‘The world was young,’ Charlie said. ‘We were learning by our mistakes.’
‘You learned nothing! You became an infestation!’ the Deep Time Mariner roared.
‘It wasn’t my fault!’
‘You burned the forests and grasslands, poisoned the rivers and lakes. You butchered the blue whale and the red wolf, the mountain gorilla and the timid forest rhinoceros. You murdered the moa and the great auk, the painted vulture and the laughing owl. You exterminated the tarpan and the pig-footed bandicoot. You turned the dodo into navy rations and the quagga into grainbags. You ruled the planet with terror. Open your eyes and look around, monkey-man. Look at the waste and the ruin. This is the end of your world!’
The Mariner strode across the kitchen, wrenched open the blind from the narrow window and stared, in surprise, at a dirty brick wall.
9.
This was not the first time that the Deep Time Mariners had made contact with the monkey-men. In 1985 a Mariner had been sent down to the South American forests on an important fishing trip. He had orders to collect two hundred different species of fish together with samples of water from the Amazon and her tributaries. Many of the these species were unknown to the inhabitants or the planet—one beautiful fish, a spiny mud dweller, carried an oil in its marvellous liver that would cure several kinds of cancer. The Mariners were fond of fish and anxious to save them before the waters were poisoned and spoiled by invading hordes of monkey-men with their sprawling towns and industries.
It was a routine flight from Mars but the Mariner had encountered problems trying to navigate his small craft through the discarded junkyard scraps that hurtle around the planet.
As he made his descent, a three-inch bolt from an abandoned Soviet satellite struck his starboard bow and burned a hole through the radiation shield. The ship corkscrewed for several dangerous plunging seconds before the computers seized control. The Mariner escaped injury but the collision altered his angle of his descent and sent him skittering through the outskirts of Chicago.
On a deserted road, at ten o’clock that night, Joe E Flyshacker was driving home from a late meeting with the men from Amazing Snacks™. Joe was an advertising executive working in one of Chicago’s most famous advertising agencies and was responsible for the launch of a new kind of canned milk shake called Squelch! The laboratories at Amazing Snacks™ had spent a fortune developing Squelch! in several exciting true fruit flavours but something had gone wrong. Nobody wanted to drink it. The advertising hadn’t worked. Joe E Flyshacker was taking the blame.
He was driving home, worrying about losing the Squelch! account and the state of his stomach and the size of his mortgage, when he saw a light on a bend in the road. It was a clear night and the light seemed suspended, like a brilliant ball of green gas a few feet above the ground.
At that moment the car engine went dead, sparks shot from his fingertips, the rubber melted on the soles of his shoes and he could only sit, helpless, watching in horror as something that looked like the Jolly Green Giant stepped through the light and approached him.
The Deep Time Mariner asked him for directions as far as the coast of Venezuela and told him the world was going to end. He told him something about the ark and the spreading plague of monkey-men. He sounded very apologetic. Joe couldn’t remember exactly when he had fainted but when he woke up he was sprawled on the empty road, it was past midnight and he was alone and shaking with cold.
After this encounter, Joe E Flyshacker experienced a spiritual awakening. He quit his job and left his wife and mortgage. He bought a one-way ticket to Central East Africa and found himself work in a famine relief operation. He wanted to do something about all the misery and suffering in the world. He wanted to do what he could to help before it was too late. He couldn’t explain it. His family thought he’d been nobbled by Moonies. They wanted him to go home for treatment.
When he reached Somalia he sent letters back to his wife. enclosing some snapshots of starving children, and tried to describe the situation. She sent a letter out to him, enclosing a newspaper clipping that featured a story about their son who had taken a hunting rifle, driven to the local liquor store, shot the owner and stolen a six-pack of beer. The newspaper didn’t blame the boy. They called him the victim of a broken home and a father who had neglected him and gone crazy with a Jesus cult. There was a photograph of his son in handcuffs, wearing battle fatigues.
Joe stopped writing letters and stayed in Africa. During a drought in Ethiopia he was sent to organise a food drop on a makeshift landing strip at a refugee camp cut from the thorn scrub three hundred miles east of nowhere. There were twelve thousand men, women and children in this camp and they had nothing left to eat but the sand. Joe set up the radio and established his position with the airport in Addis Ababa where emergency foreign aid was being loaded into an ancient British Hercules. For several days a violent dust storm prevented the aircraft making its delivery. When the transporter finally found the landing strip Joe and the rest of the team ran from their tents to watch the Hercules make its approach.
The big-bellied bird made a circle and swooped and her precious bundles of blankets and food seemed to spurt from her body like long strings of turds, bouncing and rolling into the dust. A great shout went up from the camp. As Joe stood there on the edge of the strip he knew that he had finally done something he could feel proud about and that his wretched life had not been wasted. He danced in the sand and began to laugh. He waved and clapped his hands. And twenty yards from where he was standing a bale exploded hitting the ground and a drum of Squelch! knocked his head off.
Since Charlie Nelson was only the second of his species to have stumbled into the path of the Mariners, it was obvious they had gone to great lengths to avoid contact with monkey-men. Yet, despite this, there were thirty million Americans convinced they had encountered alien life forms. Their experience ranged from sightings of flying kitchenware to serious abductions involving flights to other planets and nasty moments with anal probes. Why a distant civilisation should want to construct an ambitious space programme to travel a billion miles with the sole intention of sticking a probe up the arse of a farmer in Kansas was a question no one asked.
The American Government had already laid plans to receive extraterrestrial visitors on the lawns of the White House, an idea encouraged by Hollywood. As the Pentagon saw it, America was the most powerful nation on Earth, and it was natural that any alien embarked upon an official visit would want to shake his paw at a press conference on the lawns of the White House.
The Mariners saw it differently. If they had judged a civilisation according to its share of the world’s gross domestic product and levels of morbid obesity, they would certainly have spoken to Washington. If the Mariners had felt obliged to make contact with the largest military force on the planet they would have landed in China. If the Mariners had needed to discuss poverty and disillusionment they might have chosen any outpost of the old Soviet Empire. But the Mariners viewed the inhabitants of Earth from a galactic perspective.
It had been decided, should circumstances require them to make contact as a last resort, that the Mariners would announce themselves in the Congo Basin. The rain forest, by this time, barely covered six per cent of the planet’s surface but remained a vital refuge for half the known species of plants and beasts. The South American forests were being bulldozed, the forests of South East Asia were burning. The Dzanga-Sangha rain forest in Central Africa had now become the most significant place on Earth for visitors from another galaxy.
The Americans were waiting for a sign in the sky, but the Baka pygmies would be the first nation on the planet to receive the Deep Time Mariners. The Baka nation had the smallest share of the Earth’s wealth and no morbid obesity. But they knew everything there was to know about hornbills, parrots and pangolins.
10.
Charlie fell into a chair and he looked at the Mariner and he looked at the dog and still he could not accept the truth of it an
d he began to argue and plead for more time and the chance to have a few words with God until the Mariner grew tired of him and felt obliged to set him straight and tell him the history of Earth.
‘In the beginning,’ the Mariner said, ‘the world was shrouded in silence and its lands were barren and its waters were without life; and then the Mariners came from a faraway world and filled the oceans with worms.’
‘Worms?’ Charlie said.
‘Worms,’ the Deep Time Mariner said. ‘Silver worms, ribbon worms, feather worms and thistleheads. Star worms, flatworms, pinworms and yellow threads. The worms twisted and danced in the warm seas and turned the water to soup. And then Mariners scattered the seed of the vast forest. And when the forest had grown, they filled the branches of the forest with flying insects bright as meteor showers. The bristling dragonfly, the jewelled wasp and the luminous painted moth.’
‘And then?’ Charlie said.
‘And then,’ the Deep Time Mariner said, ‘nothing happened for a long time. When my brothers returned to Earth they came in a ship in the shape of a giant eggbox and carried with them all manner of birds’ eggs, fish eggs and the eggs of the thunder lizards.’
‘Dinosaurs,’ Einstein said helpfully. ‘They were the Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus, Tyrannosaurus and Diplodocus. Wonderful dragons the colours of rainbows.’
‘And what happened to them?’ Charlie asked.
‘The squirrels ate them,’ the Mariner said.
‘The squirrels ate the dinosaurs?’
‘These were the stories our fathers told. After the lizards there came many small and curious creatures and among their number were the squirrels and rats. They ran on tiptoe through the undergrowth and the slew the dragons by stealing their eggs. This was the first great calamity on Earth. The birds took their nests to the spiny trees and the fish spewed their eggs in the fathomless deep, but the lizards tried to build their empire in sand and their hopes were turned into omelette.’
‘And the rest of it,’ Charlie said ‘Everything that jumps and crawls and bleats and barks. The whole damned menagerie. You mean everything came from outer space?’
‘What did you expect, you anaemic anthropoid!’ the Mariner roared. ‘We’re not magicians. Is that what you think? You suppose we can cruise through the galaxies, snapping our fingers at empty planets, turning dust into elephants?’
‘But where did you find all these animals?’ Charlie demanded stubbornly. He needed an answer to everything. ‘How did it all begin and where does it end?’
‘They were rescued from planets across the universe, from the wobbling satellites of Argos Major to the dwindling Spider Star constellation, from the planets of Betelgeuse to the moons of Andromeda.’
‘And how did life reach those planets?’ Charlie asked.
The monster sighed and tried to explain. ‘The life on those planets was planted by the ancestors of the Deep Time Mariners from life on other planets and those planets were first planted from other planets planted by the ancestors of the ancestors and so on forever until time folds back upon itself and stretches into the future and the universe becomes a single loop of light spinning in a web of darkness.’
‘But what about the Big Bang?’ Charlie asked him, bewildered.
‘The big what?’
‘The universe started with a bang. Before the bang there was nothing. There was no universe, no time, nothing.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I saw it on the Discovery Channel.’
‘And that’s your idea of a good creation myth, is it?’
‘So are there other planets like Earth?’ Charlie asked, wondering now how many creation myths the lizard might have encountered on his epic voyage around the stars.
‘There are 100,000 million planets in this galaxy alone and 100,000 million galaxies in the known universe. There are stars bigger than your entire solar system. There are stars no bigger than walnuts. And, yes, there are many planets like Earth but none so small and beautiful and none with such monkey-men.’
‘But if we came from the stars,’ Charlie said, ‘where do we really belong?’
‘In the trees with the rest of your kind,’ the Mariner said. ‘You are the second great calamity on Earth.’
Charlie fell silent. He felt frightened and absurdly small, as if his world were collapsing around him, the past and the future rubbing together, shrinking him into a grain of stardust. What were ten thousand years of human history? No more than the distance God could spit. And what had become of God in this lonely infinity of stars? Charlie wanted the planets to be a painted ceiling suspended on strings above the Earth. He wanted the Earth to be a shallow bowl balanced on the shell of a turtle and the turtle to be held in the hands of an ape and the ape to be sitting on the knee of an angel. He wanted God in Heaven and the Devil in Hell.
Charlie turned again to the Mariner but the visitor had lost interest in him and was roaming about the kitchen, pulling open cupboards and examining food on the shelves. Everything seemed to fascinate him. He spent a long time reading labels, squeezing cans of fruit salad and peering into jars of yellow pickle. For a while he forgot about Charlie.
Einstein stopped cracking bones, licked his nose and went over to comfort his master. He tried to leap onto the chair but lost his balance, caught his claws in Charlie’ s sweater and fell, twisting, to the floor.
‘You should have seen your face when he came through the shower curtains!’ he grinned, sitting up and wiping his whiskers on Charlie’s knees. ‘You nearly wet yourself!’
‘Where were you?’ Charlie hissed. ‘Why didn’t you warn me? You’re supposed to be a dog!’
‘Barking and running around in circles wouldn’t have made any difference,’ Einstein said. He belched and slapped at the air with his tongue. ‘Anyway, he didn’t mean you any harm. He came here on important business. He came for me.’
Charlie reached down and gently pulled the old dog’s ears. ‘Why don’t you go with him?’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘No. But you’re free to go where you please.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ Einstein said. ‘When your tribe came down from the trees the dogs were your only friends. We went hunting with you and helped you find shelter and guarded you from the night terrors. You were so helpless. We were always plucking you from the water or digging you from the snow or sniffing you out of the bog. We taught you to dig for roots, sleep in caves and swim in the rivers. When you built your first villages we guarded your fires, worked in your fields and patrolled your graveyards and temples. And in helping you, we became outcasts from the wilderness and when you destroyed the wilderness we only had ourselves to blame. So I can’t leave you. I’m a dog. I have to stay until the end.’
‘What’ s going to happen?’ Charlie whispered, watching the Deep Time Mariner try to puzzle out a box of cornflakes. The monster frowned at the box, sniffed it, squeezed it, held it up against his face and gave it a shake to make the cornflakes rattle.
‘Don’t worry,’ Einstein said. ‘He’ll be gone as soon as he’s tired of looking around.’
‘And that’s the end of it?’
‘That’s the end of everything,’ Einstein said sadly.
‘No.’ Charlie shook his head. ‘He’s just trying to frighten me. Why should I listen to him?’
‘He’s a Mariner,’ Einstein said.
‘But if the world was really going to end they’d do something about it,’ Charlie said.
‘Who?’
‘The authorities. The government,’ Charlie said. ‘You think they’d lose control? They’d never risk losing control. Would they? No. The principal purpose of government is to remain in power. Why should they let the planet drift into chaos?’
‘Whatever happens they’ll think of something,’ Einstein chortled. ‘You can depend on them.’
‘You wait,’ Charlie said. ‘They’ll have plans. They’ll have the answer.’ He was looking at the dog but he was talking
to himself and he knew that he didn’t believe it.
‘But what would happen,’ Einstein said, ‘if they have the answer to the wrong question?’
‘It wouldn’t make any sense!’ Charlie said fiercely. ‘They’re paid to have all the answers. They’ve even planned out our future. If there’s a disaster, if there’s a threat of nuclear war, they’ll spring into action with emergency control centres, stores of medical equipment and deep underground bunkers.’
‘Where is the nearest bunker?’ Einstein asked. ‘It might be time to conduct an orderly retreat.’
‘Well, they don’t have bunkers for everyone. Obviously. They’ll be needed for selected members of government, military leaders, important men of destiny.’
‘So we’re supposed to protect ourselves by hiding under the chairs?’ Einstein asked in disgust.
‘I’m not saying it’s a satisfactory state of affairs. But when the time comes, the survivors will emerge from their bunkers to make peace and rebuild the world.’
‘They’ll get the lights working again, the trains running, the chimney pots replaced,’ Einstein grinned, cocking a leg and scratching an ear.
‘That’s the idea.’ Charlie scowled.
‘You can’t crush the human spirit,’ Einstein said.
‘Civilisation will rise from the ashes,’ Charlie said.
‘What will they use to rebuild this brave new world?’ Einstein inquired, after a moment’s reflection.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, imagine the worst has happened,’ Einstein said. ‘After a long time, when the air has cleared and the fire storms have finally blown themselves out, these underground bunkers will unlock themselves and hatch old men. Presidents and generals. Economists and town planners. Architects and industrialists. What do you think will be left for this army of choice little despots?’
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