by M. R. Carey
Baby Khan lies on his back, quiet and good, kicking his legs just a little. Beside him, swathed in an identical green blanket, is the dead boy. It’s not an equation. Greaves is not saying anything about their relative importance. He’s just saying: they’re both yours. One living, one dead, but they’re yours. See that.
Two or three of the nearest children step forward, but the scarred girl stops them again with a single syllable. She is still looking at Stephen. She makes the exact same gesture he just made, points her finger at the living and the dead, then lets it fall.
It’s probably a status thing. He has to come to her. He has to bring his offerings and lay them down before her.
He moves as slowly as he can, partly to avoid triggering any violent responses and partly to maintain the sense that this is a ritual. He steps onto the platform and picks up the dead boy.
The radio crackles in his pocket, speaks thin and broken words.
Reluctantly he sets the dead body down again, takes the radio out and puts it to his ear. “Yes?”
“Greaves. It’s Colonel Carlisle.”
Greaves considers many possible answers, settles on one that he hopes will fend off profitless questions. “I can’t talk right now, Colonel. I’m busy.”
“I know. I can see. I’m out on the parade ground, fifty yards away. If you close the airlock I think I can disperse the children without harming them.”
Greaves is appalled. “No!” he yelps. “Don’t. Please, Colonel! Don’t do that. Don’t fire on them.”
“Then what support can I give you?”
Greaves looks out into the dark. He shakes his head, in case the colonel is actually close enough to see him. “None,” he says.
“Lad, you’re going to get yourself—”
“It’s fine. I’ll be fine. This is the only way, Colonel. The only way. Don’t do anything.” He hesitates. There’s so much he can’t explain, but maybe one thing that he has to, to keep the colonel from running in with his rifle and ruining everything. But he’s bad at explanations that aren’t technical, and he is almost certain that the technical explanation won’t work here. “You know …” he tries, “with kittens … if they smell wrong, or look wrong, sometimes the mother will eat them.”
“What are you talking about?” the colonel asks.
“Rina’s baby. He has to go to his people, Colonel.”
“His people? But …”
For a few seconds there is nothing but static on the line.
Then the colonel’s voice says, “All right. I understand. Go on, Greaves.”
“That’s all,” Greaves says. “I want them to accept him. I promised Rina. And if I do everything right, it might be okay. But if you fire … Please don’t, Colonel. Please don’t do anything, whatever you see.”
He switches the radio off and sets it down on the floor. Then he picks up the little corpse again and brings it out.
The whole tribe is waiting in silence, taking their cue from the scarred girl. But a shiver of movement goes through them all when they see—or perhaps smell—what Greaves is carrying. One of the children speaks, a murmur of liquid syllables. Another makes a sound like a soft moan.
The girl inclines her head and makes a brusque movement with her hand. She clicks her tongue. Four living children take the dead one from Stephen’s hands and bear him to her. The scarred girl touches the boy’s forehead, and then her own. They lay him at her feet, as softly as if they were trying not to wake him.
Stephen goes back inside, bends and scoops up baby Khan. The baby makes a small noise in his throat. Geh. His clenched fists paddle as though he is squaring up for a fight.
Stephen raises him high as he descends from the platform again. He walks to where the scarred girl stands, in the midst of her people. He turns slowly, letting all of them see baby Khan and smell him.
Moving as slowly and smoothly as he can he goes down on one knee, then on both. He holds out the fragile bundle for the scarred girl to take. She examines baby Khan critically for the space of two, three, four heartbeats.
She tucks Captain Power’s voice box back into her belt.
She takes the baby from him. With one hand, she unwraps the blanket and casts it aside—almost with distaste. Her nostrils flare. The tableau holds, for one heartbeat and then another.
Finally she speaks: a melodious stream of sounds with no consonants in it, no hidden rocks to break the flow. One of the other children, a boy older and taller than her, shrugs off a woollen shawl he is wearing as a sash and offers it up. The scarred girl takes it and swaddles the baby in it. She licks the tip of her thumb and anoints his forehead very gently with her spit. A baptism.
And since it’s a baptism, Stephen takes the risk of speaking. “Sam,” he says. He points to the baby. Nods. Smiles. “Sam.”
The boy who gave up his shawl goes to take up the fallen blanket—waste not, want not—but the scarred girl shakes her head and he backs away. Clearly there are boundaries here that matter.
“Thank you,” Stephen says.
The girl answers him, but he doesn’t understand her any more than she understood him.
And now comes the hard part.
He rolls up his sleeve, all the way to the elbow. Taking the canteen of water from his shoulder, he unscrews the cap and pours the water over his exposed forearm. He rubs the whole area with the palm of his other hand, wiping away the e-blocker gel that disguised his scent. He holds up his wrist, which now (he hopes) smells of all things that are good to eat.
“Go ahead,” he says.
The scarred girl stares at him in perplexity. Her severe stare seems to ask a question: Is this how we treat our friends?
“You have to,” Stephen explains, knowing the words are futile. He is relying on her instincts, not her understanding. “Otherwise, when they ask me, I’ll tell them. That there’s a cure. How to make it. Men with weapons will come after you—many, many more than are here now. They’ll take you and turn you into medicine. Kill you all, just so they can have a few more years of life themselves. They won’t even feel sorry about it.”
The scarred girl seems to listen. Her mouth is bent into a trembling gull-wing scowl but she doesn’t move. Greaves wonders how much control that takes, how much strength. And how much authority to make the others hold back, though they tilt their heads to catch the smell of him on the still air. The baby stirs and utters a thin wail of complaint, made suddenly aware of its hunger.
Helpless, Stephen plunges on. “I can’t kill myself. There are ways to do it without hurting, but … it’s not one of the things I can do. So we have to do this instead.” He offers his arm again. The words are just a spur for his own faltering resolve: his dilemma would be almost impossible to explain even if they spoke the same language. He needs her to wipe the hard drive of his mind, so he can’t give her and her people up to the dubious mercy of their predecessors, humanity 1.0.
Part of this is the promise he made to Rina. Keep him safe. It doesn’t matter what happens to me so long as you keep him safe. And that means keeping the whole tribe safe. Which in turn means not letting out into the world the knowledge that will destroy them.
But it goes beyond even that strict imperative. Greaves has been thinking it through ever since he first met the scarred girl and her people. On one of the lowest levels of his mind, in a sub-routine set up for this alone, he has been working out the terms of the problem all this time. The solution is here. Now. It takes the form of a Venn diagram, two circles intersecting. The world of Beacon, dying slowly every year even before it decided to dismember and eat itself; and the world of these children, which whatever it might be now has at least the potential to be something else. It’s a seed. A dead tree can stand for years or decades as it hollows out. A seed has places to be and things to do.
Stephen has made up his mind. He’s with the seeds, the scarred girl’s tribe. He can’t be one of them, but he has chosen his allegiance. The children are all that matters. And right now, though
he’s on their side he is the plague, the pathogen that could destroy them. The knowledge in his mind has to be safely disposed of.
“Please,” he begs.
The scarred girl makes a gesture. Her hand raised towards him, closed and then open. She knows what he wants her to do, but she won’t do it.
It’s a complex problem with a simple, inelegant solution. Stephen extends his hand to touch baby Khan’s forehead.
“Sam,” he reminds them all. “His name is Sam.”
He puts the tip of his thumb against the baby’s lips. The baby’s jaws work back and forth, sawing at Greaves’ flesh. It’s very hard for the tiny teeth to get a purchase, but once they do they punch through his skin cleanly and quickly. They’re very sharp.
The baby takes its first meal.
Stephen lets go of his humanity with much more relief than fear. It was an awkward burden to carry at the best of times.
61
The colonel returns to Rosie across a field strewn with the bodies of the dead. All of the corpses he sees are adults and half-devoured. Brigadier Fry’s troops seem to have given a poor account of themselves. Of course the children won the field and therefore have had the opportunity to take their dead away with them.
Certainly there is no sign of them now. Rosie’s airlock still stands open, but the area around it is deserted. Carlisle is not surprised. He saw the moment when Stephen Greaves handed over Dr. Khan’s baby, and the moment shortly after when—in a different sense—he surrendered himself.
If Greaves were still present, Carlisle would shoot him just as he shot Samrina. Whatever the children are, or may become, an adult human on exposure to Cordyceps dies in that moment, or else becomes an unwilling passenger in a hijacked body. In the second case, the bullet is a mercy; in the first, it’s probably an irrelevance but it feels to the colonel like a mark of respect akin to covering the faces of the dead.
But there is no sign of Greaves. Perhaps when the children melted away into the dark he trailed along in their wake, moved by some half-remembered impulse. More likely he is out on the parade ground somewhere, feeding.
The whup whup whup of a helicopter’s blades makes Carlisle look to the sky momentarily. Sixsmith is hovering the Little Bird about twenty feet up, right above his head. She gestures. A thumbs-up. She has her work to do, and he has his. He waves back, wishing her and the others well.
He hopes they will make it home. He hopes there will be a home for them to go back to. There is reason to hope. Brigadier Fry wouldn’t have been out here in the wilderness making deals with the devil if her coup d’état had been thriving.
The Little Bird peels away. The last the colonel sees of it is the red light at the tail end of its fuselage lifting into the sky like a stray spark from an extinguished bonfire.
Carlisle is a practical man, and a soldier first and foremost. He enters Rosie via the cab, not the airlock, so that he can conduct a proper sweep from aft to stern. He finds no soldiers, no junkers and no children: nobody at all, in fact, except for Dr. Fournier, who is cowering in the lab with his hands still tied to the workbench. When the colonel enters, Fournier starts to babble out a stream of complaints, demands, pleas, questions and explanations, the words falling over each other in his haste to get them out.
Carlisle checks the straps. They have been partially cut through, probably with the scalpel that is lying on the floor a little way away, but the doctor had not made much progress before he dropped the scalpel and it bounced or rolled out of his reach. The straps will hold.
When he sees that the colonel means to leave him there, Dr. Fournier switches tack and starts to threaten. He has friends in Beacon. Friends with power and influence. He has been acting as Brigadier Fry’s personal agent and representative. If he is harmed, if he is treated badly, the brigadier will not be happy.
Fry is dead, Carlisle tells him. If the doctor has any living friends he would be curious to know their names.
He puts the scalpel back in the instrument drawer where it will do no harm. In its place, he presses a full canteen of water into the doctor’s hands. Whatever he eventually decides to do with Fournier, torturing him is not part of the plan.
He goes aft to the cockpit. Along the way, he closes the airlock door.
Driving Rosie isn’t easy for a man with only one functional leg. There are a great many false starts before the colonel manages to get the vehicle turned around and moving away from the carnage. Then he wastes a great deal more time looking for the gate. Eventually he gives up the search and rams straight through the fence, which offers no resistance at all.
He is back on the M1 when dawn comes up, and by noon he is on the outskirts of London. When hungries chase him he does his best to outdistance them. Only as a last resort does he plough them under Rosie’s wheels.
He is looking for a place to stop, but not any particular place. He will not be returning to Beacon, and he has no wish for Rosie to go back there either. He liked her best as an instrument of truth rather than a weapon of war. He will leave her somewhere where she is unlikely to be found by anyone in need of such a weapon. Somewhere in the capital’s endless labyrinth of streets.
When the intransigent spike of the Senate House Library appears in the centre of the forward window, he knows he has reached his destination. He slows to a halt halfway along Malet Street, on the exact spot to which the shadow of the library’s spire points.
He sits a while as the sun sinks down. The shadow swerves away from him, too slowly for him to see the movement: the hour hand of a clock, telling him his time is past.
But clocks are not infallible.
He goes and fetches Dr. Fournier, freeing him from the workbench but keeping him at the point of a gun. When they are both seated side by side in the cockpit, he explains what he is about to do. He does this as a courtesy. To see death coming and be able to look it in the face is part of what human beings gained when they took the path that led them away from the rest of the living kingdoms. Part of what they lost, too, no doubt.
Distressed and terrified, Fournier pleads for his life. But he is indignant, too. He demands to know what he has done to deserve a sentence of death.
“You conspired with Brigadier Fry to lead us into an ambush,” Carlisle says. It seems best to him to keep this brief, and simple. “We were meant to die there. You would have died too, but you didn’t know that. You were willing to sacrifice the whole of Rosie’s crew to your own purposes.”
Fournier’s face flushes red, with anger rather than shame. “I was co-opted!” he says. “Coerced. Nothing I did was by my own choice. Colonel, the brigadier gave me a direct order. And she outranks you. You of all people have to understand—” He falters, lacking the technical vocabulary.
“The chain of command,” Carlisle supplies. “I do, Doctor. Very much so. I’ve always had what might be considered an exaggerated respect for it. But you’re not a soldier and you weren’t bound to obey. You had the luxury of choosing for yourself where your duty lay.”
“No, I didn’t!” Fournier is shrill. “She told me the only way I would be appointed to the mission was if I agreed to do as she said.”
“That,” the colonel points out gently, “is what a choice looks like.” He nods his head out of the window at the Senate House. “I was a student here,” he says. “My degree was in history. I never imagined I’d live to see the end of it.”
Dr. Fournier starts to plead again. He says that with Beacon split down the middle he couldn’t be said to have committed treason, only to have chosen the wrong side. Carlisle listens for a long while, then holds up a hand to stop the logorrhoeic flow. “Doctor, please. I was trying to explain, since you seem to feel you’re being treated harshly. The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you’re lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures.”
“I’m not a historian,” Fournier points out.
“No,” Carlisle agrees. “But biology is about correspondences too, surely? You study living things to understand yourself.”
Fournier is looking at him now with wary calculation. “I suppose that’s true,” he says, with no conviction at all.
“There’s no need to humour me, Doctor. You’re welcome to disagree. But it seems to me—am I wrong?—that all living things form a sort of fractal pattern. The same features, the same structures, repeating themselves on different scales and in different configurations. You can’t look at those things for long, surely, without finding yourself reflected in them.”
“I do,” Fournier agrees fulsomely. “I find myself all the time.”
The colonel sighs. The man isn’t listening to him at all. “Well then,” he says wearily.
“Well then what?”
“Well, then you know what you betrayed. Not Beacon. Life. There were two sides and you didn’t choose life. Did you even look at that last set of samples? The ones we brought down from Ben Macdhui?”
Fournier’s face is blank. “No, of course not. When would I have had time?”
“Dr. Khan found the time. I’m not sure whether it was before she gave birth, or just after. She was surprised at what she found. None of the Cordyceps cultures from Ben Macdhui had germinated. Not one, out of twelve.”
Fournier blinks rapidly, several times. “A mistake, presumably. Inert samples.” He is thinking it through even as he speaks. “No, they would have been cultured separately. Grown in different media. But then … that would mean …”
“Exactly.” Carlisle nods. “An environmental inhibitor, for the hungry plague. Something unique about the Cairngorm plateau, at least at its higher end. Altitude? Air pressure? Electro-magnetic fields? You’d be able to come up with a better guess than me, Doctor, I’m sure.