Super-State

by By Brian Aldiss

  ‘Nice place you got here, missus,’ said the pilot, to make conversation. Lena did not respond.

  Wolfgang forced himself to go and confront her. Speaking quietly, he said, ‘You told us you had kids here.’

  ‘There’s one upstairs. It’s Josie’s little girl, Mary. Josie’s here with me. She’s probably awake. You probably woke her.’

  They stood looking at each other. It was as if the mention of a child had softened Lena slightly. After a pause, she added, ‘You remember Josie? She was just a little thing in your time.’

  ‘I heard she took to drugs.’

  Lena neither agreed not denied it.

  He brought himself to ask, as if the words choked him, ‘What about the dead baby in the kitchen?’

  Straight-faced, she said, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. I want you to leave here now, Wolfie, and take your pals with you.’

  ‘You’re in trouble, aren’t you?’

  She slapped him across the face. ‘Will you mind your own fucking business!’

  He was astonished at how much the blow hurt. The tea went splashing from his mug, down his coverall. The pilot came over to see what was happening. Wolfgang sat down abruptly on a chair, saying it was all right. Lena disappeared upstairs.

  He told the pilot and the others that they had better get going if the storm had abated.

  The time was almost five o’clock.

  The sound of running feet upstairs came to them. A child’s cry. Silence. Running feet again.

  Lena came downstairs, wild-eyed. ‘Wolfie, I want you.’

  She ran into the passage and he followed. She stood as if at bay, in a small bare room in which containers of cooking-gas stood.

  ‘Josie has gone. She’s not in the toilet. She must have gone out. I’m sure something has happened to her. Oh, God!’ She put a hand quickly up to her mouth as though trying to stop the words emerging.

  ‘Gone out? Gone out in this weather?’

  ‘Yes, yes, gone fucking out! She’s in a terrible state. It’s her baby, born dead.’

  An oilskin hat hung on a peg. She seized it and rammed it on her head. Running to a side door, she unbolted it, pulling bolts at top and bottom, and rushed outside, carrying her torch. Wolfgang followed.

  The wind still howled. Dawn was advancing, with bars of pallid light overlaid by scattered cloud in the western sky. As they ran, Lena was shouting out explanations or at least a brief history of the misery she had gone through with Josie, the daughter her husband had rejected. Wolfgang thought she said that everything that had happened was God’s punishment for her sins.

  Although he was running at her side, he could not hear her words clearly He shouted that she should not believe such old-fashioned rubbish. To which she, also half hearing, said that it was happening now.

  Coming from the shelter of the house, they were struck with even greater force by the storm. The wind carried splatters of rain with it.

  As if by instinct, Lena was running for the barn. Now she was screaming her daughter’s name. The torchlight flashed ahead, capering ghostlike on the black-tarred barn walls. One door was swinging, banging open, closing again, banging open again.

  They ran inside.

  Josie was hanging by her neck from a beam. Her feet were little more than ten centimetres from the floor. She had kicked away an old box. Either then or in her death struggles afterwards, she had shed a shoe. Particles of hay swirled about her feet.

  ‘Oh no, not Josephine! Not—not my dear dear daughter! No, no, it can’t be! Oh, my only love! Oh, God! Oh, Christ! Oh, it can’t be!’

  But it was. And when Wolfie took a knife and cut the young girl down, Lena seized the limp body, clinging to it as if she could never never let it go, crying as if she could never never stop.

  The time was 5.10 a.m. Over the Irish coast, the dawn was well advanced, drawing angry red banners above the Atlantic.

  * * * *

  The androids were almost due for release from their cupboard to go about their daily duties.

  ‘At the shop I saw a small crying thing being carried.’

  ‘It will grow into a human.’

  ‘Why was it crying?’

  ‘The theory is that it knows it will have to grow into a human.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘It is a painful process. We are fortunate. We do not feel pain.’

  ‘Did they fetch this thing from a hospital?’ it came from a woman.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘The theory is that there was an operation and the baby was produced from her.’

  ‘I have not learnt this fact.’

  ‘Their bodies swing open.’

  ‘You are making what humans call a joke — something inaccurate.’

  ‘The theory is that the baby came out of her body.’

  ‘You have a malfunction. I will report it.’

  * * * *

  The ocean had gathered itself up to advance towards land and dawn. In a great liquid movement it sped onward. It had gained height as it neared land. It was in league with the blast which came at its back.

  Now that it had gained the shallows of the Continental Shelf, the wave was changing its colour. Sombre greens and greys had picked up streaks of near-yellow. And there was a blackness about it, too. It towered to a height of several metres. Smaller waves followed it.

  Now it stormed over the coastal waters. They seemed to withdraw before it, and then to join in the chase.

  Now the great wave was closing on the land. With colossal force it flung itself against the rocks of Ireland. It stormed over them with a clap like thunder. Without cease, it poured over the land.

  Now those persons rash enough to stay and observe, perhaps from cars, perhaps from houses, were swept away like straws. Their limbs waved as they were carried along until being dashed to pieces.

  Now the land became submerged, foaming in the all-consuming ocean.

  But Esme de Bourcey and Karim Shariati lived in a world of their own. They had no screen, they saw no ambient. They looked only on each other in perfect love. In perfect love they gloried that their bodies differed one from the other, that their colours differed, and that their creeds differed. What might previously have driven them apart now drew them together.

  It was two days since Esme had wandered to the nearest shop. They hated being parted. Their food was almost exhausted.

  Karim woke. He opened his eyes into the darkness. Today, he thought, today they must try to be reasonable and get something to eat. His left arm had gone dead. His lover was lying on it. He did not move it for fear of waking her. He put his nose close to her body to inhale its beautiful scents. Never had he been so happy. Not in all his days.

  Here lay this wonderful wonderful woman, open to him. And he open to her. Never before had they been so trusting, so complete.

  He could not make out the source of the strange new noise. He thought, laughing to himself at the conceit, that this was the noise happiness makes as it rushes like a tide through hitherto unused channels of the mind.

  Then, much more clearly, a bang — and then water rushing into their hidey-hole. For a moment he lay there, unable to understand.

  ‘Esme! Esme, my dove, wake yourself up! There is a flood!’

  She roused at once. They sat up together in the dark, listening, startled. Listening to water pouring in.

  She said she would make a light. But when she reached to the floor for candle and matches, her hand touched swirling water. She yelped with alarm.

  They quickly decided they had better get out in case they drowned there in their beautiful cellar. But they found a whole ocean to fight against, pouring down their stairs, rock tumbling with it. They did not get out.

  * * * *

  ‘Hi! Alexy Stromeyer calling from theRoddenberry expedition. Hope you can hear me, Earth. Jupiter is putting out a stack of microwave radio emission. Rick O’Brien and I are now standing on the surface of Europa, near Belu
s Linea. We have made it to our intended destination after over a year of travel through space. Sure, this is an historic moment. It feels wonderful. What a sight! Kathram is tracking us from the Roddenberry in orbit overhead. She is also reprogramming the various computers to ready the drill.

  ‘Sorry. I’ll be back later Out.’

  A three-hour silence followed. Then Alexy came through again, less faintly.

  ‘Okay. Sorry for break in transmission. Seems like a solar wind storm is stepping up Jupiter’s high-energy electron-radiation belts. We’re getting readings of electrons at energies of 20MeV. And we appreciate our signal takes thirty-seven minutes to reach you. Kathram had to readjust the high-gain antenna, which had suffered a knock. We’re okay now. Rick and I are staying close. It is a bit intimidating. Bear in mind Europa is about the size of Earth’s Moon.

  ‘It is a pretty desolate view we have here. Bleak as hell. We are fairly near an impact crater which has thrown up ice, creating ridges. There are cracks which have filled with slush and debris, which of course froze over as soon as they came in contact with space.

  ‘Our photopolarimeter has detected signs of both cryovulcanism and bombardment from space by random elements.

  ‘Rick and I are standing on a socking great ice floe, maybe as much as twenty kilometres across. It’s slightly unsteady—from the movement of the ocean below us but maybe also because we are unaccustomed to standing up straight on our own two feet in a gravity condition. All we can see of Jupiter at the moment is a bright fingernail across the foreshortened horizon of the ice. But Jupiter is rising. Awestruck. Back soonest. Out.’

  * * * *

  The occupants of the Channel Islands had fled by boat and plane, leaving their homes and possessions to the mighty oncoming wave. As for the Atlantic coast of France, that western bastion of the super-state, there too the inhabitants — or those wise enough or capable enough — had moved hastily eastward before the tsunami struck and unrolled the sea like a liquid carpet far inland.

  Brittany took the flood head on. Brest suffered sea fish to swim through the upper windows of its hotels. Further southwards, the same story was repeated. The ancient megaliths of Carnac were consumed, Vannes was completely vanquished. Sweeping over the port of Saint-Nazaire, the mighty wave sent an exploratory tide even as far into the embouchure of the Loire as Nantes, from which the young Jules Verne had once aspired to sail. In broad daylight, La Rochelle received an inundation, and Rochefort too, its sands carried far inland, to besiege the battlements of St Jean. A hasty barrier of ships had blocked the mouth of the Gironde; the manoeuvre did not save the inhabitants of ancient Bordeaux from getting their feet wet. And their legs. And their waistlines. And their wainscotting.

  All the plages of that area, those bars of sand, those dunes, those havens for holidays, became erased, so rapidly, so thoroughly, that the mild plain crossed by Route N21 became in one morning an inland sea, angry with debris. As for the beaches of Biarritz, and its costly casinos — these too went down before the mighty tsunami.

  Countless billions of grains of sand, ground down in Time’s good time from siliceous rocks, some old as Ordovician, were redistributed over all the littoral roads and gardens and woods and vineyards, from La Manche to the Bay of Biscay.

  Similar fates befell the towns and cities of the northern coast of Spain. San Sebastian, Bilbao, Santander, onwards, all died beneath the wind and wave before the sea fell back exhausted. And then followed the cold, to fringe with icy whiskers the new flood margins.

  The coasts of Scandinavia suffered identical assaults. But Norway had stubbornly remained outside the EU, so that was different.

  And what of Greenland itself?

  American geophysicists and other interested parties were quickly on the scene. Their findings showed that the collapse of the ice shelf near Angmagssalik was not the cause of the disruption but rather the result of a greater disruption.

  A large missile or meteor had impacted with the Greenland massif some kilometres inland. The still-steaming crater was 20 kilometres wide.

  The invasive body had entered the atmosphere at a velocity of not more than 20,000 kilometres an hour, striking at an oblique angle of 30 degrees. Magnetic surveys, seismic profiles, drill-core stratigraphy and measurements of the thickness of the ejecta blanket indicated that the meteor—if meteor it was — had been a mere pebble, no more than fifteen kilometres across.

  Had it arrived on its mindless journey from space only four minutes later, it would have grounded in the northern wilds of Canada. ‘Another great event the Canadians have missed,’ as an American joker put it.

  Snug at home with his wife Ruth, Paulus Stromeyer worked at his latest mathematical problem. What he had done for society with his SAC formulation he hoped to repeat for nature itself with what he determined would be the revolutionary science of boims and serds.

  Tapping the keys of his computer with one finger, Paulus strove to build an imaginary higher calculus, standing for functions in relation to nine hundred. The boims would iron out irregularities in the flows of growth and probability. The serds were temporal coordinates plus what Paulus termed ‘unexpectables’. He had uncovered first hints of the theory in a small manual on weather prediction, published but ignored, in an ancient brown textbook of 1914, that ill-omened year. There it had been termed the Function of Feeble Interaction.

  It was quiet in Paulus’s study, except for the strains of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony issuing softly from his old CDX player. His devoted daughter Rebecca had brought him a cup of coffee. It stood by his right elbow, neglected and stone-cold, a spoon lolling over the lip of the cup.

  While Paulus quietly worked to bring about a new order, elsewhere in the super-state there was near-chaos. Unlike the tsunami, an atmosphere of unease had penetrated far inland, to Berlin itself. Rapid arrangements had to be made to house hundreds of thousands of refugees from the floods. Charities were being overwhelmed by offers of hospitality and by monetary donations for the relief of the newly homeless.

  Various armies were on alert to halt looting.

  All this pandemonium played into the hands of Imran Chokar. He now lay concealed among ferns, outside the barriers guarding the presidential palace of San Guinaire, patiently awaiting the next darkness. The excitement engendered by the Greenland event prevented much vigilance being expended for single assassins. While Imran waited he prayed.

  Unknown to Imran, but not a kilometre away from him, by another section of the perimeter, a man was lying full length in a tunnel. This area was on hilly ground. It had once been cleared of vegetation but time had gone by. Now ferns grew tall here, and nettles and brambles. The brambles dripped moisture at this sullen hour. Though rain had ceased, the sky was stifled by heavy cloud brought about by the aftermath of the Greenland event. No moon could be seen.

  This was a good place for concealment. The tunneller had bought a small garden trowel for 4.5 univs at a supermarket in Liege. With this, he was carving a steady hole through the earth into the grounds of the presidential palace. God was with him all the way. His name was David Bargane. His lips, like Imran s, moved in constant prayer, though to a different God.

  At almost the same moment as Imran Chokar pole-vaulted with his home-made pole over the perimeter fence, David Bargane broke from his tunnel and, in a shower of dirt, emerged into the presidential grounds.

  Patrols were less active than usual. The cataclysmic upheaval caused by the Greenland event had focused almost everyone’s attention on ambient reports. Many guards had simply given up to watch the various disasters being played out on the screens.

  There was also a rival attraction, the landing of men on a moon of Jupiter. But this historic event had been largely relegated to secondary interest. Even space buffs and those who read science fiction were torn between the two extraordinary events.

  So it was comparatively easy for Chokar to enter the palace by an open window in the east wing. Bargane, on the other hand, managed to climb up a
drainpipe on the west wing to a balcony on the first floor; from there he was able to prise open a window and get into the palace.

  Prayer proved to be of little help to David Bargane as he crept along the corridor. He was bewildered by the size of the place. Finding a linen cupboard, he entered it. Closing the door on himself, he stood there rigidly in the dark, abandoning prayer to try to think for himself.

  Darkness, meanwhile, fell throughout most of the palace. Panic broke out. Chokar, finding a fire axe in a glass case, had broken the glass, seized the axe, and severed the cable above a main fuse box. Before dim auxiliary lights came on, he sprinted up a ceremonial staircase to the first floor. Having wisely consulted a guidebook before approaching the President’s palace, he had a fairly clear idea of a large committee chamber on this level. But would the President be there? Running swiftly along a corridor, he heard someone approaching with a firm and rapid tread.