by Adam Roberts
‘Sir Giant,’ she asked. ‘This craft has travelled between the very planets themselves?’
‘And more,’ he grumbled.
‘Why does it not move now? Why does its pilot permit it to be shot upon?’
The giant said nothing.
‘Sir Giant,’ said Eleanor, her voice trembling. ‘I am afraid I will never again reach my home. Can I disembark? How can I leave this place? Am I prisoned here for ever?’ She felt a welling up inside her, and tears started to come. Tears.
In sympathetic convulsion, the whole craft began to shudder once again.
‘They bombard again,’ said the giant.
Time seemed to flow differently here. She could not say how, exactly, except that there was some pulsing quality, some sluggishness to her heartbeat and her breathing. Some otherness to the light. No, not her heart, nor her breathing; but the hourglass sifting of the granules of her thought. The throb of memory succeeding memory. Her father, white as this world, and breathing out. Her mother. Christmas cards strung on a smiling thread. The popgun percussion of a cab rattling down Poland street. A man’s face, smiling, and smiling at her. Which man? A water-blue sky, clouds of paint-daub white.
Eleanor slept, briefly, but woke again. Something troubled her sleeping mind, and when she woke she cried out, for she was in clear space and falling into the night amongst stars. But it was the floor, transparenced again, although not by her hand.
She leapt to her feet, fell, clambered up again. A vast expanse of ground had been made glassy, a huge oval of blackness cutting into the white surround. It was her Brobdingnagian: his huge hand, pressed flat against the floor, summoning the vista of the battlefield below. ‘They withdrew their fighting men,’ he grumbled. ‘They hoped to bring Littlebig crashing down upon their enemies.’
‘To destroy the entire French army in one action,’ said Eleanor. ‘I see-I see the tactical advantage of it, I mean.’
‘Now they sleep under their fabrics and, some of them, in the open air,’ said the giant. He hummed, hoomed, and moved his hand slightly to bring the view out and round.
‘It is night. The sky eastward is paling,’ said Eleanor, more to herself than to the giant. ‘Is war truly conducted after this manner? Like office business? Sleep the night, wake together, ready oneself and begin again the fighting?’
‘They will not wake again,’ said the giant, sorrowful. It was not clear whether he had heard what Eleanor said.
She felt the chill in her viscera. It did not so much as occur to her to doubt what the giant said.
‘So many men . . .’ she started to say. And, with an afterthought, ‘and the Dean too!’
The whole ground below them lit up with a firework shine of green. The shadows became ivy and vert-noir, the prominences vermilion and spring-green. The colour held. The weird illumination, like a cheap trick of stage-lighting except for its staggering scale and size, burned for many long seconds. Then it slowly faded. It flickered, for a time briefer than an eyelid-blink, a deep red and then it vanished. The ground was dark again.
‘That?’ Eleanor breathed. And again, louder for the benefit of her companion, ‘What was that?’
‘An antivitalic,’ said the giant, sonorously.
Eleanor digested this fact, and sat down. Then, surprising herself utterly, she embarked upon a great series of wailing sobs, each hurrying so fast after the previous as to tread upon its heels, and all, like winter-storm waves hammering a supine shore, expressive of a desolation so profound it passed beyond, or beneath, all words. She had not known she had it in her. Her tears wet her face and her neck. Her tears came and came and felt to her as if they would never stop.
[12]
One thought, and only that, crossed Bates’s mind as Cheeks pulled his trigger. We perhaps think of thought as something that requires an extensive stretch of time in which to make itself manifest. But Bates was conscious of this thought all as a whole, an infolded rose-bloom of thought fully apprehensible in an instant: the same instant that Cheek’s finger curled in on itself and the ignition-cap sparked a hushing hiss of gunpowder inside the weapon. The thought had to do with infuriation and meaninglessness. It was, in effect: To have lived through so much—to have survived the plague that had killed so many, to have effected that profound connection with the one woman he would ever truly love, to be so close to a profound moment of consummation: to be there, in that place, almost in that place, and then to have it all severed. It was the roughness of it; the unpolished and irregular ugliness of it. Of all things death, surely, ought to mean. It ought to be the knot into which all life’s threads are bound. But it was wrong for those threads to be severed so random with a random sabre’s stroke.
The rifle’s snap.
Run! Run! cried the voice of death, small in his ear. Run where? Run out of this life and into the next. To discovery. The land of death, under its permanent cap of seventy-mile-thick ice. Into the tiniest, or the largest, of coffins. What running could he do?
He opened his eyes.
‘Run! Go now!’ called the voice.
There was a commotion. Several voices were shouting. Cheeks was lying on his back and his face was all blooded. Blood flowed over his skin and over his uniform and laid its redness upon the green. His rifle lay in shreds of wood and metal at his side. Stupidly Bates stared, and stared. He turned, slowly, and looked up at the Captain, mounted on his horse. The Captain had his pistol out and was aiming directly at Bates.
‘Run!’ Oh, it was a real voice. It was a voice in his ears.
Then Bates took a step forward, stupidly, moving towards the Captain’s weapon. Then, the excitement bayoneting into his soul, he leapt back, and turned, and started to run. That pressure upon his shoulders was more than conscience.
Run.
Behind him he heard the pistol’s discharge, and hard upon the noise a woman’s scream, and he flinched in the expectation of the great blow of a pistol ball between his shoulder blades. But there was nothing, and he half-turned his head, still running staggeredly onwards, to glance back. The Captain sat on the ground, holding out his right hand towards Bates’s retreat, as if accusing. The Captain’s hand was gloved in blood. A glistening clump. His horse was cantering away in the opposite direction. The Captain was pointing at Bates with his stump - ‘After him! - After him!’
Cheeks was lying on his back, very particularly not looking at the sky.
The one remaining soldier looked over at his commanding officer with dismay - at his wound, or at the order, it wasn’t possible to say - and then launched into a rapid stride after Bates. He covered the ground alarmingly quickly. Bates put his face forward and reached as hard with his stride as he could.
‘Run!’ He felt the weight of his conscience shift upon his shoulders.
‘But where?’
‘On!’
‘I am glad,’ Bates panted, exhausted already, ‘that you are alive after all.’
‘Save your breath for running,’ said Gugglerum.
Bates ran. But the soldier was yelling at him, and the yells were coming rapidly closer. Bates panted. Why did his pursuer not fire his own weapon? Was it that he now had reason not to trust guns? They had malfunctioned, or been sabotaged. But this soldier would have a knife. And he would have crushing hands, capable of wringing Bates’s neck.
And there! The fellow was upon him, grabbing both of Bates’s shoulders at once and pulling him back so that Bates’s legs kicked forwards in a way that would, were it not a matter of life and death, comical. Bates almost fell, struggled, kicked out again. And then there was a crac! and a crac!, and from where the fellow least expected it - from Bates’s own hair - two pellets shot out. The man reeled away screeching, palms to his eyes, and Bates wasted no time in picking himself up and running on. He ran towards the false moon, which now seemed larger than ever it had. Up the slope, and further up, and still the curving base of this celestial apparition did not come free from the land.
He mounted the hill a
nd got halfway up before he stopped. Each breath was wrested with intense effort from the air. But he was alive. The breath boomed in his chest.
He felt Gugglerum shift across his left shoulder, coming from behind the curtain of hair and hauling himself round. ‘Come,’ he said, directly into Bates’s ear. ‘There is no time to waste here.’
With effort Bates pulled himself to his feet. ‘Your flying craft?’
‘Destroyed.’
‘Yet you survived?’
‘Yes.’
‘You blocked the rifle-barrel of...’
‘Yes.’
‘The Captain’s pistol?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. Mud and sorrowwort wrapped around a stone, with a little heat from the day, of course. Now, on!’
Bates started into an uneven stride. ‘Are we to run to that. . .?’ he gasped. He did not need to be more specific. Naught but the mendax luna could be called that in such a tone of voice. Now that he was over the top of the hill Bates could see how large a portion of the morning sky was occupied by the circle of it. It had come much closer to the Earth now. Morning light coming at it horizontally from the east gave it a weird almost convexity, rendered more optically disorientating by the odd scuffs and rents made by the previous night’s bombardments.
‘Why do I run?’ he gasped, stopping to lean forward and stay his hands on his knees. ‘They are not, are not chasing...’
‘We have lost much time,’ said the Blefuscan.
‘I cured the,’ said Bates, sucking in big breaths, ‘I listened to your words, my friend. And from your words I learned the truth. I cured the sick soldiers.’
‘I have been attending,’ said Gugglerum in his singsong voice. ‘I hid by the cart and watched you.’
‘And why do we hurry?’
They were almost at the peak of the hill.
‘The comet the comet the comet,’ said Gugglerum.
‘You were talking,’ Bates said, hauling his right foot up and planting it saggily on the turf, pulling his left foot and planting it similarly, ratcheting his unfamiliar way up the hill, ‘of the people who are Lilliputians to your Lilliputians . . .’
‘Much smaller,’ he said. ‘You misunderstand the logarithmus.’
‘The?’
‘The scale.’
‘Not a twelfth? Not a twelfth your size?’
But they were at the top of the rise, and a terrible panorama had raised itself before their eyes in the valley below. The field of battle spread before them, but there were corpses, lying face-down, face-up, grasping at air with dead fingers, stretching their limbs out straight or curled like babbies, even, some of them, sitting - corpses everywhere. They were not bloodied, most of them. They were not blackened or scarred, not, most of them, even dirtied. They looked as if asleep.
‘Grief,’ said Bates, in a reduced voice. ‘Lord. What has happened here?’
Gugglerum clambered to stand on Bates’s shoulder, steadying himself with his hand on the back of his head.
‘They are dead. Are they all dead?’
‘They are all dead,’ said the little man.
‘How?’
‘I do not know.’
‘But—’ said Bates, starting forward, and then, in a risible fear of infection - worked into him by his recent experience, but out of place here - starting back. ‘But how are they all fallen? Is it the result of the battle, or . . .?’
‘I do not know.’
Bates, overcoming his waverly timidity again, strode forward, hurried to the nearest of the corpses and knelt down. ‘No blood, no blood upon them,’ he said. ‘Did the life strength simply evaporate out of them. Is it that?’ and he put his face up to look at the great, scabbed circle of white over their heads. It dominated the sky completely. It dwarfed the moon, supplanting its right to come more near the Earth than it was wont and make men - nor Blefuscans—
‘Gugglerum!’ Bates urged. ‘Tell me.’
‘I do not know.’
‘Is there some malign being in that giant circle? Is therea - man in that false moon?’
‘I do not know.’
‘But if there are beings smaller by each factor of twelve, or twelve-dozen, then why not larger? Why not giants to whom the Brobdingnagians are toys? Could one of them be living in that great circle, and breathing . . . contagion, or other death, upon the people beneath him like . . . like a terrible being of... is it so?’
‘It is possible. I do not know.’
‘Why do you not know?’ Bates cried, leaping to his feet. The miniature hands clasped in his hair for balance.
‘Why should I know?’ squealed the little man. ‘Why should I know any more than you? I know my business, the business of regular-sized people. This thing in the sky - it is big-person business. My business is with the pyndoonemel, the little creatures who swarmed through your blood, but were defeated by your own pyndoonemel. I must talk to the monarch of your people . . .’ He said some other things too, but the voice became too squeaky for Bates, in his own agitated state, to follow.
The sky yawned above. How tired must the sky be, after so many wearying shifts? The circle shimmered, and rolled a ways left. The sense of it as a giant plate, or something of that nature, poised precariously over Bates’s head, was so marked that when it moved like this he quailed and whimpered, throwing his arms over his head and running for some dozen yards in a bootless attempt to flee, like the chicken in the fairy tale who believed the sky to be falling.
He stumbled over a body, and fell. Looking up it was clear that the mendax luna was not falling after all. Rather it had rolled a little way through the sky, and the small craters or ragged spots upon its surface had been rotated away.
Getting to his feet Bates saw another person standing amongst all the supine bodies. As he saw this other man, the other man saw him; two pairs of eyes meeting across a field of dead human bodies.
‘Buongiorno!’ boomed this fellow.
‘Hullo!’ There was a mania in Bates’s manner now. He was running, hulloing, leaping over the boulders and blockages in his path that used to be human beings, towards this fellow living man, whose blue coat marked him as enemy, or friend, or anything at all, beneath this baleful silver wash of cometary malediction.
[13]
Eleanor had passed from being the person she was and had become a newer person, perhaps better, but then again newer and better have rarely been synonyms. She wandered. The grief in her heart was larger than the heart that was - she supposed—engineered to contain it. The grief in her heart swelled and became bigger. An antivitalic it had been; and her husband down there, again. Husband, weddingband, herband, ta foi conjugale ô l’Espouse! The whirlwind, the delirium, the gospel terror of watching, of being the audience. Observing from above, whilst the savagery and cruelty flew into new eddies and intensities. Whilst a new Nero arose and cried aloud If only all Rome had but one neck - the fold of the skin, under the chin. Her own neck white and plump, as perfect a neck as any in the world. If the whole world possessed but one neck, one mighty neck ballooned like a goitre. She had been taught, as a virtuous woman, the holy truth of the gospels, and the suffering of God when He had slid himself, effortlessly, tightly, into the pain-aware envelope of flesh. God had made Himself vulnerable, and had been stabbed and hammered and His wounds washed in a sal volatile mixture of vinegar and antivitalic. It had been so monstrous a legend that her mind had revolted. She had directed her attentions to the study of the natural sciences, where the licence of her mind had room to move. Not that claustrophobia of human sufferings. But now, she understood, now she thought she understood. Now she finally had a glimmer of what understanding might mean. Imagine God watching, from His soaring - this soared - throne; eternally looking down, and observing the misery of His creatures. Imagine! How could it fail to be a relief to swoop down, like the hawk of compassion, like the shrike, to enter into the midst of the pain? The whippings and the metal pinioning wrists and shins to wood, the weeping agony, it must have been a re
lief in its very focus to the endless spectating of the sufferings of others. The automessianic apparition; to save God from His own sense of impotence in the misery of others. It is and has always been, and it will always be easier to suffer oneself than to watch the people you love suffer. And if you cannot alleviate this latter condition, then the very least you can do - for the relief of your own tormentuous consciousness - is join them.
Time seemed to flow differently here.
Eleanor lost a portion of her time. Days, and, and. She was not sure how long she strolled. When she was hungry she devoured the sugar grass, which was as white as a bridal gown. She closed her eyes and attempted, with every appearance of a sincere effort of will, to summon the wraith of her dead father. Guide me, Papa! But there was nothing. She stumbled up a broad hill or rise of perfect whiteness, its texture not unlike baked earth although not dusty. At the top she looked down into a channel thronged with strange figures, all hurrying from her left to her right, or else hurrying from her right to her left. She turned her head and it was gone.