The Art of War

by David Wingrove

  Beth hesitated, a sadness in her face. ‘I didn’t know him well enough to hate him, Meg. But what I knew of him I didn’t like. He was a little man, for all his talent. Not like Hal.’ She shook her head gently, a faint smile returning to the corners of her mouth. ‘No, not like your father at all.’

  ‘Where’s Ben?’ Meg asked, interrupting her reverie.

  ‘Downstairs. He’s been up hours, working. He brought a lot of equipment up from the basement and set it up in the living-room.’

  Meg frowned. ‘What’s he up to?’

  Beth shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Fulfilling a promise, he said. He said you’d understand.’

  ‘Ah…’ Shells, she thought. It has to do with shells.

  And memory.

  Ben sat in a harness at the piano, the dummy cage behind him, its morph mimicking his stance. A single thin cord of conduit linked him to the morph. Across the room, a trivee spider crouched, its programme searching for discrepancies of movement between Ben and the morph. Meg sat down beside the spider, silent, watching.

  A transparent casing covered the back of Ben’s head, attached to the narrow, horseshoe collar about his neck. Within the casing a web of fine cilia made it seem that Ben’s blond hair was streaked with silver. These were direct implants, more than sixty in all, monitoring brain activity.

  Two further cords, finer than the link, led down from the ends of the collar to Ben’s hands, taped to his arms every few inches. Further hair-fine wires covered Ben’s semi-naked body, but the eye was drawn to the hands.

  Fine, flexible links of ice formed crystalline gloves that fitted like a second skin about his hands. Sensors on their inner surfaces registered muscular movement and temperature changes.

  Tiny pads were placed all over Ben’s body, measuring his responses and feeding the information back into the collar.

  As he turned to face Meg, the morph turned, faceless and yet familiar in its gestures, its left hand, like Ben’s, upon its thigh, the fingers splayed slightly.

  Meg found the duplication frightening – deeply threatening – but said nothing. The piano keyboard, she noted, was normal except in one respect. Every key was black.

  ‘Call Mother in, Meg. She’d like to hear this.’

  The morph was faceless, dumb, but in a transparent box at its feet was a separate facial unit – no more than the unfleshed suggestion of a face, the musculature replaced by fine wiring. As Ben spoke, so the half-formed face made the ghost-movements of speech, its lips and eyes a perfect copy of Ben’s own.

  Meg did as she was told, bringing her mother from the sunlight of the kitchen into the shadows of the living-room. Beth Shepherd sat beside her daughter, wiping her hands on her apron, attentive to her son.

  He began.

  His hands flashed over the keys, his fingers living jewels, coaxing a strange, wistful, complex music from the ancient instrument. A new sound from the old keys.

  When he had done, there was a moment’s intense silence, then his mother stood and went across to him. ‘What was that, Ben? I’ve never heard its like. It was…’ She laughed, incredulous, delighted. ‘And I presumed to think that I could teach you something!’

  ‘I wrote it,’ he said simply. ‘Last night, while you were all asleep.’

  Ben closed his eyes, letting the dissonances form again in his memory. Long chordal structures of complex dissonances, overlapping and repeating, twisting about each other like the intricate threads of life, the long chains of deoxyribonucleic acid. It was how he saw it. Not A and C and G Minor, but Adenine and Cytosine and Guanine. A complex, living structure.

  A perfect mimicry of life.

  The morph sat back, relaxing after its efforts, its chest rising and falling, its hands resting on its knees. In the box by its feet the eyes in the face were closed, the lips barely parted, only a slight flaring of the nostrils indicating life.

  Meg shuddered. She had never heard anything so beautiful, or seen anything so horrible. It was as if Ben were being played. The morph, at its dummy keyboard, seemed far from being the passive recipient of instructions. A strange power emanated from the lifeless thing, making Ben’s control of things seem suddenly illusory: the game of some greater, more powerful being, standing unseen behind the painted props.

  So this was what Ben had been working on. A shiver of revulsion passed through her. And yet the beauty – the strange, overwhelming beauty of it. She shook her head, not understanding, then stood and went out into the kitchen, afraid for him.

  Ben found her in the rose garden, her back to him, staring out across the bay. He went across and stood there, close by her, conscious more than ever of the naked form of her beneath the soft gauze dress she wore. Her legs were bare, her hair unbraided. The faintest scent of lavender hung about her.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked softly. ‘Didn’t you like it?’

  She turned her head and gave a tight smile, then looked back. It was answer enough. It had offended her somehow.

  He walked past her slowly, then stopped, his back to her, his left hand on his hip, his head tilted slightly to the left, his right hand at his neck, his whole body mimicking her stance. ‘What didn’t you like?’

  Normally she would have laughed, knowing he was ragging her, but this time it was different. He heard her sigh and turn away, and wondered, for a moment, if it was to do with what had happened in the night.

  She took a step away, then turned back. He had turned to follow her. Now they stood there, face to face, a body’s length separating them.

  ‘It was…’

  She dropped her eyes, as if embarrassed.

  He caught his breath, moved by the sight of her. She might have died. And then he would never have known. He spoke softly, coaxingly; the way she so often spoke to him, drawing him out. ‘It was what?’

  She met his eyes. ‘It was frightening.’ He saw her shiver. ‘I felt…’ She hesitated, as if brought up against the edge of what she could freely say to him. This reticence was something new in her and unexpected, a result of the change in their relationship. Like something physical in the air between them.

  ‘Shall we walk? Along the shore?’

  She hesitated, then smiled faintly. ‘Okay.’

  He looked up. The sky was clouding over. ‘Come. Let’s get our boots and coats. It looks like it might rain.’

  An hour later they were down at the high-water level, their heavy boots sinking into the mud, the sky overcast above them, the creek and the distant water meadows to their left. It was low tide and the mud stretched out to a central channel that meandered like an open vein cut into a dark cheek, glistening like oil whenever the sun broke through the clouds.

  For a time they walked in silence, hand in hand, conscious of their new relationship. It felt strange, almost like waking to self-consciousness. Before there had been an intimacy, almost a singularity about them – a seamless continuity of shared experience. They had been a single cell, unbreached. But now? Now it was different. It was as if this new, purely physical intimacy had split that cell, beginning some ancient, inexorable process of division.

  Perhaps it was unavoidable. Perhaps, being who they were, they had been fated to come to this. And yet…

  It remained unstated, yet both felt an acute sense of loss. It was there, implicit in the silence, in the sighs each gave as they walked the shoreline.

  Where the beach narrowed, they stopped and sat on a low, gently sloping table of grey rock, side by side, facing back towards the cottage. The flat expanse of mud lay to their right now, while to their left, no more than ten paces away, the steep, packed earth bank was almost twice their height, the thickly interwoven branches of the overhanging trees throwing the foot of the bank into an intense shade. It could not be seen from where they sat, but this stretch of the bank was partly bricked, the rotting timbers of an old construction poking here and there from the weathered surface. Here, four centuries before, French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars had ended their days, some
in moored hulks, some in the makeshift gaols that had lined this side of the creek.

  Ben thought of those men now. Tried to imagine their suffering, the feeling of homesickness they must have felt, abandoned in a foreign land. But there was something missing in him – some lack of pure experience – that made it hard for him to put himself in their place. He did not know how it felt to be away from home. Here was home and he had always been here. And there, in that lack of knowledge, lay the weakness in his art.

  It had begun long before last night. Long before Meg had come to him. And yet last night had been a catalyst – a clarification of all he had been feeling.

  He thought of the words his father had quoted back at him and knew they were right.

  Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.

  It was so. For him, at least, what Nietzsche had said was true. And he had no access. Not here.

  He was restless. He had been restless for the past twelve months. He realized that now. It had needed something like this to bring it into focus for him. But now he knew. He had to get out.

  Even before last night he had been thinking of going to college in the City. To Oxford, maybe, or the Technical School at Strasburg Canton. But he had been thinking of it only as the natural path for such as he; as a mere furthering of his education. Now, however, he knew there was more to it than that. He needed to see life. To experience life fully, at all its levels. Here he had come so far, but the valley had grown too small for him, too confined. He needed something more – something other – than what was here in the Domain.

  ‘If I were to…’ he began, turning to face Meg, then fell silent, for at the same time she had turned her head and begun to speak to him.

  They laughed, embarrassed. It had never happened before. They had always known instinctively when the other was about to speak. But this… it was like being strangers.

  Meg shivered, then bowed her head slightly, signalling he should speak, afraid to repeat that moment of awkwardness.

  Ben watched her a moment. Abruptly, he stood and took three paces from her, then turned and looked back at her. She was looking up at him from beneath the dark fall of her hair.

  ‘I’ve got to leave here, Meg.’

  He saw at once how surprised she was. There was a widening of her eyes, the slightest parting of her lips, then she lowered her head. ‘Ah…’

  He was silent, watching her. But as he made to speak again, she looked up suddenly, the hurt and anger in her eyes unexpected.

  ‘Is it because of last night?’

  He sighed. ‘It has nothing to do with us. It’s me. I feel constrained here. Boxed in. It feels like I’ve outgrown this place. Used it up.’

  As he spoke he stared away from her at the creek, the surrounding hills, the small, white-painted cottages scattered amongst the trees. Overhead, the sky was a lid of ashen grey.

  ‘And I have to grow. It’s how I am.’ He looked at her fiercely, defiantly. ‘I’ll die if I stay here much longer, Meg. Can’t you see that?’

  She shook her head, her voice passionate with disagreement. ‘It’s not so, Ben. You’ve said it yourself. It’s a smaller world in there. You talk of feeling boxed in, here, in the Domain. But you’re wrong. That’s where it’s really boxed in. Not here. We’re outside all of that. Free of it.’

  He laughed strangely, then turned aside. ‘Maybe. But I have to find that out. For myself.’ He looked back at her. ‘It’s like that business with memory. I thought I knew it all, but I didn’t. I was wrong, Meg. I’d assumed too much. So now I’ve got to find out. Now. While I still can.’

  Her eyes had followed every movement in his face, noting the intense restlessness there. Now they looked down, away from his. ‘Then I don’t understand you, Ben. Surely there’s no hurry?’

  ‘Ah, but there is.’

  She looked up in time to see him shrug and turn away, looking out across the mud towards the City.

  The City. It was a constant in their lives. Wherever they looked, unless it was to sea, that flat, unfeatured whiteness defined the limits of their world, like a frame about a picture, or the edge of some huge, encroaching glacier. They had schooled themselves not to see it. But today, with the sky pressed low and featureless above them, it was difficult not to see it as Ben saw it – as a box, containing them.

  ‘Maybe… ’ she said, below her breath. But the very thought of him leaving chilled her to the bone.

  He turned, looking back at her. ‘What were you looking for?’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Before the wave struck. You were about to tell me something. You’d seen something.’

  She felt a sudden coldness on the back of her hand and looked. It was a spot of rain. She brushed at it, then looked back at her brother.

  ‘It was a shell. One I’d never seen before. It was attached to the rock but I couldn’t free it with my fingers. It was like it was glued there. A strange, ugly-looking shell, hard and ridged, shaped like a nomad’s tent.’

  More spots of rain fell, distinct and heavy. Ben looked up at the sky, then back at her. ‘We’d best get back. It’s going to chuck down.’

  She went across to him and took his hand.

  ‘Go,’ she said. ‘But not yet. Not just yet.’

  He leaned forward, kissing her brow, then moved back, looking at her, his dark green eyes seeing nothing but her for that brief moment. ‘I love you, Megs. Understand that. But I can’t help what I am. I have to go. If I don’t…’

  She gave the smallest nod. ‘I know. Really. I understand.’

  ‘Good.’ This time his lips touched hers gently, then drew away.

  She shivered and leaned forward, wanting to kiss him once again, but just then the clouds burst overhead and the rain began to come down heavily, pocking the mud about their feet, soaking their hair and faces in seconds.

  ‘Christ!’ he said, raising his voice against the hard, drumming sound of the rain. For a moment neither of them moved, then Meg turned and, pointing to the bank, yelled back at him.

  ‘There! Under the trees!’

  Ben shook his head. ‘No. Come on! There’s half a day of rain up there. Let’s get back!’ He took her hands, tugging at her, then turned and, letting her hands fall from his, began to run back along the shore towards the cottage. She caught up with him and ran beside him, laughing now, sharing his enjoyment of the downpour, knowing – suddenly knowing without doubt – that just as he had to go, so he would be compelled to return. In time. When he had found what he was looking for.

  Suddenly he stopped and, laughing, throwing his hands up towards the sky, turned his eyes on her again. ‘It’s beautiful!’ he shouted. ‘It’s bloody beautiful!’

  ‘I know!’ she answered, looking past him at the bay, the tree-covered hillsides misted by the downpour, the dour-looking cottages on the slope before them.

  Yes, she thought. You’ll miss this in the City. There it never rains. Never in ten thousand years.

  Chapter 48

  COMPULSIONS

  That night he dreamed.

  He was floating above a desert, high up, the jet-black, lavatic sands stretching off to the horizon on every side. Tall spirals of dust moved slowly across the giant plain, like fluted pillars linking Heaven and Earth. A cold wind blew. Over all, a black sun sat like a sunken eye in a sky of bloodied red.

  He had come here from dead lands, deserted lands, where temples to forgotten gods lay in ruins, open to the sky; had drifted over vast mountain ranges, their peaks a uniform black, the purest black he’d ever seen, untouched by snow or ice; had glided over plains of dark, fused glass, where the image of his small, compacted self flew like a doppelganger under him, soaring to meet him when he fell, falling as he rose. And now he was here, in this empty land, where colour ended and silence was a wall within the skull.

  Time passed. Then, with a huge, almost a
nimal shudder that shook the air about him, the sands beneath him parted, the great dunes rolling back, revealing the perfect smoothness of a lake, its red-tinged waters like a mirror.

  He fell. Turning in the air, he made an arrow of himself, splitting the dark, oily surface cleanly. Down he went, the coal black liquid smooth, unresistant, flowing about his body like cold fire.

  Deep he went, so deep that his ears popped and bled. His lungs, like flowers, blossomed in the white cage of his chest, bursting, flooding his insides with a fiery hotness. For a moment the blackness was within, seeping into him through every pore; a barrier through which he must pass. Then he was through; freed from his normal, human self. And still he sank, like a spear of iron, down through the blackness, until there, ten miles beneath the surface, the depths were seared with brightness.

  The lake’s bed was white, like bone; clean and polished and flat, like something made by men. It glowed softly from beneath, as if another land – miraculous and filled, as bright as this was dark – lay on the far side of its hard, unyielding barrier.

  He turned his eyes, drawn to something to his left. He swam towards it.

  It was a stone. A dark, perfect circle of stone, larger than his palm. It had a soft, almost dusted surface. He touched it, finding it cool and hard. Then, as he watched, it seemed to melt and flow, the upper surface flattening, the thin edge crinkling. Now it was a shell, an oyster, its circumference split by a thin, uneven line of darkness.

  His hand went to his waist and took the scalpel from its tiny sheath, then slipped its edge between the plates. Slowly, reluctantly, they parted, like a moth’s wings opening to the sun.

  Inside was a pearl of darkness – a tiny egg so dark, so intensely black, that it seemed to draw all light into itself. He reached out to take it, but even as he closed his left hand about the pearl, he felt its coldness burn into his flesh then fall, like a drop of Heaven’s fire, on to the bed below.

  Astonished, he held the hand up before his face and saw the perfect hole the pearl had made. He turned the hand. Right through. The pearl had passed right through.