by Adam Roberts
We broke and ran; even those few at the front (as I was) sensed it, glanced round, and had to lurch backwards. I could hear whoops of joy from the Senaarians, and the rate of fire increased. More people fell, screaming and crying, or else fell without a cry, never to get up again.
A fury took me. I began screaming, yelling at the loudest pitch. ‘To me!’ I howled. ‘To me! Forward, forward!’
After the initial spurt, the urgency of the retreat diminished. Some, of course, sprinted all the way back to the water but others slowed, turned. Their heads were ducked down, out of the way of the whistling deadly needles, but they saw me. And the switchback started to take hold. Still I was yelling ‘To me! To me!’ I raised my spar. A needle went through the outer part of my thigh, clean through (as I later discovered) but I did not even notice until afterwards.
‘Back! We have them! We have them!’ I yelled, the odd-sounding phrase sounding perversely right to some deep part of myself (as if we were actually taking ownership of them). And, just as suddenly as we had fled, we found ourselves advancing once more. Again screaming, a more ragged formation.
Several Senaarians had left their cover to chase after us, to provide better firing platforms; and two of those had been picked off by the snipers over the cave mouth. We were on their bodies almost straight away, two women wrenching their guns from them, another man turning one corpse over to pull free the ceremonial sword. The other soldiers were running from us now, scattering back to the shuttles to take cover. And we came down upon them, howling and full of rage.
I was running so hard, I remember, that it was difficult for me to pull up straight when I arrived at the shuttle, and I collided bodily with the metal of the shuttle hull, and was knocked a little backwards. But we were on them now: people falling back with needles in their faces, but others battering the soldiers with our weapons, or pinning them with our captured rifles. I myself took my spar to one man, and the pleasure of striking him with it removed me from myself; there was a timeless period of intensity, unlike anything else I know, and during it, all I was doing was bringing the spar down, and I was yelling, was (the spar seemed to have got itself lost) punching and throttling with my bare hands. Somebody’s face was very close to me (the memory itself is a little dissociated, and I can’t quite remember how I got to this position), and I was ramming my palm hard against its yielding features, its eyes rolled upwards and white, blood coming from several places.
The next thing I remember, with the conscious deliberation of true memory, is the shuddering as the shuttle began to rise into the air. This, I remember, intensified my rage, to think that we were losing the shuttles. What had happened was that the cave advance party had returned and rushed us, and that the extra bringing-to-bear of firepower had forced a way through. Most of the remaining Senaarian soldiers retreated inside the shuttles, and they pulled away into the sky. Only a few wounded and a single fighting man (except he didn’t last long without the shuttles) remained.
And then I was sitting, gasping, on the salt: conscious of blood all over my leg, and blood all down my front, but unsure which blood was mine (and there seemed to be a pain somewhere, I was not sure where) and which was from other people. The area between the cave and the water was a mess of fallen bodies; some cursing and moving, others lying quite still. By now, everybody had heard the commotion, everybody from the settlement was coming, and soon there were people everywhere. A man helped me to my feet, and a woman came by with some water (I was very thirsty, either through my exertions or my loss of blood) which I sipped through the straw in my mask. And the sun went down in a glory of red and gold, and the field was all dark as people limped from it. Somebody brought out trolley lighting and, as I went away towards the hastily inflated medical tent, they were going about the floodlit field, checking the dead.
I spent an hour inside, sitting, letting the sensations drain out of my body. I felt bitter that the shuttles had got away. Eventually a medical-rotation came to me, and I stripped, although my only wound was on my thigh. He bandaged me and I dressed again in the blood-stiff clothes.
I could not face sleeping in the dorm for some reason. And I had no partner to share with, nor did I want to seek somebody out. I intended sleeping in the diplomatists’ office, being by myself. And it was there, in that office, that I discovered the whimpering Rhoda Titus, hiding behind the desk. She shrieked when I turned on the light, and shrieked some more when I came towards her. ‘Please don’t kill me, don’t kill me’ she kept saying in the common tongue. I sat watching her until she calmed down and stopped making noise, then I turned off the light and lay on the floor to sleep.
Barlei
I am sometimes asked whether we anticipated retaliation. But you must understand that it is not a leader’s job to waste his energies in pointless soothsaying. God orders the future in his own way, and a leader must learn to respond to events, not sit about like an old wise woman, attempting to anticipate them in the entrails of animals. Preparedness is everything. And, with our great success building our reputation all about the shores of our sea, we did prepare. I promoted jean-Pierre, and put him in charge of building up our defences. Historians of the counter-patriotic type (the Alsists used to say that I suppressed all public discourse of which I did not approve, but how untrue!) have criticised me for not following the raid on Als through with more thoroughness. I can say, before God and with truth, that I had my suspicions but would it have been lawful to flatten Als? No war existed between us; the only provocation was the children, and they had been removed.
I prayed, and I received my answer, my consciousness of Grace. Make Senaar a strong citadel of God, I heard; and so I did. So I have done.
4
Wandering
Petja
There was a certain sinking of my spirit, a curving reflex action of the soul away from people. I became bitter, angry at the world’s people, almost at the world itself. It was as if some part of my being had tasted too much sweetness in the euphoria of battle and now I revolted. It was not that I had killed people, not even that I disgusted myself because I had enjoyed killing, although perhaps a small part of my nameless rage was to do with that. It was that, for an instant, in the belly of the battle, I had wanted the other people who were fighting with me to cease to be people, to become instead automata, to become mere extensions of me. I wanted them to do what I told them to do, whether they wished it or not. I wanted, perverse as it seems, to own them, to possess them, to have them. At the time I experienced frustration that they were not doing what I wished, and my frustration took the hierarch’s bent of wishing them somehow, metaphysically, under me.
At the time I barely noticed that this was happening in my soul; but afterwards, by myself and not wanting a partner, I fell to thinking about it. I dwelt on it, perhaps, and grew revolted with myself. I decided I had the seed within me to become a rigidist, as the common talk styled me; and worse than that, I had the capacity to become a hierarch.
And then there was the issue of Rhoda Titus. I woke on the morning after the raid, and she was still in the diplomatist office. She was sitting like a frightened child in the corner of the room, her hair disarrayed, her blotchy face scrunched up. Her eyes were shut, and she seemed somehow to have fallen asleep in that awkward position, with her knees up in front of her and her hands clenched together resting on her feet. I watched her for a while, with a weird detachment, but then got up and went through to wash without waking her. I think she finally woke to a sense of panic, because I heard a dog’s yelp as I rinsed my face. I put my eyes round the doorjamb and saw her curled in the corner with her eyebrows up against her hairline.
My lack of compassion for her should perhaps have alerted me to the change in myself. I had little thought for her, but evidently (with hindsight) she was in a state of terror. She had, as she saw it, been abandoned in the camp of the enemy, with no means of making the trek to the other hemisphere where her own people lived. Perhaps she feared torture or death (many
of our people had died in the raid, after all; and she might have feared our rage). Whatever, she was too afraid to come out of the little office. She later told me that she had sometimes shrunk through the door, pressed herself up against the wall, and come a few metres down the corridor, but that the sight of somebody or other had sent her scuttling back where she had come from. She had drunk and relieved herself in the tiny toilet pod attached to the room, drinking the water out of the toilet pan itself (so low she had sunk from her former pride).
I, on the other hand, spent two days in my thoughts. There were angry meetings of people, coming into being and drifting apart all over Als; people were full of high words about the terror that these Senaarian soldiers had inflicted upon us, and people were eager to repay death for death. I took little part in this but instead wandered about places where people were not. I avoided the farm spaces for fear of running across Turja (so absurd had my relationship with her become!), but I spent a while operating the excavation machinery that was opening up new tunnels and smoothing out new caves deep in the mountains. The workers allotted to this had been caught up in the general mood of outrage at Senaar, and so were doing what most people were doing; abandoning their rotas, planning revenge and reprogramming the Fabricants to turn raw materials into weaponry. On the second night there was a large gathering outside, people crowding about a communal fire that burnt green in the chlorine, along with its fiery whites and yellows. Individual after individual spoke up to denounce the murderous actions of the hierarchs. It suited me that everybody gathered in this way, because I was without desire for human company and it made it easy for me to avoid them. I operated the machines, or allowed them to follow their pre-programming, and sat in the cabin in the glow of electric lights, letting the wombish hum of the grinding technology envelope me.
I had never been one of those hermit-people (soldjosbeyern) who, from time to time, are seized with a desire to quit humanity and live by themselves in the wilderness. Such people have always been a small part of Als, and usually they will spend a number of years solitary before growing tired and wanting people again: and so will return, and take up work rotas again, and mingle with people, drink, make love, until the urge for solitude becomes strong in them again and they leave again. But this was not me. I was always amongst people, always with a partner, always engaged in work that benefited the whole of the community.
Now, for the first time, I yearned to be absolutely alone, and alone for a long time. I slept in the cab, and woke with a sense of liberation that there was nobody with me. Then I worked some more at grinding away a tunnel, and finished late in the afternoon with a resolution: I was going to spend some time alone. I would take a car and drive into the desert, simply be by myself: perhaps simply stay in the car and drive slowly about the world. Or perhaps find a likely place by a water source and build a hermit-hut.
I could have gone straight then and there, but I did not. For a while I contemplated telling people where I was going and what my plans were (as if people would be interested!), but I realised underneath this strange desire was an attempt to give myself an excuse to get back into the company of Turja; to say, perhaps, that I was leaving. And perhaps (so perverse had I become) to hear her say, ‘No, don’t go, stay with me.’ But once I had identified this lurking desire I was able to sidestep it. Being by myself would do me good in that area as well.
I only returned to the diplomatist office to collect my screenbook and to ensure that there was a car I could take (it occurred to me, as I wandered back through the evening, through knots of people coming together and separating and all talking war, that all cars might be taken in this new enthusiasm). By the time I went back inside the cave it was dark outside, and in the office I turned on the light. There was a squeal, little more. Rhoda Titus, unused to fasting, was in a feeble state.
‘Technician,’ she wheezed. ‘Please, I throw myself upon your mercy. I am your supplicant.’
I replied, but my voice was hoarse with having been silent for days. ‘I admit to surprise at still finding you here, Rhoda Titus.’
At this she cried, her tears coming so copiously from her eyes that they scattered and dripped off her face. ‘I had no idea that any military action was planned!’ she gasped, each word requiring a breath. ‘Please, believe me! Please believe me!’
I was not paying too much attention in fact, but was busying myself with gathering together a few things from the office and accessing the datastore on the terminal, but she seemed to take my involvement in these things as a snub of her. She came over, her red and blotchy face pressed into my shoulder, her hands taking hold of my arm and repeated her insistence.
‘You must believe me. Oh please! Please believe me!’
This, of course, is another function of the hierarchy, the need for the person above you in the chain to ‘believe you’, that is, to accept the assurance of the subordinate that her mind is properly in tune with the requirements of the hierarchy itself. As you can tell from this, it is in the nature of the hierarchy to seek to control even thoughts and beliefs, and it is the way of those who live under it to boast of their openness, as if their minds might be read by telepaths and be proven pure. I did consider trying to explain to Rhoda Titus how alien this was to me (why should it matter to her whether I believed her?), but decided it was not the best time to do this. Instead, I completed my requisition of three months’ water and food, with a fuelled car, and stood up to go.
At this Rhoda Titus started keening, an unpleasant sound like an engine slipping out of gear. Her hands slid from my arms and she tried to take a grip at my hips as she collapsed onto her knees. But, as I stepped towards the door to leave, she relinquished me and her wailing broke up into a series of shorter and shorter sobs.
As I stepped through the door into the corridor outside I heard her voice, pitched almost too low for my ears, as she said:
‘How you hate me.’
For some reason this snagged in my brain. Hatred. I had managed only a few metres down the corridor before I turned myself back. I came back into the little room and found her in the same position, still kneeling on the floor.
‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘I am intrigued that you should say such a thing. Why should I hate you? Why should I feel anything about you at all?’
She looked at me with blackened, bleary eyes, and said only, ‘What?’
‘You said I must hate you, but I assure you I do not. You seem to think that I have some emotional connection to you, to feel one way or another about you.’ Having said this, perhaps I should have gone straight away. But still I loitered.
‘If you don’t hate me,’ she said, her voice thick, ‘then why don’t you help me?’
This was a puzzle. I sat down on one of the chairs. ‘I do not understand. You cannot help yourself?’
‘Of course not!’ she blurted, anger getting past her tiredness and her hierarchy-trained subordination.
‘This is strange to me,’ I said.
Perhaps the kneeling was uncomfortable to her on the hard floor, because she sat back, and then wriggled her legs out from underneath her to clasp them in front of her, the posture of a frightened child. ‘You’re mocking me,’ she said.
‘Not at all.’
‘Of course I can’t help myself,’ she said, the warmth of her words seeming to heat her a little. ‘I am a woman, all by myself in the middle of the enemy; forgive me, but you are the enemy. I looked outside, I saw your mob: Als is famous for its lawlessness, but it was terrifying to see, that anarchic mob venting its caveman urges, killing and destroying. If I had,’ she went on, her words gathering speed as she spoke more of them, ‘if I had not hidden myself away in here your people would have torn my limbs from my body, would have mauled me to death. Of course I’m scared; what would you expect me to be, except scared?’
At this she paused, as if waiting for my reply. I was shaking my head a little. ‘It is genuinely difficult for me to understand you, Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘You tal
k of my people as if I owned them all, every woman, man and child in Als, as some sort of slaves. And you talk about being scared, when I asked whether it was true you could not help yourself. You speak as if being scared and being unable to look after yourself were the same thing.’
Her brows contracted. Anger and despair jerking in combat over her features. Then she started crying again.
‘You’re a monster, a monster,’ she said over and again. I tried to speak some more. ‘Rhoda Titus, if you were scared of coming to Als why did you come? If you considered coming to Als as putting you in a position where you felt unable to help yourself, why did you come?’ But she was not listening to me.
I sat for several minutes whilst Rhoda Titus worked out her crying, and then for a minute or so more in silence. Then I said, in what I hoped was a softer voice (but it was so difficult talking with this strange creature who never said what she wanted or what she did not want, but rather expected you to read the complexities of her alien social relations into her moods), ‘Perhaps you would tell me what you want of me?’