Yeah, thought Tom, I could.
The bird settled on the broad expanse of roof to his left.
Turning toward the machine, allowing Vacine room to exit, he waited, approaching as a door grew in the bird's oily side, spilling perfect blackness.
‘Climb in,’ he was instructed.
He did and they glided high over the dark city.
‘So,’ the voice resumed, without direction in the stygian interior, ‘you're my escort.’
Tom said nothing. It wasn't his place to talk.
‘Did they tell you who I am? No? Well, I suppose that's my secret. Some guess it, my true identity, and others bestow names upon me. I don't object to either; for what they believe becomes mine after a fashion. I take as they give. I grow solid as they decay and become hollow inside. I'm a criminal of sorts; an heroic one. An alien. An enemy. I'm from another world, and you and I, Tom, we're at war.’ He paused. Continued, ‘Does that surprise you? Not many know of our conflict, fewer still the reasons behind it, the primal cause. And just one or two realize the outcome. Of course, opinions differ, but all agree there will be an end. It's been going on for a long time and there have been many casualties on both sides. Costs cannot be accurately measured, material or otherwise. It would be useless to estimate. And peace, Tom, peace is still a long way off.’ There was a shift in the black as eyes detected things besides displaced light. ‘Do you know what peace is, Tom?’ Mockery now. ‘Have you experienced that gentle tranquility? In your mother's womb, perhaps. Or maybe not.’
Tom felt a stab in his mechanical heart. The jeering of this other's talk stained his mind, sent trembling messages of quiet desperation along his alloyed bones, through his synthetic flesh, across technologically engendered nerves. The planet Pulchritude was the only mother he'd known. His toes pressed into the floor, tensing him in his seat as the bird that had swallowed him cut a passage between vacuum and stone, above and below, the undeveloped future that was his to earn and the familiar past which, Tom abruptly realized, was either stolen or lost.
Had it ever been his to keep?
They cruised in silence for what seemed an age but was in fact an hour, then alighted on a shelf. Lights shocked the cabin. It was smaller than he'd imagined, the alien occupying a seat identical to his own, legs crossed, head at an angle, quietly winding his watch.
‘I hope this is a pleasant prison.’
‘I wouldn't know,’ Tom answered.
‘Naturally. You've yet to experience war, as I've said.’
Tom made no reply. He was luckless. The manufacture of his life and all that went with it, the lives of his children and wife, none of it had been his idea. He'd had no input. The door appeared and they stepped out.
This monster, his self-professed enemy, walked ahead. He appeared cognizant of the route to his cell. Tom had almost to jog to keep up. The shelf was one of hundreds spread like flakes of dead skin on the gaseous bath-water of the world. There was a peculiar damp smell reminiscent of a children's book dungeon. Sconces in the walls cast a smoky light. The narrow corridor down which they advanced turned in a series of random, subterranean curves. The ceiling lowered and the air grew hotter, more tightly compressed. The crude flooring was cracked and pocked. And there were thick bars, a stunted jailer. And there was dust. The chain-mailed dwarf jangled rusty keys, spinning one in a heavy lock and grinning about yellow teeth. He stank of rotting seaweed and decayed fish, the heads of which stared up from round his naked, blistered feet, peering at Tom as he clung hopelessly to the corroded bars, the ferric verticals of his cage.
Yes, this was a war he had become embroiled in. There was no escape. Peace, he recalled his enemy telling him, was a long way off.
In one lonely corner of the cell stood a television, its concave screen alive with colour, its ancient speaker pushing distorted sound.
It was raining on the television the day Vacine came to visit. ‘Tom,’ said the picture in the tube. ‘How are the batteries? I hope you're getting enough food. No substitute for a balanced regimen. Now, don't get me wrong, I liked you, but we all have to change, to adapt to new circumstances, just as we all have to make sacrifices. The wife and kids are fine. You don't have to worry about them. Annie looks smart in her school dress and new shoes. I hear she's exceptionally able at history. So forget everything, Tom; concentrate on the job at hand. Trust me. This is important. Remember the war? You have a big part to play in it, Tom. You're going to be a hero. Imagine that! Your kids will be so proud of you. Especially Annie. She'll lecture her friends on how her daddy saved the world - but right at this minute we're experiencing a few minor technical problems, particularly concerning your attitude. It's wrong, misguided. You have to co-operate if we're to be successful. And you want us to be successful, don't you, Tom?’
Tom, starved of conversation involving him personally, hesitated, the words only half formed. ‘What kind of problems?’ he said eventually, magnifying the soreness in his ribbed throat, his cell chill and sweet with corrosion.
A flashing rectangle composed of alternate black and white bars showed in the right-hand corner of the screen. ‘Ah,’ replied his superior; ‘no time to explain, Tom; must go. Don't forget to tune in the same time tomorrow.’
He sat numb before a commercial. He dreamed of his artificial children, of how they grew in erratic stages, as yet imperfect, an evolutionary step beyond himself, the woman who'd borne them a ghost in his bed each silver morning. The shortened years they'd spent together as a family unit seemed impossibly, even comfortably distant. Had he loved her? The children? He couldn't say. Like the chinking dwarf on the far side of these denials that caged him, he had no answers. So Tom, perplexed, turned on the hard floor and hummed like an electric motor.
The first day he sat in the chair his knees hurt. Presland Bill sat too, arms folded and heavy jowls dragging loose features toward a plain wooden table between them. Tom waited patiently for this enormous man to speak. The table had rocked when he'd shuffled gingerly into the vacant chair. The man's large hands steadied it. The floor like all floors was uneven. Then the knotted arms had folded, remaining such.
‘We require your services as an assassin,’ Presland Bill said. ‘It won't be easy. This person understands death.’
The pain shifted from knees to hips.
‘There's a situation that needs to be rectified. This person cannot be allowed to continue unchecked.’
‘Who?’ Tom asked.
‘Your mother,’ Presland Bill, his enemy, revealed.
‘I have no mother.’
‘Your mother. You're not all tin and plastic, Tom. The blood flowing through your veins is significantly more than hydraulic fluid.’ The man smiled, articulating folds of skin. ‘Superior of course, but still red.’
‘My mother...’
‘Right. And we need her eliminated, taken out.’ Presland Bill's flesh was imbued with a sheen, a yellowish oily tinge. ‘I'll tell you a story that should straighten things in your head. There was a tall house. A man and a woman lived there. Unexceptional, you might think, eh?’
The sun broke in the window and stole their sleep. She was exhausted and so rolled over to chase dreams fading fast while he climbed from under the sheets and dressed, washed, took a dump, polished his teeth, ate breakfast and set off on foot to work, a warehouse full of tiles and plaster dust, half an hour distant, uphill. The day was unexceptional, a day like any other. The dutiful husband drew an order from the pile in the tray by the door and set himself in motion. With a barrow and a pallet he entered the dim interior where yesterday's air still hung to assemble the sale. First came two hundred 8x4 ethereal blue, next one hundred and fifteen like-size cloud white, seventy rain soaked, twenty of the patterned border frieze. Straightforward enough. Then there was an ascent to the topmost stack of aisle D to collect a single precious bird's egg: nine-thirty of a Tuesday morning in May perched on an orange steel ledge supported by pegs and pins the size and shape of pulle
d teeth, disconcertingly flimsy in respect to the accumulated weight of tiles, a moment before the fall, the broken back, a moment wherein he learned the availability of dying an untrue, proxy death. The wind sang and the ocean pounded the cracked rocks below, swirling surf and brine, fish scales and microscopic submarines. The truth of the worlds had opened for him. The nest was a hand's breadth farther into the shade. He stretched for the silver globe and felt the ecstasy of its encompassing warmth, heard the idle chatter of gregarious penguins just returned from the North Pole, their endless complaints about how the sea-lions thereabouts had taken to disguising themselves as strands and ice floes, thus circumventing their more traditional predatory role, the old inefficiencies reduced through this unfair - as the penguins saw it - application of what was after all an alien technology to increase the penguin feast. The flightless themselves schemed in tight groups, nervous and edgy, peering ceaselessly between webbed feet for any intimation of whiskers and jaws, the birds as yet disagreeing as to the appropriate action, whether that action should include force of arms or simply jet-packs that they might swim, as evolution surely intended, above the sea, catching their food using projectile weapons, a stand the purists insisted ranked them no better than the secreted sea-lions and would ultimately lead to the fish taking retaliatory action. And what then? But Presland Bill was apart from this crisis, although no participant in the Great Atmosphere Quench could ever truly not be a part of inter-species negotiations, as those negotiations stood, i.e. on one leg. Electricity jerked him: that alternate death. In that instant he saw via another's eyes, a person unknown to him who stared out across an unfamiliar landscape, marshy, a vast area of black-green swamp set in an endless valley that reached forever toward no distantly perceptible horizon, broadening to occupy the crumpled space afforded by two dwindling mountain ranges whose slopes appeared eroded and smooth through perspective, whose shades altered in concord with the sky. The mountains extended like arms from a massive body, the body in reality belonging to that person from whose airy skull he gazed in wonder - he, Presland Bill, an ordinary fellow who had happened upon an unordinary and become one with this world, joined to it via a silver egg. These slopes and marshes were his.
‘Stagnation and waste.’ The arms unfolded. ‘Struggle and toil for nothing, no gain, no glorious end in sight, only that same obscured horizon.’ Palms flat on the rickety table. ‘A little hope, but not much. This was a world lacking ambition, a world content simply to get up in the morning, and doze. Its inhabitants were listless, abiding in squalor because they understood nothing else, nothing of life beyond breath. They had no guiding star, no concept or direction or leadership that might guide them along richer, more lucrative paths. A sad place, you'll agree. I raised that sadness from between the stalks of sick weeds to an embrace with galaxies! I harvested technology. Yes, as the sea-lions, as the penguins. But the fish remained too weak. The fish were selectively bred, for quality of flesh, smallness of brain. They did not arm themselves and shoot the flying flightless birds from the sky. I fought and my side won. But one prize, a particularly coveted one, eludes me. History is nothing if not a search. It is no less than history I plan to defy. And I will. You are my latest weapon. With you I will draw a step nearer. How big a step, Tom, is up to you.’
Presland Bill sat back and the table rocked anew.
Shoes for Annie...
‘The silver globes create and I destroy - we destroy. You are one of us. The silver globes circulate power of a greater magnitude than mere stars. Stars are motes in their storm. The silver globes are the seed, the root, the bloom of survival. And survival is destroyed, by me, by us, by all that would move and not stand still. Its power is harnessed to new ends. The power of one's adversaries, so used, is a potent force when turned against them. The silver globes are the fish in this scenario, you see?’ There was a bubbling in the jowls. ‘Ah, but I see you have no appreciation of the scale of the drama. Let me put it another way.’
There was fire and ashes.
‘The face in the smoke, Tom, do you recognize it?’
Horns sprouted from Presland Bill's head.
‘Evil, our evil, is inbred. We are purer than the globes. They are random profligates, uninvited do-gooders, whereas the likes of us, Tom, we are the true reflections of flesh and blood.’
32
He was rowing.
She rose from the brown water, shook drops from her spangled black crooks of hair.
The boat overturned.
Trees were subsumed by water and leaves by bubbled oxygen. She rescued his floundering body, pulled him by the shirt collar to the shore and left him coughing, spluttering once more to life on a different river bank in a different time. He stared glassily at the rusty armour provided him, as if dumped from a sack, and closed his stinging eyes.
They were prised open by morning.
Prisms shifted gear on the bright scales of metal. Steel and bronze shone as if magically burnished, imbued with wondrous lubricants like some solid-state engine.
The chosen climbed stiffly into this regalia.
As he walked, upright on two feet into the lightening jungle, plant fronds and insects were crushed in the hinges of elbow and ankle, further oiling with there small bodies the metal joints of neck and knee, enabling the steady release of his muscles' torpor while affording those same a mould of more suitably heroic proportions.
He lacked, as yet, an offensive capability. He headed north.
And she raced before him, lithe as a cat, agile as a monkey, fleet as a snake's jaws, illuminated by another name in this uncreated world.
33
Doctor Mood peered out the high window at the forest green and dappled beneath, polished and sustained by water from the spent afternoons of once saturated clouds, their memories having overflowed. The castle retained its cool without the need for rain. The walls surrounding, encasing him, were spliced from lustreless granite quarried from the heart of a secret mountain that had stood, aeons past, guard over this nascent globe. Prior to the surgery its volatility had nurtured civilizations, feeding them on the produce of its rich loam before destroying them, drowning the people in their own accreted filth, what they had fed it in the form of prayer. The mountain grew bored, even senile. They worshipped it through fear. Therefore the transplant, as the doctor could well understand, was a happy event. The stone contained a friendlier chill than the oven heat of the castle's foundations, which possessed a malicious spite; but such were young and perceived their burdens differently. A column of smoke rose in the distance, made to oscillate as a consequence of evaporation, shimmering like a petroleum lake. The pall dusted fine ash across a broad radius of trees. The castle lay a-slumber, breathing its own stillness, while outside, among the vegetation, was an abundance of organized cells. The whole vista represented the cover and pages of a book the doctor very much wanted to read; but he had first to master its language. He turned from the window and wandered, as he had many times, the castle's airy passages, looking into room after room, examining the sparse furnishings which shied behind the barest veil of dust, creasing his lower lip with thumb and forefinger as he thought again of the involute ways, the shadowy events that had led him to this Spartan if strangely comforting enclosure. There was meat aplenty - but who could guess the true nature of the animal from whence that meat came without a reliable contour map of bones? The castle had neither moat or drawbridge. There was no direct exit from its arid planes. Mood had climbed the vertical stone to gain access, feet and hands finding purchase on the merest strands of hapless moss, the cracked shells of pollen grains and the dried husks of spider shit, the dismembered limbs, brittle and hollow, of flies and ants and midges, avoiding the spider's silky web by concentrating with a stubborn rigidity upon the next lifeless shelf, gripping its time-cut wrinkles, clambering over the battlements by such means, the neck of the sack clenched in his determined teeth and the child within wriggling, perhaps afflicted by vertigo. They were pursued by a
nemesis, one who wanted the boy dead, as his existence, however tenuous, cast a shadow of denial over the superficies of the strangled world, setting it a challenge, promising a negation of those forces which sought by whatever means to fashion the land and all it sustained into a hideous parody of fosterhood.
The doctor couldn't let that happen. He took to his new role as one familiar with bizarre remedies and unusual concoctions, the bare fact that he didn't believe in them proving, as always, no obstacle. For there was a romance in his heart that seized on the opportunity as a dreamer would on his pillow. He cared not if the answers were one day supplied or never. His passion for the arts of knowledge grew like an appendage from the mystery. They were integral parts of each other. Hunger, sated in the present, resided permanently in the past and future. He had come to realize this. And so he abided now in the castle's blocked limbo deciphering letters of wind and dust. The elements would tell him when, if ever, to leave. And meanwhile, as he waited, the child grew.
34
The yonderscope glittered musically, its many pulleys in commensurate motion. Austin Pearce, late of Formalhaut, lay surrounded by light and sound, the headset in place and the pedals newly lubricated after a test run to Mars. The Martians had greeted him strangely, drawing circles in the red sand with outsized stone nibs that may well have been the pulled teeth of mountains. He'd travelled by barge to Meridian, the planet's dusty capital, a languid journey beneath an orange-yellow sun. The sluggish water drew the craft, which resembled a huge walnut shell, to where the irregular city poked through the surface, trailing canals like antennae, hunched under the wispy armpit sky. His hosts, the sailors, fended off invisible monsters with their knitting-needle poles. He wrote in his tatty diary of this lax floating, of other barges and their mysterious, often pungent cargoes, of the tall Martians themselves, their sick grins and blind eyes. Despite appearances, he received nothing but kindness from them, a childlike eagerness to please the outsider, whereas in their own dealings little courtesy was shown. Austin guessed his status to approximate that of an imbecilic elder; they patronized him, but in a friendly way, although such friendship (perhaps a consequence of interpretation) brought with it the obligation to participate in the sometimes tedious charade.