Bête

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I’m Graham Penhaligon,’ I said.

  ‘I know who you are,’ the Major General replied. ‘I googled you.’

  ‘I thought the authorities had turned off the internet,’ I said.

  ‘I am the authorities!’ he said, and showed me his thirty-two white teeth. ‘Actually, we have our own internet, in here.’

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ I said ‘I’ve been a little out of things.’

  ‘Living like a wild animal in the woods!’ Hetheridge boomed. ‘I’ve heard. What we did was download the internet, prior to the outage. Who knew you could do such a thing? But there you have it. Our own private double-you, double-you, double-you. We couldn’t run things without it. Harrison? A chair, for Mr Penhaligon!’

  A subaltern brought me a chair, and I sat down. Major General Hetheridge did not sit. ‘So shall we crack on, Graham? Or do you want to expend further time and energy on chit and chat?’

  I took a breath and plunged in. ‘The bêtes south of Reading – over, um, I don’t know how large a geographical area. They constitute one loosely affiliated tribe. Not all of them, I think. But most of them.’

  ‘We know all about the bêtes south of Reading, my man,’ said Hetheridge. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, I spoke to their leader. Which is to say, he spoke to me. He sought me out.’

  ‘The Lamb, you mean?’

  I glanced over at Preacherman, and saw that he was looking very intently at me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the fucker.’

  ‘Why would he seek out you, of all human beings, Graham?’ asked Hetheridge. ‘You don’t mind me calling you Graham, do you, Graham?’

  I met the feller’s gaze. His eyes were small and – if you’ll excuse the cliché – twinkly. I can’t think of a better word. But his face was large and red and the texture of his skin was coarse. The hair on his uncovered head was close-cropped, black, bristly. The longer I stared at him, in all his human status and authority, the more I was struck by his resemblance to an animal. Except for his eyes. His eyes had a positively chip-like liveliness to them.

  ‘Mind?’ I said. ‘I’m perfectly mindful.’

  Hetheridge didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he smiled at me. ‘You’re a canny one,’ he said. ‘A touch slippery. A tad angry, I think. I like that in a man, though. Fighting spirit. All right: so – Mr Penhaligon? And what: the bêtes came to you because they know there are eight hundred thousand human-quisling bête-lovers and environmentalists and third-agers who wouldn’t get past my front door, even if they stood at the threshold and screamed they had personal authority to negotiate on behalf of the Pope of All Bêtes himself. But you – I watched your film. You shot that cow in the head. It begged most piteously for its life, and you lifted your pistol in cold blood. Shot it dead. I’ve a whole army under my authority currently engaged in doing that. You’re one of my kind.’

  ‘A sadly neglected military strategist,’ I said. ‘That Michael Hutchence.’

  ‘You’ve got past my door. And that’s – a thing! That truly is. But you’ll have to spell it out for me, Penhaligon, in words of one syllable, because I’m a gruff military man and don’t understand such nuances.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said mildly.

  He smiled broadly. ‘Indulge me, Penny. Explain to me the leverage.’

  I wouldn’t have thought that anybody could have found a way of addressing me more capable of annoying me than calling me ‘Graham’; but by abbreviating my surname in this fashion, the Major General had chanced upon one. I swallowed my anger.

  ‘No peace talks without leverage, eh?’

  ‘Real world, Penny, real world. Or would you prefer a discussion about the ontology of consciousness?’

  ‘I’m the messenger, nothing more than that,’ I said. ‘My guess is: the leverage is the sclery. My guess is the Lamb wants to trade that against securities for his people. But I don’t know, I’ve been out of the loop. You tell me. Has it been a problem, down here?’

  ‘Oh we’ve certainly had deaths from sclerotic charagmitis. Quite a few, actually.’

  ‘But I’m assuming not an epidemic, right? I’m guessing the Lamb is holding back whatever he has by way of minions, whichever vector he has decided will best deliver the germ – insects, maybe. Rats, cats, fucking wombats, I don’t know. But I’d guess he has them, and I’d guess he’s holding them in reserve until he’s had a chance to chat with you.’

  ‘Leverage,’ said Hetheridge, nodding.

  ‘The sclery would go through a town this crowded in a week. You’d be piling the corpses in pyramids high as Egypt, and burning them with white phosphor to get rid of them.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hetheridge, after a moment, ‘war is what I understand. And I understand it well enough to know that peace negotiations are also a form of war. Does that sound paradoxical? It’s not. Most of what happens at negotiations are not to do with the content of discussion. Most is about who sits where; who has the better array of power tells, who dominates. Who bangs his shoe on the table, and who simpers feebly. Who is able to impose his will on the choice of biscuits. Once you’ve done that, you’re in a much better position to steer the negotiations your way.’

  ‘You mean you won’t go to the Lamb,’ I said. ‘The Lamb had better come to you.’

  ‘I mean that me sitting on a chair in the middle of a field chatting with a chunk o’ mutton on four legs would not play,’ Hetheridge said. ‘Not play in whatever the UK equivalent of Peoria is.’

  ‘Peckham?’

  ‘I mean,’ the Major General said, jabbing his hand down in a karate motion to emphasize his word. ‘That we are always of course open to the possibilities of peaceful negotiation. But I won’t stroll into the countryside. And I dare say the Lamb won’t come trotting through the streets of Reading. People here are positively ravenous for kebab meat, you know.’

  ‘He’s here already,’ I said.

  ‘Is he.’

  ‘I think the bête mentality cares much less than we do for all that alpha-male dominance-submission status posturing bollocks. I think he’s happy to concede all that. I think he just wants to cut to the chase.’

  ‘You think that?’ drawled Hetheridge. ‘Then you and I disagree about bêtes, Penny. They’re not just the chips, you know. They’re the chips plus the animal’s wetware, and that latter is precisely as obsessed with in-group pecking orders as us primates. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s in my pocket.’ I fished out the handkerchief and unwrapped it. ‘Isn’t that an absurd thing to say? But it’s true. He’s literally, not metaphorically, in my pocket.’

  ‘That’s the Lamb,’ said the Major General.

  Preacherman spoke for the first time: ‘Graham!’

  ‘Jason,’ said Hetheridge, without looking at him. ‘Control yourself.’

  ‘Tat,’ Jazon said, ‘he didn’t tell me he had the Beast of Revelation in his actual pocket! Gray, you sat opposite me in that pub with the devil in your pocket – and you didn’t say anything?’

  ‘I figured you wouldn’t take it well,’ I said.

  ‘Oh get thee behind me, Satan!’ Jazon cried, with rather splendidly melodramatic intensity.

  ‘Jason!’ said Hetheridge sharply. ‘Don’t make me remove you. So, Mr Penhaligon. That’s actually the Lamb? Or is it some kind of proxy device?’

  ‘I was there at the, eh, ugh, the extraction. It wasn’t pretty.’

  ‘And it has come here to talk – to me?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How do you propose we actualize that? Feed it to the regimental goat?’

  ‘You really have a regimental goat?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the Major General. ‘And it’s dumb as a stone. But I’m not fetching it from barracks to feed it a chip.’

  ‘You could just plug it into a laptop,’ I suggested.

  ‘Ah!’ said the Major General. He pondered for a while. ‘Daisy, can we do that?’

  I noticed for the first time that three uniformed
military officers were literally standing attendance upon the Major General. One of these – a man, despite the name used to summon him – stepped forward. ‘We can plug it in, see if it’ll talk. Are we sure it is what it claims it is?’

  ‘It doesn’t claim anything,’ said Hetheridge. ‘Penny here is doing the claiming. But all right – fetch me a tablet, let’s see what comes out of the speakers. Maybe it can prove itself that way.’

  As they were fussing about setting up a machine, Preacher­man sloped over to me. He was doing his Knight of the Doleful Countenance impression. ‘Graham,’ he said. ‘Mate! Please! We were friends!’

  ‘Come on, Jaze,’ I said. ‘Don’t use the past tense. You fucking pot-of-toss.’

  ‘I’m bitterly disappointed.’

  ‘Bitter as in beer?’

  ‘This is not a fable,’ he said. ‘The Revelation of Saint John is not some vague gesture in the direction of prophesy – it’s exact. It’s rather frighteningly specific, actually. You’ve let me down, Gray. You tricked me, Graham.’

  ‘Let’s say I agreed,’ I told him. I felt oddly awkward sitting down whilst Jazon stood, but the mere thought of getting up made my legs ache. ‘Let’s say you’re right. Can’t we use the long spoon?’

  ‘Spoon,’ he said. ‘Is that another of your Matrix references?’

  ‘No, you fucker. It’s the proverb. Sup with the devil, use a long spoon. But, you know, sup, all the same. Because, you know what’s at stake? You want to see this town destroyed? You want that? We’re still friends, you wanker, and we always will be.’

  ‘I’m not happy,’ said Preacherman. To show that he, indeed, was not happy he stomped sulkily off to the far side of the room and sat down.

  But he was the only unhappy one. There was a palpable buzz in the room. People were excited. Major General Hetheridge disappeared, and returned five minutes later. ‘I’ve had a chinwag with the Paym,’ he announced. It took me a moment to realise he meant PM. ‘Full steam, gentlemen, ladies. Let’s see what this beastly diplomat has to say for itself.’

  A young man in a blue jacket and jeans took the Lamb from me, and laid it on the table. He held in his hand what looked like, but presumably was not, a giant cotton bud. With this he combed out some of the silk-thin threads from the central chip against a flat pad that was, in turn, plugged into the machine. There was a hush of excited anticipation.

  The screen flickered to life. A screen saver pattern of wiry spirals started writhing, and the speakers made a series of coughing sounds. ‘How pleasant to have the power of speech again,’ said the laptop.

  ‘It’s like that scene in Skyfall,’ I said absently. My heel was starting to sting, and I leaned forward to rub it.

  When I sat upright again there were two rifles pointed directly at my face. ‘The fuck?’ I said, but in a shrunken voice.

  ‘What did you say?’ snapped the soldier who had originally escorted me up the stairs.

  ‘The lieutenant is asking you,’ Major General Hetheridge said sharply, ‘to repeat what you just said.’

  ‘I said it reminded me of that scene in …’ I looked over to the laptop, and saw that the blue-jacket guy had snatched the chip away from the connection pad. Everybody in the room was looking intently at me.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Take him downstairs,’ said Hetheridge, in a severe voice.

  I was helped to my feet. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean—’ But I was already out of the door. Behind me I heard the Major General’s voice: ‘—connected long enough to do damage?’ And the other man’s reply: ‘With QU, long enough is hardly an issue …’

  The door slammed.

  Most what I felt was a sense of foolishness as I was manhandled down the stairs. Two squaddies, one on each side, each had a meaty hand under an armpit, and a third soldier followed behind with a rifle aimed at my head. I almost dropped my stick several times. ‘Steady!’ I said.

  We went down past the entrance lobby and into the subterranea of the place. A hefty door was unlocked and I stumbled into a white-tiled room. By the time I turned about the big door had been slammed. ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  The cell was a large, square room with slatted benches along two of the walls. Two men were seated upon these, and both looked up expectantly, although their expression wilted when the door slammed.

  ‘Evening,’ I offered. Neither replied.

  5

  Gaol

  I had been out of the loop, I know. So the question as to the present-day legal status of bêtes was beyond me. For all I knew, their legal equivalence with humanity had been withdrawn. Revoked. Overturned. The slaves returned to bondage, the cows marched back to the slaughterhouse. But a moment’s thought ought to have made me realize – of course not. A state of war existed between His Majesty’s government and certain canny animals in the northlands, and one does not legally revoke one’s enemy’s humanity. This is not a matter of fairness, or even of legal or parliamentary principle. This is a simply matter of strategy. You want battlefield superiority because you want to win your war; but you don’t want to blow Bambi up with a cruise missile. If you style your enemy as too far beneath contempt them people will start to feel sorry for them, because pity is the geological layer directly underneath contempt. And the bêtes were a threat. Admitting that one’s enemies had a certain legal status hadn’t prevented us killing one another for hundreds of thousands of years of almost continual warfare, after all.

  I was tired, so I lay out on the bench and fell asleep. I don’t know for how long I slept; I assume not for long. It was not comfortable, and the light was bright, so neither did I sleep deep. When one of my cellmates leaned over me I was half-conscious of the fact and came up swearing.

  ‘Wanted to see if you were still breathing,’ the man said, backing rapidly away.

  ‘He thinks you’re a plant,’ said the other. He frowned. ‘Not vegetable,’ he clarified. ‘I mean, someone put here by the author­ities to spy on us.’ Then he did something odd. He held out his left hand and began twiddling his right hand’s index finger in the palm of it.

  ‘Are you worth spying on?’ I asked, sitting up.

  ‘Prisoners of conscience,’ said the first man. ‘Both of us.’

  ‘Pro-bêtes activists?’

  ‘Humankind has raped the earth for thousands and thousands of years,’ said the first man, sitting down again. ‘Not metaphorically raped, but literally raped – dug its collective prick in the earth and violated it.’

  ‘I do think you do mean metaphorically, though,’ said the second man. ‘Actually.’

  ‘Bill Hubbard!’ exclaimed the first. ‘I thought you were on my side?’

  ‘I am on your side. God has given the animals a voice, and we must listen to what they say. But that doesn’t give us the right to misuse “literally”.’

  ‘You are such a human being, Bill.’

  Bill continued paddling in his hand with his finger.

  ‘What,’ I asked, ‘the fuck are you doing?’

  In reply he said: ‘We can say what the fuck are you doing but not what are you the fuck doing? Although. We can say absofuckinglutely, but not abfuckingsolutely. Grammar is a funny old business. Isn’t it?’

  ‘They took his iTab away,’ explained the first man. ‘It’s a nervous tic. He used it to interact with the world. He’s worried,’ he added, after a pause, ‘that they shot his dog.’

  Bill whimpered, and scribbled more furiously on his palm.

  ‘The problem with dogs,’ the first fellow said, ‘is that their mouths just aren’t well shaped for languages like English. My ex-girlfriend had a dog that used to communicate with her by barking Morse code. Took ages to say anything. Bill here—’ he nodded ‘—used to chat with Barack Obama via his phone rather than face to. That worked better for him.’

  ‘The dog?’ I asked. Bill whimpered a second time, and concentrated on staring more forcefully at his own palm.

  ‘He called the dog after Barack Obama,�
� said the first man. ‘The dog didn’t mind. Liked it, even. Obama was the first African American US president.’

  ‘I know who Obama was,’ I told them.

  ‘The thing that’s a shame about dogs,’ the first man said, leaning back against the tiled wall behind him, ‘is that otherwise they’re perfectly suited. Brain wise, I mean. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I don’t even know that you mean,’ I replied.

  He was unphased. ‘Bung a chip in a bee, or a frog, and you’re basically just talking to the chip. It’s like talking to one of those toy teddy bears they used to sell – before the war.’

  ‘There hasn’t been a war!’ Bill blurted out. Then he whimpered again and returned the whole of his attention to his invisible iTab.

  ‘Bill keeps saying that,’ the first man told me. ‘Because there’s not been an official declaration of war. Legally, I guess he’s right. But I’d say humankind is fighting a war, nonetheless. Where was I?’

  ‘Lulu-land,’ I said. I had sat up during this rather pointless conversation, but my leg ached and I was as tired as ever I had been. I lay down again and closed my eyes.

  ‘Yeah – put a chip in a insect, or a fish, and you’re just talking to the chip. Which isn’t Nature communicating with us, yeah? That’s just computing. But at the other end of the scale, put a chip in a human being, or a gorilla or something, and you cause schizophrenia. The cognitive will of the processor fights the cognitive will of the bearer. It ain’t pretty. You know Manzilla? The film star? That chipped-up grill that starred in all those movies? The crime hatin’ primate? No? Manzilla the crime hatin’ primate in Blackmail 5: the Reckonin’. No?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘encapsulates my entire response to everything you’re saying.’

  He carried on, unfazed. ‘Anyway, he went bonkers-in-the-brain. So, yeah. Chip up a human, or a gorilla, or a whale, and the wearer goes mad. Mad. There’s a sweet spot, is what I’m saying. Chip up a middle-range animal, cat, dog, cow, horse – that’s when the magic happens.’

  I opened my eyes at this. ‘There’s no fucking magic in any of this,’ I said.