Bête

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I know the devil when I see him!’

  My leg twinged at this, as if prompting me. ‘You know I’ve got to deliver the Lamb back to—’

  ‘Deliver Satan, you mean!’ Jazon snapped.

  ‘—to his tribe. That’s what Hetheridge is expecting of me. That’s how the treaty is going to be actualized. The Lamb will, I guess, find himself a new home, and from there command his followers to walk the straight and narrow.’

  ‘I don’t want to use the gun, Graham,’ said Preacherman. Then, surprisingly, he proved himself as good as his word, and put the gun away in his pocket. ‘Make me nervous, firearms do. Supposed to beat it into a ploughshare, I am; though it’d make a wee diddy little one. Turn the other cheek, that’s the karate I’ve been trained in. But you gotta understand …’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. There was a dog at my side. A lithe, black Labrador, taller than my knees. It had peeled away from the hedgerow that ran alongside the road, or from its shadow. Sun low in sky. Suddenly here it was.

  Preacherman waved the crucifix at the dog. ‘The devil is a canine!’ he called. ‘The devil is an ass! The devil is a cow! The devil is—’

  What you need to think is: maybe he was right.

  ‘Preach! Calm down’, I barked. The dog was silent. I almost slapped Jazon; he was on the edge of hysteria. ‘Wait. What do you mean? Helicopters?’

  Jazon danced behind me, to put my body between him and the canine. He was still flourishing his crucifix. ‘Hey! Hey!’

  ‘Jason: who has helicopters, that you can you summon them in twenty minutes with a phone call?’ I asked. ‘Twenty minutes is further off than Reading. Reading is five minutes by chopper.’

  ‘Graham. Hetheridge is making a mistake,’ he said.

  ‘So you waited until you were out of the town,’ I said. ‘Until we were beyond Hetheridge’s interference.’

  ‘We come to it at last,’ Preach said urgently. ‘The great war of our time. Don’t be on the wrong side, Graham! You think they care for us? They don’t need us, and so they will destroy us. Think of the future. God gave us dominion over the birds and the beasts. Who would want to up-end that hierarchy, except the devil? Think of where the country is going! More and more humans abandoning the countryside, more and more squeezing into the cities. Abandoning the countryside to the bêtes! Leaving them in charge of all our farming! Why should we trust them? Who’s to say they won’t wait until the urban population reaches a maximum and then starve us, in our concrete citadels? Infect us with the sclery? Why wouldn’t they? How can we trust them? That’s the way of it. Trust me. Why won’t you trust me? I’m your friend!’

  ‘You are my friend,’ I conceded.

  ‘You can’t,’ Preach said, waving his crucifix in the air for emphasis, ‘choose a dead woman over a living friend. That’s just – morbid, mate. And you have to choose! You’ve got to make a choice.’ He took a step towards me. The dog at my side stood perfectly still. Birds stirred the white air in a great circle overhead.

  ‘On the one hand,’ said Jazon, ‘you have me, your best friend. You have your country and your duty. You have humanity, your own kind – your daughter, your son, your grandkids. You have all their futures. On the other hand you have— Forgive me, Graham, for being brutal, but it’s the truth. On the other hand you have a woman’s corpse. And a whole pandemonium of canny beasts, the enemy of humanity. What kind of a choice is that?’

  ‘It’s no choice at all,’ I said. But I didn’t mean what Jaze hoped I meant.

  ‘The land is divided against itself! Literally apartheided between country and city. Unless we fight back, we’ll be expelled from the green spaces for ever. This peace treaty is not the right call. I have friends in the military who disagree with Hetheridge. Come with me, Graham, and take the Lamb to them. The Satan in your pocket – it could prove invaluable in the war! It could make the difference between winning and losing. Or would you turn traitor? Traitor to your own kind?’

  Black dog. How does that guitar riff go?

  ‘I’ll be with her again,’ I said.

  ‘You’re no Romeo, Graham. I know you! I’ve known you years.’ He held his free hand out towards me. ‘If you won’t come with me, at least give me the chip. The chip from your pocket. At least do that.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve made my choice, mate.’

  ‘Graham!’ hooted Preacherman, in pure frustration.

  I turned away from him, to resume my walk. And as I started to turn, the dog moved. He slid forward, without so much as a growl. I sort of witnessed what happened next, although it was my corner-eye not my full vision. My memory of it is: Jazon reached quickly for his firearm, but his fingers slid off the flap of his pocket instead of slipping inside. Why do they even fit those external flaps onto jackets? I mean, who benefits from them? In this case it cost Preacherman dear. His fingers fiddled at the outside of his jacket, and without a gun in his hand the dog was not stopped. He pushed off with his bow bent back legs and flew up.

  And there wasn’t even time for Jazon to call out. The dog’s jaws snapped a single bone-break note, and I was beginning to turn round. I could see, as I turned, that there was a great messy scarlet cravat at Jazon’s Adam’s apple where there hadn’t been one before. But he was already falling backwards, and the hound paddled its legs against his angled torso and leapt away.

  Jazon fell straight back. He fumbled at the air with his hands, and a fountain of bright red bubbled from his throat. Soon enough he stopped moving.

  The dog was standing beside his body, looking up at me – blood on its chops. A dog panting can hardly help but look like it’s grinning, which isn’t a pleasant thing at the best of times, and was much much less than pleasant now.

  My own heart was running on. My hair moved on my scalp as if under the influence of a halo of static electricity. I felt the gush of panic and fear and elation. ‘God,’ I said.

  ‘Sic semper, Graham,’ said the dog. It mangled the words in the speaking, but there was no mistaking them. ‘Sic semper tyrr, tyrr,’ but the last word was more than his dog jaw could manage. He woofed, and woofed again. Then he spoke English again: ‘Off. You. Toddle.’

  I stepped towards the body of my friend, and the dog began to growl. ‘Fuck,’ I yelled, suddenly very scared indeed. ‘You going to kill me too, muttfucker?’ I was scared that, in a second, I would be lying next to my friend and my heart’s blood would be pouring onto the road. I was scared not of dying, but of being denied my reunion with Anne.

  ‘Toddle,’ grunted the dog. ‘Off.’

  I didn’t look down, or back. I picked up my stick, and turned around, and walked away. Walked as briskly as my bad foot could manage. I kept walking, and at the beginning of this walk my heart was sounding four beats for every one knock of my stick on the weeded tarmac. After a while this slowed to two heartbeats per step. The sun slid down, as it always does, and always must. The moon was there, bright as a silver penny, paid into the purse of night. What we must do with our choices, my Judas, is not pretend we never made them. Not hang ourselves from a branch in a grand melodrama of denial and despairing cod-atonement. We made them, and that speaks to us, and who we are. We is the pronoun in question. Not I, not I, not I.

  I slept that night in an abandoned house. I found blankets in the airing cupboard upstairs, and they were a little damp and mildewed but not too bad. I gathered twigs from the garden, and made a fire in the fireplace. It burnt bright and brief, and I warmed the blankets as best I could. Then I wrapped myself in them and slept on the floor, with my pack as my pillow. I did not dream. Mark, mark, mark.

  When I woke it was with a heavy feeling of a kind of symmetry of regret. I got up and explored the house. Mushrooms were growing in the carpets of the downstairs’ rooms: spreads of little white globes like spilled pearls, mostly in the corners and by the walls. Upstairs there was one wardrobe and I opened it to the scent of decay and rose petals and found a woman’s clothes, limply hanging.

  Tha
t the riddle is solved does not mean that we will find any comfort in the answer. The answer is always how we diminish. It is always how we fall away from human-ness, like Nebuchadnezzar and become again as the beasts of the field. ‘Truth’ means precision and accuracy, but ‘truthfulness’ means sincerity and assertion, and those two things are very different. It’s not hard to see which truth is the one we prefer.

  I tried the various taps and sinks about the house – there was no water. What I thought was dew in the front garden was actually the silky mist of many spiders’ webs. The sun was tinting all the eastern clouds strawberry and beeswax colour. The light was bright and fresh and fell upon my dirty face like clean water. I set off walking, and walked all morning, and the road was surrounded by trees, and the only sound was the breeze shaking hands with the treetops and whispering its not-for-human-ears secrets to the woodland. I saw no bêtes all that morning. Conceivably they were deliberately ignoring me. But inside the woodland was the cat, and inside the cat were a lifetime’s memories of Anne, and soon, I knew, they would be inside me. And this is where the backwards memorializing reaches its stopping point, where the air poured through the sieve of leafless trees and the light picked out every speckle and every smut. I felt bad, but here’s the thing: I was not going to be I for much longer. Under the new dispensation, I would soon become we.

  I had made my choice, after all. Choosing to betray your country rather than your friend is all very well, except that the odds are your friend lives in your country. Or does the phrase mean betraying the countryside? I was not allying myself with these new cyborg animal creatures, with their incomprehensible goals and their repulsive sex lives, carving out their mega-farms in the abandoned rural landscapes. I had no love for anybody, it turned out, except one person.

  It all comes to the moment: a man, his cat. ‘His’ meaning not possession, but identity. There is a riddle here.

  ‘Hellmiaow Graham,’ said the cat.

  ‘You killed Preacherman,’ I said.

  ‘Not I!’ whispered the cat.

  ‘Your kind. You are at war with us.’

  ‘This is news to you, Graham? This has only just occurred to you?’

  It was in my head to say, he was my friend. But he had called upon that friendship on the road out of Reading, after the manner of someone withdrawing funds from a long dormant bank account, and I had rolled down the shutter on him. ‘I’ve misunderstood your lot,’ I told him.

  The cat came forward and stretched himself, sinuously, winding between my legs. ‘Misrecognition,’ it said. ‘It’s your peculiar genius, Graham. It’s what humans are best at. They see a sky and misrecognize it as God. They see bêtes and misrecognize us as animals. We’re not other, Graham. We’re not the animals your kind shared the planet with. They never made war upon you! We’re quite other. You don’t like admitting you don’t recognize something; so when you see something that is genuinely baffling you misrecognize it as something else. That’s the whole long and the short of it.’

  ‘Have I misrecognized your fidelity, cat? Are you going to betray the deal we had?’

  By way of answer, the cat continued rubbing itself against my legs, turning and turning in a tight-set gyre. I recall, vividly. Who was better skilled to butcher an animal than I? The riddle always turns on misrecognition. That’s the whole point of a riddle. And when all the riddles are solved, and there are no more riddles, will be when the salt loses its savour and we surrender all conviction to despair. At the last moment Cincinnatus’s cat body gave a little squeal; but only at the very last moment, so I suppose that right up to the Anne Boleyn end Cincinnatus himself exercised a remarkable control. I took the relevant part through to the kitchen and opened it with a knife, and washed the chip at the sink. Squeamish of me. In bête terms sexually puritan of me. But there you go. And then— Well, there’s always a moment before you take your pill when you hold the thing in your right hand and your glass of water in your left hand and pause. Why do you pause? You don’t know. The doctor has prescribed this pill to cure what ails you, and you will take it. But you pause anyway. And look at it. Perhaps you’re trying to see what the pill really is before you ingest it. There is no recognition; there is only misrecognition. That’s the truth of the riddle; that’s what the riddles says with its content as much as with its form. Love is seeing the other person and recognizing yourself in them. Memory is writing a book with a French title that is so pointedly about England in our compromised late twenty-first-century epoch. Life is about misrecognizing poison as food.

  The rain started up a tattoo on the window like an executioner’s drumroll. Past the teeth, and halfway down the throat. It was uncomfortable for about a minute, and then it sank through my flesh like water through soil.

  I tidied up my miniature shambles, and washed myself. Then I went upstairs and lay on the cold bed. I contemplated my own feelings of guilt, and wondered if I had misrecognized those too – they’re strangely akin to love, don’t you think? Or maybe that’s an English thing too. Preacherman had misled me, and the fact made me feel strangely affectionate towards his memory. I hadn’t realized that he was capable of such subterfuge. So: fair play to him. Soon enough I drifted towards sleep, even though it was the afternoon (but, you see, I’m not as young as I used to be). And on the lip of somnolence I had a weirdly piercing moment of clarity. I thought: I’m going to wake up, and I’ll see her clearly for the first time in a year and a half. That’s a frightening thing. And then I was under. In my dream the whole landscape was laid before my inner eye that is the bliss of solitude as solitude is about to be taken away for ever. The dark green field, and the rain falling onto it; and the grey raincloud passing on, leaving the field heavier than before. Twig and leaf and a dusk-coloured bare dual carriageway. Verdure and concrete. The rain turning to snow. Clouds occluding the stars, and the wind bringing with it a scent of peat and iron and chill. There are gates, there are many gates, there are always many gates. The city, teeming with folk. The fields beyond, empty. This hill. This lone tree. I would wake, and live my life and never be alone, until I died, and, not dying, would enter a new more crowded mode of living inside the hard, hot body of a fox, and that fox would sniff the post-sunset darkness, and eye the glimmering snow, and then set off leaving a line of slant semi-colons in the snow. That’s the riddle: that you have misrecognized the end and it’s not the end at all. When I woke it was late afternoon and the day was dwindling. Outside, the rain had turned to snow, and the house was filled with the extraordinary muffled silence of snowfall. That cold powder and its starlike flakes. The garden beyond the window was pressed white and clean like a virgin sheet of paper. I breathed in and smelled something sharp and tangy – me, I suppose. A beast moved quickly towards the copse beyond the garden wall.

  Acknowledgements

  This is the best of me. Thanks to Simon Spanton for metaphorical obstetrics, to Rachel Roberts for reading an early draft and making many helpful comments, and to the ghost of Ted Hughes and his Goddess of Complete Being. This novel is dedicated to the memory of my friend Jonathan Black, who appears in it distributed, as it were, in the guise of two of its characters.

  Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:

  Salt

  Stone

  On

  The Snow

  Polystom

  Gradisil

  Land of the Headless

  Swiftly

  Yellow Blue Tibia

  New Model Army

  By Light Alone

  Jack Glass

  Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Adam Roberts 2014

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion Ho
use

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 12770 8

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.adamroberts.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk