Grazing The Long Acre

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Or you would be hydrocephalic Eloi, with heads the size of pumpkins.”

  She nodded, though she had no idea what an Eloi was.

  They sat with their knees folded up, like the figures in the mural.

  “I’m sorry I fooled around, Elen. I scared you. I think I’m going stir crazy.”

  “Or else you’re reacting poorly to racist abuse, Batman.”

  Sigurt laughed, and scratched his ear. ‘Batman! Half-domino, cute little shoulder cape. Sounds too girly for my taste. If you like comparisons, we are more akin to frilled lizards than bats.”

  “Nadeem must really annoy you.”

  “He is something I would scrape off my shoe,” pronounced the alien, with relish. He tipped back his head. “Do you hear that, Commissar? Shoe-Scrapings!”

  They started to laugh. The Active Complement lived in each other’s heads, accommodating each other as if they’d been workmates for a lifetime. They were a group mind: inhibited, licensed; in constant negotiation. Elen replayed the first remark Sigurt had made. Sigurt had known that someone was visiting the artefacts, but because he was only supercargo, not A/C, he hadn’t known who it was.

  “I’ve been visiting the Tomb Wife,” she said. “I’m fascinated by the idea of a ghost on an instantaneous transit. Do you know anything more about her?”

  The alien shrugged. “Like what?”

  The tomb crouched like a massive, patient animal. Ancient artefacts peered at them from the gloom, carving and shaping blurred into a vague sense of life.

  “Was she old? Was she young…? Did she have a lover?”

  “Widows are a danger to social cohesion,’ said the alien. “The relict of a partnership has to be neutralised, or there’ll be misalliances, inheritance disputes. Therefore the widow must marry again, harmlessly. She must wed the tomb—”

  “That sounds very human. Nadeem would be horrified.”

  Sigurt seemed to think it over. “The ancient Lar’sz’ kept state records,” he said at last. “And accounts. Not much else was written down. I’m afraid we don’t know much. There are the bas-reliefs, but they’re high art, highly ambiguous. And not of her choosing, of course. They are the memorial her husband ordered.”

  Elen wanted to ask what was her name, but she was afraid that might be a lapse in taste, a cultural taboo. Another question came to her. “Is it right to call her a ghost? Or did a haunting mean something different to the ancient Lar’sz?”

  “It’s different and it’s the same, of course.”

  The constant cry of one numinously intelligent sentient biped to another.

  Sigurt grinned, acknowledging the problem. “Let me try to bridge the gap. In my world we believe that people can, how can I put it, leave themselves behind at certain junctures, life events. Someone else goes on. When we speak of a haunting, that’s our derivation. Not the, er, spirit of someone physically dead. D’you see?”

  “Yes,” said Elen, startled and moved. “Yes, I think I do.”

  She felt that she knew Sigurt better, after this conversation. There was a bond between them, the celebrated archaeologist and the navigator: unexpected but real.

  The country of no duration can’t be seen from the outside. You can never look back and say there, I was. That’s what happened. Everything that “happened” in a transit was doomed to vanish like a dream when they fell back into normal space. As the Pirate Jenny moved, without motion, to the end, without ending, of the paradoxical moment, everyone had a terrible psychic headache. The Active Complement suffered fretful agonies that swamped the ghost, Rafe’s nightmares; all their shipboard entanglements. They regarded Sigurt, whose wakefulness was part of their burden, not so much as an exciting famous person, more as a demanding pet. Batman’s favourite expression (of course!) set everybody’s teeth on edge.

  The captain had been interstellar crew for as long as there’d been commercial interstellar traffic, and he could see the writing on the wall. “The Pirate Jenny is a horseless carriage,” he moaned, in mourning for the sunlit green walls, the mossy ground; the polished birchwood. “Soon it will all be gone, all this. Nobody will bother. Passengers will transport themselves, we’ll be obsolete.”

  “Shut up,” muttered Elen, “shut up, shut up, I’m trying to concentrate—”

  She was mortally afraid that she’d made a mistake. She scoured the code for a single trace of the ghost (there must be a trace!) found none, and knew she must have missed something. Mistake, mistake. The insensate, visceral memory that she always felt like this in the closing phase was no comfort at all.

  “What about freight?” Gorgeous Simone, Chief Engineer, looked up from a game of solitaire. “Who’s going to carry the freight, doctor? Hump it through the indefinite void, if not people like us? Fuck, look at the size of that problem.”

  “Swearbox,” piped Rafe, who had grown chirpy while the others grew morose, and was now a rock, a shoal, an infuriating danger to shipping.

  “Go and eat your head.”

  “They’ll paint the crates with essence of consciousness,” explained Carter, doom-laden. “Or some crazy Borgs will break the Convention. They’ll create actual supernuminal ‘Artificial Intelligence’ nanotech, and inject it into matter.”

  “So fucking what. You won’t be redundant, you’re a doctor.”

  “Ooops! Swearbox again!”

  “Does not compute, man! If it’s a true AI it’ll have civil rights and they won’t be able to make it do anything. We’ll unionise it, it will be on our side—”

  The alien laid his black velvet head on his slender arms on the tabletop and sighed, very softly. All seven of them took this as an outrageous insult. They’d have fallen on Batman and torn him limb from limb, except that they knew there’d be hell to pay. The navigator quit the saloon and retired to her section. God, let this be the peak. Let us be over the mountain, this is unbearable.

  They were over the mountain.

  Elen reported their position, news which was greeted with exhausted relief. Now there was nothing for her to do but watch the tumblers fall: watch the numbers cascade into resolution, not a phase-point out of place. She loved this part and hated it.

  She went down to the hold to visit the Tomb Wife, for the last time. There was a rumour that they’d all be given free passes for the Exhibition, but she didn’t think she’d go. The relationship had been formed here, in the dim-lit cavern under a sea-mount. It wouldn’t be the same in normal space. The tomb greeted her with its shimmering silence, with the stillness of a grief embraced; set in stone.

  “Hello?” she whispered. “I think I’m here to say goodbye.”

  She was not surprised when Sigurt joined her. They smiled at each other and sat for a while; but the black teardrop beckoned. The alien succumbed first. He hooked his long fingers into twin curves in the carving, that she hadn’t noticed, and was through the doorway in one movement. There weren’t any steps, thought Elen. The entrance is supposed to be like that. She tried to copy his action but couldn’t find the handholds. She had to make the same scrambling jump as before; and followed him to the chamber where the partners faced each other, the “wife” poised forever in that gesture of farewell.

  Emotion recorded in art was the rosetta stone, the only (and frequently deceptive) common language of the Diaspora. Elen wasn’t sure what a rosetta stone had been, originally. Sigurt would probably know. But she felt she understood the message of that unfinished caress; the speech in those bright, half-hidden eyes. The dead are gone. The Tomb Wife stayed with herself. She stayed with the life that had ended, rather than going on, a different person—

  How strange, how beautiful.

  Sigurt had gone further into the tomb. At length she heard him coming back. She didn’t have to look around, she could clearly picture him leaning in the ancient doorway. She imagined staying with herself, in the country of no duration. As often as she left this homeland and woke into forgetfulness, she never got used to the wrench of parting. Oh, she thought. I
need not leave. I can stay. If I hadn’t taken this berth, if I had never met Sigurt, I would never have realised that I could do this! With a rush of immense gratitude towards the alien she knelt, she crept on her knees to the offertory table and settled there, curled against the stone.

  “The Tomb Wife was obliged to remain,” said the archaeologist, behind her, in a tone of mild apology. “For all eternity, with the partner to whom she was bound. But in special conditions it might be possible to make, well, a kind of exchange. One ghost for another. I may have lied to you a little. In your terms, it happened long, long ago. In my lifetime, the time I have spent awake, it was not so long ago as all that.”

  Faintly, in her mind’s eye, Elen saw that she had let a transcription error get past her, and what was happening to her now was the consequence. In absolute terms there was no saloon, no eminent alien, no hold full of tombs, there was nothing but the storm, never anything but the storm, the blizzard, and she was falling into it, into the thrilling void of terror that every starfarer knew was waiting—

  Emotion can deceive. The sentient bipeds barely knew anything about each other, as yet. Misconceptions abounded, wild mistakes were only found out when it was too late. A family divided by a single language, thought Elen: knowing at the same time that everything, the stone against her cheek, Batman’s deception, was a translation, and really there was only the blizzard. Yet in the last paradoxical moment, annoyed that it had to happen, that she would not stay here entirely, she felt herself splitting, giving birth to the person who would go on.

  —and saw herself walking away with Sigurt, arm in arm: glimpsed, through the veil of Elen the Navigator’s physical form, the Tomb Wife’s caped shoulders, the delicate black domino of velvet fur, the gleam of the lovers’ eyes.

  IN THE FOREST OF THE QUEEN

  Aymon Bock was not taken with the Montsec American Monument. It seemed inflated: a Doughboys’ monster donut, dominating a landscape that really didn’t need any more reminders of war and death. Surely the hectares of white crosses, another thick-sown field of them every time you turned a bend, were sufficient? The only way to escape the thing was to drive up there, which Aymon and his wife Viola duly did. They left the car, climbed a momentous flight of steps and walked around the circuit of massive fluted columns. Built in 1930, damaged in WWII, restored 1948.

  “Designed by Egerton Swartwout,” remarked Viola. “Sounds like a German name, and it looks like Nazi architecture, isn’t that ironic.”

  ‘The Doughboys didn’t fight Nazis. They were here in 1918, they fought one of the last great battles of the Great War, down there below.

  Viola sighed and nodded. She knew all about the Doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force, their gallant part in licking Kaiser Bill; the various rationales suggested for that nickname (the dumpling shape of an Infantryman’s buttons, the dust of battle, a derogatory reference to apprentice bakers’ boys…). The Doughboys were the reason, or one of the reasons, for this pilgrimage to North Eastern France.

  The only other visitor was a stooped young man in mis-matched tweed jacket and tan chinos, laden with camera equipment, who did not have kin remembered here, he was just interested in the AEF. So Amon was in his element: pointing out his great-grandfather’s name, explaining the strategic importance of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, General John J Pershing’s objectives, the difficulties that beset the American boys, in their biggest operation on French soil—and Viola was released to gaze in peace at the landscape of what had been the “St Mihiel Salient”. The wooded ridges, the lush green, lake-dotted plain, the tide of forest lapping at its shore.

  Aymon remembered that his penchant for talking to strangers tended to get him into trouble with Viola, and he wanted her on his side, today of all days. He bid the young man from Kentucky a courteous goodbye, before he’d even scratched the surface of his knowledge, and came to join her.

  “It looks so peaceful now.”

  “Did you know,” said Viola, “this is still one of the most sparsely populated areas in Europe? Right here, practically next door to Paris, and all those big, packed, developed cities? It’s a boneyard, a graveyard, a derelict munitions dump. I warned you. Didn’t I warn you? The eastern flank of La Belle France is just battlefield after battlefield. Who’d want to come here, work here? How do you plan to attract the good people?”

  “Money,” said Aymon. “Space, freedom, natural beauty. You’re so wrong: this location is perfect. We’ll be fighting them off with sticks.”

  Aymon Bock was an extremely wealthy man. He’d been loaded before he was thirty, avoided getting his fingers burned in a long career of daring start-ups; and finally, in what he still felt was youthful middle age, he wanted to give something back. He looked on the grinning slackers who were this generation’s overnight billionaires, not with envy but with trepidation; and felt his long-ago hippie roots stirring. He meant to do something good, and since this region of France was (according to family legend) his ancestral home, he had chosen the forests of Argonne for the site of his Foundation. Having a French son-in-law also helped; though Jean-Raoul had been almost as hard to convince as Viola herself.

  “There’s another Great War going on, Vi. The world’s in crisis, don’t you understand that? The Bock Foundation is going to be a beacon in the storm: here, where my people came from. I’m the one to do it, I know I am. I have the experience, the talent for spotting ventures that will fly, and for hiring the guys, the scientists, the technologists, who are really going places. I’m tired of all the defeatism, the denial and plain lies. It’s time to get organised, pull together, and see this Global Warming, Climate Change bogey for what it is: a dazzling opportunity. A new industrial revolution.”

  “You’re such a romantic. If you want to be a war hero like your great-grand daddy was, why don’t you set up a Sustainable Technology Centre in the Sudan? Or closer to home, in Down South, Black Hispanic USA, the newest Desperate Developing Nation on the block?”

  “I give a heap of money away to good causes, Vi. You know I do. But it’s pouring water in a bucket full of holes: and you know that too. A man like me, with my expertise, is better employed turning out new buckets.”

  “Those Developing Nations,” remarked Viola, heading for the steps, “can be such a hassle to deal with. Where there’s human suffering there’s dirty politics. Business dies, and God forbid Aymon Bock should get his fingers burned at last.”

  “I’m doing this for you, too. It’s going to reboot your career. You’re going to design for me.”

  “Now you’re talking crazy. Designers have to be cool, and middle-aged women are not cool. Only youth is cool, in a woman.”

  “That’s ridiculous! That’s antediluvian thinking, this is the Age of the Grey Tigress. What about Vivienne Westwood?”

  “She’s in fashion and she’s pushing seventy. Thanks a lot.”

  “Hell, did I say the Bock Foundation? I misspoke myself. It’s going to be the Viola Canning Bock Foundation.”

  Viola laughed, touched in spite of herself. Say what you like about Aymon Bock, he could do irony: he could laugh at himself. She took a vintage Hermès scarf from her $6,000 shoulder bag, and tied it over her hair, Grace Kelly-style. He liked to drive the gun-metal Aston Martin he’d chosen for this trip with the top down, and the wind in his golf-tan wrinkles.

  Of course he did.

  She was a disappointment to her husband because she’d taken a career break, long ago, and never got around to mending it. She couldn’t convince him that it would be madness for her to return to the fray: a wealthy woman, playing with her husband’s newest toy. She’d be a laughing stock. But Ay’s own “career” was in the same state. The money produced itself now, without Aymon’s assistance: churning out mounds and mounds of cash, like that infernal salt mill in the fairytale. The money-maker and his wife were over. They were on the downslope, and this eco-technology fantasy just proved it.

  “We’re barely middle-aged,” cried Aymon, as they drove a
way. “We have half our lives ahead!” And went off into one of his one-man brainstorms: Microgeneration. Virtual Tourism. The billions to be made in the development of efficient recycling. Get the basic patents, the ones that are going to change the entire world…We are both drowning, thought Viola, fully aware that her age was no excuse for anomie. We are both lost, we’ve always been lost. It’s just that Ay doesn’t know it. And deep inside her, like a tiny stone fetus curled around her heart, she felt what she might have been: shining, shining.

  Discontent was all she had left, her only proof that life could have been better, could have been wonderful.

  Down on the plain, when they reached the boundary of Aymon’s new real estate, there was certainly a sense of crossing some kind of crucial border. The wide fields of ethanol-fated corn (where Aymon muttered about the dumb European energy policy, not yet woken up to the exploded concept of biofuels) had given way to water meadow, then suddenly they faced a wall of trees. There was no signage. The road surface, equally suddenly, deteriorated to dirt, with a few scabby patches of asphalt.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  Aymon had been enlarging on the fortunate partnership of Jean-Raoul and Madeleine. Their daughter the biochemist, brilliant and flighty, who’d taken up computer science as a sideline, currently spent her time modelling neurotransmitters, out in the wild blue yonder. Jean-Raoul Martigny, however, was a scientist with a sound business mind, always took Aymon’s advice, understood that sustainable dies if it means non-profit-making.

  He paused in this pleasurable rant—leaving Maddy with her head in the clouds, Raoul with his feet on the ground—and punched up the help menus on the dashboard map.

  “Heck. Something’s wrong with this…”

  The Aston Martin was a beautiful car, and as guilt-free as a classic performance roadster can well be, but its subsystems had proved unreliable. Or else there was something in the air, interfering with the signal…Aymon could feel the prickling heaviness, an electric storm on the way.