by Adam Roberts
The stranger said nothing.
‘It’s a variation on a standard theme,’ Soop put in, when it became clear that the female wasn’t going to speak. ‘A hero flies up to the moon on a giant firework. He is aided, of course, by the gods - he could hardly have reached as far as the moon without supernatural help. There’s a pre-industrial god called Saturn - I’ve always assumed that the final syllable there means that he was a funereal god, though that’s not clear. There’s also a god called Apollo, who is the pre-industrial god of the sun and the moon. The significance of these gods to the story is a little obscure, but I assume that on a metaphorical level they fight, Saturn the god of Death and Apollo the god of Life, fight over the mission, over, I mean, the success of the mission. Armstrong succeeds, of course, despite terrible danger and adversity.’
‘So. A mythological tale?’
‘But that’s one of the things that’s interesting about this story,’ said Soop, warming to his theme and forgetting, as he was wont to do when in full spate, his surroundings, his interlocutor, even his fear. ‘In common with the science fiction of its period it is a mythological story - but it’s told in this pedantically pseudoscientific, or pseudo-technical manner. There’s a lot of detail about machinery, dials, switches and so on. It tells a purely fantastical imaginary story in a peculiarly detailed realist way.’
The female twitched as he said this, and glanced nervously at Soop.
‘Realist?’ said Jeunet in a low voice, coming a little further out of the doorway.
‘It’s a wonderful paradox, really. But it’s one of the things I love about all this antique science fiction. There are lots of examples of it. Take Robert Highline; he was a contemporaneous writer of imaginary voyages and his stuff is full of gadgets and technical digressions and the like, although the stories themselves are as fantastical and mythic as you like. This Armstrong story is just like that. It’s a perfectly impossible adventure, of course, but it’s told with a straight face. And that combination is just, is just a thing that I - and I’m speaking only personally of course - love about all this work.’
‘It was an age that trusted in technology,’ said Jeunet.
‘It was, and that sapped its strength, of course,’ said Soop rapidly, ‘although they didn’t entirely lose sight of the importance of strength. That’s why, of their two modes of storytelling, it is the science fictional that is the greater. Their dreary non-science fictional art is all of it morbid and diseased and depressing. But in the science fiction! Well, well, this Armstrong story is a good example. Pure fantasy, yes, but a fantasy of overcoming and strength.’
‘I know this story,’ said Jeunet.
The female twitched again. She was holding herself up on her two feet only, it seemed, by an enormous effort of will. Soop had never seen anybody so nervous before.
‘You know it?’ said Soop. It made no sense, and he couldn’t quite understand what Jeunet had said. ‘You know it? Really? I must say, I’m surprised, Jeunet ... I mean, it’s a minor example of the genre. Interesting, but minor. I had no idea your knowledge of the artform was so extensive.’
‘Minor, you call it,’ said Jeunet, his gaze still fixed upon the female.
The stranger suddenly spoke out at this, her voice strained. ‘If he thinks it’s minor,’ she said, nodding her head at Soop, ‘then he clearly doesn’t know it very well.’
This pricked Soop’s professional pride. ‘Indeed I do!’ he insisted. ‘It is a variant of a story as old as the industrial period itself. As, that is to say, science fiction itself. Don’t know it well? I know this: one of the pioneers was a European called Sir Arno of Bergerac - that’s a county in old Europe, you know - and he told a story about flying to the moon on a giant firework. Then there was the Jew, Verne, who told endless stories about gigantic magic pistols, amongst them one that could shoot men all the way to the moon. And Wells from World’s-End, who told a story about a magical house that only stayed on the earth when its windows were open - if you shut them you flew up to the moon. What could be more fantastic? This Armstrong story is in the same vein as these, except there’s a pleasant and agreeable twist at the end. You see, all the previous tales of this sort had portrayed the moon as a vibrant and fantastical place filled with colourful monsters. The Armstrong story starts in full-colour, but the moon is a purely black-and-white location. It’s The Wizard of Oz in reverse, you see. It’s a deliberate artistic inversion. It’s a land of paradoxes, you see - he lands in the sea, but the sea is all dust. He tries to take small steps so as not to fall over, but the smaller the steps he takes, the more gigantic his walking becomes. That’s taken from Alice in the Looking Glass Wonderland, where the people must run as fast as they can to stand still. He finds a place without any air at all, and yet he plants a flag that flutters proudly. And yet! And yet all this bizarre fantastical nonsense is related in the driest, most precise pseudo-scientific manner! It’s splendid. It’s hilarious, actually. And then the story ends by Armstrong leaping directly from the mirror-land back to earth, from black and white to colour, from a sea of dust to a sea of water.’
‘It is not an orthodox story,’ said Jeunet.
It took a moment for the full implication of this statement to find a point of entrance into Soop’s jangled mind. ‘What? What’s that? Not orthodox? Not orthodox? But - forgive me for appearing to contradict you, Jeunet, but. Surely it’s perfectly orthodox! Surely as I’ve just been saying, speaking as an expert of the science fiction from this period and it’s exactly like two dozen other stories.’
The strange female sucked a deep breath and released it again. ‘Shouldn’t he be calling you sir or lord or master?’
Soop might almost have admired her courage in talking so, to such a man, excepting that it evidently wasn’t true courage; it was the recklessness of an individual who knew that whatever she did she would die very soon. Her impertinence, at any rate, seemed to amuse Jeunet.
‘That wouldn’t be very strong, now, would it?’ he said. ‘Using that sort of cowering idiom? But you’re right; I am the superior party here.’
‘Well,’ said Soop, croakily. ‘Of course.’
‘If I say the story is not orthodox, then young Soop must just accept the fact.’
‘Of course,’ said Soop, in a smaller voice.
For the first time in the interview Jeunet moved his eyes from the stranger and looked at Soop. ‘I am aware of this story. I know about it because it is proscribed.’
‘Proscribed? But why?’
‘You’ve been on this island for too long,’ said Jeunet. ‘You’ve become a little dissociated from real life, Soop. It’s necessary, I realise, if we are to maintain a proper quarantine on these dangerous memes. But it has its own dangers. People like you lose touch with real life. It’s proscribed because it’s an evident forgery.’
‘Jeunet!’ said Soop, for this was to insult his professional judgement. ‘I strongly disagree! All my long-built-up expertise tells me that it is an authentic artwork from the industrial age.’
‘It’s a modern pastiche,’ said Jeunet, in a tone of voice of somebody not about to enter into a discussion over the fact. ‘Worse, it is made - perhaps by this stranger and her people, perhaps by some other group - specifically to undermine our strength. It’s a crude satire. Come come, Soop: the hero here is called Armstrong.? Doesn’t that strike you as almost too obvious a libel on the Man of the Strong Arm?’
‘Libel?’ said Soop, alarmed and confused. ‘Libel? But he’s a hero, Armstrong is a hero. He’s a recognisable archetype of strength!’
‘Tch. A man called Strong-Arm journeys to a barren land, and jumps up and down in the dust, and then returns home and declares that he has undertaken mankind’s greatest adventure. Can you honestly not see how this works as satire? Can you not understand how injurious to the dignity of the Man of the Strong Arm such a tale would be, if it were widely disseminated?’
‘I,’ said Soop, confused. ‘I
had not regarded it in that light before. I saw it as an example of a well-attested tradition in fantastical science fictional art. . .’
‘You have been too close to all this material, Soop,’ Jeunet said. ‘Cut off from the real world for too long. Let me ask you: who is the creator of this artwork?’
‘It,’ said Soop, sweating now. ‘It is sometimes attributed to a man called Nasa. But then again, Nasa appears in the story as the organisation that sponsors Armstrong’s extraordinary voyage, so that might be a mistake - that happens sometimes, in the case of an anonymous tale, a character from the stories gets misidentified as the author.’
‘Nasa is an acronym.’
‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Soop.
‘You know what it stands for?’
‘Well, there are several theories. Personally I take it to be a reference to the Jew Verne. His moon adventure was organised by the American National Gun Club. The Armstrong story has very many similarities with that earlier story - I take it Nasa is the same organisation, perhaps the National Association for Shooting Artillery.’
‘And if,’ said Jeunet with a grim face, ‘I were to tell you that it stands for Never Accept the Strong Arm? If I were to tell you that it is a real organisation, in the world today, dedicated to subversive revolutionary action against the Man of the Strong Arm?’
‘No!’ gasped Soop.
‘You see now why this story is proscribed?’
‘Of course! I’m . . . I’m horrified at my error . . .’
At this point the stranger in the clearing spoke out. ‘That’s not why the story is proscribed,’ she said.
Soop’s poor brain was starting to find everything becoming too much. ‘What? What’s that?’
‘Strong-Arm has a good reason for keeping this story secret,’ she said, in an unquavery voice. ‘But that’s not it.’
‘Why then?’
‘Don’t be foolish,’ snapped Jeunet. ‘I have told you the reason.’
‘You are a liar,’ she said.
But this really was going too far. Jeunet stepped quickly from the doorway and strode out into the little clearing. ‘You are extraordinarily bold,’ he said. ‘Considering that you are about to die, it is almost impressive. But enough now.’
It took a moment for Soop’s bewildered brain to process what happened next. There was the sound of a snake. No, there was no snake. Jeunet had pulled a slender wand from his belt. Soop didn’t know that he had such a truncheon on his person, except that there it was. But it wasn’t a wand, it was an arrow shaft. And it hadn’t been pulled from his belt, it was sticking out of his hip. Jeunet gave voice to a sort of strangled yell, something like a cough, and his right elbow jerked out, flapped back, jerked out. He began to reach round with his left hand, and there was another hiss. This time Soop saw the arrow strike home, thudding audibly into Jeunet’s hip and digging out a little spurt of blood that fell as a twisting cord that broke into beads and droplets before it reached the grass. This second arrow knocked Jeunet leftward and he hopped on his left leg to keep his balance. His left hand had reached his gun now, but for some reason he didn’t seem to be able to unholster it. He fumbled at the weapon a little and it came away from its hook, but instead of falling into his hand it only slid a little way along the shaft of the arrow.
The female started screaming.
Soop saw, with abrupt understanding, that the second arrow had struck home directly through the trigger guard, and had pinned the pistol to Jeunet’s hip. The first arrow had nailed Jeunet’s right hand to his flank.
The female was not screaming; she was whooping. A second individual, another female, emerged from the foliage, holding her bow before her, an arrow cocked. She came round from the right to face Jeunet directly.
‘Soop,’ he growled. ‘Soop - now. Now!’ He meant, Soop, get your pistoletta out. Soop’s mind buckled, stretched with astonishment, and snapped back into normality. He grabbed his weapon.
The second female fired an arrow straight into Jeunet’s stomach where it buried a third of its length in his flesh. With startling rapidity she drew a new arrow from a pouch at her side and cocked it. She had pulled the bowstring back even before Jeunet had hit the ground - he slumped down, and fell heavily on his rear, to end up sitting on the grass with three arrows in him.
Soop raised his pistoletta. It was clear that he should first shoot the arrow-woman, and then the other. But the fact that there were two of them put a moment of uncertainty into his aim. What if the first had a concealed weapon - a knife, say? Should he shoot her first and the other after?
Then he was aware of a sudden, violent pain in his elbow. He looked down. It had been pierced by an arrow. The dart had entered obliquely on the outside of the arm, passed straight through the muscle and bone and emerged behind just at that place where the bicep joins the end of the humerus. Actually seeing this wound with his eyes intensified the agony. A huge, fierce pain leapt upon his body with malign completeness, most intense at the site of the wound. Worse, it possessed a disorienting, counterintuitive quality; instead of ebbing away from a point of initial severity, it seemed merely to accumulate upon itself, to grow more fierce as the seconds passed.
Jeunet rasped from below him. ‘You fool, Soop.’ There was a wet, grinding quality to his voice. His breathing had taken on an asthmatic resonance. ‘You idiot.’
Soop tried to move his arm, not to shoot his pistoletta, although that, clearly, would have been a good idea; but only from animal instinct, from a revulsion at the sight of the arrow piercing his flesh. The muscles twitched. The surface of his bones scraped against the shaft of the arrow as the joint attempted, without success, to uncurl. This made the pain assume perfectly intolerable proportions. Soop wailed, a vibrato high-pitched squealing over which he had no control at all.
There was a whomp, a punch to his gut, and he sat hard down on the grass next to Jeunet. For a moment he was aware only of the pain at his elbow, and the concussion on his rear-end of the tumble. Only after he saw that a second arrow had passed through his right hand and bedded itself in the meat of his stomach, just below the ribs, did he begin to feel the sensations of the new wound. His hand flared, the split bone in the palm radiating shards of agony down each finger and hard up the wrist. It was quite impossible to move the hand. It was already pinned to his gut like a butterfly to a board. He could not maintain a grip upon his pistoletta, but neither could he drop it; the weight of its stock rotated it about his trigger finger so that the barrel now pointed up at his chin.
He tried to take a breath to scream aloud with pain, but the action of his diaphragm and the fluid motion of his belly jarred against the arrow-point buried there, and a new intensity of pain scorched with fearful inevitability in his solar plexus. He would have thought his nervous system was already transmitting as much pain as it was capable of; but this new agony intensified the sensation to a new level. Unable to scream, he gasped, drew a shallow breath and let it out again in a wheeze of distress.
‘Idiot,’ said Jeunet beside him with a perfect, complete contempt.
The first female, the one without the bow, was crouching in front of Jeunet. She was carrying a weapon, Soop saw. A large knife. Each tiny smile-shaped serration on its blade bit into air in a way that was, somehow, connected to Soop’s own nervous system. She jabbed the blade forward, towards Jeunet’s stomach, and the mere motion somehow transferred pain through the air to the triple node of agony in Soop’s own body. Elbow and hand and stomach, each adding their hurt to the two others, forcing acid through every nerve channel that Soop possessed. His vision was blanching out. His head buzzed. Oh, it was painful.
‘Let go with your finger,’ the female with the knife was saying to Jeunet, ‘or I will just cut the finger off.’
‘You don’t think,’ Jeunet rasped, ‘that I’m trying?’
‘Nazdh dra’gh dijit,’ said the archer, the arrow in her bow aimed at Soop’s head, Soop’s poor, dizzy, pain-stunned he
ad.
The first stranger answered in English, ‘But it’s snagged in the trigger guard.’
The archer said something rapidly in her barbarous tongue.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and she turned back to Jeunet. ‘Cutting your finger off wouldn’t make you pass out. Big strong man like you?’
‘I am not,’ wheezed Jeunet. ‘Afraid. Of you.’
‘I’ll reprogram your pistol now,’ the archer said to Jeunet. Her accent was more pronounced that the first stranger’s, so much so that it was hard to follow what she was saying.
‘You,’ said Jeunet. ‘Can’t.’
‘If you are alive,’ said the archer, releasing the tension in her bowstring slowly, and then dropping easily to her haunches in front of him, ‘then I can.’
‘The pistol,’ wailed Soop, the pressure of his pain and the terrible realisation of what the females were about almost overwhelming him. He felt like a child. He felt the desperate need for somebody strong to come in and help him - to swaddle him. To make the pain go away. To save him. Over his head the bitterns moved through their element, slowly, sadly, entirely indifferent to his sufferings.