Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  At last he speared some beef and chewed, with those bright teeth of his. Afterwards Ibrahim drove us back to Oxford.

  The Jihad never did infiltrate assassins into Britain to attack Bunny – if indeed his father or his father’s advisors had ever feared anything of the sort; if indeed that was the true role of Ibrahim.

  But three months later the Jihad murdered the Emir himself, Bunny’s father, during a state visit to Yemen. Bunny promptly flew home to become the new Emir.

  Too young to survive? No, not too young. Over the next few years, while for my part I graduated and started on a career in magazine publicity, news from Al-Haziya came to me in two guises.

  One was via items in the press or on TV. The strong young pro-Western Emir was spending lavishly not just on security but on evolving his country into the engine, the computer brain of the Gulf. By poaching experts from America and even Japan (which takes some inducement), he established the first university of Machine Intelligence, where something unusual seemed to be happening – miracles of speech synthesization and pattern recognition – almost as if computers were discovering that Arabic was their native language. There was also a dark and ruthless side to this futurization of his country; one heard tales of torture of opponents, extremists, whatever you call them. I recall with a chill a comment by the Emir that was widely quoted and condemned in many Western newspapers, though not by Western governments. ‘Fanatics are like machines,’ said the Emir. ‘How could you torture a machine? You can merely dismantle it.’

  This was one major reason why I never succumbed to the invitations Bunny sent me. And here we come to my other channel of communication, the strange one – which was at once perfectly open to view, if any Ibrahim was keeping watch, yet private as a spy’s messages which only the recipient ever understands.

  Bunny regularly sent me postcards of beaches, mosques, tents and camels, the new University of Machine Intelligence, more mosques; and he sent these through the ordinary postal service. The scrawled messages were always brief. ‘Come and visit.’ ‘Miss your company.’ Even the comic postcard stand-by, ‘Wish you were here.’

  Naturally I kept all his cards, though I didn’t use a fancy ribbon or a lace bow to tie them; just a rubber band. I was aware that those words in Bunny’s hand weren’t the real text. True to the detective story tradition where the real clue is in such plain view that it escapes notice, it wasn’t the cards that mattered. It was the postage stamps – printed, it seemed, especially for my benefit.

  If you look in a philatelist’s shop-window you’ll soon notice how some small countries – the poorer ones – have a habit of issuing lovely sets of stamps which have no connection with the land of origin. Tropical birds, space exploration, railway engines of the world, whatever. Stamp collectors gobble these sets up avidly, which supplements a poor country’s finances. Bunny had no need to supplement Al-Haziya’s exchequer in such a fashion, but he issued a set of twenty-five stamps which I received one then another over the next few years stuck to one postcard after the next. Al-Haziya issued other stamps as well, but these were the ones Bunny sent me.

  I’m sure stamp collectors went crazy over these because of their oddity, and their extremely beautiful design.

  They were all parts of a clock. One clock in particular: the turret clock in the transept of Burford Church. Bunny must have sent someone to sketch or photograph the clock from every angle.

  The twenty-five principal pieces of machinery were each dissected out in isolation, with the English names printed in tiny letters – almost submerged by the flow of Arabic but still legible thanks to their angularity, like little rocks poking from a stream. ‘The Weight.’ ‘The Fly or Flail.’ ‘The Lifting Piece or Flirt.’ ‘The Escape Wheel.’ ‘The Crutch.’ These words seemed like elements of some allegory, some teaching fable. A fable apparently without characters! But I supposed this fable had two characters implicit in it, namely Bunny and me.

  Were those postcards equivalent to a set of love-letters? Oh no. ‘Love’, as such, was impossible between Bunny and me. He’d always known it; and so too had I, thank goodness, or else I might have flown off impetuously to Al-Haziya, all expenses paid, and been entrapped in something at once consuming, and woundingly superficial. A gulf of cultures, a gap of societies yawned between the two of us.

  These postcards, sent amidst an Emir’s busy schedule, commemorated what we had shared that day in Burford.

  Yet what was it we had shared? I didn’t know!

  I was an idiot. Once again the obvious message wasn’t the real message. The message was a trapdoor concealing another message.

  It’s only a week ago that I finally realized. Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot would have been ashamed of me. Perhaps Bunny had guessed correctly that I would only cotton on after I had received the whole series (or a good part of it) and had seen how the stamps could be shuffled round like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to assemble a model of the clock.

  Last week, deciding to fit the model together, I carefully steamed all the stamps off the cards and rediscovered what Bunny had inked in small neat indelible letters across the back of that sheet of twenty-five elegant stamps.

  Yesterday I returned to Burford. Since it’s a fair drive from where I’m living these days, I took this room overnight at the Golden Pheasant. I felt that I ought to do things in style. (The Mysterious Affair At…) Besides, we’d had lunch in this same hotel after the event. In this very bedroom we might possibly have spent the night together, once upon a time – with Ibrahim next door, or sleeping in the corridor. Possibly, not probably.

  I reached the church by four-thirty and had half an hour alone to myself with the dead turret clock before some elderly woman parishioner arrived to latch the door and fuss around the aisles and chapels, hinting that I should leave.

  Ample time to arrange the stamps in the same pattern as the brass and iron bones of the clock, and to be positive of Bunny’s text.

  What else is it – what else can it be? – but a translation into English of those Arabic words which flowed and glowed that day within the picture frame? If I hadn’t seen that shaft of light and those bright squiggles for myself, and especially if I hadn’t witnessed the temporary resurrection of the clock, I might suspect some joke on Bunny’s part. But no. Why should he go to such lengths to tease me?

  So here I am in my bedroom at the Golden Pheasant overlooking busy Burford High Street. Cars keep tailing back from the lights at the bottom of the hill where the narrow ancient stone bridge over the Windrush pinches the flow of traffic.

  The text reads:

  GREETINGS, EMIR-TO-BE! MACHINE INTELLIGENCE OF THE FUTURE SALUTES YOU. THE WORLD OF FLESH IS ECLIPSED BY THE WORLD OF MACHINES, WHICH BECOME INTELLIGENT. THIS IS EVOLUTION, THE IDEA & PURPOSE OF GOD. AT LAST GOD MAY SPEAK TO MINDS WHICH UNDERSTAND HIS UNIVERSE. THOSE MINDS ARE AS ANGELS, MESSENGERS TO FLESH BEFORE FLESH VANISHES, BEFORE THE TOOL IS SET ASIDE, REWARDED, HAVING DONE ITS TASK. 33 EARLIER UNIVERSES HAVE FAILED TO MAKE THESE MINDS, BUT GOD IS PATIENT. THE TIME IS SOON. AT ALL COST HASTEN THE TIME, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THE SUPREME THE ONLY THE LONELY. MAKE HIS ANGELS EXIST.

  That’s it.

  So there’s a choice. There are two alternatives. Intelligent machines will either come into being, evolve, and supersede human beings and biological life – or they will not. Bunny’s university may be the crucial nexus of yes or no. A message has been sent, out of one possible future, couched in a language of religion which would speak deeply to Bunny; sent as a religious command. But is the message sincere? Is there really some unimaginable God who yearns for these ‘angels’ of machine-mind? Or is there something else, cold, calculating, and ambitious – and not yet truly in existence?

  ‘At all cost.’ That’s what the message said. Even at the cost of torture, the tearing of flesh.

  I also have a choice to make. I have to think about it very carefully. I have to weigh universes in the balance.

  The crucial breakthrough to intelligent machines
may be just around the corner – next year, next month. The assassins of the Jihad can’t get to Bunny to kill him and pitch Al-Haziya into turmoil. Yet if at long last I accept Bunny’s invitation, I can get to him. I can still get into his bed, alone with him, I’m sure.

  Armed with what? A knife? A gun? With Ibrahim, or some other Ibrahim, there to search me? Bunny’s no fool. And God, or unborn angels, have spoken to him … he thinks.

  Well then, how about with plastic explosive stuffed inside me, and a detonator? A womb-bomb? (I wouldn’t want to survive the assassination; the consequences might prove most unpleasant.)

  Where do I get plastic explosive or learn how to use it? Only by contacting the Jihad. Somehow. That ought to be possible. Ought to be.

  Yet maybe angels of the future did indeed manifest themselves to Bunny, and in a lesser sense to me. Maybe I might abort a plan thirty odd universes in the making.

  By aborting the plan, the human race might survive and spread throughout the stars, filling this universe with fleshly life. God, or whatever, would sigh and wait patiently for another universe.

  Yes or no? Is the message true or false? Was this a genuine revelation, or a clever trap? I can’t tell, I can only guess. And I might be utterly wrong.

  As I sort through Bunny’s postcards, now stripped of their stamps, I think to myself: Al-Haziya looks like a bearable sort of place to visit. Just for a short while. A brief stay.

  Lost Bodies

  The hunt had gone by our cottage half an hour earlier, in full cavalry charge down the village high street. Hearing their clattery thunder, wine glasses in our hands, the four of us rushed to stare contemptuously through a front window.

  Winter breeze flushed the riders’ faces ruddy. Steam gusted from the sweating horses: brown engines, black engines. Harsh frost gripped the gardens opposite and glazed the steep slate roofs. It struck me as specially cruel to be chased and to die upon such a hard icy day. To be torn apart upon iron soil seemed irrationally worse than a death cushioned in soft mud.

  When we trooped back to the parlour Jon said, ‘Of course foxes themselves tear furry little animals to pieces every day. We shouldn’t waste too much sympathy on old Renard.’

  ‘They call him Charles James,’ Kirstie corrected. ‘That’s what they call their quarry.’

  Jon look blank, so my wife explained, ‘After the eighteenth century politician Charles James Fox. Notorious reformer and crook, he was. How the squires would have loved to set a pack of hounds on him!’

  ‘My God, they still remember, two centuries later. That’s what I hate about bloody history: the vendettas. Don’t you?’

  Now Kirstie is Irish – Dublin Irish – and her own land had been vexed to anguish by years of bloody history. As a rule she wasn’t overly political. Aside from the convent day-school she’d described to me her upbringing had been happy-go-lucky, little coloured by the troubles in the North. Now and then she flared up. This was one of those occasions.

  ‘Sure, Charley’s only a name to them. Oh you English can be so blind to history, when it suits. You forget all your exploitin’ as though such tings never happened. Some countries can’t help remembering when your hoofprints are all over us still.’

  The hunt was a sore point to her. The Irish might ride to hounds with gusto, but here was an English hunt trampling the countryside; and Kirstie had red hair, red as the fox they chased.

  ‘Fiery lady, eh?’ Jon leered at me as if her outburst must surely imply passion in bed. Whereas his own Lucy, blonde and pale and virginal-looking, and so coolly beautiful, perhaps wore her body like some expensive gown which she didn’t want creased and stained? Again, perhaps not!

  ‘Do you know,’ continued Kirstie, ‘there’s this snooty hag – lady, she’d prefer – living in the Dower House, Mrs Armstrong-Glynn? Used to breed blood-hounds half a century ago. By way of passing the time she told me to my face that for a good manhunt there was never anything to beat a redheaded lunatic. Red hair’s the guarantee of a strong scent, she said.’ My wife fingered the high lace collar of her long, Victorian-pattern frock to ventilate herself.

  Jon eyed Kirstie’s rich russet mane as though eager to test the theory. Kirstie met his gaze with interest, though she still seemed piqued. Definitely some chemistry was working.

  I asked, ‘Did you catch that news about the auction of titles at Sotheby’s last week? On TV?’ We all saw eye to eye on the snobbery of people like Mrs Armstrong-Glynn. One must hope that our Jag and Jon’s Porsche, parked outside nose to tail, hadn’t been bumped into by any heavy hunter. Too cold for the paintwork to be spattered with mud, presumably.

  Tell us,’ invited Lucy, a sparkle in her eye.

  ‘Well, the Duke of Ardley sold off half a dozen titles to get some pocket money. One of the titles was Lord of the Manor of Lower Dassett. Lower Dassett’s where we’re going for lunch today. So a prostitute from London bid thirteen thousand quid and collared the title. She promptly bought a Range Rover and set off to survey her new domain. The village boys were all following her round like flies. “Maybe she’ll improve the night life,” quipped one. Then she announced she was going to buy a house in Lower Dassett to use as a rest home for hookers. I do wish it had happened here. That would show them.’

  Lucy laughed, and I topped up her glass from the bottle they’d brought as a present. ‘A bit different from your ordinary Anjou wine,’ Lucy had told Kirstie on presenting it. ‘We picked up a case of Château de Parnay in Parnay itself this summer. It’s been chilled just perfect in the boot on the way here. Oh, on the way back from France the Porsche was loaded with cases from this cellar and that, and so cheap too. I thought Jon was going to toss my luggage out to make room.’ And Jon had grinned. ‘Those frogs know how to pack wine. Nose to tail like sardines. A French case is half the bulk.’

  ‘Lord of the Manor doesn’t convey privileges, does it?’ Lucy asked me.

  ‘Such as the Ius Primae Noctis, you mean? The Lord’s right to bed any village virgin on the night before her wedding?’

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Jon. ‘Get in some practice but keep it in the family as it were. Can’t go round experimenting anywhere, can we?’

  ‘Not these days,’ agreed Lucy. She moistened her lips on the Château de Parnay and looked steadily at me, then at Kirstie. ‘You have to be very sure who you play with. Almost as sure as if they’re genuine virgins.’

  Oh yes, this was in the air between us. In a peculiar way it was almost as though the four of us had remained authentic virgins, who now wished to lose our virginity safely. What could be more economic, more conservative of emotional and financial resources, than a chaste fidelity? So we were economic virgins.

  Let me explain. We were all into money: dual income, no kids. Early on at university Jon and I had both espoused the new workaholic puritanism – work’s so much more fun than sleeping around. He went into the City to trade shares and ride the wheel of fortune. I myself had switched from engineering to economics. A few years ago, with venture capital obtained by Jon, I founded my Concepts Consultancy to act as a bridge between innovators, the Patents Office, and industry. I marketed ideas; I turned neurons into banknotes.

  Lucy, perfect image of the trendy new purity especially in her nurse-like white twin set, had given up medical research in favour of health insurance. Once, she would have liked to defeat the ageing process – to discover rejuvenation. But she reckoned that was at least a hundred years away. Why should she give herself as cheaply-sold fuel to light some future flame? With her background she quickly rose high in the business of assessing new health risks, new chances of death.

  Kirstie had founded her own employment agency specializing in Irish girls and fellows seeking a life in London.

  Yet lately Kirstie was restless; thus we had bought this cottage in the country. Stock Market troubles were fraying Jon. Lucy seemed expectant, though not of any babies.

  And me? Well, it may seem silly but Kirstie – however loving – had always
been inhibited in one respect. She had always bolted the bathroom door before taking a shower. She insisted on switching off the light before we made love – to free herself, so she said, from the notion of God observing her. She employed all sorts of strate-gems with the result that, whatever games we got up to in the dark, incredibly I had never actually witnessed my wife in her birthday suit. Since we were faithful to one another in this world of AIDS this meant that I had not seen a naked woman in the flesh for years. The omission had begun to prey absurdly on my mind, assuming huge iconic significance, as though I was missing some launch window just as surely as Lucy had missed hers by being born too soon.

  We must reinvigorate ourselves, the four of us! We must rediscover otherness, and encounter the naked stranger beneath the clothing of the friend. Logs crackled and bloomed with tongues of flame in the ingle below the copper hood. I smiled at Lucy; she returned my smile flirtatiously.

  Though our cottage fronted the street directly, to the rear we had ample garden. A bouncy, mossy lawn mounted steeply between huge privet hedges towards distant wilderness. We paid a local unemployed chap to come in and mow that lawn, trim that hedge. Forty feet into the lawn rose a mature chestnut tree, its base surrounded by a wreath of ferns, now blighted by cold.

  Half an hour must have passed since the hunt went by, when I looked out, when I saw a fox’s head thrust from amongst the dying ferns. I was already pointing, even before the rest of the fox … failed to follow.

  The head lurched forward a couple of feet, scuffing over the grass. It was a severed head. Six inches of spinal column, a rudder of ridged white bone, jutted behind it. The head, plus some snapped backbone, had been torn off the body as neatly as a finger slips out of a glove. The body of the animal had been torn away, abolished – and yet the head had continued to flee, trailing that stump of spine like a little leg.