“We wondered, when you came, whether you were real. Or whether you were new.”
“New?”
“Made. It’s what we call the people who weren’t born, who were just made up or who are split in half so that there’s two of them. Or more.”
“More?”
“There was an old man from over in Gondry turned out to have four whole people running around in his head. One of ’em was a dangerous bastard. Others were just scared. We call that kind of person new.”
“Have you seen a lot of them?”
“Yes, I would say that we have.”
“We’ve seen only a few.”
“How did that go?”
So I tell her about Pascal Timbery and Larry Tusk’s dog, and the fear.
“But you’d be safe from all of that, with us.”
“So you say.”
There’s a pause.
“I know this region pretty well,” Dina says. “I was thinking about it last night.”
Oh crap.
“You can’t go south, because of the water.”
“No.”
“And I guess you could go north. But it would be hard.”
“Not impossible.”
“Really?”
“Probably.”
“But the truth is, you’re coming through my town. Aren’t you?”
“I’m not. I mean, if it happens, I’ll be there. But I’m not . . .” I’m not the one who wants to roll on over you. I just deliver her messages. “You’ll be safe. It’ll be all right. Better. We really are doing a good thing.”
“Oh,” says the woman behind the grille, and her voice sounds sort of strange and weak, which is normal for persons being rescued and fills us all with a kind of relief, but also sort of lost, which isn’t and doesn’t. “Oh well. In that case, if you promise we’ll be safe?”
“I do,” I say. And when that isn’t enough for her, I say the words, slowly and out loud, so everyone can hear. She sighs again.
“Then come on in.”
And she opens the door.
We walk into the village and I know something—everything—is more wrong than right. Dina is small and spry and somewhere between thirty and sixty, with greyish hair tied back like a hippie’s. Around her there are men and women in all shapes and sizes, in all kinds of clothes scavenged and pieced together. Over by the fence there’s a huge man like an ape, with a bearskin around his waist and a bristling beard. His eyes are sharp and dangerous, and he stares at me all the way until I pass behind a wall. Without a word, Dina turns and leads us through the narrow streets, under the watchful eyes of the people on the rooftops, and into the main square. And that is where the wrong becomes clear. Gonzo stares. Samuel P. lifts his hands and leaves his gun very well alone. Sally Culpepper steps just a little closer to Jim, and Jim doesn’t do a damn thing, just stands there and waits to see what will break.
“You promised,” the woman reminds me, and yes, I did.
Tobemory Trent turns his head to take in the whole thing, and then he steps with his left foot turned out, and lets his body carry him all the way around. One step, two, three, four. Back to where he began. His gaze takes in the men and women around us, and the children, and then it flicks over them to the others huddled in doorways and peering from around corners: the strange haunted eyes and the curious hands and all the other little things like scales and fur—these are dream people, fake people, people made real from someone’s thoughts. Reification people. They are the new.
Oh crap.
“How many of you are there?” I ask at last.
“One thousand and eight,” she says.
“And how many of those . . . ,” I begin, staring at Dina. She pushes her hair back from her ears. They have little points, like an elf’s. “How many of you are . . . new?”
“All of us,” she says.
Crap-a-doodle-do.
ZAHER BEY is thumping the table. I have never seen him so angry. I have never really seen him angry at all. To whatever extent I have considered it, I have imagined that his anger would be cool and sophisticated, possibly barbed. It would be witty, trenchant and terribly effective. It is none of these things. His hand, with round fingers and very pink nails, hits the tabletop again. Hits it very hard. The coffee cups are jumping a little and the noise he is producing with each impact is a sort of bone-deep BUH! rather than the soft pmf! which people use for emphasis, or the toctoctoc! you sometimes hear when a Teutonic public speaker wants to call the room to order.
BUH! BUH! BUH! (And sscluttertinkledonkdonk!—that’s the coffee cups.)
It’s not a noise of debate. It’s a sound of fury. It’s what you get when you horrify someone.
Hellen Fust convened the council as soon as she heard my report, and she and Ricardo van Meents are sitting at the top of the table in a shiny new executive meeting room. It is a very grown-up place. It makes you feel very professional, very wise and very realistic. In this room you can’t cavil at necessity. It has ugly prints on the wall and coffee from a Thermos, but the Thermos isn’t a solid, portable one with smooth sides; it is got up to look like a classic coffee jug. I went to pour myself some, and got scalded as the hot coffee squirted in a thin stream at right angles to the lip. Hellen Fust took it away from me and unscrewed the lid, turning it a couple of times so that the little arrow on top pointed straight ahead. She gave it back to me. The coffee came out in a broad gush, due north. I felt like an idiot. And then they started.
“I think we can all agree that this is a very significant moment,” Ricardo van Meents said, fingers flat on the table like a frog’s. He rolled his thumb against the reflective surface, making a print, then scuffed at it with his sleeve. He didn’t say anything else. Hellen Fust nodded. And then she began to speak, although it didn’t feel like a speech. It was a series of things which had to be said before a thing is done, like the last rites before the hangman’s trapdoor opens. It was an execution.
Hellen Fust used what might be thought of as the basic five-step text for announcing an act of atrocity; she didn’t embellish or call on anyone’s patriotism, and she didn’t spew invective at the enemy or froth at the mouth. She was actually very reasonable. It was just that once you followed her reasoning all the way to the end, you found youself somewhere you didn’t want to be. It went like this:
1) She told us who we were and who she was. She regretted that the responsibility for this situation was hers, and she thanked us for seeking to lighten her burden. She admitted that she was tempted, but averred that in the end, command is not shared. Translation: this is not your decision.
2) She reminded us of the exigencies placed upon her, and upon us, by the terrible situation in which we found ourselves. She recalled to our minds the dreadful fact that the population of the world was a fraction of what it should have been. The trust of the remnant population—of all our loved ones far away—was vested in us. Translation: no one has the right to shirk what must be done.
3) She pointed out very gently that the villagers were not human. They were, by their own admission, new. They were consequences of the Go Away War, with strange powers and strange appetites which could not be detected or guarded against. They were not safe. And if they should infiltrate us, it was not clear whether this would jeopardise our survival as a species—could they breed with humans? Would they try?—but the risk was very high and the consequences appalling. The precautionary principle must be applied. In this, we stood at the gateway of our race, and we must close the door. Translation: these people are not people. They are un-people. Worse, they are pretend people. They will come for us, if once we trust them, and we will be destroyed.
4) She hung her head and allowed sorrowfully that this upset her personally very much. She had a PhD in sociology and was well aware of the perilous antecedents of such announcements. And yet, here she stood. She accepted the difficulty of the situation, and she believed that the majority of people—real people—would feel the same way as she did. Of
course, that could not be allowed. The panic which would ensue at the notion of a colony of unreal people would be awful. This must remain a secret, for now. Translation: if they knew what we were doing, they would thank us out there. We keep it from them so that they may rest easy. We have the backing of the people, even if they do not know it.
5) She hoped that in future times, when this moment was discussed, it would be seen as a necessary sacrifice for the good of all, and she enjoined us to see it that way even now. We were fighting to survive. They were—however friendly they might seem—the enemy. Translation: if, which is denied, what we do now is wrong, history will understand it as a wrong chosen in extremis to prevent a greater, and God bless us, every one.
And then she said, quite simply, that the village was to be razed, and the inhabitants taken into custody for study. Given the nature of the settlement and those who lived there, however, resistance of any kind should be treated as extreme hostility. Better safe than sorry.
And it was into the silence following this pronouncement that the noise of Zaher Bey’s strong, soft palm striking the table came clamouring like an ambulance bell. He has continued to thump the table with greater and greater emphasis for some moments, and now, finally, he boils over into words:
“No, no, no, no, NO!”
His face is suffused, and his chin is tight with fury. Having captured the podium by main force, he holds it by erudition and outrage. He begins by cataloguing all the instances of mass murder and genocide he can think of, all the atrocities in the name of necessity that he can come up with. And then, into the silence this generates (because these events demand silence, in acknowledgement) he starts to throw personal abuse at evil-doers in general and Fust and van Meents in particular. They are roaches. They are parasites. They choose to crawl when they should cry out for their humanity, beg for a breath of life to make them whole. They are weak. They are wretched. May they be forgiven for countenancing the return of this kind of monstrosity into the world; may they be forgiven by some god or other, because that same deity will be well aware that such pardons will not be forthcoming from Zaher Bey (ibn Solomon ibn Hassan al-Barqooq, of the lake of Addeh and the mountains called Katir, most precious of lands and mother of peace). Then he turns on me.
“And you!” the Bey says, finger shaking. “You of all people! We took you in, didn’t we? When you needed a place to hide, to shelter? And you were our enemy. But we took you in. So now—and by your own admission you promised these people—people—that they would be safe—you’re prepared to let them die, kill them yourself, because you haven’t decided yet whether they’re real or not. Of course they’re real! And you made a promise! So what’s it worth?” And he throws a wad of paper at me, and we watch as the leaves tumble and drop to the ground. “Nothing!” says the Bey. And he stalks to the window and looks out.
In the silence which follows I think about that. And then I find that I am speaking. My voice is low, but it carries.
“He’s right,” I say.
I am standing. Everyone is looking at me. It is one of those moments, like the one in Crispin Hoare’s study, where I seem to have any number of options but in fact there is only one. I could, for example, stop there and slide back into the shadows. I could try to calm the Bey, build a bridge between the parties—something which would ultimately play into the hands of Fust and van Meents. But the Bey is right. This is bad. It is a clear, horrible thing and it is wrong. I don’t know whether the people of the Found Thousand (which is what we have been calling them to one another; Hellen Fust won’t say it because un-people can’t have names) can be at peace with us. I don’t know what they’re really like—whether we’re going to discover that they all live exclusively on a diet of small children with a dash of puppy juice (if they do, maybe we can find a baby substitute; as to puppies, I like them, but if the price of avoiding genocide is a hundred or so puppies a year going into a kind of monster version of Tabasco, I’m good with that). What I do know is that I won’t be a part of this. I have discovered a line in myself which I am unwilling to cross, and therefore to my own great surprise, I rip the Piper 90 badge from my shoulder and toss it onto the table. Hellen Fust starts to say something. I hold out my hand to cut her off.
“I quit,” I say. “This is wrong. Fuck you for thinking that it isn’t, and fuck you slowly for asking me to do it. This is not how you make a safe world. This is what got us here in the first place.” I look across the room at Zaher Bey, and see in his eyes a fine, bright hope and a moment of pride. I nod, and he nods back. Well, yeah. Damn right.
And I walk out, thinking that Leah will understand and that I’m so unemployed and that it’s going to be a very lonely walk home. Until I hear a strange noise behind me, a pitterpatter as of ducks in anger, and I realise that Jim, and Sally, and Tobemory Trent have all also torn the badges off, and Gonzo is here, and we are all walking out together. And as the word spreads, so does the sound of fabric ripping and voices raised in discontent, and by the end of the day everyone in our gang has quit, along with a whole bunch of other people, and everyone in Piper 90 is on strike.
IT IS a mystery of human mathematics that—however you may transect a population, whether you decimate it or cut it clean in half, whether you pick out the obvious troublemakers or collect at random some fraction of the whole—once you have set apart your chosen group, you will find among them at least two persons of otherwise gentle and accommodating mien who know in their blood and bones how to organise a strike. You need only cry the words “Aaaaaaaallll OUT!” on the factory floor and lead with confidence, and by the time you reach the outer gate there will be a woman from catering marching beside you leading the chant (“Two, four, six, eight! Down with prej’dice, down with hate! What is it that we won’t a-bide? Comp’ny men and gen-o-cide!”) and a milk-faced bloke in a knitted jumper handing out placards and telling the pickets where to stand to cause maximum disruption. By the time you get to the Club Room (ex officio HQ of the Piper 90 Strike Committee) there’s an open meeting ready to go, and milk-face has collated your grievances into an agenda and drafted a motion.
Baptiste Vasille and his boys have shown up to provide security—apparently they have done a certain amount of counter-strike work in the past, very much against their personal political convictions, he informs us stoutly, but one must make a crust, to be sure, and please put this hat on so that you’re less obvious, it’s always the figureheads we go after (pardon, they go after) first. Everyone from our old unit is here, and mutinous with it. The curious thing is that almost everyone feels ambivalent about the Found Thousand. Many people in this room are deeply suspicious of them—and they may be right. The point, as Tommy Lapland announces to a rapt audience of civilian refugees, is that we don’t go out and annihilate people just because we don’t trust them. That’s how you tell the bad guys from the good guys. And finally Larry Tusk gets up on the stand (two packing cases roped together which until two hours ago were doing duty as a table) with Dora the dog in his arms, and clears his throat.
“I don’t know much,” Larry Tusk says, and then has to repeat it because he didn’t have his megaphone on. “I say, I don’t know much! I wasn’t ever much for talking and I’m not now, either.” Dora the dog snuffles at the megaphone, and there’s a rousing cheer for the plucky canine comrade. “But you all know where I come from on this and what I did to Pascal Timbery.” Larry Tusk lowers his head for a second. He liked Pascal Timbery. When he can remember Pascal without remembering cutting Dora from Pascal’s insides, he misses him, and he’s not ashamed to tell you that over a glass of something, if you care to listen. “Now, that’s all well and good. It’s done, and I can’t promise I’d do different now. But the thing is,” and he has to stop because there’s another round of applause, “the thing is, what I did, I did on the spur of the moment. I came upon it all sudden-like, and I up and cut him open and saved Dora because she was all I had. I killed my friend because I was afraid and I was shocked and he was at
tacking something I loved. Well, that’s one thing. But this here is another, and it’s a whole other kind of a thing. What they’re talking about is taking people—people, same as Pascal—and crushing their homes and handing them over to some science fellas likely the same as those who did all this in the first place—not that they didn’t have all our help, and don’t you forget it—because we’re afraid. And I don’t know about you,” says Larry Tusk, “but I don’t fancy being that person and I won’t have it in my name. I won’t be afraid half my life and ashamed the other half.” And before he can sit down, Dora the dog yips sharply into the megaphone, and such a cheer goes up that the walls vibrate and Dora becomes overexcited and barks some more, and the motion is carried on a sea of indignation. Piper 90 will not give itself to this. Not today, not ever. No, no, no, no, no. Which ultimately is how all revolutions start.
I look around for Zaher Bey but cannot find him. This is his victory, as much as anyone’s. But perhaps he and the Katiris are having their own celebration, or perhaps they are working. But the open meeting is turning into a party (no one has work tomorrow), and on my shoulder there is a cool hand, and on my cheek a kiss. Leah is with me, and she is proud. I can do anything.
. . .
IT TAKES Fust and van Meents thirty hours to get a bastard squad in from elsewhere. We block them and obstruct them, we stand in front of them and make them crawl ahead of Piper 90. We will not start the fighting, if there’s going to be fighting. There is a red line on our map at the edge of the forest. If they try to come past us there, this will get bad. I take Leah’s hand on one side, and Annie the Ox’s on the other. We are the human chain. We will not break. We will stand, and if they want to come through, they must come through us. In fact, our pacifism is called somewhat into question by Vasille’s concealed tank and selection of small explosive devices we have been scattering in our wake. The strike committee is very much in favour of non-violent resolution, but there are problems with pacifism in a situation where the soldiers of the enemy are being launched upon a particular, short-duration task. They can roll over you and apologise later, when the deed is done. Passive resistance is a long-term game of sacrifice, and it works against humans, not machines.