Bête

by Adam Roberts

  I suppose this was the first time I ever saw a chip. Certainly it was the first time I ever saw a chip that had already been seeded into the brain of a bête. The chip itself was rice-grain sized, or perhaps smaller. What was noticeable about the thing the rat was holding was the spider-silk spread of its mesh. There was no gore on it: licked off, I suppose. I took the thing in my big, clumsy fingers and laid it in the palm of my left hand. With dabbing motions I spread the mesh out – some of the strands were short, some longer. The whole thing had a snowflake beauty to it. I scrunched it up in my hand.

  ‘I’m not wearing this,’ I announced, to the room in general.

  ‘You don’t have to wear it in your skull, Graham,’ said the cat. ‘Carry it with you. It’ll interface with any smart tab, or phone, or computer.’

  ‘Carry it.’

  ‘It’s your passport to being taken seriously as a negotiator,’ said the cat.

  I stood up again, for the third time, and amazingly this time I managed to remain on my feet – my foot, I should say. ‘The Lamb gave his life for this?’ I said. ‘He sacrificed himself to kick-start human-bête negotiations?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ hummed the cat, close by me. ‘The Lamb isn’t dead. He’s in your hand.’

  The calm after the storm would have unnerved me much more if I hadn’t deposited two-thirds of a bottle of whisky into my system. There was, I feel sure, some confused sense in my brain that I had to go back and release Mary from her house arrest – to reassure her that she was all right, and I was all right, and that everything was going to be fine. The sheet I had been wearing had fallen to the floor, and I did not deign to stoop to pick it up. More to the point, my drunken brain had forgotten than one of my legs was not working. It did not realize this, even after I began to stride purposefully out of the kitchen. I planted my good foot down forcefully, and then staggered hard as I tried the same manoeuvre with my other leg. Surprisingly, though, I was still upright. The wall had propped itself firmly against my left shoulder. I tried again and made for the stairs. Stopped. A deep breath, then a sudden burst of speed: two more steps, then two more, then two more, a repeated scurry-stop motion from dead foot to living one, and all the time I was bent absurdly far forward. Perhaps I was trying to keep my profile low so that snipers couldn’t pick me off. I went straight into the bedroom and realized only then that it was my bedroom. At that point it occurred to me that a lie-down might be just what the doctor ordered. I fell face forward.

  I lay in bed, so drunk I was barely aware of the ghastly, nerve-twanging pain of my ankle. I shifted my position and my whole left leg sang horrible songs of pain that jangled up and down my entire nervous system. I could feel, but not see, creatures of nightmare scuttering up and down my body. I felt like Gulliver, and all the tiny verminous Lilliputians were upon me. I thought to myself: they have no right to treat my body as a world to explore. So I drew in a breath to yell at them to get off me, when—

  This was the oddest part. The breath was inside my lungs, and was not coming out. I checked out of my body: slid down the bright-lit tube people talk about. I remember this experience vividly, although – drunk as I was – I don’t remember what I was thinking about the experience at the time. Presumably I was dying. Was I alarmed at this prospect? Relieved? I was still aware of agony in my ankle, but the leg itself stretched like a strand of hot spaghetti under massive gravitational pull. As it grew longer the pain became more and more diffuse, until with a snap I felt something separate from something, and I rolled forward, or tumbled, or sprawled through the open manhole of light. White light everywhere, and a sensation first of featheriness, and then of increasing cold. I got to my feet, and found myself in a snow-clogged wood. Everything was blanched with a weird overlit whiteness, as if the snow were somehow lit from within. The trunks of trees black against the white, hazy at the edges. I was seeing through fog, perhaps. My eyes were blurry with sleep, perhaps. I was naked. My feet were beginning to register the cold of the snow as pain, so I lifted my right foot and tucked it against my left thigh, like a crane, to minimize the discomfort. Something was moving, away amongst the trunks, a big creature. ‘Hello?’ I cried, twitching with the cold. ‘Hello.’ The creature was a stag. This was no mean beast. It was a stag the size of a house. It was a stag the colour of black vinyl. Its horns were winter trees. It was so big that if it stretched up its llama neck it could have reached that place in the sky where the moon was fixed. Gobbled the lucid fruit straight down. And then it would have been darkness time. And then there would have been darknesses and and the darkness maketh shadows within the light, and the light comprehendeth it not. My left leg was being scalded by the snow. Pains jolted electrically up and down the limb. I could not put my right foot down. My right foot was sealed or glued or frozen against its perch point. I was shivering all over my body, but I could not move. The hurt of it all almost overwhelmed me, except that a point of will focused in the middle of my forehead kept me conscious; and the will was a question I had to ask; and the question was to the stag: Can you speak? How can you speak? What can you speak? Can you speak? Only my determination to ask that question was keeping me awake and standing, only the stubbornness, and I shook with shivers that looked to the outside world like terror. The snow muffled all sound. I opened my mouth, and my top and bottom rows of teeth castanetted off one another, and I tried to breathe in order to speak, but when I tried this I discovered I had already breathed in, that I was already holding on to a breath in my chest. My brain was slowing down as the cold seeped in, the cold creeping through the seams of my skull. I had to think. First, expel all the air in my lungs. Then I would be able to breathe in, and then speak. The stag turned his prodigious head to look at me, and snorted cauliflower-puffs of breath from its nostrils.

  I breathed out.

  The next thing I knew, I was lying on a bed in a darkened room. The only light was a dim illumination coming from the half-open door. For an indeterminate length of time I lay, unable even to shift a limb, staring at the upright of orange-yellow light formed in the space between the doorframe and the half-closed door. My bladder was overfilled with fluid. I wanted desperately to move – to take a piss, to find some painkillers.

  Eventually I fell asleep again. The whisky I suppose.

  When I next awoke it was morning.

  The first thing to impinge on my awareness was: pain. It was morning, I saw. My hangover was all-encompassing and vile, as if the innards of my skull were rotting alive.

  I pulled myself round and sat up. My naked right leg, pale and skinny with slender white hairs. My left leg had been bandaged. I suppose the verminous Lilliputians were responsible for that. My bladder was overfilled. I felt sick in my stomach.

  ‘I,’ I said aloud, through a Gobi-desert mouth and a gravel throat, ‘am hungover.’

  ‘We have some Neuroaspirin,’ said Cincinnatus. Of course he was sitting there, his legs folded neatly away under his body, watching me. ‘And a glass of water. On the bedside table.’

  It was true. I drank half the water straight down; ate the pills and drank the rest. ‘How did you carry the glass of water through?’ I asked in a frog voice. ‘Did you balance it on your little kitty head?’

  ‘Mary brought it,’ replied Cincinnatus. ‘Since you ask. There are some things humans and monkeys are good for, I’m happy to concede that. I’m no humanist. Not,’ he added, ‘you understand, prejudiced against humans. In other contexts I am rather fond of the teachings of Erasmus and Saint Thomas More.’

  ‘I need to piss,’ I said.

  There was a walking stick propped against the bed; a proper teak pole with a capital omega handle. I don’t know where it came from, or whether it had been placed there by Mary or by bête. I got upright and my left leg flamed with agony. My calf muscle clenched, and I fell back. It took three goes to get on my feet, and my leg raged at me for even trying. I made it to the toilet, though, and relieved myself with long, Marmite-coloured piss. It seemed to go on for
ever. Finally it dribbled to a stop, and I sat down on the toilet to get my breath back.

  ‘Is that you, Graham?’ asked Mary, from the other room. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Breathing, Mary,’ I replied.

  I made my walking-stick assisted way back to the bed and sat down again. ‘I am overhung,’ I said. ‘I am hungover.’

  ‘Look thou not upon the wine when it is red,’ said the cat. ‘When it moveth itself aright. When it lendeth its colour in the cup. For at the last it hath teeth, and biteth like a serpent. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘By no means,’ I said. I’ve never minded having hangovers. I mean: it’s not that I enjoy them – but there’s something important about them, I think. Something to do with acts and consequences. Something to do with facing down extinction. The truth is we get drunk less for the intoxication and more for the aftermath. Because the experience of intoxication itself, whilst pleasurable (I guess), is fundamentally banal. Whereas the experience of hangover, of post-drunken-excess guilt, has about it something more profound; it carries within its temporary discomfort a mustard seed of existential resonance. It says: I survived, which is to say: I can survive. I poisoned myself, but I have physically survived the trauma. I humiliated myself in public, but I have psychologically survived the shame.

  Mary came tentatively into the room. I could tell immediately from her expression that she was scared; and from the way she kept glancing at Cincinnatus the cause of her fear was obvious enough. ‘So glad to see you up and about again, Graham,’ she said.

  ‘None gladder than I.’

  ‘There were such noises, last night!’ she confided. ‘Coming from the kitchen. Horrible noises. Between you, me and—’ a quick glance at Cincinnatus ‘—the gatepost, I grew alarmed. If the phone lines were still up I might have called somebody.’ She gave these last few words a heavy emphasis, in order I suppose to impress upon the bête present that she wasn’t prepared to tolerate any more of that nonsense. Only later did it occur me to me that in fact this had been her way of telling me that she was wholly isolated and cut off, and needed my help. Stranded in the wilderland with a platoon of bêtes; no wonder she was worried.

  ‘I’m sorry if I made a brute of myself, Mary,’ I said, through my still-crushing headache.

  ‘It wasn’t as if you had a choice!’

  ‘I could have said no to the amber toxin,’ I said, essaying a smile.

  ‘You must be starving,’ Mary said, seizing on the rumble as an excuse to scarper. ‘I’ll see about fixing some breakfast. I have some Vitabacon from the shop, and wild mushrooms I harvested myself.’

  When she had gone I asked Cincinnatus: ‘You bandaged my leg?’

  The cat had curled itself up into the shape of a tea cosy and was looking smugly at me. ‘Alas that we don’t have access to the internet any more, although various of us have various chunks of it in our chips. I, for instance, know that non-surgical management traditionally was selected for ruptures of the Achilles tension in less active or more elderly patients, those with medical conditions that would prevent them from undergoing surgery. Some surgeons feel an early surgical repair of the tendon is beneficial. The surgical option was long thought to offer a significantly smaller risk of re-rupture compared to traditional non-operative management, 5 per cent versus 15 per cent, footnote three. I’m sorry, though, that I’ve no idea what text is located in that footnote.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘On the other hand, surgery imposes higher relative risks of perioperative mortality, morbidity and other side-effects. The relative benefits of surgical and nonsurgical treatments remain a subject of debate; authors of studies are cautious about the preferred treatment. It should be noted that in centres that do not have early range of motion rehabilitation available, surgical repair is preferred to decrease re-rupture rates. Footnotes four, five and six. Considering the tools at our disposal …’ He stopped speaking, and licked his paw for a while.

  ‘That Turing test is based on a false premise,’ I said. ‘Never mind if a computer can simulate ordinary conversation – can a computer go mad as a hatter? That should be the real test. And you lot have passed it.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you to say,’ said the cat, with a pleased little wipe of its own whiskers.

  I rolled myself to the other side of the bed, somehow got upright, and hobbled with my stick downstairs and through to the kitchen.

  ‘Without wishing to bring your spirits down, Graham,’ said Mary as I manoeuvred myself awkwardly into a chair at the table, ‘you look like a corpse.’

  ‘I feel like one.’

  She put a plate in front of me, and despite myself – despite my illness, and the queasiness in my gut, and my grinding headache – I discovered I was very hungry. So I ate it all up, and then I drank two cups of black ersatz, and then I sat in silence feeling abashed at my poor table manners as Mary sat opposite me and partook of her own breakfast with considerably more delicacy.

  ‘These bêtes,’ I said. ‘In your house.’

  She looked at me.

  ‘They’re here because of me. I’ll go, and they’ll leave you alone.’

  There was the subtlest glimmer of fear in her gaze. She said: ‘I can look after myself, Graham,’ and I was able to parse how far this was a statement of fact borne out by her life so far, and how far it was bravado. I would say that the proportion of the latter was higher than it had been before I turned up.

  ‘I wouldn’t dare contradict you.’ I said. I wanted to say more, but I was finding it hard, in my physically wrecked state, to get my thoughts straight.

  Mary finished her breakfast, and lay her knife and fork parallel on her plate, like a statuary medieval knight and his lady on their tomb. ‘We’re are war, you know,’ she said, in a small voice.

  ‘So it seems,’ I agreed. Not every detail of the previous night was in my memory, but I had some sense of where the discussion had gone.

  ‘They know,’ she said, in a lower voice, ‘that I hunt. So. What if they decide I’m a war criminal? What if they decide I’m Klaus Barbie? The butcher of Berkshire.’

  ‘Believe me, Mary,’ I said. ‘They want something very particular from me. I shall make a guarantee of your safety one of the conditions of me giving it to them.’

  ‘To be put on trial in a beast court? With a jury box full of bêtes?’

  ‘Sounds rather Alice in Wonderland,’ I said, in an attempt to lighten the mood. It was a foolish thing to say; because of course it actually sounded at once nightmarish and only too plausible.

  ‘When you think what our kind has done to the natural world,’ she said, in a gloomy voice. ‘Why should we expect mercy from them?’

  ‘Maybe not mercy,’ I said, my stomach shifting under its unaccustomed weight of food, ‘but self-interest.’ A moment from the night before flashed up: the Lamb being savaged to death and rebirth in an eager mash-up of physical and sexual appetite. ‘They can’t wholly do without us,’ I said. A belch was on its way, and however much I tried to be discreet it was not to be stifled. I sat back.

  The cat said: ‘You should rest, here, for a week or so. Graham, I implore you.’

  I was packing up my stuff; which, since I had never properly unpacked in the first place, wasn’t taking me long. ‘That’s the cloven hoof – right there. No human being would say I implore you. You speak like a nineteenth-century novel, and it fucking shows.’

  ‘Rest,’ insisted the cat, in its weirdly soft, low-timbre voice. ‘And recuperation.’

  ‘You don’t know how fucking monstrous you are,’ I told it.

  ‘Is that a tu?’ Cincinnatus asked. ‘Or a vous?’

  I knew enough now to recognize when the beast was deliberately trying to wind me up. I even had enough self-possession to understand that it thought it was doing me a favour by so doing. It had made its HAL-9000 assessment of my capabilities and motivations, and concluded that what motivated me best was being angry.

 
; ‘You want me – OK,’ I said. ‘But me being here brings you into Mary’s house, and she doesn’t deserve the aggro. You’ve turned her house into a shambles – a word I use literally, and a thing about which I am more knowledgeable than most people.’

  ‘Your idea is,’ said the cat, ‘you leave the house, and we follow you. And thereby is Mary left alone and unmolested?’

  ‘Something like that.’ I hoiked the backpack onto my aching shoulder blades. The painkiller was wearing off and my hangover-headache loomed back at me. Worse, the extra weight made every stride I took on my left leg, no matter how much I suckered the step and hobbled, torturous. But I wasn’t staying.

  ‘Graham, you have only to ask. We have a deal, after all.’

  ‘No deal,’ I barked.

  I made it to the front door, before I had to stop; so I sat my arse on the edge of Mary’s empty umbrella holder for a while, until I got my breath back. Cincinnatus had strolled nonchalantly after me.

  ‘You agreed,’ the cat said reasonably, ‘to represent us to your kind. We shall broker a peace agreement. The sooner you make your way to the centres of human power and start us off, the sooner you will be finished, and can get on with the rest of your life.’ At this, the cat began purring and wagging its tail, and I knew it was laughing at me.

  ‘We have no deal,’ I repeated. ‘No deal in toyland.’

  ‘We have things to offer you,’ the cat assured me, ‘that will make a deal irresistible to you. Deal.’

  ‘No deal. What’s in the box. Your severed head.’

  The cat chuckled at this – actually chuckled. ‘Truer than you know. And yet you’re asking us to leave Mary alone,’ said the cat, curling its tail into a scorpion arch. ‘Hand washes hand, as the saying goes. You scratch my back, I don’t scratch your friend’s face to ribbons.’

  ‘I tell you what my leverage is,’ I said. ‘I have the Lamb in my pocket. If you fucking bother, or wind me up, I’ll find two big stones and crush it to dust. You understand?’