Out of Nowhere

by Gerard Whelan

  ‘Can you appear in two places at once?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Of course. Under some circumstances it just happens – when someone close to me is in some kind of danger, for instance.’

  He chuckled.

  ‘Don’t humans talk about being “beside yourself with worry”? Well, this is the same thing – only you’re not beside yourself, you’re a bit further away.’

  He drew his hand out of the table, but Simon’s eyes stayed fixed on the place where it had gone in.

  ‘But why?’ the old monk muttered. ‘Why do you bother coming back at all?’

  For the first time since his arrival, the driver looked a little nonplussed.

  ‘We have our own needs, you know,’ he said. ‘For one thing, we starve. Not for physical food, of course. But your spirit can starve too. We’re creatures of the senses, like all born to flesh. We starve for sight and sound and touch. We starve for the simple fleshly experience of our lost home. We do send our creatures back – creatures like your ‘patients’. They collect … sensations. Words won’t describe it. I’ve called these creatures biological tape-recorders. When – to use that metaphor – the tape is full, we take them back. Then we play the tape and share the sensations. We can drink their experiences just like I can drink this coffee, and our spirits gain sustenance and nourishment from it. We can all share in it. Imagine if, say, humans could actually feed on music, a whole hall full of you feeding on the notes of a symphony.’

  Simon’s eyes had taken on a slightly glazed look.

  ‘The Sug, now,’ the driver said, ‘they’ll have none of this. Going to Nowhere seems to have used up what little common sense they had. They did send their own people back at first, but they soon sickened of being among humans. So they stopped coming. They now prefer to recycle old sensations and memories – and so, of course, they’ve lost touch completely with the reality of this world. They’d rather blame the Tellene for persuading them to leave it in the first place – as I’ve said, they sulk.

  ‘It’s hard for the Tellene to be among humans, too. But we accept reality, we learn to bear it. To us, the world itself is the important thing. But the Sug still regret not having their way in the first place. They suspect that they made a mistake in letting the Tellene persuade them to go. So they resent the Tellene, and when they do come back – which hasn’t happened for thousands of years – they spend their time trying to interfere with Tellene operations here. As I said, the old races competed – to you their conflicts would seem like complicated games of one-upmanship. The Tellene felt it was past time for such games, but the Sug still work out their resentment in the same old way. It’s childish, but there you are – the Sug are a childish people.’

  ‘That man who saved us in the chapel,’ Kirsten said, ‘was he a Sug?’

  ‘He was. A most unusual one.’

  ‘So they came back now. For the first time in millennia. Why?’

  The driver smiled.

  ‘You’re a smart girl,’ he said.

  We’re reaching the nub of it now, Stephen thought. We’re reaching our part. And I’m not sure I want to know about it at all.

  The driver looked at him.

  ‘I’m sorry if this frightens you,’ he said, ‘but facts are facts.’

  He looked around at all of them.

  ‘We who made the original journey,’ he said, ‘had actual memories of this world. We’d grown up here. But we were few, as I’ve told you. And the Noplace has no physical things there at all – nothing. So we needed to come back here to have our children. And once those children were born, we didn’t want to feed their minds on second-hand sensations, as the Sug did. That’s a very dangerous thing to do to young creatures. It makes for incomplete people – I’m speaking quite literally. We wanted our children to have actual experience of the world we loved. We wanted them to have lives.’

  Simon drew a sharp breath.

  ‘Your children grow up here!’ he said. ‘They grow up as …’

  ‘As humans. Yes.’

  Both of them turned now to look at Stephen and Kirsten. In Simon’s wide eyes there was something almost like awe. The driver’s eyes had dropped their bland mask. There was open fondness in his look now. Kirsten and Stephen looked back at them with identical expressions of numbness.

  ‘So I’m … a Tellene,’ Stephen said. ‘A Tellene who’s grown up as a human?’

  ‘And me?’ said Kirsten. ‘Me too?’

  ‘You are. And very special ones. This may be the hardest part for you to accept, but …’

  He paused.

  ‘Yes?’ Both Kirsten and Stephen said at the same time.

  ‘Well, the Tellene weren’t a tribal people. They weren’t what you call a democracy either. The closest thing humans would have to our society would be a kind of monarchy.’

  ‘They–’ Kirsten began, then stopped. She frowned, trying to work out what he was implying.

  Simon began, very gently, to chuckle. Stephen and Kirsten stared at him, bewildered. Gradually the chuckle broadened into a hearty laugh. Simon slapped his knee.

  ‘My dear children,’ he said, ‘I think what our friend here is saying is that you two are royalty.’

  If Kirsten’s face had looked blank before, now it looked positively uninhabited.

  ‘You …’ she said, whirling to look at Stephen. ‘I …’

  Stephen was no help. The absence of expression on her face was mirrored on his own.

  ‘But this is plain mad!’ he said

  Now Kirsten laughed too. There was a hint of hysteria in it.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s a fairytale!’

  The driver smiled.

  ‘It just goes to show you,’ he said. ‘It’s a funny old world.’

  40. The Real Adventure

  Kirsten couldn’t stop laughing. She’d subsided to a giggle, but it went on and on.

  ‘I’m a princess!’ she said. ‘Me! A princess! That’s ridiculous!’

  Simon seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. From the look on his face they were difficult ones.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said to the driver, ‘you can’t imagine how interesting I’ve found your story. It tied up with all sorts of things I’ve thought about for more than fifty years now. That’s nothing to you, I know, but to us it’s a very long time.’

  ‘Are you sorry you’ll forget the tale, then?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Because it disturbed me too. People say I have a dim view of my own species. But it turns out that maybe I’ve been overestimating it.’

  ‘All creatures have childhoods,’ the driver said. ‘All species too. And children are not always wise – how could they be? They’re new things under the sun. But adults have no such excuse.’

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ Simon said, ‘do the Tellene have a god?’

  The driver looked puzzled.

  ‘I have to admit,’ he said, ‘I’ve never really understood that particular human idea. If I have a god – in so far as I understand the word – then you could say my god is information. It’s here all around you – in the table and the chairs, in the grass and the sky. But your species doesn’t seem to care much for information. Half the time you don’t even notice it. I know you have notions of what you call ‘heaven’. In fact, some of those notions make ‘heaven’ sound more than a little like Nowhere. But to us heaven is here – in this world full of wonders. Heaven is now. And you humans control it, or you think you do, but you don’t seem to care for it much. We find that … odd.’

  ‘Odd, yes. That’s one word for it.’

  Simon looked with narrowed eyes at the affable other.

  ‘You must hate us very much,’ he said. ‘We took your whole world. Literally. How you must long for our destruction!’

  ‘Not at all! That would be foolish. You are children of this world, as we all are. What you do with yourselves is your business. Long ago you interfered with us. We chose our response, and there it ended. We live with reality, not dre
ams. We’re a practical people.’

  ‘That you are, my friend. That you certainly are.’

  ‘But I still don’t know what happened to us!’ Stephen complained. ‘Why is all this happening now?’

  ‘It has something to do with those Sug creatures,’ Kirsten said.

  ‘Indeed,’ the driver said. ‘Things like this usually do. You two have been here since your birth. You were due to … to come home, for want of a better word. Not a real home, but all we have. Our halting site. Some of our creatures were due to come back with you – we call them creatures, even though they’re alive only in the broadest sense of that word. We send such creatures often – far more often than we come ourselves. They stay here awhile and they just … have experiences. They live as humans, they take jobs, sometimes they marry – they do all the things that humans do. Nobody here notices.

  ‘The Sug seem to have concluded at some point that sending our young and our creatures here was giving us some kind of advantage over them. Don’t ask me how they came to that conclusion, I don’t pretend to understand their minds. Maybe they were just bored – it can’t be a very interesting existence when you do nothing but sulk. At any rate, they thought they’d interfere with this particular operation. It was meant to be a sort of game – as I’ve told you, we have always competed through something like one-upmanship.

  ‘The Sug decided to ruin the homecoming of our most important children – you two. They sent an agent with a hunting pack of their own creatures to attack you and destroy your companions. You came to these mountains, which had always been important to us. Just as you prepared to leave, your party was ambushed – not physically, but effectively. A psychic attack humans would call it. Your own minds were confused, those of your creature companions were … destroyed, really. Completely short-circuited. But the Sug operation went wrong. Disastrously wrong. They’d miscalculated badly. They’d stayed away too long, so they had no idea how much the atmosphere here had been changed by humans in the mill- ennia since they’d last been here. The non-physical atmosphere, I mean.’

  ‘The non-physical atmosphere,’ Simon repeated, shaking his head with a bewildered air.

  ‘Yes. It’s as real to us as the physical one and, if anything, your species has polluted it even more. The Sug agent was damaged as soon as he arrived. The creatures they’d sent were outmoded – old models unsuited to this time. In the middle of their assault they went berserk, and turned on the agent when he showed up. It was the spiritual air that did it.’

  ‘The spiritual air,’ Simon muttered, shaking his head. But there was humour as well as bewilderment in his tone.

  ‘It was a very dangerous situation,’ the driver said. ‘The Sug creatures were hunters and they were out of control, that made them very, very dangerous – for humans, too. It was as though some of your own ancestors had arrived back here among you. Dyed-in-the-wool killers, knowing no sanity at all. We knew at once that there was something wrong. So we sealed the area and cleared it.’

  ‘You cleared it,’ Simon said. ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Yes. Just like that. We’d never done such a thing before, not since we’d left, but it proved to be simple enough. But we couldn’t find our missing people by our normal means – so we had to come in person. Outside the barrier your human authorities are going frantic, but there’s no way they can get in. We really didn’t want to do such a thing – it’s a bit show-offish for our taste. Flashy, you know? But we couldn’t take any risks with the Sug creatures – they were just too dangerous.’

  ‘You didn’t clear us,’ Simon said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Maybe in our hurry we overlooked you.’

  Simon looked at him with some disbelief, but before he could say anything Stephen interrupted.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why you … why we stay in this Nowhere now. Maybe humanity was savage once. But surely not nowadays. The Tellene could contact the United Nations, or–’

  He stopped. All three were looking at him sceptically.

  ‘That would be madness,’ Simon said. ‘There are too many Philips in the world, liable to turn savage in the face of anything they don’t understand. Too many savages under the skin. And a lot of them are in positions of power, not buried in some mountain monastery.’

  ‘Yes,’ the driver said. ‘I must admit this Philip did rouse a kind of sad nostalgia in me. I’ve seen many like him among your people in my time.’

  Stephen blushed. He could see his own foolishness when it was pointed out to him.

  ‘So, what now?’ Kirsten asked.

  ‘Well,’ the driver said, ‘my friend will have been clearing up. The various bodies have dissolved.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ Simon said. ‘All this violence, and then you tell me nobody really died at all – apart from that man, that … Sug in the chapel. And from what you say, his death didn’t matter very much to him.’

  ‘Not at all. It was less than an inconvenience.’

  ‘Less than an inconvenience,’ Simon said. ‘Yes. I see.’

  Again he shook his head.

  ‘I think,’ he said gravely, ‘that I need some fresh air. I’m going out to the courtyard for a while. To think about your story.’

  And without looking back, he went out. He looked like a man who was weighed down with a great many thoughts. Stephen watched him as he went.

  ‘He’s bewildered,’ he said. ‘So am I.’

  Light footsteps sounded in the corridor. The second Tellene came in. He had put his shirt and jacket on, and was knotting his thin knitted tie. He smiled at them broadly.

  ‘I see you’ve been telling Brother Simon a story,’ he said to his friend. ‘I could tell by the expression on his face. Or maybe I should say the absence of one.’

  The driver chuckled.

  ‘He’s a good man,’ he said. ‘Have you tidied up?’

  ‘Yes. We’re all clear.’

  ‘And the abbot?’

  ‘As good as new. Better, in fact.’

  The driver looked at Stephen and Kirsten.

  ‘Well, folks,’ he said, ‘we’ve a car to leave back at a house, and then we can go. Are you ready?’

  ‘Not really,’ Stephen said. ‘But as ready as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ Kirsten said, ‘this is going to be the real adventure!’

  Her eyes were shining. It’s not every day, Stephen supposed, that you find out you’re a princess – even if it’s the princess of Nowhere.

  The driver took his cup over to a sink and rinsed it. He upturned it and put it carefully down on the wooden drying rack.

  ‘Let’s go so,’ he said.

  So they did.

  PART FOUR: These Our Actors

  41. Family Reunions

  In the fading afternoon light a dusty car drove down an unkempt country road. In the front seat were two ordinary-looking men in dark suits, in the back seat a boy and a girl. They’d been driving for some time in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Though not all of them knew it, each in their own way was thinking about exactly the same thing: the events of the previous days in this part of the world.

  Stephen wasn’t comfortable in his mind. The long explanation he’d heard had raised at least as many questions as it had answered, and they were all questions he badly wanted to ask. But he didn’t know where to start or, in some cases, how to ask at all.

  He looked at Kirsten, who had a dreamy smile on her face. Still pleased at the notion of being a princess, he supposed. The Princess of Nowhere. And as for himself … he leaned forward suddenly and spoke to the men in the front seat.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘if Kirsten is a princess, does that mean that she and I are … does that make me …’

  But he didn’t know how to go on. Both men smiled.

  ‘A prince?’ said the younger one.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so. Is that what I am?’

  The two men exchanged a meaningful glance.

/>   ‘Not exactly,’ the driver said. ‘You’ll understand in a little while.’

  ‘But I want to know now.’

  The younger man sniggered. The older one laughed outright. Stephen was annoyed. What had he said?

  ‘Look,’ the driver said patiently. ‘I told Brother Simon what I felt he could understand. But there’s a bit more than that to this story. Not much more – but he’d have thought it a great deal. In your condition you might think so too. And I didn’t want to risk upsetting you.’

  Stephen worried when he heard that.

  ‘Well you have upset me now,’ he said.

  The driver gave a rueful shake of his head.

  ‘You’d think I’d know better,’ he said. ‘You may have forgotten who you are, but you’re still the very same.’

  Again the two men exchanged glances. But both of them were smiling now, amused. Stephen felt their amusement was at his expense, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  ‘Are you going to share the big joke or not?’ he demanded.

  ‘You may as well tell him,’ the younger man said. ‘Other-wise we’ll have this all the way back.’

  ‘Right,’ Stephen said. ‘I woke up two days ago knowing that I was a human, that I was a boy and that my name was Stephen – three simple things. Now I know I’m not human, and I’ll be very surprised if my name’s Stephen, and– ’

  ‘And you’re not a boy,’ the driver finished in a conversational tone. He caught sight of Stephen in the rear-view mirror, and he grinned. Stephen’s face had gone blank. His mouth hung open.

  ‘I …’ he began. ‘You …’

  He turned to Kirsten, who was staring at him with a face almost as shocked as his own.

  ‘I’m a girl?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Stop talking in riddles!’ A terrible thought struck him. A sick feeling grew in his stomach. ‘Are you telling me,’ he said, suddenly frantic, ‘that I’m one of your … creatures? Some kind of … tape-recorder?’