Merciless Reason

by Oisin McGann

  Gerald would have made changes over the last few years too, as would some of the other family members. Nate tried to imagine the most likely places where new traps might have been set. When it came to creating a killing ground, Gerald could boast a particularly deadly combination of qualities: his profound knowledge of the human body and how to damage it; and a vivid imagination. From the moment Nate entered that building, he could face mortal danger from any direction.

  And that was before he even counted possible attacks by enterprising family members.

  Flash’s engine had a brooding quality as the engimal rolled up the driveway. Word had already spread and people were emerging from the front door of the house to greet the long-lost Duke of Leinster. A small crowd had gathered as Nate drew up near the steps. The expressions on his relative’s faces ranged from joy, through suspicion, to unbridled hostility or fear. Elvira had barged her wheelchair through to the front of the gathering, and was clearly examining him for any sign of neglect in his deportment. The wide smile on Gideon’s heavily bearded face could not hide his uneasiness. His wife, Eunice, narrowed her beady eyes in dull-minded calculation as she tried to ascertain how this would affect the ranking of her husband and sons. There was no sign of Oliver, but his remaining brothers, the Gideonettes, were there, scowling through, their own various arrangements of facial hair. Nate took note of some of the other cousins, trying to judge which of them could be counted as allies, and which should be labeled as enemies. There were precious few allies.

  There was also no sign of Elizabeth or his son. Perhaps it was best not to think about Leopold altogether for now.

  Despite the overcast sky, the afternoon light had a slightly dazzling quality that he found hard on his eyes. He dismounted and pulled off his leather helmet, goggles and riding coat, which he handed to a waiting servant. He was clean-shaven, having bathed and had his hair cut before donning his new suit. Even so, the changes in him were obvious. Tatty was first to greet him, rushing forward and throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his new suit. Daisy came forward then. Looking over Tatty’s shoulder, she waited her turn, and when it appeared as if Tatty meant to hold on for the rest of the day, looked over her friend’s shoulder at Nate. She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and closed it again, completely at a loss as to what to say. Nate could understand, feeling a warm rush of emotion welling up inside him, threatening to choke him and blind him with tears. They stared at each other for a long time as Tatty cried and the rest of the relatives, in a show of good social grace, began to applaud his return.

  “You’re late,” Daisy managed at last, barely heard over the noise.

  “I took the scenic route,” he replied, finding it difficult to get the words out.

  “You are absolutely never going away again,” Tatty mumbled from his chest.

  Nate did not reply. His eyes were on the thin figure that appeared at the top of the steps. Gerald had a cigarette in his left hand and his right tucked into the pocket of his jacket. Struggling to maintain his composure, Nate suppressed a shudder, though whether it arose out of hate or fear he didn’t know. It would take every ounce of self-control he had to keep his hands from Gerald’s throat. This was not the time or the place for their confrontation. Gerald, in turn, regarded Nate with the kind of contemplative air he might have adopted while looking at one of his test tubes, and drew a long drag of smoke.

  “Hello, Nate,” he said. “Still struggling with your daddy issues?”

  “Always,” Nate answered. “You still pulling the legs off engimals?”

  “Only for the good of humanity,” came the reply.

  Taking Tatty’s right arm in his left, Nate offered her his handkerchief to wipe her face and then began greeting the other relatives as if they were a real family, shaking Gideon’s hand and giving Elvira the obligatory kiss on the cheek. Nodding to a few of the servants he would have known well, he walked to the marble steps with the rest of them following behind, and started climbing. Daisy took his right hand and gave it a tight squeeze as she walked alongside him too. He noticed that two of her fingers on that hand were bandaged. As they came to the top of the steps, they found themselves face to face with Gerald. There they all waited, with Gerald standing in their way. Nate looked past him and saw a giant in a tailored suit standing in the hallway. Brutus, Elizabeth’s brother.

  Nate brought his gaze back to Gerald’s face.

  “It’s over,” he said to his cousin.

  “On the contrary, old chum. Things are just kicking off.”

  With a chilly smile, Gerald stood aside and ushered Nate into the house. A house he’d had years to prepare in anticipation of Nate’s return. In that moment, even without Brutus standing in the middle of the hallway, Nate would happily have traded this place for the storm-struck, heaving deck of a sinking ship. As his fear threatened to smother him, he leaned closer to his cousin, his voice low so that only those closest could hear.

  “I know where the intelligent particles came from,” he said. “But I’m never going to tell you.”

  Gerald’s face went a shade paler, but there was no other reaction. Nate stepped past him and went on into the house, a lady on each arm.

  “Brutus!” he exclaimed, standing before the huge man. Brutus gazed down at him without expression. “I believe you’re running things at the moment. When’s dinner? I’m famished!”

  The next hour was spent in the living room, with celebratory drinks all round and a long line of strained chitchat, which threatened to sap Nate of the will to live before Gerald could even get started on him. Gerald kept his distance, watching the proceedings but hardly taking part. Brutus stood back too, though his expression was harder to fathom—a wariness perhaps, the look of a man who was careful to do nothing in case he might do the wrong thing. Or perhaps it was something more to do with the fact that he would occasionally glance across at Gerald, as if the latter was holding him in check.

  Nate told interesting and amusing stories of his travels, as if he had merely been away on some whimsical adventure. The others listened and related their own tales of their doings while he had been away. It was all very courteous and civilized, and when Nate felt that he could not bear any more he excused himself and made his way out to the mechanical lifts.

  He took the elevator right to the top floor. Even as he stepped out into the corridor that led to what had once been his father’s study, he felt a nervous tremor run through him. His experiences in this part of the house had never been pleasant. Following the corridor until he came to a flight of stairs, he climbed them to the door that let out onto the roof. The wind tried to pull the door out of his hand as he opened it, and he had to close it firmly behind him.

  The area of flat roof was overlooked on all sides by tiled gothic turrets, plated in terracotta. In one of these turrets, a round window looked in on a room that connected to the attic. The room where his mother had been imprisoned for years had long been bricked up—it had been one of the last commands Berto had given as Patriarch before he died—but it was still possible to see into it through the round steel-framed window up here. Nate peered into the shadowy place, a heavy weight in the pit of his stomach. Rain was falling in widely spaced drops, lazily, like the light opening notes of a tune that would soon build up to a great crescendo. Walking across to the parapet, he leaned on the wings of a gargoyle and looked over in time to see Gerald on the back of a velocycle, riding away from the rear of the building on the road that led to the church. At the same time, he heard someone come through the door behind him, and knew it was Daisy.

  “At a guess, I’d say he’s building some kind of complex musical instrument,” he said to her, without turning round.

  Daisy came up beside him, standing close enough to put her hand on his where it lay on the stone parapet.

  “It’s the organ in the new church,” she told him. “He built it using the bodi
es of engimals.”

  Nate nodded to himself. Gerald was taking what he knew and meant to apply it on a much, much larger scale.

  “Then there’s still time to stop him.” Nate turned and sat on the low parapet, watching the wind blow strands of Daisy’s dark hair across her face. He wanted to take that face in his hands and press his lips against hers. He wanted time with her, and a life with her, one where they were not perpetually at risk and where they could talk about normal, everyday things. But he was not to have it. Looking Daisy in the eyes, he said, “There are two things you need to achieve to gain control over intelligent particles. You need a clear understanding of what they are, and the acceptance that it is possible to communicate with them on an instinctive, subconscious level.

  “Imagine if you had never seen anyone swim, but you were faced with learning it yourself, on your own. You have to consciously work out the strokes that will move you through the water, but you must also accept, deep down, that the human body can float.

  “Gerald has achieved the first of these, and he could be on the verge of the second. If he masters this control, he will have the power of a god. Believe me when I say that I am not exaggerating.”

  Daisy looked down at her bandaged fingers. She untied the bandage and unwound it, exposing the once-injured fingers. The tips had almost completely grown back, leaving only a slightly flattened shape on the side of each that was still tender to the touch.

  “I believe you,” she said, standing against him to seek warmth from the wind.

  He put his arm around her, pressing his cheek to the side of her head. For the first time in years, Daisy felt some of the weight lift from her. Finally, there was someone to help carry it.

  “I have to tell you a story,” Nate said softly. “You’re going to find it hard to believe. I wouldn’t have believed it myself, except that I was made to experience it. In a way, I still am experiencing it.

  “When the serpentine entered my body and saved my life after the last fight with Gerald, she started showing me visions of the people who created the particles. It took me a long time to understand what I was seeing, and … well, let me start where this all started. And bear with me, it is a … a perfectly bizarre tale.”

  He stopped and took a breath, staring out across the mountainous landscape, watching the heavy, saturated clouds scud overhead. Even among the mountains, there were the hedges and fences that marked out farmland. The gleaming twin lines of railway tracks coursed through the trees at the bottom of the hill. Smoke rose from the chimneys of cabins in the distance. In any direction he looked, the mark of mankind could be seen on the land.

  “Centuries from now, the human race has reached a point in its science where they are capable of things we could only dream of. But something happens: a cataclysm that wipes out most of humankind. The ones who are left begin rebuilding. Their world is little more than a barren rock, and despite their great advances these people still need to grow food to eat. In its weakened state, their civilization is vulnerable, and when a terrible blight begins destroying their crops they realize that they are going to starve. This fungus is resistant to everything they try, and whenever they attempt to eliminate it, they destroy their food too. Because of a simple fungus, the last members of the human race are going to starve to death.

  “Their lives are governed by … I can only describe them as thinking machines—far more sophisticated than even the smartest engimal. Among their other scientific advances, they have developed the ability to travel through time itself. Now they mean to go back and eradicate the fungus entirely, while it is still a primitive organism, before it can even evolve into the indestructible strain that is attacking their crops. But this traveling through time involves incredible hazards in itself. It was the misuse of this science that rendered the Earth uninhabitable in the first place.

  “The machines see no other choice, however. So they resolve to go back so far that any humans who witness this intervention will have no means of understanding it, or making a record of it for future generations. They go back to the Stone Age, over ten thousand years in our past. But the machines don’t send humans back in time. They send the intelligent particles. These particles are not capable of thought themselves, but one type can take over the brain of a human being. These ones are designed to use the human brain to create more particles, different kinds, and control them. They take over a tribe of early humans, who then begin thinking in far more advanced terms. They can create particles to perform whatever function they wish.

  “In the beginning, these hybrid humans are clear about their purpose, their mission. The first particles they make can seek out the particular fungus that will evolve into the blight that is threatening their future. They can take to the air and dissolve this fungus—and its spores—wherever it is to be found. And these new humans don’t stop there. They start gathering seeds, plants and even soil, increasing the scale of their operation, to send supplies forward into the future, to help rebuild the human world. They build engimals, first to help them in their tasks, and then for the sheer fun of it.

  “But as they discover a passion for living, they become corrupted by temptation. You see, a machine cannot comprehend how to exist as a human, any more than a human can fathom what it means to be a machine.

  “The particles are designed to bond with humans of the future—humans who have mastered their emotions, and who are ruled by a purely rational machine government. But these particles have bonded with the minds of primitive humans capable of the most extreme emotions. Without the thinking machines to control their urges, this beautiful, fertile world is intoxicating to them, and before long they have begun neglecting their work and are living lives of wild abandon, full of passion and excitement, with intelligent particles to serve all of their needs. And why wouldn’t they? They are living in paradise—a world untainted by cities or farming or industrial revolution.”

  Nate smelled Daisy’s hair, feeling how wet it was becoming in the light rain. Neither of them wanted to move. He could not see her face, but he could feel her body language, and how bewildered she felt about this story he was telling her. And who could blame her? Except for the evidence all around them that this science had existed. Did exist. He gave a bitter smile and went on:

  “Then two men fall in love with the same woman. They argue and then fight, and one man is beaten to the ground. In the future world, no human has engaged in violence in hundreds of years. The thinking machines have under-estimated the sheer power of emotions such as hate, fear and fury. In a moment of unhinged rage, the beaten man uses the intelligent particles to kill his opponent. The horror of that death shocks him, causes him to lose control of the violence he has unleashed. The particles destroy all of the people standing nearby, including the woman he loves. Faced with the atrocity he has just committed, the man goes clean out of his mind. The strength of his emotion overwhelms the particles, the ferocity surging through them just as an earthquake can trigger a tidal wave. Anything that can rot simply disintegrates in the surge, absorbed into the swamp of feeding particles. The only engimals that survive are those that are made from metal or other inorganic materials, or can move fast enough to escape.”

  Nate ran his fingers through Daisy’s hair, pulling her closer to him. He felt cold now, and vulnerable, the exhaustion of the last few weeks draining the energy from his body.

  “The visions the serpentine showed me led me to a place right on the southern tip of South Africa. I met an archaeologist there, near the Klasies River. He showed me a section of the riverbank where the water has cut deep into the ground, where you can see all of the rock and stone that has been laid over the last fifty thousand years. Like looking at the rings in a tree to judge its age, you can read the age of the ground itself in the layers. In the layers they think are about fifteen thousand years old, there is a dark grey, almost black, line that runs through the ground. The archaeologist told me that
this layer of ash and rot can be found in the ground for hundreds of miles in every direction. They can only guess at the disastrous event that left this mark in the earth, but they believe it was something no human could have survived. This new civilization came from the future, and was here for a few short years. They were capable of miracles, but the only traces they left were the engimals, and the stain of their annihilation tattooed in the ground.”

  Nate pulled away from Daisy and looked at her. They were both wet through now, and the sky had grown darker, clouds bulging with pent-up rain. The air had a smell of the sea, and they could see gulls over the hills to the north-east. A storm was coming.

  “I just wanted you to know what we were up against,” he said lightly.

  “I think I was better off merely being scared of Gerald’s mutant organ,” she snorted, her gaze taking in the storm-clouds as she shivered. The rain was growing steadily heavier. “I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to deal with the apocalypse.”

  “One thing at a time,” Nate told her. “Let’s see if we can survive dinner first. Then we can start putting this plan of yours into action.”

  “Then Duffy did tell you?” she muttered. “He should reach Dublin Castle soon. There’s no going back now.”

  “What made you so sure I’d be any use, even if I did come back?” he asked her. “You’ve never had a high opinion of my usefulness in the past.”

  “It’s all about how one uses you, my dear Nathaniel,” Daisy replied sweetly. “Even the most delicate of operations can sometimes benefit from the forceful application of a blunt instrument.”

  “Charming—” he began, but was cut off as she pulled his head down and pressed her lips against his.

  He folded her into his arms, kissing her passionately as they both resolved to make this moment linger as long as possible. In what might be the last few hours of their lives, they would at least have this one desperate, hungry kiss in the drenching beat of the rain.