swarming drones. Maybe future tech?’
All three were looking at me.
‘Rudy,’ said the second woman, with a warning tone. ‘Don’t make a fool of yourself.’
‘Well,’ said the first woman, briskly, as if there were nothing more to say. She got to her feet. ‘Thank you, Rudy. You have been… helpful.’
When she got up, the other two got up as well, and of course I followed.
‘Can I ask?’ I asked. ‘Do you happen to know where the head is now?’
‘In a research facility somewhere’ said the first woman. ‘California, I believe.’
And there the matter rests.
Five
Except that, of course, it doesn’t rest. It is the opposite of restful. I’ve hardly had a whole night’s sleep since Chillingworth came back from the zone. It’s the dreams. They keep waking me up. Now, I know there’s little more boring in this our sublunary world than hearing other people recite their dreams, so I guess I’m craving your indulgence. Maybe they’ll do some research on the head that will reveal all, and release the news to the world. I’m not holding my breath on that. Maybe they’ll finally locate the command centre from the zone – assuming it has o
ne – and bomb it to crumbs and dust and that’ll be that. I figure they’re trying to bomb a place, when what they need to be doing is bombing a time, or a state of mind, or an abstract concept. I don’t know. When I kept waking up, breathless (I’m not holding my breath because I have no breath to hold) and sweating and thirsty, I’d say: it’s the climate here. It’s the snafu’d air-con. But I was rotated to a posting in Glasgow, and I’m still doing it. Waking up stare-eyed. I’ve gone from never remembering my dreams to being unable to forget them.
I’m there. They’re there. Suppose they sweltered here three thousand years patient for our destruction? I see Dallas’ back as he strides off, and the bursting geometric pattern the sunlight makes me think I’m looking through a camera lens, rather than through my eyes. To act can be decisive, but there is a greeting beyond the act. There’s an ox, I think, which may be more Indian than Afghani: lugging the earth, hauling ploughlines through the solid world so that there’s grain to eat next year. And it is this big brown ox that speaks to me: ‘one day the zone will disappear,’ it says, giving me the side-eye because it can’t give me any other kind of eye. I can feel the heat falling on me hard, and the light dazzling mine eyes. Mine eyes, thine eyes. ‘I’m not sure I believe that,’ I tell the ox, but already I’m feeling that bat-flutter inside my ribcage, and sweat is pinning and needling my skin, and I feel the gut-panic. I want to wake up, and I can’t yet wake up. But why should the prospect of the zone vanishing alarm me? Wouldn’t that be a consummation devoutly to be wished? I mean, wouldn’t it? Life could go back to the way it was before, except that obviously it couldn’t, and wouldn’t. The future would be haunted by the past, and more to the point, the future would be haunted by the past’s dream of the future. Isn’t that the whole point of the zone? Its weirdnesses and dangers, its glamour and strength? The weird reweaving of time and cause-effect and threat and so on? What would be left? The odd artefact, maybe. Echoes in the rooms of the world, where women and men stop for a moment, and stretch their spines with a hand on one hip, and turn their heads just enough to the right to see through the window, all in unison, and gaze without even really registering it over the rooftops, fishscaled with tiles, slick with sun-shine as if wet, and the drones in the air, and the birds in the trees, and the distant irregular line of the horizon. At any rate the Ox is having none of this nonsense, and says, ‘man, one day the zone will vanish, and at that moment you will finally understand what the zone is.’ That thought fills me with an acid sense of dread, sifting through my torso, and I start to cry out, no, no, it’s not there to be understood. And the Ox speaks for a third time and says: you can understand with your head and you can understand with your heart and there is a third mode of understanding …’ And the beast says nothing more, because nothing more needs to be said. But I don’t like it. What do you mean? I shout. Depending on the dream, I might shout different things, but the emotional freight is always the same: panic and anger and a deep sense of revulsion. So for instance, I might shout: what do you mean, the future will be haunted by the past’s dream of the future? What does that even mean? That would be when I wake up, usually. Anxious and sweat-wet and panting. Gasping. It’s a very untidy sort of sound, gasping. Don’t you think?
I don’t have to wait until the zone disappears, assuming it ever disappears, to know what the zone is. I know what the zone is, now. So do you, the you who is reading thing. How can you not?
About the Author
Adam Roberts is the author of twenty novels, most recently By the Pricking of Her Thumb (Gollancz 2018) and The Black Prince (with Anthony Burgess, Unbound 2018). He has a day job, teaching English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and lives in the easternmost spur of Berkshire with his wife and family. He considers Rudyard Kipling the finest writer of short stories in English.
NewCon Press Novellas Set 5: The Alien Among Us
Nomads – Dave Hutchinson
Are there really refugees from another time living among us? And, if so, what dreadful event are they fleeing from? When a high speed car chase leads Police Sergeant Frank Grant to Dronfield Farm, he finds himself the focus of unwanted attention from Internal Affairs and is confronted by questions he’s not sure he ever wants to hear answered.
Morpho – Philip Palmer
When the corpse on the mortuary slab sits up and speaks to Hayley, asking for her help, she thinks she’s losing her mind. If only it were that simple… Philip Palmer delivers a tense fast-paced tale of a secret society that governs our world from the shadows, of immortality at a terrible price and events that lead to the overthrow of social order.
The Man Who Would Be Kling – Adam Roberts
When two people ask the manager at Kabul Station to take them into the Afghanizone he refuses. What sane person wouldn’t? Said to represent alien visitation, the zone is deadly. Nothing works there. Electrical items malfunction or simply blow up. The pair go in anyway, and the biggest surprise is when one of them walks out again. Nobody survives the zone, so how has she?
Macsen Against the Jugger – Simon Morden
Two centuries after the Earth fell to alien machines known as the Visitors, humanity survives in sparse nomadic tribes. Macsen is an adventurer, undertaking hazardous quests to please Hona Loy. Macsen never fails, but this time he is pitted against a deadly Jugger. Can he somehow survive, or will it fall to his faithful companion Laylaw to tell the tale of his noble death?
www.newconpress.co.uk
Table of Contents
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About the Author