Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  And here’s the strangest thing of all: out of this fertiliser, most fully concentrated in the valley but spread over a great many acres where it had spilled along the river’s path, were being created wholly new and unseen crops. Wheat grew in new hues and new florettes; great marrows and strange bone-shaped trees, and single leaves larger than any Brobdingnagian growth. Whether these were new metamorphoses of Earthly plants, or plant seeds born through the aether from a distant world, nobody is in agreement. The army has built a camp on the edge of the outflow. But the Littlebig, his craft or himself, whichever it is, is dead. Perhaps he is dying.

  And here she comes now. She looks eye-smitingly beautiful, her dress a cantilevered arrangement of dark and light green in strips of silk and ribbon over the bell-dome of its skirt, and a sheen-filled upper portion and tight sleeves. Her hair is bound up behind in ribbons of green. And is such harmonious vert not the very principle of the rebirth? Of spring?

  ‘My love,’ he says, rising. ‘My dearest heart.’

  The kiss they exchange would not be out of place between brother and sister.

  Eleanor sits, and settles herself. Bates flaps his hand to draw over a waiter, and sits down himself.

  ‘How is Henry?’ he asks.

  ‘As ever,’ says Eleanor languidly. ‘An ideal husband. But how,’ she smiles, ‘how is the hero of the hour?’

  ‘Alas,’ says Bates, good-humouredly, ‘I fear the hour is passing, and that this hero must bid it adieu. Do you read the newspapers?’

  ‘Rarely.’

  ‘The news from America’s southern continent? From Peru?’

  ‘I have heard something of it,’ says Eleanor, with a delicious impersonation of languid uninterest.

  ‘The new cometary arrival seems to have focused its attention upon Peru.’

  ‘From the ocean?’

  ‘The ocean,’ says Bates, shaking his head. ‘The ocean can never have been its destination. I wrote to the Times to express my view that...’ He stops himself. The smile that eases itself between his lips and widens across his face makes him look more handsome, and better humoured, than you have ever seen him. ‘How clever you are,’ he says, nodding at her, ‘to tease me out of this humour of self-pride. Do not think I am unaware of the tricks you play. I owe you so much.’

  ‘And I owe you something more material,’ she replies. ‘Or did you think I had forgotten?’

  ‘My gift.’ Saying the words gives him a deep sense of joyous wellbeing, in the deeps of his abdomen.

  ‘Your gift.’

  ‘Have you brought it?’

  By way of reply she slips a small mahogany box from her handbag. It is the length of a man’s hand, the width of a man’s wrist, perhaps two inches deep; its cover is marked with the intricacy of Lilliputian work, in curlicues and lines, gorgeous little welts in the wood delineating blossom. Spring-blossom. Blossom.

  ‘Thank you my darling,’ he says, laying his hand on the box and drawing it across the table towards him. The waiter is here, so he must delay looking under the lid - although he wants nothing more, this moment, than to look under the lid - and instead he orders her a verre of hot chocolate. The fellow turns his back and slinks back inside the shop, to the chocolate mill and the steamer and the stove, the boxes and bottles of ingredients, to all the paraphernalia behind the bar, and Bates lifts the lid and holds the box before his face, angling the light right to be able to look inside. Inside is a perfectly tapered, delicate turd. He can smell its dizzying smell. He lowers the lid with that absolutely intoxicating sensation of foreknowledge that this small portion of his lover is now his, and his for ever.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, simply, and slips the box into his pocket.

  They sit in sunlit-caressed silence for some minutes.

  ‘The riverside,’ he says, pointing. ‘Just there.’

  ‘There?’

  ‘It’s where I first met your brother, your saviour.’

  ‘I have two,’ she said, dropping her face but looking up at him from under the brows.

  ‘Two saviours,’ agrees Bates, ‘but not two brothers.’

  She laughed. ‘That,’ she agreed, ‘might be an outrage too great. But, there, that was where my big brother and my true lover first encountered one another?’

  ‘During the invasion. He carried me along the river’s way to the Tower. And how is Sir Splancknunck?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘The most liberating and extraordinary thing,’ he says, after a moment, ‘is the surrender of jealousy. I had not before realised, for instance, how intimately jealousy and hope are woven together in the human heart.’ He takes another sip from his coffee. What is happening in his brain, now, where those tiny threads spurt electrical and alchemical discharges from one to the other, of unimaginable density and complexity and intricacy, to form thoughts - what is happening is: he is considering how little he understood of love before. How scalar love is, simultaneously , small and large, the smallest and the very largest scales both at once. He loves Eleanor, of course. But, it occurs to him to admit to himself, he loves her husband too, he has won that battle over himself. He loves her big brother.

  The sunlight goes, promiscuously, over roof and ground, over water and earth, each particle of light as large as the sun and as small as the smallest atom.

  ‘How long do I have you?’ he asks.

  ‘Forty-five minutes,’ she replies, easily.

  ‘It is long enough. It is in the nature of love, you see, being infinite, that one minute of it is an eternity, and the whole eternity of it functions as a continuous present.’

  ‘And to think,’ she says, laughing, ‘when I first knew you, that you were so tongue-tied!’

  AFTERWORD

  It has often been my habit (and a bad habit too) to flick from my reading-place in the middle of a fat book to the end pages: teasing myself with the last paragraph perhaps, or reading whatever postscriptum or afterword the writer may have provided me. Often this deplorable practice results in me chancing upon spoilers that materially diminish my enjoyment of the remainder of my reading. If you are doing this same thing then don’t. Go back. Read the rest of this novel and then read this afterword.

  This story, beginning as it does from the point of view of Swift’s Gulliver, always seemed to me to contain within it a version of the story of H. G. Wells’s Martian invaders from the point of view of the true defenders of Earth: the microbes themselves. The novel you hold in your hands makes plain, I hope, how that perhaps counter-intuitive connection works. I brought in Voltaire’s Micromégas not because I take any particular delight in the promiscuous recapitulation of the backlist of this glorious genre of ours, SF, but rather because it was necessary for the specific story I was telling. And besides, one thing that is defiantly true of Voltaire’s splendid little fable is that it is already an extrapolation from Swift’s original (giants twelve times human size? But why stop there! One-forty-four times, or greater still!), and any subsequent fictional experiment in the extrapolation of Swift’s extraordinary vision ought, as a matter of mere courtesy, to acknowledge that. Other acknowledgements are also needful for this, the most long-drawn-out, carefully and indeed anxiously revised of all my novels. Having got into the habit of writing novels across a period of time to be measured in months it was challenging to write one whose gestation and parturition was measurable in years, but during that time I have received support from my wife Rachel and my daughter Lily; from my brilliant editor Simon Spanton; and from Steve Calcutt my agent. My knowledge of the nineteenth century, upon which of course this novel depends, derives in part from my other job as Professor of Nineteenth-century Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, and I would like to thank that excellent institution in general and my eighteenth-century and Victorianist colleagues in particular. You can find them here: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/English/. They’re good people.

  An earlier draft of Part 1 appeared in Infinity Plus, edited by Nick Gevers and Keith Brooke (PS Publishin
g 2001), and also online at SciFiction, edited by the estimable Ellen Datlow. Particular thanks to them. Part 2 first appeared in the like-titled Swiftly: Stories (Nightshade Books 2002), which stands as a pendant to Swiftly: a Novel. At some point in the future I’ll put together Swiftly: Poems, and that will then be enough Swiftly for the time being.

  AR

  London June 2007