Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Vacant shop, vacant house, vacant debts. As vacant as this street of empty bins; as vacant as the rear of the car was fast becoming. He wished he had closed the hatchback down. Otherwise something more precious than junk might escape, might be snatched or simply drift away into the chilly air here between these looming steel boxes that mockingly imitated a decrepit city street – from the future, perhaps, after a war.

  He halted the car and shook his head to clear a cold fog of apprehension from his brains. Before he could engage reverse gear, he saw in the driving-mirror the high front of a truck loom around the corner behind. Piston arms, at attention, dangled chains embracing the steel bin on its flatbed back. Somehow the bintruck negotiated the turn. He wondered how it could ever manoeuvre to pick up or deposit any of the bins ranged on either side. Maybe there was a turntable built into the chassis. Standing in the bin as though navigating the vehicle was the moronic woman.

  Suddenly the sight of her terrified him. The truck slowly approached, and honked.

  It must be one-way-only, Rosy.’ Tim drove forward to the next intersection and swung down á lane of close-packed bins containing scrap metal. By the time they reached another arrow, and another turn, the bintruck had already entered the scrap metal street.

  Tim took another turn, then another, losing the truck way behind, If it had been deliberately following, to begin with.

  Arrow followed arrow. Turn followed turn. Lane of bins succeeded lane of bins. Once they turned into the street of clothing bins, yet this led to a street of scrap metal bins, not a street where the bins were empty. Unless his memory was deceiving him. No, it wasn’t. The clothes bins must have been different ones. They were lost in a maze.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he told Rosy. ‘There isn’t space for all these lanes.’

  ‘We’ve entered the world of rubbish,’ Rosy whispered back. ‘Where we’ve been heading for the past twenty years.’

  The engine coughed and missed a couple of times. Tim pulled the choke half out, racing the engine, though of necessity still driving slowly.

  ‘It’s all this damn crawling in first gear. The plugs soot up.’

  The very next lane opened into a long concrete yard walled in by bins. It wasn’t the yard that housed the shop. Slamming the choke back in, Tim gunned the car toward the arrow marking the exit at the far end, hoping to burn the plugs clean. He braked violently in time to enter the next narrow alley.

  Six lanes later the engine quit. Tim couldn’t restart the car.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Rosy.

  ‘Walk. I’ll leave the keys in the ignition.’

  The bins on either side stood shoulder to shoulder. They seemed twice as large as previously. You couldn’t even squeeze sideways between bins, though you might just manage to crawl on your belly. The only route was the concrete road.

  ‘I wonder if this was once an old airfield?’

  Then Tim remembered the gulls flocking about the infill. But no gulls flapped in the sky now.

  ‘What’s in the bins, Tim?’

  Not since that second yard had they passed a single sign announcing the contents. He peered up. Suddenly he understood the assorted shapes peering over the lips of the containers.

  Car doors.

  Further along … a forest of exhaust pipes like several church organs jumbled by a bomb blast.

  ‘Bits of cars,’ he said, opening his door.

  Two lanes later they heard from somewhere behind them the whine of a power tool, then the clanging of metal. He felt sure that their stalled car was being broken up into parts. Taking Rosy’s hand, he hurried her onward and along another lane. Faintly, he heard a thump of boots and a silly, idiotic giggling.

  Clothes bins again! Jackets, shirts, sandals, nightdresses looked over bin tops. Before they could reach the next corner, the moronic woman waddled out from it ahead of them. She was accompanied by a big, bony, overall-clad man in his mid-forties, his thick black hair slicked back in waves, his nose an absurdly small squashed blob in a large, battered face.

  ‘Yer need a hand, squire?’

  Tim jerked around. One of the youths sat perched on the edge of a shirt bin behind him. The youth dropped to the ground just as his partner came wading over the bin of summer dresses opposite. He leapt down, too.

  ‘Show us the way out of here!’ cried Rosy. ‘No, go away! Leave us alone!’

  The two youths rushed and clamped Rosy by the arms. At the same moment the man seized Tim, who struggled uselessly; the grip was like granite.

  ‘Yer need a hand,’ the youth repeated.

  The plump woman ambled forward. While the man manipulated Tim like a toy or a life-size doll, the woman undressed him, taking her time about it, tossing his clothes up into various bins. Soon Tim shivered nakedly, still held tight.

  Then it was Rosy’s turn.

  Their captors led Tim and Rosy, both stripped naked, to the turn and released them, thrusting them into the next steel and concrete lane.

  ‘Ge’ on, now, squire!’

  The woman and her three companions remained at the intersection, blocking any return to the bins where Tim’s and Rosy’s clothes and shoes had been discarded. Shaking with cold and shock, Tim and Rosy ran along numbly to the next turn, as much to hide their nakedness from the blankly watchful eyes and chilly breeze as to escape.

  Tim’s teeth chattered. ‘We’ll f-find something to wear. F-further on. Any old rags. Or c-curtains.’

  The bins in this new lane were loaded with sheets of cardboard, rolls of wallpaper, bundles of old magazines.

  Tim wondered whether he could scale the side of a bin with bare feet. He would have to!

  Rosy wailed, ‘I thought they were going to rape – !’ Her breasts bounced. ‘They did! They did. It was the same.’

  ‘Listen, this is all a vicious joke. Next we’ll come across some rags to put on. Then we’ll reach the yard where the shop is, looking like scarecrows. And we’ll find our car waiting for us – with our clothes folded on the seats. Nobody will believe us, but…’ He had to believe it. ‘They could have hurt us. They didn’t.’

  ‘You think they didn’t hurt us? I’m hurt forever.’

  The bins in the next lane all looked empty; nothing peeped over the tops. Tim rapped his knuckles against several; all rang hollowly. He didn’t feel inclined to try to climb, to check.

  They walked in cold shade. Whichever direction a lane led, sunlight seemed excluded. At last an arrow pointed the way down between rows of bins full of broken furniture, to a concrete-surfaced yard.

  ‘It’s the way out,’ he said. ‘We’ve arrived.’

  However, the yard, lined with more giant bins, was only as large as a tennis court, and no arrow pointed to an exit. There was only an entrance. Half of the yard was bathed in sunshine, where Rosy ran to warm herself. Her bare flesh quivering, the breeze still nipped her. Whatever these bins contained couldn’t be seen from ground level. A car roof-rack rested against one. Side-on, its metal bars were steps.

  ‘I’ll see the way out!’ Wincing, then planting her feet sideways so as to spread her weight along the thin steel bars, Rosy ascended.

  Shading her eyes, she stared around helplessly.

  She looked down inside the bin itself. And screamed. And screamed.

  Tim scaled the bars; there was room alongside. Clutching her cold shoulders with a chilly arm, he, too, gazed down.

  For a few seconds he hardly understood what he saw. A layer of slime-coated ping-pong balls? Hundreds of hard-boiled eggs?

  No. Eyes. The optic cords sprouted like tiny lengths of electric cord torn out of plugs.

  Sheep’s eyes? No, he didn’t think so. Not the eyes of sheep, or any other animal. Rosy had stopped screaming, out of breath. She shook convulsively, clutching the top of the bin, screwing her own eyes tight shut as if to hide them.

  He could see into the neighbouring bin as well. A heap of french fries? Baby parsnips? No.

  Fingers. Chopped-off human f
ingers.

  He stared wildly around the yard. What did all the other bins hide in their depths? Toes, tongues, lungs? Arms and loins and brains? The parts of the body, sorted out… Yes! He knew this was so, even before the grind of an engine dragged his gaze to the entrance of the little yard.

  The bintruck heaved into view and halted in the entrance, completing the circuit of metal walls. The front jutted sufficiently into the yard that the truck doors would be free to open. Crowded side by side in the cab were the man, at the wheel; the two youths; the moronic woman with her boy on her knee; the blank-faced fat woman in the pink parka; and the skinny, ratty girl. All of the passengers, even the little boy, were clutching assorted tools. Saw. Pincers. A gouge. A small axe.

  The truck engine died.

  ‘For God’s sake, climb on top, Rosy! Walk along the side to the bin beyond. We must get out of here.’

  Beyond the yard for as far as he could see in all directions were endless rows of bins.

  Desperately, bruising his naked body, almost crippling a toe, Tim scrambled on top, struggling to balance, half-helping, half-dragging Rosy with him. The top edge was far too narrow ever to walk along with bare feet, tight-rope-style. Nude, he knew they couldn’t even slide along, astride. That would be like riding a blunt steel blade. After a while it would cut through them, between their legs. Instead he slid down inside, pulling Rosy howling with him.

  ‘We’ll climb out the back way into the next one! And the next!’

  Jelly lumps squelched underfoot. He skidded in the six-inch-deep pool of eyes and fell, nauseated. Scrambling up, he waded, then leapt at the high rear edge of the bin. He did catch hold, with outstretched fingers, his front smashing against the metal, but he couldn’t pull himself up. He hadn’t enough of a grip. There was no purchase. His feet were slipping on soft marbles.

  ‘Yer need a hand?’

  A crowd of heads popped up behind. Vacant faces smiled vaguely. The man, the women, the youths, the ratty girl, even the little boy.

  Hands rose into view, displaying a gouge, an axe, pincers, saws.

  The Moon and Michelangelo

  Peter Catlow woke from a dream of a wide straight road stretching invitingly through cow pastures and willow trees upon a sunset evening towards, yes, some village with a pub where the real ale would be strong and malty just the way he liked it.

  He lay trying to keep hold of the dream, since it was years since such rural scenes had existed in such an unprotected form. As an earlier image clarified he realized that the dream had only been a half-happy one, for the road of his dream had set out from one of the gateways of the alien city. His right arm had been trapped in the mouth of one of the stone Herms; he’d been struggling to pull free.

  Pins and needles stung Peter’s hand as paralysed flesh thawed. He’d been sleeping on his arm, squeezing the blood-flow.

  Though he was sure that it must still be the middle of the alien night, as soon as he turned over to catch more shut-eye his alarm began to bleep. Disbelieving he slapped the alarm off, slapped on the light (and his wake-up tape of Vaughan Williams’ Variations on a Theme of Thomas Tallis), and swung out of bed before he could relapse. A button unshuttered the window upon another streaky-bacon dawn on Rock.

  Not that the landscape was barren; the brightening light of swiftly-rising Tau Ceti was disclosing lush herbage, the vegetable fields checkered purple and emerald, a sinuous fish-rich river, and a forest of giant ferns and bottle-trees.

  But whereas Earth people had named their world after the flesh of the planet, the soft fruitful soil, the lemur-like natives of Tau Ceti II apparently preferred to call theirs after the bones of the planet, the hard skeleton. Apparently.

  From the edge of the window of his little cubicle Peter could see a kilometre away the southeastern flank of the city writhing with its gargoyles and grotesques.

  Mary Everdon had said to him: ‘Perhaps for the natives the hardness of rock, and the manipulation of rock into shapes dense with meaning, equates with their emergence from biology, from organic culture, into culture and permanence and history? Carved rock and sculpted stone equals thought solidified and redeemed from timelessness into the new stream of sapient time.’

  Each time that she voiced her embryonic theory, it seemed to put on more weight, to become ever more viable. But Peter thought of it as her intellectual phantom pregnancy – which could become ever more convincing until one embarrassing day she might need to face the fact that there was nothing in it, after all. Of course, that was Mary’s merit too, in an extraterrestrial context: the ability to make speculative leaps.

  Mary pointed out that this city near which the expedition had set down was only one of many such carved wonderlands (or horror-villes) scattered about the two habitable continents which shared the same side of the world, nestling together like a pair of cashew nuts. The closest distance between any two cities was a couple of hundred kilometres. Forest or swamp, desert or mountain intervened. No road network existed. So the architecture must display the psychic bedrock of the inhabitants, must be a way of perceiving and celebrating their own triumphant separation from unthinking nature.

  As Peter let the pastoral swell of Vaughan Williams tone up his nervous system (while he washed quickly, while he shaved) he contemplated another day which wouldn’t last long enough to tire a fellow without taking a pill, to be followed by another night not long enough to rest oneself adequately.

  This planet makes me feel prematurely old,’ he’d confided to Mary in the refectory the evening before, while they hastily spooned up their dinner of chili con carne before the nightly info-swap began, prelude to bedtime.

  The forty-strong complement of the shuttle base munched their spiced beans and chattered science at twenty little tables. (Prevent cliques; prevent isolation. Nevertheless, there were cliques. Nevertheless there was…) Cheery yellow plastic walls; several doors open to the corridor; Commander’s podium; large video screen showing a Californian beach-scape that particular evening. Overhead the large bubble skylight framed one of the two bright moons chasing its partner in vain, or being chased. Periodically (not now) you saw the glint of the orbiting voidship, Michelangelo – named a touch arrogantly after Earth’s supreme sculptor – with the non-landing crew on board. They would soon get their treat: a trip out to orbit the third, fourth, and fifth planets which were two modest airless deserts plus an awesome gas-giant with a family of moons; before returning for pickup.

  Since Mary usually generated a theory she asked, ‘Does your speciality make you feel you’re a sort of medieval person, who’s ancient compared with all this?’ She smiled with sympathetic bonhomie.

  He shook his head. ‘No, it’s because when you’re young the days seem to stretch out endlessly, yet they shrink as you grow older. Here, the days have all suddenly grown very short, as though I’ve aged twenty or thirty years.’

  ‘How old are you? I’ve forgotten. Is it forty-eight?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She hadn’t forgotten.

  They had all had access to each other’s bios, and according to the bare bones of hers Mary Everdon was thirty-nine years old, doctorate in cultural anthropology from… Peter couldn’t care less where. Mary was unattached, plumpish, red-haired. She reminded him of… (Had she taken lovers? What were her erotic preferences? If any.)

  Peter nodded in the direction of Carl Lipmann, the scrawny blond linguist.

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t ask the natives how they feel, and understand the answers.’ It was a pity he couldn’t bring himself to ask Mary outright how she felt about him.

  ‘Not yet. We’re making progress, aren’t we?’

  Was he?

  ‘They twitter and warble like birds.’

  ‘Ah, but in a flexibly structured way. And we have quite a few sound-groups provisionally pegged with meanings. So it’s a true language.’ She raised her voice. ‘They’re far from being some sort of mammalian termite, as Fremantle had the nerve to suggest.’

  Ba
rney Fremantle, bald and natty, sat two tables away with Sandra Ramirez, the ecologist (black waterfall of curls). The biologist cocked an ear and shrugged. He had a sample bag beside him, which he patted like an obedient dog. Fremantle had suggested that the building of the city and the intricate carving of the natives might simply be wired-in, instinctual behaviour – akin to the artistic forecourts of bower birds – and that they weren’t genuinely sapient. This, despite their wooden agricultural implements and their sledge-carts, and their cooking bowls and their use of fire; despite the presumption that they must possess metal tools so as to have sculpted their ornate city.

  Peter wasn’t here in quite the same capacity as the other experts from sciences hard and soft. After the drone-probe had hyperpulsed its highly detailed aerial pictures of the cities of Rock back to Earth, it had been decided imaginatively to include a stonemason in the exploration team. A stonemason should have practical, existential knowledge of what seemed to be the main manifestation of the native culture.

  When the invitation had come – when some computer had picked up his name as a master stonemason without family ties – Peter had been in charge of renovating the abacus of ancient statues on the front of the acid-eaten Lichfield Cathedral, now that the town was safely protected by a Fuller dome. Perhaps it was nostalgia, rather than the promise of interstellar adventure, which prompted his acceptance. To be able to stroll through a city of uneroded carvings under an open sky, a city neither rotted by pollution nor air-conditioned like a museum piece.

  As Peter scraped up his last spoonful, Commander Ash strode to the podium, short, stocky, crew-cut, her oval face nevertheless (or perhaps on account of the crew-cut) that of a delicate china doll. She blanked the screen.

  ‘Need for brevity,’ she reminded. ‘I’ll guillotine garrulity.’

  Oh yes she would; and during the info-swap they would all talk in the same clipped telegraphic way. How to cram a pint into a half-pint pot. Likewise activity by day and sleep by night. Likewise the Commander’s own physique: a pint of power in a half-pint frame, with irrelevant coiffure shorn off. No time to bother with your hair on Rock. Emulate the name of the world; have head like a boulder. Made of china. Peter felt his brain gearing up to match the pace of the info-swap.