Empire of Fear

by Brian Stableford

  ‘If it were only so,’ said Thomas, ‘how right we would be to say: What a piece of work is man? A thing of genetic thread and patches! If it were so, though, we could only deem our makers bad and careless parents: fathers who donated their semen to a luckless womb in the course of a loveless one-night stand, then disappeared, leaving their infants to a life of struggle and strife, bereft of loving care and good advice, save that which busy Mother Nature feels she can spare.’

  Michael did not laugh, but at least the flow of his tears was dammed. ‘You don’t give much credit to fathers,’ he said, gruffly.

  Thomas Southerne looked sharply at his son then, as if blame were being hurled in his direction.

  Michael met the look, and instantly regretted the careless implication. He knew that he had been a late child, from his father’s point of view – his mother was somewhat younger – but Thomas Southerne had delayed his own conversion until Michael was fifteen, and few would reckon that an inadequate delay. Even before his conversion, the elder Southerne had spent much time abroad, but he had never neglected his family, according to their reckoning as well as his own. When Michael had had his accident, his father had come to sit beside his hospital bed every day for a month. Michael knew that he had no legitimate grievance against his parents; they were not responsible for his accident, or for his unfortunate immunity to emortality.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Michael. After a pause, he added: ‘I can’t help feeling that in some crazy way I’ve let you down. It’s just the one thing on top of the other, you see. The accident was bad, but I could accept one bad break. To find on top of that that I’ve got Cordery’s syndrome, in the untreatable form, is just too much for this flesh and blood to bear. Too much, you see?’

  Michael had tears in his eyes again now, though he was still trying his best to suppress them. He would have liked, in a way, to see tears in his father’s eyes too. That would have given him permission to let go and weep, and it Would have demonstrated that his father, though emortal, still cared for him as much as he ever had.

  But Thomas Southerne had no tears in his eyes.

  Emortals rarely wept, though no one really knew why. The tears simply did not come readily to their eyes. Once, it had been said that vampires could not cry, but that was not true. They had said the same about witches once; it was probably no more true of them, if there ever had been witches in the world.

  ‘It is too much,’ agreed the older man. ‘And it means that you must be extraordinarily brave. You must be too good to be defeated, even by a burden like this. It isn’t enough to be a common man – you have to be a hero. Common men can be heroes. It’s a proven fact.’

  ‘It’s equally well proven,’ said Michael, ‘that some can’t.’

  ‘But you do have the choice.’

  Michael shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, shifting the conversation back to safer ground, ‘about the Adamawaran meteor. If the DNA is extraterrestrial, how did it come to be the case that it could stick to a human Y chromosome as if it had always really belonged there?’

  ‘God alone knows,’ said Thomas Southerne, softly. ‘So far.’

  ‘But what do you believe?

  ‘It’s not a matter for belief. We can only speculate. The alien artillerists aren’t credible, but I don’t find it so difficult to believe that life, and DNA, are spread all over the known universe. I can’t deny that I find it an attractive notion. The astronomers assure us that the sun is a second-generation star, and that all the heavier elements in the solar system are the wreckage of a supernova which flared up billions of years ago. Maybe life on earth is second-generation life. Maybe the space through which the solar system glides in its journey about the centre of the galaxy is impregnated with the genetic wreckage of an earlier ecosphere, or perhaps a thousand ecospheres. And perhaps the story of life on earth really is a story, which we are just re-telling, recollecting, re-membering phrase by phrase, legend by legend. Perhaps we aren’t just moving from non-existence to annihilation, by way of emortality and the atom bomb. Perhaps we are like your monkey tapping away at a typewriter, except that when he’s typed “To be or not to be …” and then pauses for inspiration, staring into the empty darkness, he happens upon something which can cling to it, and extend the phrase “ … that is the question”. Perhaps life isn’t just something that’s here, in our tiny little corner of infinity, but everywhere, busily making ecospheres and species, which – even if they bloom only briefly and then wither – leave lingering traces in the emptiness: tiny molecules which busy themselves all over again, whenever and wherever they find a place to take root, always reaching further and further on, though stars explode and even the universe itself expands toward some distant oblivion.

  ‘It’s not a matter for scientific belief, Michael, but perhaps it’s a matter for faith. Perhaps we have to have faith in something like that, to make sense of ourselves at all, just as our ancestors had faith in a paternal God, just as those ancient elders of Adamawara had faith in Olorun and Shango and Olori-merin. Perhaps you do have to look outside yourself – as far outside as you can – to figure out just where you fit in. Perhaps you have to ask yourself bigger questions than why did it haue to happen to me? Suppose, after all, that the meteor hadn’t hit Africa thirteen thousand years ago. What’s thirteen thousand years in the litany of eternity but the blink of an eye: an arbitrary pause, entirely irrelevant to the pattern of the prayer? Then, Michael, you might measure your predicament in the fate of the whole human race. But the meteor might come tomorrow or never come at all, and still we’d be a part of the same vast unfolding story, still we’d have our part to play, our moment on the stage, our little legend. I don’t think we need to see ourselves as an irrelevant detail, Michael. Not the earth, not mankind, not any single life that any one of us has ever lived.

  ‘I think what I’m trying to say, Michael, is that there are all kinds of ways of finding hope, if you look hard enough for it. Sometimes, you need a little help, that’s all. A microscope, or an idea.’

  Thomas Southerne lowered his dark eyes, and drained the last drop of wine from his glass. He seemed embarrassed at having said so much, and a little saddened by what he had said, but there was still no trace of a tear in his eye.

  Abruptly, Michael decided that he did not, after all, want to see that tear. The reassurance which he needed from his father was not some casual symptom of his heartfelt pity, but a simple reaffirmation of community and kinship, which he already had.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said, uncertainly.

  ‘Maybe I am. I’m sorry a maybe is all I have to offer. I’m sorry a maybe is all there is.’

  ‘I can cope with a maybe,’ Michael told him. And added, lest he be thought impetuous: ‘At least, I can try.’

  THREE

  Michael Southerne had often walked along the clifftop paths which wound around the bays to the south of his parents’ house. He knew the bays well, having explored all those which were within easy reach before he was twelve years old. He had returned again and again to his favourites, to search among the rock-pools for the creatures of the sea abandoned by the retreating tides.

  He had been, in those lost days, an agile youth. He had had a veritable fondness for the work of scrambling and clambering over the rocks. When the tides were at their lowest he would follow the sea out as far as it went, to examine those jagged reefs which saw the light of day only once or twice a month. There he would hunt for exotic weeds and strange echinoderms, then play a joyous game with the returning waves, keeping one step ahead of them all the way to the shore, leaping from rock to rock, emotionally charged by the thrill of the chase.

  He had not minded, in those days, that the sea was always cold, the wind usually bitter, the skies often leaden with cloud. He had been indomitable, warmed by his own enthusiasm for life, made safe from the elements by his fascination with the zone between the tides.

  The accident had changed all that.

&nbs
p; For a while, he had not walked the cliff paths at all, but lately he had gone back to them with a new purpose: to make his weak leg grow stronger with use. When he had first come out of the hospital he had hardly been able to manage a hundred yards across level ground, but since returning to the cliffs, and making them his training ground, he had made himself far more capable. Now he could drive himself for several miles, and often did, visiting the farthest places to which his earlier love of rambling had taken him.

  Those places were very different now; he barely recognised them. Where once there had been racetracks along which he had fled before the tide, now there was a wilderness: untouchable, unreachable. His battles now were no longer with the sea, but with the pain which threatened always to return, and with the fatigue which was forever draining the spirit from his efforts.

  When he first began to venture out, after his return from the hospital, he tried at first to judge his exertions so that he could return to the house on foot. He quickly came to believe that this made him cowardly, and adopted instead a policy of drivine himself to the limit on the outward journey, then searching for a house or a coastguard station from which he could call for a car to pick him up.

  His mother did not like this habit, worrying that he would one day overreach himself and be stranded too far from the nearest source of assistance; but his mother was emortal now and he often thought, perhaps unworthily, that she protested too much, to disguise a cold calmness which was growing inside her, taking over her mind just as the alien DNA was colonising her body. For this reason, among others, he refused to take her protestations seriously, and pursued his exertions with obsessive determination.

  Michael had hoped, today, that his father might walk with him, as he sometimes had in earlier and happier days; but a man like Thomas Southerne could never entirely escape the demands of his position, and the fact that he had returned from Europe specifically to see his son had not deterred interested parties on the Atlantean continent from clamouring for his attention. So Thomas Southerne had gone to Halifax, leaving Michael to seek amusement and distraction without him, as he had so many times before. Michael masked his disappointment by driving himself all the harder, determined to break previous distance records and take himself as far from his home as he possibly could before he was forced to return.

  The morning was not very cold, though the wind from the sea was strengthening and the weather forecast had promised heavy rain. The fishing boats in the village harbour had not put out to sea, which argued that the forecast might err on the side of leniency. Michael was undeterred; he had never been afraid of bad weather in his youth, and he was still prepared to be contemptuous of its threats.

  By noon he had covered seven miles, and was nearing a path which he had not walked for years. He had not paused to look down at the bays beneath the cliffs, although their weed-clad rocks were being slowly exposed by a far-retreating tide in a way which once would have tempted him greatly. The path descended as the cliff-face became less steep, bringing him to a shallow strand of scree-slopes and wooded hummocks.

  The downward slope carried him forward more rapidly, but the acceleration put additional strain on his poorer leg, and it began to ache. It seemed to Michael an unkind paradox that while the path was becoming easier the punishment inflicted upon his damaged muscles was increased. He stopped, and began to look about him. The sea was now a long way out to the east – a thin sparkling line upon the horizon, sharply differentiated from the crust of grey cloud which stood behind it. The greater part of the sky was clear and blue, though scudding cumulus clouds frequently interrupted the sun’s light.

  He looked inland, but the undulations of the ground and the clumps of trees obscured his view. There was only one house in view, nestling among the trees, and he judged that it was quite remote from the road. It was not a farmhouse, and he guessed that it had been erected in order to take advantage of the loneliness of the spot, probably harbouring some immigrant survivor of an earlier age, who had become reclusive in response to the vexatious pressures of adaptation to a world dramatically transformed by modern technology and the legacy of the two world wars. This part of New Atlantis still offered a lot of scope for such escapists, who liked a landscape unthreatened by change and modernisation.

  He looked along the coast to the cliffs which raised themselves up in the south-west, like a great fortress contemptuous of his tiny strength. He was sure that he had been up the farther slope, once or twice, but could not bring the route to mind. He struggled with the recalcitrant memories for several moments before he realised, with a rush of annoyance, that he was no more than half a mile from a stream, still hidden from him by the rocks, which ran into the sea near here. Though it was by no means a river, it had cut a deep and steep-sided ditch during the millennia of its running, and even as close to the beach as this it provided an obstacle to his course. There was a bridge, but it was some way inland, and he decided that it might be more convenient to go out towards the sea, in search of a place where the waters fanned out into a delta of shallower rivulets, which he could easily ford even in his walking shoes.

  With this in mind, he descended to the beach below the high-tide line, and made his way across the wet sand, selecting a way between the outcrops of rock which ran out to sea like twisted ribbons. In former years, he would not have considered the rocks to be any kind of barrier, but his injured leg was a far greater deterrent to climbing than it was to walking. In search of a way through to the stream he went farther and farther out towards the line of the returning tide. Twice he reached low rocks which seemed simple enough to negotiate, but even with the stick he could not get over them. The damp wrack made them very slick, so that there were too few footholds to help him.

  Because he was concentrating on the business of continuing his course south-westward he did not notice how far he had strayed from the line of broken weed and empty shells which marked the upper reach of the tide. It was with a slight shock that he realised that the waves were bursting on rocks only ninety feet away.

  He was not immediately alarmed, even though he was fully aware of how slow he had become. Even in his present state of deterioration, he could not imagine being in danger from the sea. He turned, in some annoyance, to make his way back to the wooded shore. He realised then that there was no direct course which he could follow, and that he had not the slightest memory of the route which had brought him here.

  It dawned on him that his situation was hazardous. The shock of knowing that this time, a race against the ocean would be no foregone conclusion, was not totally unpleasant. There was a thrill in it, too, a sense of challenge. The awareness that his weakened body was to be put to the proof was oddly satisfying.

  He looked back at the white waves breaking violently upon the rocks, and noted how far the grey pall of cloud had now extended itself into the sky. He felt that it was not simply the ocean which was hunting him, but the whole of the earth, investigating with studied impartiality his fitness to exist.

  His walking-stick rattled against the pebbles as he forced himself forward, but he knew within minutes that he had not the time to retrace his steps, though he could see the irregular footprints which he had left in the glutinous sand. It mattered not that he was ill-equipped for climbing; climb he must.

  He knew that if he could get to the top of a twisting ribbon of rock he might well to be able to follow it all the way to the tide-line, for although the granite ridges turned in their course, they were basically natural jetties extending like tentacles from the bedrock.

  He came close to the wall of rocks which was on his left, searching for a place to clamber up. It did not look too difficult. The nearness of the sea and the violence of the waves made him hurry, but the first time he tried he could only pull himself part-way up before he slipped and fell backwards. He dropped his stick and grazed his right knee painfully. He knew that he had as much to fear from a fall as from a failure to mount the wall.

  He knew how to swim, an
d paused to wonder whether it would be so very awful if the sea did catch up, but when he felt the gathering force of the storm-wind, and the first drops of rain, he knew that he would stand no chance at all in the water in the midst of so many jagged rocks. The merciless waves would dash him upon the brutal edges with casual contempt.

  Desperate now, he tried to climb again, and again he slipped back on the wet wrack. He had not the strength to draw himself up by the leverage of his arms alone, and his feet could find no purchase. He hurried further along the wall, but the sea was gaining ground on him.

  At last he found a crack wherein his feet would lodge. It was like a very narrow chimney, into which he could wedge his body so that he could raise himself up, inch by inch. He threw his walking-stick up on to the ridge, and scrambled up, with the waves lapping at his heels. He scraped his hands and bruised his elbows, and tore his trousers on the roughened stone, but with one last heave he pulled himself out of the cleft.

  For a moment he lay there, but he knew how far he still had to go, and he knew that the ridge of rock would surely be far more uneven than the sand. He picked up his stick and hobbled on, aware now of dozens of bumps and abrasions. In his rush to go forward he fell, and when he had hauled himself upright, fell again. The rain was pelting now, and though the surface of the rocks had earlier been dried by the noonday sun they quickly became wet again, their slipperiness threatening more falls, any one of which might damage his injured ankle so badly that it would no longer bear his weight.

  He forced himself on with gritted teeth, his stick clattering as he probed the way. Every step now seemed a victory, but his eyes, blinking away the rain as he searched the way ahead, reminded him how many such victories he would need. He reached up with a dirty hand to wipe the rain from his face, and realised with a start that the rainwater was mingled with tears. He was weeping copiously, responding as if by reflex to exertion and anxiety. He cursed himself for it, though it was one weakness which could surely never be detected by an observer.