The six yellow points are now closer to the black pulsing star than they are to the blue ball.
Every time Bir-dee returns with her pictures for me, my heavenly sight becomes clearer. I see now the war machine that destroyed the river bank where Peeg dreamed as a red triangle moving off to our left, along the river we crossed. It has lost interest in us. Between us and the black star is an area of open ground. When I look at it in my head, the words “lumpy ground” come to me. It is little more than a morning’s walk for us to the lumpy ground.
On the lumpy ground we will decide what we are to do when we reach the Destination. So our orders go.
Between the lumpy ground and the black star the picture looks as if ten, twenty, many many red stars have fallen out of heaven on to the earth.
The outer defences.
Ceefer leads us through the dark beneath the great trees towards the Destination, sensing for any traps and nets and snares that might await us. Now it is we who must ride on her back. We must have faith that she can see and hear and smell what we cannot, we must trust her to see what cannot be known, for to know, to see, to taste and touch, would be to die. I have learned a new word today. Ceefer’s words of the night before have made it come bubbling up out of my head like deep deep water. Foreboding. Such a duty, the angels have laid upon us. But would they have given us a task they knew we could not perform?
Ceefer’s screech sends my angel-pictures whirling away in many many torn pieces. The wail dies slowly into a growl: Ceefer crouches, eyes wide, whiskers and ears folded flat, staring at the thing she has found in the dark underforest.
It has been dead a long long time. The smell of it has been dissolved away into the smell of forest: guts and eyes pecked out by pecking pecking birds and insects, skin pulled away from teeth bared in the final snap at death. Pelt a dried tatter of fur and leather. The metal spike of the spring trap is driven out through the back of its neck. Some kind of possum, or small, biting marsupial: I cannot tell, it is so old and dead.
There are bright metal sockets beneath its ears, and torn strands of circuitry. Nestled among its bare ribs are long, thin, steel somethings.
Cat-cool recovered, Ceefer brushes past, moves on. Porcospino pauses to sniff at the dried corpse, papavator steps past on his metal legs. He is a machine, he does not have the weakness of feeling. But Peeg is terrified. Peeg will not go past it. Peeg cowers away from it; it is a bad sign, he says, bad sign, bad sign, bad sign.
“It cannot harm you,” I say. “Its duty is done. Its soul flies in heaven with the angels. You too have a duty, given you by the angels, that you must do.”
I do not want to have to use the circuits in my finger again. Wide-eyed with terror, Peeg approaches. Any moment he will break and run, I think. I have circuits in my hand for that possibility, too. Keeping as far as he can from the dead impaled thing, Peeg edges past. Ceefer waits, head turned, eyes shining red, tail lashing impatiently.
But Peeg is right. It is a bad sign.
We enter a clearing. Ceefer is suspicious, looking to the sky, sniffing all around her. Nothing registers on her sensors but she is not happy. If Ceefer is not happy, I am not happy. Porcospino, too, is uncomfortable; blinking his tiny eyes in the light. He is a creature of the forests, of the darkness of the forests; he is naked in open terrain. Naked sky frightens him. Peeg looks across the clearing to the great great trees.
“Look at the trees, Coon-ass,” he says, pointing with his trunk. “Dead dead trees, with leaves on them.”
I look where he is pointing. And I am afraid. For the great trees are dead, bare, blasted wood, killed by black air and war, but the branches are hung with black leaves.
“Quick, quick!” I cry. “This is a trap!”
And the leaves rise from the branches of the dead trees and we understand. They are not leaves at all. They are bats, rising up in a cloud of beating, roaring wings so dark they shut out the sun.
Those red dots in my inner vision as many as the stars in heaven . . .
“Quick! Quick!” I try to watch the sky as we run across the clearing beneath the wheeling, chittering mass of bats. They swoop down upon us: I can see the shine of circuitry in their fur. I can see the shine of weapons clutched between their feet.
“Quick! Quick!”
The ground rises up in front of me in a burst of noise and earth: the explosion sends me reeling backwards. I plunge onward, blindly, guided by older, baser, truer instincts. The bats release their bombs and flap away. Explosions to the right of me, explosions to the left of me, explosions before me, explosions behind me. We run on; the sky is gone. There are only bats, wheeling, croaking, screaming. The edge of the forest is close, the cover of the trees. So many bats could not safely fly there. Not day-bats, as these are. I look back, see papavator lurching unsteadily across the clearing. Then the bright bombs fall, there is an explosion, flying metal and machine juices. Arms and legs wave, flail, fall dead.
When I am sure I can no longer hear the beating of wings or the sound of bat-voices, I call a halt. We have lost more with papavator than needle-dreams, I say. Without his picking and purging and preparing digested pap for us to suck from his titties, we must take the time to forage and find our own food. This is a dangerous thing for us to do: we cannot be certain that food we find is not enemy food, or tainted with the black air poisons that papavator’s stomach removed, and there are always the traps and snares and nets.
“Hungry now,” says Peeg. “Hungry now.”
“We all must feed ourselves,” I say. “There is no more papavator.”
For me to grub and dig for food is a fearful, animal thing; the fat maggots and wild honey I dig with my hands, my fine, clever hands, from the hollow of a dead tree and share with Peeg and Porcospino are crude and disgusting compared to the milk of papavator. For Ceefer to hunt, to bring some small forest thing back dripping in her jaws, is a joy. Her sensor eyes glow red as the tears the small thing she has killed with her steel claws. She offers me a piece of hairy flesh gently grasped in her teeth.
“You are a raccoon,” she says, setting it down before me in the way of a wicked joke. “You are an omnivore. You can eat anything.” I would sooner eat my own shit. Clever clever Ceefer with your smart, clever words, and your smart eyes that can see things no one else can, and your sharp little claws, and your confident belief in disbelief.
We come to the lumpy ground as the day is growing old. It is a strange terrain indeed; full of hummocks and mounds and hollows and dark pits. As if something huge and unshapely had died long ago and let the forest grow over it. Scattered across the open space are stranger spires and pillars of heaped earth. There is a smell to this place I cannot identify but which stirs the hairs along my spine; a smell, and a sound, a deep, deep humming, everywhere and nowhere.
There is a dark shape moving among the shadows and hollows: a creature. A peccary, rooting. I order Porcospino forward. He raises his quills, growls in his throat.
“Tell him to put his spines down,” says Ceefer. “It is not a being. It is just an animal. Come, Peeg, with your lance. That is our evening meal, out there.” Off she goes, a black shadow flowing across the lumpy ground. Poor, silly Peeg trots after her. The peccary looks up, bolts for the forest edge. The vague troubling noise has become a definite sound, a buzzing, a droning.
Streams of black vapour pour from the strange earth pillars.
“Ceefer! Peeg! Come back at once!” I say. They need no warning from me, they are already flying back across the lumpy ground. The dark vapour forms a cloud around the peccary. The frantic animals tries to flee but the swarm follows it. The peccary twists, turns, plunges; and falls. And I understand. It is not black air, as I had feared. It is much worse. It is insects. Flying, stinging insects. Millions upon millions of insects. They swarm up from the dead peccary, a dark, droning tower looming above the lumpy ground, leaning over us.
What is this Coon-ass to do if he is to obey the will of the angels? I stare, mesmerized, at
the whirlwind of insects, moving slowly across the open ground towards me. We cannot fight. We cannot run. We cannot escape. Then I hear Porcospino’s voice.
“In. Now.”
Has the fear overloaded his circuitry? What is he talking about? He is scratching at a dark hole at the foot of an oddly shaped green mound.
“Others already in. You. Now.”
“Bir-dee,” I say. “What about Bir-dee?”
“If she is out there, already too late,” says Porcospino. “In. In.”
I scuttle into the hole as the storm of insects breaks. Porcospino works with his strong feet, kicking at the dirt to seal up the tunnel. A few insects have crawled inside, I strike at them with my hands and feet, crush them into the earth.
“Come. Come. Fast. Fast,” says Porcospino as he leads me down, down, downward. To me, a being of the light, with hands and much much words, this is a foreboding of death; dark, pressing close all around, fear, down down downward into the gnawing earth. To Porcospino this is his place of places, underground, grubbing, sniffing.
When I was a seed in the womb of mamavator, adrift in highest heaven, I had a dream in which I was shown the shape of the world. In this dream the world was a bubble of light and air and life surrounded by earth and soil and stone that went on and on and on beyond all counting, for always. In the dream, a voice told me that somewhere lost in this neverendingness of earth and soil were other worlds like our own, of light and air and life.
Of course, it is the foolish imagining of a raccoon, but when I find myself in light and air and space after so long in the dark I think that we have dug our way through the bottom of the world and emerged in some other earth.
It is a very small world, this bubble of air and light, barely big enough for Ceefer and Peeg and Porcospino and Coon-ass. The air is stale, dead, and tastes of old, used-up poison. The light is strange, dim, blue, coming not from one sun, but from flat squares above us. It is a square world altogether, this world, square-sided, everything sharp-edged. It has the smell of a work of angels.
Peeg is looking as if he is going to cry with confusion.
“I think this must be an old defensive position,” I say, I hope that he will trust my words and knowledge. “It must come from the very very early time of the war, so long ago the forest grew over it and forgot it. Look: see?” I point at more flat, square things fixed to the sides of the world. They are covered in tiny red and yellow lights, like the shapes in the pictures in my head. “Machine servants. This is a place made by angels.”
“More than machine servants,” says Ceefer. “Come. See.”
She leads us through an opening, along a tunnel into another blue-lit square-cut chamber. There are more inorganics on the walls with their red and yellow stars. On the floor are the bodies of organics.
The dead possum-thing we encountered on the forest path was frightening because it still retained a memory of life. These things are so long dead that they are not even memories. Beyond fearing, they are merely curious.
“What beings these?” asks Porcospino. I cannot answer, I have never seen creatures like these before. Very tall they are, very thin. Long long legs, very big and fine hands at the ends of their forelegs. Fur only on the tops of their heads. Double-skinned: that is the only way I can describe them. Over the middle of their bodies and their legs they wear a second skin, very soft and fine, though ill-fitting. When I touch it, it falls into dust.
“I will tell you what manner of beings are these,” says Ceefer. “They are angels. That is what they are. Dead angels.”
Peeg whimpers.
“No,” I say. “That cannot be. The angels are all in heaven.”
“The stories say that the angels fought upon earth and heaven,” says Ceefer. “And this is a very old place. And the stories say that the angels can die. Can be destroyed by beings.”
“No,” I say, though fears and doubts rise up around me like stinging insects. “No. No. They are monkeys. That is what they are. See the skull, the jaw? Monkeys, created and shaped to the will of the angels, but no more than monkeys.”
Ceefer sniffs at the body, delicately bares her teeth and picks up a bone. She coughs, spits it out.
“Piss and dust, that is how angel-meat tastes,” she says.
Sit Ubu, sit. Good dog.
American TV sit-com production company sound-byte.
Peeg will destroy.
How?
Peeg will know.
How will Peeg know?
You will give Peeg the knowledge.
Knowledge that I do not myself know?
Strange indeed, and wonderful, are the ways of the angels.
Peeg slept a black sleep last night, down in the square chamber among the strange bodies. There was no papavator with his needleful of dreams to send him flying through the night. I listened to him crying and whimpering, under the blue square lights. The world is too much for him.
Ceefer’s eyes, which see in any darkness, lead us through many chambers under the earth full of the strange dead beings before finding a scratchway up into the real world again. It is little more than a scrape; bulging with weapons, Peeg can barely fit through. For one moment we think he has jammed good. He screams and screams and screams in terror as Porcospino digs around him to widen the tunnel. I can understand the fear of the earth closing in all around, I have been learning much about fear.
We emerge into the morning. The sun is high above us. The ground is covered in dead insects, like black dust. They are too dangerous for their angels to allow them to live long. From the lumpy ground we pass into forest again. We scavenge. We scratch. We shit.
From the forest we pass into the smouldering land.
The line between the two is as sharp as the edge of a claw. From the cover of the root buttresses, we survey a land burned clean of life: trees, creepers, ferns, fungi, every living thing, every creature, swept away, stripped down to the sick, shit-coloured earth. A dusting of white ash covers the earth, the smell of burning is strong; here, there the charred stump of a tree has resisted the burning.
There is a shadow on the land. A giant shadow. Before us, above us, on the edge of the burnt land that smoulders further than my eyes can see, stands the hulk of a huge war machine. Some terrible weapon has blown away the upper half of its body, the ground is littered with its torn metal flesh. The wind from across the ashlands moans over the jagged, ripped shell.
“The outer defences,” I say, quietly. Porcospino rattles his quills. Peeg whimpers in dread. Ceefer hisses. No one need ask, What could have done this? There are forces here that can shatter even mamavator: that is why we were set down on earth so far from the Destination, to trek through dread and danger and death. Yet we beings, in all our sinful imperfection, may slip through to work the will of the angels where the mighty machines fail.
We pass between the feet of the destroyed war machine. The wind-blown ash stings my eyes. In the picture in my head, the Destination has grown huge, throbbing like a black heart, filling all my inner vision with its beating, throbbing. The ground is warm beneath my hands and feet. Ceefer quests ahead of us, sniffing a path through the soft white ash.
One scream. One warning. That is all we get. That is all Ceefer is allowed before the dogs, bursting up from under the ground, are upon her. Black hurtling dogs, many many many of them; in an instant she is snatched up, tossed into the air. I see her little steel claws flex, her teeth bare in rage, then the waiting jaws catch her, shake her, tear her in two, shake out her guts and blood and bones and scatter her across the burning earth.
Peeg squeals, lowers her stupid head. The tip of the metal lance slides from its housing on his side.
“No Peeg, no. Let Porcospino!” I say.
The dogs hurl themselves upon us. Porcospino hisses, raises his spines. He flicks loose a flight of quills. The lead dogs go down, kicking their paws and writhing and twisting until their backs snap from the pain of the poisons the angels have put on Porcospino’s quills. The
second wave of dogs comes bounding on, over the bodies of their brothers. They have red eyes and silver metal jaws. Emplants stud the backs of their necks. Again Porcospino throws his neurotoxic spines and they go down on the right and on the left. A black dog leaps: I see his metal jaws open in my face, smell the stinking steam of his breath. Porcospino raises his tail but Peeg catches the dog in the belly with his high-pressure lance. Intestines bursting from its open mouth, blood spraying from its eyes, it goes spinning away to fall among the bodies of its littermates.
And the third wave is on us. They have ferocity, but no conception of strategy. All they know is to run, and to leap, and to savage. Squealing with excitement, Peeg thrusts with his lance, again, and again, and again: the black evil dogs go down, shattered, smashed, impaled and spasming, stuck full of Porcospino’s needles.
Then there are no more for they all lie dead on the soft white ash beneath the war machine. All the dead dogs. And the sun is low on the edge of the world, red and huge behind the thin smoke that rises from the smouldering land.
“Come,” I order.
“Ceefer . . .” says Peeg. Soon it will hit him, and I have no dreams to stop him crying.
“She is gone. The angels hold her in their hands. Believe me.”
But I am no longer sure I believe what I am telling them they must believe. Where do the faithless go? Is there a lonely place, dark and sad, for those who deny the angels? Or is death death? Nothing? Nothing? As we pick our slow and careful way through the ashlands under the rising moon, I find myself drawn to this thought, over and over and over. Nothing. It is a terrible thought. I cannot imagine it. Yet over and over and over, I am drawn to it.
Future War Page 10