by Adam Roberts
The sun put itself a millimetre above ground, like a red-shining periscope checking out the world above, and [Name deleted] called out ‘Day! Day!’
‘Can we stop now?’ I asked. ‘We’re out of sight of the camp.’
‘But look around you!’ he said, throwing his arms wide and wheeling about. ‘Look! Look!’
I looked. The sharp angle of new sunlight threw a giantess’s shadow behind me, stretching with ludicrous extension almost (it seemed) to the far horizon. [Name deleted]’s shadow was similarly elongated. And the plane of snow that looked, by night or in clear day, smooth as paper, was revealed by the oblique illumination to be fantastically pitted and carved, grotesquely distorted into a million humps and pools. A million little knobs of snow caught pink-and honey-coloured light and appeared to litter the world with semi-precious pebbles. A million jags in the surface stretched shadow in weird, witch-like shapes. Undulations in the snow, like beach sand at low tide, were here emphasised by the light into fantastical horizontal staircases, scattered architectural or giants-causeway features strewn in broken-off array. The purple of the receding night sky westward blended with the pink and orange and blue of the coming daylight. The white snow took all these colours, held them, and assumed jewel-like scintillations and threads of sheer colour as luminescent as an aurora.
‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ hooted [Name deleted]. He was dancing from foot to foot, like the old guy in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. That last sentence will only make sense if you’ve seen that movie.
‘Very pretty,’ I said. I flopped down to rest my legs, folding them underneath me as I sat on the snow.
The sun had moved above the rim of the world now, a neon-red carbuncle. The clouds near the horizon were shreds of claret. Everything was roseate light, blue immensity, blurring to purple in the west, everything was silence, except for [Name deleted] hooting and the scrape of his dancing feet on the snow.
‘Look at those colours,’ he called. ‘Salmon,’ he yelled. ‘Tomato! Pumpkin! Hay! Eggshell blue! Eggshell blue!’
‘You’re quite excited,’ I observed. ‘You want to calm down, maybe?’
He hurried over to me. ‘I could forgive them, you know – they made the Earth a beautiful thing. You realise how beautiful when you see it like this. Not mud and pollution and people everywhere breeding like maggots, but everything picked clean and pure, just pure colours and open expanse, and clear light!’
‘You mean the snow?’ I said.
‘It’s better this way. It’s purer this way. The Earth isn’t infested with people the way it used to be. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘That’s a pretty Nazi thing to say,’ I said.
He sat himself down beside me, his eyes scintillating with reflected glory. ‘Say,’ he said. ‘What did you say your name was?’
My stomach turned over a little. I kept forgetting how insane he really was. ‘Tira,’ I told him. ‘I’m Tira – don’t you remember? Jesus, [Name deleted], we were lovers for months – don’t you remember that? Have you lost that much of your mind?’
‘Sure, sure,’ he said, waving his mittens in the space between us. ‘I just forgot. There’s a lot to think about, it crowds out the newer stuff. Listen – Tira, yeah – listen, I’ll tell you something. This is secret, right? You mustn’t tell anybody. Anybody at all. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘When I was a kid—’ he said, and stopped. He rubbed his beard with his mittens. ‘This is the most secret of secrets,’ he said. ‘You understand?’
‘If it’s so secret,’ I said, ‘why are you telling me?’
He ignored this. ‘When I was a kid I was,’ he paused, dramatically, and then said, ‘abducted by aliens. I know! I know!’ He spoke as if I had reacted with amazement, when of course I had not. ‘It’s fantastical – but it happened. They took me from my bed, not once but many times. They took me to a metal room, and … did stuff to me, I don’t want, I don’t want to tell you about that. And I never understood it, I used to try and pretend it wasn’t happening. But I don’t want to talk about that. They were different-looking from these aliens, they had arms and legs.’
He stopped, as if musing. So I prompted: ‘These aliens don’t have arms or legs?’
‘Of course not, of course not. They live in the snow, do you see? This is their medium. Those other ones, I don’t – I haven’t quite worked out what the relationship is between those other aliens and these new aliens. But, man, they speak to me! That’s why the military flew me out here, to parley with them. They asked for me! You believe that? The ETs. They asked for me by name!’
‘Hey,’ I said. This sounded even more insane to me.
‘Or,’ he said, in more thoughtful mode. ‘Maybe they brought me out because they’d been copying me. Then when I was here they discovered I could talk to them. Maybe they didn’t ask for me by name, didn’t ask for me by – but that doesn’t matter.’
‘How do you mean, copying? Copying you?’
‘Hey, when I lived in Liberty I was the leader of the freedom fighters. It was a secret. I wouldn’t expect you to know about that. It was a secret.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘Have you lost your mind completely? Don’t you remember all those conversations we had when we were …’
He waved his mittens, dismissing me. ‘Never mind that, never mind that. You need to understand this about them: they’re not what you’d expect.’
‘What would I expect?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t say. But science fiction – you know—’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘[Name deleted], are you going to … show me these creatures of yours? Are you, I don’t know, doing to call them forth, or something?’
‘Not little green men,’ said [Name deleted], as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Not blobs and tentacles. Science fiction made us believe that invaders would come in saucers, and blast the White House with lasers, and march over our landscape in killing machines, and suchlike shit. But, when you think about it, that’s not a very sensible way of proceeding. We wouldn’t invade Mars that way, would we? So why should Mars invade us that way?’
‘So these aliens are Martians?’
‘Martians?’ repeated [Name deleted], his face clouding. ‘What do you mean? Of course not. The point – the point – is, is that if we invaded Mars we’d terraform first. Wouldn’t we? We’d need the world to be prepared for our arrival. Seeding the atmosphere, working over the ground. Wouldn’t we?’
‘So your aliens,’ I said. The whole conversation had an unreal quality to it. ‘They terraformed Earth? With the snow?’
He put his arms about me, bringing his face close to mine. His eyes were agitated, it was difficult to say whether with joy or fear. ‘That first flake, it wasn’t like any snow that had fallen before. You remember that first flake? And, and, and,’ he added, releasing me, and standing up, ‘when you think about it – but who actually thinks about it? No, people don’t think about it, they take it for granted, they live in the world of habit and tomorrow’ll-be-like-yesterday, day-after-tomorrow’ll-be-like-day-before-yesterday – that’s the limit of their thought. But if, if, anybody had sat down to think about it, everything would have been clear.’
‘Clear?’ I echoed, because it seemed to me far from clear.
‘All this snow? How could this enormous amount of snow come out of our little earthly clouds? No way. It would have to come from outside. It’s so obvious when you think about it. You know what comets are? Snow. You know how many you’d need to send into the atmosphere? Little ones sure, but enough of them to keep supplying the higher atmosphere with granules of snow, granules of ice. And it snows, and it snows, and after a while the world is no longer inhospitable meadows and inhospitable mountains and inhospitable oceans – after a while it’s nothing but snow. If you think about it, it becomes clear.’
‘So aliens …’ I said, but I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence.
He sat down on the snow in front
of me. The sun was a fist’s breadth above the horizon, its fire more orangey than before.
‘We used to think that water was an essential, a sine qua non,’ he said, very rapidly. ‘But, of course, for a more developed form of life any fluid, any solvent, anything capable of … you see, there are many differences between the metabolic logic of them and us, but plenty of the higher functions are comparable. Still, they don’t like the sorts of heat we like. It’s uncomfortable for them. I’m guessing here, of course, but I reckon it’s a logical guess. Given the volatility of ethyl-based circulation at – you’d say, at room temperature. We still say room temperature, don’t we? Even when our rooms are freezing. By rights, room temperature ought now to mean however-many-degrees below, and—’
He stopped.
The next thing he was talking about was the circulatory system of the aliens. A lot of this passed straight through my brain: it was disjointed, and some of it was stickily technical. But I remember him going on and on about their circulatory system, how it was gravity-driven, not pump-driven, not heart-driven, they must constantly up-end themselves, let their let’s-call-it-blood sift down their systems, upend themselves again. There was no way he could know this, of course. With hindsight it looks like the most random speculation, and it bears no relation to the reality.
‘This,’ I said, for the nth time, ‘is crazy.’
‘Look around you!’ he bellowed, throwing his arms wide. ‘This is their doing!’
‘They live in the snow?’ I said.
‘You ever read Dune? You ever see the TV version? That’s them, those worms. They thread through and through the snow. That’s where they live!’
‘I never read Dune,’ I said. ‘But wasn’t it on telly …?’
I thought of what Colonel Fairford had called him: a fantasist, a born liar, don’t trust his words. From thinking it was too weird to be a lie, I started thinking that he’d concocted it all out of some old sf novel he’d read once. ‘[Name deleted],’ I said. ‘This is incredible. I mean that in the actual sense of the word. I mean literally that it’s hard for me to believe it’s credible.’
For a long time, perhaps a minute, [Name deleted] stood upright on the snow. He seemed to be staring at the western horizon. When he finally spoke it was in a different voice, a calmer and saner-sounding voice. The old [Name deleted] seemed, briefly, to have returned.
‘I worry,’ he said, ‘that perhaps they have gotten inside my head. My moods seem to be – since first meeting them—’ He trailed off.
I got to my feet, and started over to him. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Don’t be glum.’
‘They bombed the hospital,’ he said, bleakly. That stopped me in my tracks. I had an instant, and vivid, memory of picking a severed hand out of the wreckage of the hospital. ‘That’s not Dune,’ he said, meditative.
‘I guess that does sound more Independence Day,’ I said. ‘That sounds more like War of the Worlds. I mean, bombing us. That sounds to me more like the kind of thing an invading alien would do.’
Abruptly, he was hypomanic again. He swirled round, his voice accelerated, acquired a headlong rapidity. ‘But that’s the really weird thing, it’s not like that at all. Jesus, I can’t tell you how hard it’s been trying to talk with them. Trying to talk. They are—’ and he spun round and round like a dervish, his arms out, ‘—they – are capricious,’ he said. He stopped, a little unsteady on his feet. ‘Capricious,’ he said. ‘That’s the word for them.’
‘Capricious,’ I said.
‘But it’s more than that. They are capricious in their capriciousness. They can’t even be consistent in being capricious. Sometimes they are rational – serious, logical, predictable. Sometimes they act for reasons that are obviously self-interest. Sometimes they deal in terror, in power – and we surely understand those things. That’s how we act. We understand power. But we don’t understand power manifested only intermittently. Does that make sense?’
‘Not,’ I said, ‘really.’
He paused, mulled over his own words. Then he opened his mouth and another gabbling rush came out. ‘It’s a human constant, power, isn’t it though? Some humans have power wrested from them, but we – just – don’t – give it away. They do. They do. We can’t work out why. It’s not predictable. They seem enthusiastic. They seem to get carried away by imitating things – us, say – and you think, hey, that’s all they are! They’re interstellar children, they’re just really impressionable, they’ve been captivated by some new fad, and it happens to be us. But if you think that you’re just wrong. Or, I heard somebody say, they’re guilty for having all but wiped out our life form, and their guilt makes them act strangely. But I don’t figure it’s guilt. It’s not predictable the way guilt is. When the bombs went off in Liberty they just copied the explosions. That’s all. They sent projectiles into the city to make more explosions – it’s like they thought we were blowing ourselves up for fun and they wanted to show us they could be fun too. Sending explosive globes raining down on the city. Why? I don’t know. Copying us. Why should they? It’s like the British invade India, they steamroller over India, and force every Indian into British schools and the British army and the British way of life. And then, having committed that force majeure, they start themselves spontaneously wearing turbans and saris and drinking tea and riding elephants.’ He threw his hands up, shaking his head. ‘Is that the way imperialisation happens?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘The military sent dozens of squads to them – armed, of course. Aliens are invading, and now they’re bombarding us – are you surprised they want to keep these facts from the people? Think of the panic. Sometimes, though, they seek out the soldiers and they say, “Hey hey, shoot us, there’s the fatal spot, beneath the head,” in this singsong voice. Impossible to say if they’re being happy or sad, delirious or depressed-suicidal. Sometimes they act that way en masse. Sometimes it’s one or two. But, again – sometimes they respond as if to a threat. I mean, the way we respond to a threat.’
He shook his head.
‘They hunt,’ he said. ‘They show astonishing co-ordination over large groups. They show self-protecting, rational, animal behaviour. They hunt like sharks. The men stationed out on the ice call them Great Whites. You know?’
‘Sharks,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the sound of that. Have we been invaded by alien sharks? And they speak English, do they?’ That sounded to me more like a sf-TV alien, stepping out of the saucer and just happening to speak perfect English.
[Name deleted]’s eyes were suddenly very wide, as if he had been goosed. ‘Man!’ he exclaimed, as if it had struck him for the first time. ‘It’s exciting, though! I mean, the end of the world, and now we meet the aliens. And – they learned our language really quickly. Idiosyncratically, sure, it’s not Harvard English, but nevertheless. Nevertheless. We assumed that they must be like us in some deep way, to have picked up our language so quickly. But it’s not so, it’s not so at all. They don’t seem to have a language of their own at all. We can’t learn their language, find out what their core concepts are, all that – because they have none. Great white aliens.’
I felt a tremor in the snow.
‘It’s like,’ said [Name deleted], ‘they conquered the world, and now they’re at a loss what to do with it.’
‘Jesus, [Name deleted],’ I said, starting as another tremor in the snow vibrated the soles of my feet. ‘What’s that?’
He seemed much calmer now. ‘Here they come,’ he said.
What happened next is hard for me to remember with any precision – which is more than a little ironic, since I’m sure that for most people reading this document it is only this part that you’re actually interested in.
This is what I remember. A plate-shaped cloud seemed to have slid along the sky and into the zenith. The sun was yellow, as tall above the horizon as I was. The richer colours had drained out of the sky, but the east was still pink and the west was still gentian blue. The sn
ow trembled, and trembled, and [Name deleted] dropped to his knees like a religious ecstatic.
The ice rippled and sagged a little to my right.
‘There’s a chopper,’ I called.
A helicopter was visible in the sky away to the west, its cockpit glinting like landing lights, gold and white.
I felt something wriggling inside my head, like maggots. Under the bone of my skull. My own thoughts, like solid things in my brain-matter, thought and memories, flickers of epileptic light at the edges of my vision. I think it was the stress at that moment. Who knows what terrible carnivorous creatures were moving through the snow under my very feet, sifting the snow like earthworms through earth. [Name deleted] was making a high-pitched ululating noise. The chopper’s distorted throb was reaching me through the air – the police, the army, coming after us for fleeing the camp, and Pander’s words kept coming back to me: ‘My men have orders to shoot anyone found outside the fence.’ It was all happening at once.
A circle of snow six yards in diameter cracked, sank, broke into boulders of white, and then fell suddenly away. I was a couple of yards from the lip of this hole. I saw something, corpse-white, flecked with flat patches of cream-coloured squares that could have been intermittent scales, move in the hole, curl around it like a cat settling to sleep in its bed. I stepped back, I felt this overwhelming revulsion. It was as if a plague pit had opened up.
‘They don’t have a ship!’ squealed [Name deleted], as if in ecstasy. Perhaps the realisation had just come to him. ‘They don’t travel through space that way – gleaming control panels and flashing lights and – ugh—’ All the breath left him and he flopped forward.