The Snow
Page 38
Donna agreed with me, and wrote her novel based on this premise. But the book adds some intriguing speculation that is all her own. She thinks that the Others landed on our world, like it was Plymouth Rock, landing on the Native Americans, from another star system – who knows how long they had travelled through the vast chill of deep space, etcetera etcetera. She also doesn’t think that they infected us, as most people assume. She thinks (there’s no evidence for this, but it makes for a good story) that we infected them; she thinks we have passed over to them the virus of intelligent consciousness. I’ll quote: ‘what use would intelligence be to these creatures, cruising for millennia through vacuum-dark? It would be a hindrance, a recipe for madness not survival. But now they demonstrate a hectic, undisciplined intelligence. As they copied us in various, seemingly random ways, perhaps they copied us in terms of consciousness too. Perhaps they have been awoken by our own capacity for thought. They got inside our heads, one by one, and they took away our habits and strategies of intelligent thought.’
According to something I heard on the radio a few months ago, only seventeen humans in the whole of the world were ever diagnosed with the infectious plaque in their lungs and/or brains placed there by the Others. I am one of those seventeen. Four of the others died. But the rest of us continue our existences none the worse for our encounters. I think the plaque was one strategy they used, a rare one, and I think it was superseded by more complex and subtle ones. I don’t think they were really trying to establish communication, as my first husband thought. I think they were sipping our consciousness to see whether they liked the flavour. I doesn’t seem likely to me that they had no consciousness at all themselves, as some people insist, for that would leave them nothing more than bugs or plankton, and they are so clearly more than bugs or plankton. But I suppose their consciousness was alien, and not like ours. But I think they liked the form of intelligence they found on our world so much they copied it. I think they sampled it, and sent the virus all around their snow-body until they became agitated and alive with plans – to bomb, to grow imitation plants, to create and populate under-snow seas and so on.
Or perhaps we should think of it this way: maybe this is their life cycle. They pass through space as snowballs, as mindless as embryos. But when they strike a suitable world they fill it, and take from it what they can. Perhaps they are designed to feed on whatever consciousness they find there, just as a caterpillar feeds on whatever leaves are to hand, to build its own mind. Or minds. Perhaps this is why they are helping us to stay alive, providing us with bizarre but edible foods. They want more of our thoughts. That’s a less comfortable thought: that we are nothing more to them than a kind of harvest.
Except that – we’re still alive. Our numbers increase. There’s plenty of food. Anything is possible. We must be hopeful. We have every reason to be hopeful.
[4] There is one more thing I want to say. This new cycle of life. They passed up carbon in various chemical forms, and it is bound into the stalks and fruiting-shells of the plants. Eventually these crops will become self-sustaining, once enough dead matter has accumulated to form a substratrum of soil, the manure that all plant life needs. They recycle organic material more directly by feeding it directly into their under-snow lagoons. Since these pools are cut off from the sunlight this will continue to be necessary: if the Others stop supplying the matter for the insect-shrimps and all the rest of the creatures to eat, then humanity will have to supply the gap. In all this they are only doing what food-miners used to do, reusing the buried resources of the world. This pleases me, very deeply. I know that my daughter is one of those resources. It no longer makes me cry to think of it. More than this, it gladdens me to see a child eating a roasted fruit-shell, to think that all those people have not been lost, that they serve a purpose. Eleven years ago I had another daughter, and nine years ago a son. They gladden me too, and for similar reasons. I have come to hate waste above all, and in my happier moments I sometimes come to the conclusion that nothing is wasted. Everything endures, though sometimes changed. We’re near the summit of the mountain, I feel, and soon we’ll be able to leave purgatory behind. I’m convinced of that.
Of course I can’t pretend to be a prophet. The prophets belong to a different age. I think that’s all I want to say right now. Thank you.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Adam Roberts 2004
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The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published Great Britain in 2004 by
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This eBook edition published in 2018 by Gollancz.
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ISBN 978 1 473 22443 8
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1 This sentence changes according to which personal account or memoir the So You Want To Be A Food-Miner? appendix is added. IP Order. all accounts or histories of the Coming of the Snow should also include statements tending towards the recruitment of workers for the public good and the increase of public wealth.
2 Before the snow much of northern Africa was hot, dry and barren. The Sahara was a waterless place.