by Adam Roberts
Closer. Legs working over the ice, carefully. Arms hanging limp.
Almost reached me.
There was a high pitched hum, like a whistle, and it ceased almost as soon as it had begun. A flicker of more intense brightness ran round the horizon. But I was still there, standing on the bright snow, under a bleached-out sky, with this strange figure walking out of the distance and straight up to me.
When she got close enough, I could see that it was myself. I said: ‘Hello there.’ What else do you say to yourself?
‘Hello,’ I replied.
We were standing, face to face.
I said to me: ‘If I stand here long enough, you’ll pass on by.’ I didn’t understand what I meant. Then I said, ‘How high you’ve climbed!’ I said this with a sort of laugh, a little snickering sound, as if it were a joke. I didn’t understand that either.
But I was really there.
‘I didn’t climb,’ I said to me. ‘I was carried up.’
‘Are you talking about just you,’ I said, ‘or all of you?’
‘What do you mean?’
I laughed again, but it wasn’t unkind.
My dark face contrasted neatly with the brightness behind and all around. I could look intently at my own shining black hair, my solid nose, my straight brow. I could stare into my own brown eyes, and as I did they were staring into mine. I have not been very much given to staring into mirrors, not since my teenage years, so it was almost a surprise to see just how round and bright my eyes are, to see how Pocahontas-like my face was.
I said to me, ‘Such a lot of water!’
‘It’s not the water,’ I said, hugging myself in my chill, ‘it’s the temperature of the water. If it were fluid—’ I was going to add that if the snow all turned to water we’d all drown; but, for some reason, I didn’t say that. Standing out on the snow, conversing with myself, as if it were the most natural thing in the world!
I seemed unimpressed. ‘Everything’s a fluid at a high enough temperature,’ I said.
‘I learnt that at school,’ I said, disdainful. I peered again at this avatar of myself. ‘How come?’ I asked, trying to find a way of phrasing the question. ‘When I saw you before—’
I inclined my head. ‘Before?’
‘You were a giant – worm, a sort of dragon. But that’s not your form?’
I shrugged. This made me angry.
‘No games,’ I warned. ‘Can’t you be straight with me? Can’t even you be straight with me?’
‘I see a lot of water,’ I said, clearly enunciating each word, and turning my head. ‘And some trace elements: everywhere. And what do you see?’
‘When I encountered you before I was with … him,’ and I pointed down at the snow, where (I couldn’t see, but I knew that) [Name deleted] was lying. ‘And I think his perceptions influenced mine, but all I want, but all I want to know is, was it a real thing, or only a hallucination? Did his thoughts take concrete form, or did I just dream it?’
But in reply this version of myself only repeated: ‘I see a lot of water.’ She smiled, and for a moment – it sounds like vanity to say it – I was struck by just how pretty I was. ‘All I’m asking,’ I said, ‘was, are you manifesting, or is it in my head?’
‘Your head,’ I said, with a curious little gesture of the left hand, ‘is – what? Mostly water, and some trace elements.’ I opened my eyes very wide, and suddenly I didn’t look so pretty any more. ‘Are you content?’ I asked. ‘For how long do you intend to remain content?’
It was such a strange thing to say. I couldn’t think of an answer.
That was all that exchanged between us.
The light burned with its perfectly cold flame, all around.
I felt something rise in my head, as if a torus of magnetic charge had passed entirely around it – the magician’s hoop passed about the body of the assistant. Things flickered, momently, into photo-negative, such that the snow subliminally became a waste of carbon dust, the sky a canvas of dark grey, and my own face a skeleton flash of whiteness in the middle. Then everything was white again.
And then I was being strapped into a stretcher. Masked men were fussing over my head, fitting me with a helmet, tucking a scarf around my exposed neck. The stretcher was connected to the side of a helicopter. The helicopter schwump-schwumped into flight, and carried me up. I was looking up where the black blades of the machine blurred pale grey in their rotation, and a massive oval veil laid over the blue and the clouds above.
Then I was back at the base. Or I was back in Liberty, I wasn’t sure. I felt weak, thin, my head hurt. I would sit up in my bed, in my room, and look about. I called out for Minnie. I believed for a moment that I had fallen asleep in the bedroom of Sam’s house in Collier’s Wood on a hot summer’s afternoon, and I thought I could hear Minnie downstairs. ‘Minnie!’ I called, feebly. ‘Love, what are you doing down there?’ But that world was now smothered and cold.
I slept a great deal. I was in a much worse state than before. I lost some of my fingernails. But it wasn’t the cold, I think: it was my second dose of them. Doctors in full head masks came and went around me, testing me. I had to use the vaporiser, inhaling astringent chemicals of some description or another. Sometimes the chemicals would change, as if the doctors were experimenting with various substances to try and shift the infection, or plaque, or whatever, from my lungs and sinuses. ‘It’s a different kind,’ they’d say, mystified by their own ignorance. I slept, ate, slept, slept. I read. I slept and woke choking, crying out. Each day was like every other day.
One day I napped and woke to find Crow sitting on a chair. ‘Hello Tira,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said.
It took me an inordinately long time to pull myself into a sitting position. Crow didn’t come over to lend me a hand. He was wearing a mask that covered his lower face. My mouth was dry, and I drank some cold, cold water from a misty-glassed cup.
‘You been watching me sleep?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘You’re still beautiful, Tira,’ he said, mournfully. ‘I’ve missed you.’
I nodded, as if this were my due. ‘[Name deleted] is dead,’ I said. ‘I guess he had a heart attack.’
‘We know. We found his body on the snow. You were wearing his clothes when we picked you up.’
‘Was I? I don’t remember putting them on.’
‘You met them, didn’t you?’
I let my vision defocus. Crow went furry at his edges, the room plumped and blurred. ‘I guess,’ I said. I could feel the water I had just drunk, like cold mercury in my stomach.
‘I’m so sorry, Tira,’ said Crow. His voice sounded, I realised with a start, close to tears. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It was all a stupid mix-up. I wanted you at my side.’
This made no sense to me. ‘At your side?’
‘Robinson is stepping down. His health is not good. I’m going forward as the next IP.’ He shook his head, as if this were a sorrowful thing.
‘But that’s great,’ I chided. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, simply. ‘But I was hoping to persuade you – I mean, I know we’ve had our differences. But we’re still man and wife. So I was hoping to persuade you to be First Lady. I was hoping to persuade you to stand by my side. It’s important for a man with those sorts of responsibilities to have a helpmeet.’ Using that cod-Biblical word summed up so much about Crow. He shook his head again.
‘And clearly that’s impossible now,’ I said.
‘I’m so sorry. It’s all a stupid misunderstanding. I sent a message to [Name deleted] to meet the plane you were on, and bring you to me. But he says he didn’t recognise you when you got off the plane. I guess you’ve changed. We all have – you’re thinner than you used to be.’
‘Thinner,’ I said, sourly, feeling bile rise, which in turn started to make me feel fully awake for the first time. ‘And a different colour.’
Crow shrugged noncommittally. ‘
Anyway, it’s a powerful shame he missed you. If you’d have been with me, you would never have been exposed to the Others’ contamination. We could have gone back to Liberty, and then to New NY.’
‘You’re going to New NY?’
He nodded. ‘And I wanted you to come. I wanted it very much. But I guess it can’t be helped now. When he missed you at the camp—’
‘He didn’t miss me,’ I said, heated. ‘I pointed myself out to him.’
‘To who?’
‘To your subaltern, to what’s-his-name, [Name deleted].’
‘It’s a shame,’ said Crow again, shaking his head. ‘A mistake.’
‘He fucked up,’ I said.
‘I guess he did,’ said Crow. I might add, with the benefit of my hindsight, that Pander still ended up as Chief of Military Staff under Crow’s presidency. So Crow was clearly not that convinced of his incompetence. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After that initial meeting, Crow came to see me fairly often in the hospital. It was clearly the case that my fleeting encounters with the Others had infected me with something, but the doctors weren’t sure with what, or to what end, or with what degree of infectiousness, so I was quarantined. It was deadly, it was dull.
When Crow visited, he usually did not come alone. Perhaps he didn’t trust himself to stay emotionally level-headed in a room with me alone. Usually he brought a junior officer along with him.
The two of them would sit on chairs on the far side of the room, wearing their masks, and talk about the Others. Sometimes they got so engrossed in these conversations that it was as if I weren’t there.
‘You see we assumed,’ said Crow, ‘that aliens would be corporeal, much as we are, maybe with a different arrangement of limbs or sense-organs. But they’re not like that at all. We assumed that if they could travel through space, they’d at least be civilised – like us. But they’re not like us. They’re not civilised. We assumed they’d live in cities, and travel in machines, and have families, or I-don’t-know-what. They don’t drive cars. They don’t live in cities.’
‘Oh, I’d say they do,’ said the junior officer, whose name I didn’t know, but who seemed to be on informally chummy terms with my husband. ‘I think so, at any rate.’
‘Cities,’ said Crow, dismissively. ‘Where? You check the satellite photos, there just aren’t cities, it’s white everywhere.’
That was the first I knew for sure that the snow was general over the whole globe. I’d still been clinging to the idea that somewhere, some mythical Australia of the mind, was free of snow. It was a shock to realise that this wasn’t true. But Crow and the other military guy were still talking about cities.
‘That’s what I’m saying, General,’ the other guy said. ‘You think an alien city will be towers and apartment blocks and roads. But why should it be? You’ve seen the geotherm and sonar studies of the under-snow. The snow is not compacted the way it ought to, it hasn’t compacted down regularly. There are areas of greater-than-expected density, and areas of less-than-expected density. Maybe that’s what their cities look like.’
‘Maybe,’ said Crow, dubiously.
‘Three-dimensional cities,’ said the other guy. ‘Cities for cellular beings who live in the snow.’
‘Cellular beings?’ repeated Crow, as if trying the phrase out in his mouth to see how it sounded.
‘Why not? That have bodies, but without organs, you know? The balance between individual cells and the whole is – different than the way it is with us.’
‘Maybe,’ repeated Crow. ‘But the point is, they established a connection with us. They copied us, some, but they fought us.’ He shook his head. ‘We couldn’t understand them. It’s hard to fight an enemy you don’t understand,’ Personally I think this was Crow’s way of saying it’s impossible to fight an enemy you don’t understand, but that he was constitutionally incapable of uttering the phrase ‘it’s impossible to fight’. It’s not in his nature to say that.
‘They copied us, but erratically. They swamped us, and I figure they must have known—’
Crow interjected, ‘That’s not proven.’
‘—must have known what they were doing, that they were killing billions of sentient creatures. You don’t conquer a world in a fit of absence of mind.’ He chuckled at this, as if it were a great witticism, and was moved to repeat it. ‘You just plain don’t conquer a world in a fit of absence of mind. So they knew, and then afterwards they felt guilty. Like the British in India in the nineteenth century …’
‘It’s not like that,’ said Crow. ‘I’m almost certain it’s not like that. They don’t have the same relationship to motive, to notions of responsibility, guilt, shame, that we do. They’re …’ He searched for the word.
‘Capricious,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Exactly,’ he said.
‘So, [Name deleted], when he and I were on the snow—’ I started, but Crow leant eagerly forward.
‘That’s precisely it,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly the thing. It’s about [Name deleted].’
‘What about him?’
‘I tell you what. He’s a hero of the new world.’
At this I almost laughed aloud. ‘A month ago you guys were interrogating him as a terrorist. Last week he strangled one of your men. He’d lost his head, he was a psycho, he threatened me at gunpoint and dragged me in my nightclothes onto the snow. This is heroic?’
‘He died,’ said the other guy, laconically. As if that was all that was required to be a hero.
‘What he means,’ said Crow impatiently, ‘is that this is how he must be represented to the people. The people need heroes at a time like this.’
I didn’t follow. ‘The people?’
‘This is important,’ said Crow. ‘He died, and with him died the belligerence of the Others. It’s as simple as that.’
‘As simple as …’
‘They won’t attack any more. They’ve communicated with us. Electronically.’
‘Which,’ the other guy added, ‘just really suggests civilisation to me. So – what are we saying – that they can, like, manipulate the different electrical valences of water at different low temperatures to confect whole neural nets from nothing, to process billions of bytes? So they can fashion weapons and fire them out of the snow at us? These are both civilised.’
‘Well they didn’t say it was a misunderstanding,’ said Crow. ‘Not as such. But I guess we can take it as read. They didn’t gather, they just didn’t understand—’
‘This is merely speculation,’ interjected the other guy on a warning note.
‘—didn’t understand that we’re a race of individuals. I guess they’re not, in the same way. Or maybe they are. But the point is, they established communications with [Name deleted]. To be strictly accurate, they first tried to establish a connection with two of our guys, two soldiers in the field, but they, both those men died.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Those guys weren’t smokers.’
Crow ignored me. ‘But [Name deleted] didn’t die, that’s the point, and they set up some sort of two-cans-on-a-wire with him. Or a one-way thing. But anyway, anyway, the point is that they took his aggression, his anger and urgency for war, to be everybody. That’s how I see it. This, they thought, was everybody.’
‘We think,’ warned the other guy, shaking his head, as if warning me off from jumping to conclusions. ‘We don’t know.’
‘Then he died, and they saw what a death was, from the inside if you like. They got to roam around inside a dead man’s head. It may be that they don’t have death, or if they do they don’t recognise it, or don’t acknowledge it, or something like that. I think they found [Name deleted] dead, and since they assumed he was everybody, or everybody was him, it was a shock to find him a corpse. Maybe that woke them up.’
‘They killed those other two guys as well,’ said the other guy. ‘Before.’
‘But they were on active duty, so we whisked them outta there pretty quickl
y. So I guess they didn’t get to see firsthand what the death thing is like. But with [Name deleted], they’d established pathways in his head, they’d laid down this plaque in his brain, and so they could plug into his consciousness, go in there, wander about.’
‘Hypothetical,’ said the other guy, unimpressed.
‘I don’t know,’ said Crow. ‘Something’s certainly changed their view. If he’d’a stayed alive, then maybe they’d still think of us in terms of fighting and hatred. But now they’re communicating through equipment, and we’re making progress with them.’
‘Plaque,’ said the other guy, wonderingly.
‘Plaque, that’s it,’ said Crow. ‘There’s a little bit in your lungs now, Tira, I guess. It’s, they tell me, like a site of TB, grown about with living tissue to contain it. Or something like that.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘I reckon they killed him,’ said the other guy, ‘to see what would happen.’
‘We don’t know they did that,’ said Crow, hurriedly. ‘We’ve no evidence they did that.’
‘We’ve no evidence either way.’
‘Now I guess it is possible,’ said Crow, ‘that they read about [Name deleted]’s heart condition in his brain. If that’s how their connection works. Or maybe – maybe [Name deleted] just had a heart attack, just like that. He was prone, it could have been fortuitous.’
‘Fortuitous,’ I said.
‘Anyway, they’re copying us, they’re peaceful now.’
‘But they bombed the city,’ I said.
‘Oh that was before,’ said Crow, dismissively.
‘Let me explain the sequence of events,’ said the other guy, pompously. ‘When we realised their presence we went onto the snow to combat with them. A couple of our soldiers got contaminated, and died, but they weren’t ever properly used as contacts. They were soldiers and at war, and the Others seem to have taken that as representative. Besides which, establishing the connection proved fatal: too much of the Others’ material was absorbed too quickly by these two soldiers’ healthy lungs, and they died of a form of toxic shock. They kept attacking us. When they saw explosions in the city, they bombed the city. They tend to be copycats like that. This was all before [Name deleted] had any contact with them.’