There was a sort of shrinking-rushing sensation in my head, as if I had understood something of the greatest profundity. That line, drawn through the earth, that linked together this other human being and myself. It was more than itself. Everything became clear.
I was not – even at so late a stage – entirely plain within myself what was going on. I was slowly, silently, getting myself into a sitting position, digging my bare feet into the matter of the soil. Even as I braced myself and tightened my grip around the root, tightening my hand around the life of Ari-shend-roba-le-patilta-gunarzon, I was barely self-aware.
I heaved, a tremendous effort, pulling back with all my weight. The tangled chain of Drüd lurched, seemed to pull back against me as if resisting me, and Ari stumbled forward. From where I was sitting it looked only that he was bending over a little way, as if trying to get a closer look at what was by his feet.
There was a distinct, thrumming, crumbling sort of noise. Immediately, a wide swathe of ground from me to the edge simply collapsed. It bellied down, like a sheet with a weight in the middle, and the next thing I knew it was falling away, dropping and bowing out until it hit the water below. In my memory the whole thing happens without sound, but I have to assume that this subsiding of so great an area of ground, twenty or thirty square metres of it, falling and splashing into the water must have made an enormous noise. I am not sure why it lives in my memory as a silent event.
I was on my feet before I knew it, my heart hammering briefly before my dotTech was able to regulate the gush of adrenaline I had experienced, releasing just enough to enhance my reactions but not so much that I panicked. The cliff path now looked as though a giant had bitten out a semicircular patch from it. I was two steps from the edge.
Below me I saw a mass of fragments of compacted Drüd bobbing and floating in the frothy water. At first I could not see Ari, but then he emerged, popping up like a cork. He was looking round him with that controlled surprise that is characteristic of a dotTech individual. Then he put his head back and looked up at me, standing over him.
'I slipped,' he called, sounding amused. 'Hey, the whole ground slipped.'
He started pulling himself onto the nearest raft of bobbing Drüd; but that small float tipped and rose vertically from the water under his weight, shucking him back into the sea. He laughed again, a clipped and bubbly sound. With another effort he pushed himself out of the water, and got himself into the position where he was belly-down on the raft of Drüd, his legs still in the sea.
I felt an enormous sense of power. I mean the word in the sense of the ancient philosophers, dear stone; not motive or reactive power, but interactive power, the intoxicating thing that old human society used to be based upon. I was up here; Ari was down there. I was better than him, stronger, more vigorous. It is very difficult, dear stone, for me to explain to you what I felt.
He was still laughing. I saw the red-purple water darken beneath him, and it came up as if it were some sort of physical externalisation of my power. The Sea Dragon rising.
It broke the surface with its maw around Ari's two legs. There was a rushing sound, the white-noise that splashing water makes. The worm-fish bulked into the air, glistening and grey, and then dove down again. Ari-shend-roba-lepatilta-gunarzon was thrown upwards, and tossed aside. He made no noise. I remember very distinctly that he didn't cry out. I watched as the worm-fish disappeared under the water again, and Ari's body splashed like a pebble into the turbulent sea.
He went under, and bobbed up again; his arms working hard to bring him up. Everything happened so suddenly that for a moment I thought he had merely been bumped by the worm; but then his struggling body overbalanced and his head went under the waves. This brought up his lower body, and briefly his twin stumps flashed through the air. Both legs had been severed halfway down the thigh-bone.
What I did next is, perhaps, the most interesting thing of all. I say this, stone, because the emotions that accompanied it were exactly the same as the emotions that attended me pulling the root and throwing Ari-shend-roba-le-patiltagunarzon into the water. What I mean is that either of these actions was equally random; neither of them was prompted by consideration on my part. It was not that I thought to myself 'I shall do a bad thing now', nor that I thought 'and now a good one.' They just happened. The best way I can put it is this: events collapsed my possible ways of acting into a single path of doing. Earlier, events had collapsed my coexisting ethical possibilities of good/bad into bad. Now the same process of moral observation by the universe collapsed my possibilities into good.
I jumped straight down on to the largest raft of broken-off Drüd. It was a tricky jump, and I only just managed to maintain my balance. The water had slopped over the jockeying raft of dead vegetable matter and made it greasy and slippy. From there I hopped on to a smaller raft and dropped easily to my knees.
Ari had tumbled three-sixty degrees through the water, and now his head was uppermost again, his arms working frantically to keep himself afloat.
To my left the darkness of the worm-fish moved through the water, circling back round to finish off its meal.
'Here,' I called. Those two syllables were all I spoke.[24]
His eyes locked with mine, and he tried to breaststroke his way over to me. But he overbalanced again, and ducked forward through the water. His ragged stumps appeared above the waves, swung over and disappeared again. His head came up.
I lay down on the wet float of Drüd and reached out, just managing to take hold of his hair with my finger's end. The hair was long and slippery, but I could just about tangle my fingers into it. Then, awkwardly at first but then with a stronger effort, I hauled Ari over towards me.
The head of the worm-fish burst through the surface of the water. This surface was covered in a film of Drüd-dust, moistened and floating like a slick all around, and the beast's head came through it like a fist through fine cloth. It just missed Ari, catching only one of his stumped-legs a glancing blow. This impact pushed the boy down into the water, and almost pulled me off my temporary raft. But the great beast veered in the sky and fell away, splashing us prodigiously. Ari came up, my fingers still entwined in his hair.
He scootered with his arms at the edge of the Drüd-raft, his eyes filled now with an existential (though, thanks to dotTech, not hormonal) panic. If the beast came by a third time it would almost certainly devour him. And then, probably, me.
I tried to reach down and grip Ari under his arms, but one of my hands was all tangled up in his hair now and wouldn't come free. I felt calm. I tugged down as hard as I could, and a fistful of Ari's hair came out. The dotTech were not quick enough to prevent the first burst of pain, and he yelped aloud. But I had him, gripping him under his arms, and hauling him out. Somehow I managed to pull him out and stand myself up, so that I was holding his half-body directly in front of me. And even as I was doing that I was stepping backwards, half-turning, and leaping.
The leap saved us. The worm-fish burst up again, breaking through the raft of Drüd on which we had been a moment before, its searching mouth wide and fatal. I landed on the larger raft and skidded, but didn't drop Ari's body. It was surprisingly light. He looked very pale; the dotTech had sealed the wounds at his legs, but he had lost a great deal of blood before they had been able to manage that.
I went down on one knee as the raft buckled and leapt around, the water thrown into choppy waves by the splashing of the Sea Dragon. 'Grab round my neck,' I shouted at Ari.
His eyes were closed, and I could not be sure he was still conscious. But when I pushed him around to my back, like a pack, his arms did at least tighten about my neck. I stumbled to my feet, ran as best I could on the brief deck with my feet slipping and pushing away in odd directions, and made the best leap possible.
I only just caught poking-out roots of Drüd at the torn-off lip above me; my belly and legs swung in dangerously, and I almost lost my grip. But then I swung out again and I scrabbled with all my might, hauling myself up and up. When I wa
s able to slide my belly up and on to what remained of the solid ground, I could shrug Ari's half-body from my back and heave myself the rest of the way up.
Then I lay for a while, until the dotTech could give me my strength back. I looked at the sky. I felt very calm.
Beside me Ari had become unconscious.
This was the first and only moment of choice in the entire occasion. I thought then, distinctly, that I could throw Ari's body back into the water. The Sea Dragon would devour it, nobody would ever know. Or, I thought, I could carry him back to the camp and he would regain his health. I could do either thing: I was not guided or compelled either way. I think it was largely the fact that I had put so much effort into rescuing him that persuaded me to heave him up onto my back and carry him all the way along the coast into the town. It seemed wasteful, somehow, to do anything different. But I was intensely aware, as I laboured along under my unconscious burden, of the power of the choice I had possessed, for those few minutes by the side of the sea.
That was what corrupted me, dear stone. That incident changed me for ever. I had first set in motion the death of another human being; then, halfway through the process, I had rescued him. Once having done that it was, for me, inevitable that I would explore the first half of the event in more detail. I knew for an absolute certainty, as I lay down to sleep that night, that I would kill again.
The people at the camp, and shortly after that a great many people on the continent, were impressed by my heroism. The adults at the camp were congratulatory and emotional. Ari was cared for. Even dotTech cannot regrow legs overnight; that process takes many weeks, and his whole family came up to stay with him whilst he was indisposed in this manner. They insisted on meeting me and thanking me.
A deputation of adults fabricated a series of boats, and went up and down the coastline deterring the Sea Dragons with DNA-darts that infected them a special phage, one that compelled them to stay in the deeper water. Then they sprayed all the under-arches of the coastline, where it had been eaten away to what was judged a 'dangerous' thinness, with a chemical fixer that strengthened them.
And all this activity, and notice, and news (I thought) was actually about me, about what I had done. Of course, only I knew the truth of my supposed 'courage'. But my secret knowledge in fact made me feel stronger, because I knew more than anybody else.
I was given a medal, dear stone; an antique symbol in honour of my courage. The ceremony took place during a bright Terne sunrise, with hundreds of people around me singing and cheering. The medal was small but weight-enhanced (so that it hung solidly from around my neck). It was marked with a single 'F'.[25] I was enormously proud of it, ridiculously so in fact seeing as how the whole 'near-tragedy' had been my doing. But the pride, the sense of power, the goodness, the badness, were all – I am sure of it – merely different arrangements of the same essential components. Those components were me.
2nd
Dear Stone,
I resolved to kill again – or kill, to be more precise, because my first 'victim' was still alive – but in fact I did not do so for many years. I looked about me with care, but the opportunity did not really present itself. I thought it through, you see; and it was obvious that if I killed blatantly I would be imprisoned. I did not want to be imprisoned.
I won prizes for playing the conscree, and travelled to Sobrianna, the major city on Terne to take part in planet-wide competition. That probably sounds grander than it actually was; there were hundreds of these sorts of competitions. It was one of the features of living on Terne, as a child. Everybody was put in for one or other, depending on what area of sport or art or living you were marginally skilled at. There was an occasion at this competition in Sobrianna, when I was on top of a building, and I was able to creep up behind a fellow competitor and push them from a ledge, where they had been blithely kneeling and looking down. They did not see it was me, and nobody suspected what had happened; but the person did not fall very far – twenty metres, perhaps – and quickly recovered. For my first actual murder, dear stone (and I shall not prolong this narrative, for I am growing bored with it) we have to go several years further forward. I became a man, and embarked upon the varied life of recreation, travel and sex that characterises the citizens of t'T. For a year or so I travelled randomly from world to world, until I arrived at a world named Foram. There was a passion at this place for great jet-cars and jet-boats; the resurrection of an antique technology. I seem to remember that there was a spurious historical justification for this craze; but rather, I think, it was the pleasure of assembling the clunking, large-scale, intricate engines of the ancients. I became involved with this, moving from city to city, from lover to lover, helping build these behemoth machines by hand. At one port, by a lovely stretch of bright blue water, with sharp white cliffs of fossils curving round, I helped build a jet-boat. It was a hundred metres long, and constructed of metal and plasmetal. There were six of us working on it; myself, my then-lover and four others. And this is where I killed again.
We had built two jet-engines at the back of this craft and were tinkering with the rest of the device. We built these engines on an enormous scale; twenty foot tall. There was no very good reason for this, other than that it caught our fancy to build such monumental devices. The other four were away for the day, and I persuaded my lover to clamber inside the jet outlet to fix a problem I had myself created. Then, when he was in there, I turned the jet on. The combination of very rapid, mincing blades and the superheated exhaust shredded him; he was completely destroyed. The engine itself clogged and exploded, devouring itself and its fellow in fire and shrapnel. I think I had assumed (it is hard to remember exactly) that the blades would simply pulp the body, but this was not what happened. I was badly burned, and received several pieces of hot metal in my body, even though I was many metres away at the controls; of course the dotTech healed my wounds. My victim was completely disassembled. When my companions returned they were horrified, but they assumed (why should they think anything other?) that there had been a tragic accident.
In fact, the crime was so perfect, so free from consequence, that it made me overconfident. I travelled back to Terne and tried to burn a person to death; tricking them into a small shed built of dried spars of Drüd and panels of Drüd-weave. Then I locked the shed and set it alight. I could hear his cries inside the structure of fire, and that noise made me feel peculiarly powerful. But a party of revellers, out for a day's flying, noticed the unusual blob of heat on their sensors and flew down to see what it was. When they landed, they too could hear the (by now desperate) cries, and their flying panel blew the flames out with a smothering jet of carbon dioxide. The person inside was very badly disfigured, and nearly dead; but the dotTech kept him alive and he recovered.
The rescuers gave me some very strange looks, I remember. They could not understand why I had not tried to rescue the burning man. It did not occur to them that I might have deliberately attacked him, for why would anybody do such a thing? But my behaviour was nonetheless puzzling to them. They flew the injured man away to the nearest city for care and attention, and I refused to go with them. That puzzled them even more. But when my victim had recovered sufficiently to accuse me there was no escaping the conclusion; I was a throwback, a statistical freak in the perfectly adjusted t'T population. I was dangerous. 'Police' set out to apprehend me.
Meanwhile, obviously, I had hurried to the nearest elevator and into space. I travelled to Nu Hirsch, and changed my appearance. The 'police' pursued me. There was, however, one advantage to my predicament, which is that I no longer had to look for obscure and deniable situations in which to indulge my growing passion for harming human beings. I could attack much more frequently; and so I did, as I was pressed closer and closer. I severely harmed an individual on an orbital platform by battering them with an implement and severing their head (they survived). Then I killed another individual on the planet by pushing them into a tidal tank – this was a device that produced inter
esting water effects, waves and tides and the like. I attacked the individual with a knife, damaged him so that he became unconscious; then I placed his body inside the tank and set the device in motion. The water pressure inside was so great that the body was pulped, jellied, and the person died.
But with each attack I found I was gaining less enjoyment. There was no longer a sublime, transcendent sense of superiority; instead there was only the raw feeling of danger, excitement and escape. I think, dear stone, that it was not violence and murder that I particularly craved; it was, instead, novelty. It was precisely because there was (more or less) no murder in the worlds of the t'T, that killing was a revolutionary act. But killing again and again lost its point. I wondered, more than once, as my attention was caught by a random passer-by, why I was moved to attack them. I came to the conclusion that it was only out of habit after all. I started planning to give up the killing of people, to flee the t'T 'police' altogether, perhaps to the realms of the Wheah or the Palmetto tribes. To begin a new life.
Then I attacked another person; a kite-flier on the world of Tanze. I became interested in this sport, which involved the manoeuvring of unpowered kite-planes through the blowy Tanze atmosphere. I had not come to this place intending to kill anybody, but only to take part in a sport that intrigued me. But then one day, my fourth day of flying I remember, I flew close to another competitor – close enough to grasp her kite and tear its wings. She yelled at me over the howl of the wind 'what are you doing!' -'you'll damage the kite' - 'look at what you're doing!' - but I was able to pull both wings free and watch her tumble, turning over and over, the kilometre or so to the jagged rocks below. It was enough of a fall to cut her to rips, to kill her beyond the ability of dotTech to repair her.
But others saw me; and when I landed I was apprehended. The 'police' took me and brought me to the jailstar.
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 21