martinmcg - Tumblr blog

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

THE FIRST DANCE

They had taken away the memory that Alejandro cherished most. He wanted it back. The Muninn in his shoulder whirred warmly and recalled everything. The old man relaxed, allowing the device to take him back, he did not hope – did not allow himself to hope – that this time would be different. He accepted the pain that must come.

Alejandro, as he has always done, looked around at the faces of friends and family. So many were now long gone. Even the community centre was rubble today, cleared for some office building that was never finished. But here were the people, young and bright. And here was the room still filled with the smell of fresh paint.

He let the soft rumble of conversation enfold him, Arsene’s barking laugh, the tinkling of glasses and the scraping of chairs on the red-tiled floor. He felt the warmth of the summer’s day seeping through the building’s thick walls and the gentle breeze from the single fan that stirred the air above the hastily cleared dance floor. His stomach felt heavy from drink and food, his head light from an unexpected depth of joy.

Finn, Tommy’s little boy, stared up at him. Alejandro smiled then and now. Finn was twice married, and twice divorced, with three kids and a big belly but here he tottered across the dance floor, his body still working out the complexities of standing upright. The boy’s face was set in a mask of fierce determination. Every step was a struggle of will against gravity, battling loose legs that only reluctantly obeyed his commands. In the boy’s fist, gripped tight and held out high, a carnation, the buttonhole from his father’s rented tuxedo.

The boy plodded towards them, dragging the focus of the room with him. The chattering faded, the band, tuning up in the corner, fell silent. The world stopped spinning. Finn swayed to a halt and raised the bruised white flower to Teresita.

“Thank you,” she said as she stooped to take the gift.

“Princess!” the boy said, eyes wide.

Teresita laughed and scooped the child up in her arms, spinning him around.

Alejandro flicked a jaw muscle to pause the play back. The hum of the Muninn, more felt than heard as it thrummed against his collar bone, settled into a lower pitch.

Teresita.

His throat tightened. He blinked away tears.

She had been, on that day, so convinced of her own happiness that it had seemed to Alejandro that a kind of joyful rapture had engulfed the whole wedding. Even her mother, who had always known Alejandro would never amount to anything, sat holding her new husband’s hand with a soft smile and her eyes bright. Teresita’s faith in him, in them together, had been so absolute that it had scared him even then. From here, knowing all the ways he would let her down, all the stupid disappointments and carelessness, the promises that he never could keep…

Alejandro blinked, restarting the recall – the Muninn whined.

Teresita kissed Finn on the forehead and set him down. The boy nodded solemnly, turned on his heel and tottered away into the arms of his parents – both gone now, God take them – and the laughing, applauding crowd.

Teresita put the flower in her hair, the white petals shocking amidst that ebony flow. She looked up, a wide, immodest grin on her face. Alejandro felt his hand reach out, the movement steadier and stronger than he had managed in many years. He felt himself brush her face with one finger, wondering again at the softness of the touch, the cool smoothness of her skin. She rested her cheek against his hand.

And there they stood, perfectly still, at the centre of the world.

The lead singer of the band started counting.

“One, two, three, four- ”

And at that moment the picture fractured and the sound crackled and a wall of static fuzz rose up around Alejandro. Over the hiss and warble a low female voice began to intone a legal statement about copyrighted material and the rights of its owners and the cost of licensing and offering him the opportunity to upgrade his package with Mnemosyne to reinsert the missing moments.

Alejandro sighed, twitched his jaw again to end the playback and felt the Muninn’s hum fade on his shoulder.

Alejandro flicked through his bill from Mnemosyne. He’d long ago paid off the basic charge on his Muninn so going through the bill and removing memories that were flagged with demands for copyright payments meant that the basic services of the device were available free.

He could have set his scroll to automatically reply to the bill, giving up everything that contained a memory he could no longer afford to keep, but sifting through the memories he was about to lose had become a small ritual. He’d wander down through the list, attempting to remember each incident without the Muninn, trying to work out where copyrighted material might have slipped into the memory.

Was it a tune on a distant radio? Or was a screen in the corner playing some movie? He flicked away one memory when he realized they were demanding a payment for the taste of a soft drink.

Alejandro enjoyed the puzzle even as he resented dropping each lost moment into the wastebasket. Every deletion came with a polite reminder from the sweet-voiced Mnemosyne woman reassuring him that his memories would never be deleted and were always there for him if he paid the required licence fee. It stung every time. He knew that he could never bring them back.

He’d held on to their wedding dance for as long as he could afford it. Now, though, the prices had gone up again and the rules kept changing. He had no choice.

He clicked the box and dragged the file to the corner of the screen and consigned it to the trash.

Tomorrow I will visit Filipe’s boy, he thought.

Alejandro wondered if he was the only one left who remembered that this building had once been a bowling alley. The neon signs were long gone, and so were the bowlers. The inside had been divided up into tiny rooms – the lanes buried under cheap flooring. Did the mechanisms still work? Were there, somewhere underneath the narrow, dirty corridors and crudely boxed-in apartments, pins and balls sitting, waiting to be rediscovered one day by a wrecking crew or, perhaps a thousand years hence, by a confused archaeologist?

He pushed his way through the junk-filled space, past discarded furniture, heavy boxes, broken toys and stacks of waste-filled plastic bags that reeked of rot and seeped colourless liquids across a tacky floor that sucked at his feet.

The door to Gideon’s room was open just a crack and violet light spilled around the jamb into the corridor. From inside music throbbed with bass so deep that Alejandro could feel it vibrating in every bone – his skin shivered with the beat.

Alejandro knocked. Waited. Knocked again. And then, when it became obvious that the music would drown out any sound he was capable of making with his knuckles on wood, he pushed the door.

There was a man with black skin, not brown but black with a hint of blue, like the deepest night sky, and stars of silver sparkled in his ears and his lips, his nose and his eyebrow, his teeth and his tongue. A line of what look liked rivets ran from the bridge of his nose over his brow and across the bald-black skin of his head.

The music snapped off and silence roared into the room.

“Gideon?” Alejandro said.

The boy looked up, suspicious at first. Then he smiled and Alejandro saw his mother in him and for an instant he was again the little boy he had once been, playing in the street with Gael and Tad, Alejandro’s grandsons.

“Mister Marichal?” The boy stood up. He was very tall. Alejandro wondered if that was something else he’d done to himself. Filipe and his mother were not so big. “Mister Marichal!”

The boy came around the desk, ignored Alejandro’s offered hand and gave him a fierce hug, lifting the old man off his feet. Then he pulled away, looking serious.

“What are you doing down here? You should have told me you were coming, it’s dangerous down here.”

Alejandro waved away the boy’s concerns.

“I lived in this neighbourhood before your father and mother were born,” Alejandro said, laughing. “I walk where I like and no one bothers me.”

The boy looked unconvinced and again Alejandro saw his mother’s kindness.

Gideon remembered his manners, Filipe had been a good father, and rushed to clear a stack of boxes and papers from a deep armchair that was almost buried in one corner of the room. Alejandro sat, perched on the edge of the seat, and Gideon propped himself against the vast desk that filled most of the room.

“I want to remember the things they’ve taken away,” Alejandro said, tapping his shoulder where the small box of the Muninn was buried beneath his skin.

“Mnemosyne would do that, Mister Marichal.”

“Pfff!,” Alejandro shook his head. “Too much money.”

Gideon nodded, biting at his lower lip, as he took a moment before making up his mind. He reached for something on his desk.

“How long have you had the Muninn installed?”

Alejandro had to stop and think.

“Well, Teresita and I were married in twenty-one so that would be sixty-one? No sixty-three years ago.”

Gideon whistled.

“Any upgrades?”

“Not since I stopped working. That was in fifty-eight.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked on implants that old,” Gideon looked impressed. “That must be first generation hardware.”

Alejandro shrugged. He’d never been much interested in technology.

“Teresita was desperate to have these things installed before we were married. She was determined that it would be a day we’d never forget.” The words caught in Alejandro’s throat. Surprised by the emotion he coughed and looked away. “Now they’ve taken even that.”

Gideon said nothing but got up and began to move around Alejandro, running a small device over his shoulder and neck, nodding and tutting.

“Everyone in the neighbourhood says that you are the best person to see about Muninns,” Alejandro said. “They say there’s nothing you can’t make them do.”

Gideon tried to pat him on the shoulder, clumsily trying to reassure the old man. But Alejandro grabbed the hand, surprising the boy with the strength of his grip, and pulled Gideon closer.

“Give me back my Teresita!”

Gideon bent over the old man for a stretching, silent, moment, not sure how to respond to the hunger in Mister Marichal’s expression.

“Let’s see what I can do,” he said finally.

Alejandro nodded and smiled and Gideon took it as a signal that he could disentangle himself and go back behind his desk. He swiped his device across a scroll. A display jumped into life between them and the boy began manipulating information, figures streamed up from the desk, lines twisted and curled at eye level.

“I can do this,” Gideon said. “But there will be a price.”

Alejandro nodded.

“I have a few dollars.”

“I wouldn’t take your money, Mister Marichal,” the boy looked genuinely hurt and Alejandro had to smile. He’d known this was a good boy.

“Do you know how a Muninn works?” Gideon asked.

“I know what anyone knows,” Alejandro said. “It records your memories and lets you replay them later – you see what you saw, smelt, tasted, heard. Everything. All the experiences you had at the time.”

“That’s true, sort of” Gideon said. “But the Muninn doesn’t store your memories. It puts itself between your sense organs – your eyes, your nose, your skin – and your brain. It records the electrical impulses that your nervous system uses to communicate with your brain. When you recall something from the Muninn it replays the electrical signals from that moment in the past and amplifies them so that they override whatever you’re experiencing in the present. It feels like everything is happening again.”

Alejandro had sat through an endless demonstration by the Mnemosyne people back before the wedding. None of it had mattered to him then and he hadn’t paid attention.

“That’s not even the really clever part,” Gideon said. His enthusiasm brought out the young boy in him. Alejandro tried to imagine him as he had been, skinny, brown-skinned, always laughing. “The pathways and patterns in your brain are always changing. You learn new things. You add new memories. Old memories fade. You forget almost everything. The brain is always changing. The Muninn threads through those pathways and keeps track of the changes, it adapts the recordings it makes to fit the new patterns so you still perceive them in the same way as when they were recorded.”

Gideon looked at Alejandro as if he’d just explained something vital.

“So?”

“My system can’t do that,” Gideon said.

Alejandro shrugged, not understanding.

“So… if I pull out the memory, you’ll only be able to review it once or, if you’re lucky, twice. Watching it will change your memories and make my copy unplayable. And you can’t wait too long after I pull it onto a scroll before you watch it. After a few days the patterns in your brain will have changed and it’ll break down if you try to use it. Your brain won’t decode the signals in the same way.”

“Oh?”

“And there’s something else,” Gideon leant forward. “When you replay the memory, Mnemosyne will know I’ve tampered with your Muninn. It isn’t strictly illegal but it does break their terms and conditions, there’s a chance they’ll cancel your service.”

“I didn’t know…”

Alejandro looked away for a moment. He knew his own memory wasn’t what it was. He knew he relied on the Muninn for a lot of simple things. It would be difficult without it.

Gideon gave a tight smile.

“Mister Marichal, I would do anything to help you. You have always been good to my family. Gael was like my brother before…” Gideon stopped. Alejandro nodded. Some things didn’t need to be spoken about. “But I think you should go home and think about it.”

Alejandro looked into the palms of his hands. He hated his hands. They trembled slightly, they were lined and creased and dark with liver spots. They were old hands. He was old. He relied on the Muninn. But their fees and their rules – they were robbing him of everything he cared about

He needed to dance with Teresita again, even if it was just once more.

There was no choice to make.

“No,” he said. “I don’t need to go home.”

“What if I paid the licence fee?” Gideon dropped his gaze to the floor. “It isn’t so much.”

“I did not come here for charity.” Alejandro’s tried not to shout but his voice was loud in the small room. He stood up – struggling out of the low armchair – and took a step towards the door.

“Just like my dad –”

Alejandro turned and opened his mouth ready to spit some angry response but the boy was laughing, hands raised in surrender.

“You’re certain?” Gideon asked.

Alejandro set his jaw firm and nodded.

“Then come with me.”

Alejandro had been expecting something that was more clinical, more futuristic. The walls of the little room may once have been white or cream but the paint had aged and yellowed, bubbled and cracked. You could tell from the edges that the carpet that it had started off a pale shade of blue but shuffling feet had worn the centre threadbare, the brown structure of the weave showing through. There was a single seat, a soft, battered armchair with a high back covered in a floral-patterned material that was thin and faded and had lost any charm it might once have possessed.

Gideon waved at Alejandro to sit down while he walked over to a scroll that lay on a small wooden table that was propped uncertainly against one wall. He tapped a few instructions on the scroll’s screen then pulled a skullcap of fine metal mesh from his trousers pocket. He swiped it against the scroll and then came towards Alejandro.

“Sit back, please, Mister Marichal,”

Alejandro did as he was told and the boy stretched the cap over his head.

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

Alejandro nodded, resolute.

Gideon went back to the scroll and tapped at the screen again. He paused, looking to Alejandro, but the old man gave no sign of doubt. The boy entered a final instruction.

“This will take about twenty minutes,” Gideon said, stepping towards the door. “It will work best if you can keep still and relax. I’ll come back when it is done.”

The dance was not elegant. Alejandro and Teresita did not sweep across the dance floor in a dramatic tango or spin in a light-footed waltz. They shuffled, they bumped and they wheeled around gracelessly to a long-forgotten pop-song that Teresita had loved.

It didn’t matter to Alejandro that his new wife trod on his toes or that they stumbled when he tried, unwisely, to sweep her up in dramatic turn.

All that mattered was her smile. She stared up at him and he saw himself reflected in her eyes and it seem that the man she saw was bigger and prouder and happier than he ever remembered being. He was a man with hope, a man who would do great things and who would always have this beautiful woman beside him.

He lifted her off her feet and she squealed his name as he whirled them both around, her dress ballooning out, one shoe flying off across the floor to land at the feet of the band’s guitarist. And when he put her down she threw her head back and laughed, her face wide and open and honest with simple pleasure. And then all their friends were around them, clapping him on the back, kissing his new wife and then dancing themselves – just as clumsily – and laughing.

It was a perfect moment.

Gideon put a hand on Alejandro’s shoulder and the memory dropped away. He lifted the cap off the old man’s head and rolled it up.

“We’re done,” Gideon said.

Alejandro sprang from the chair, surprising the boy with his sudden vigour, and gripped Gideon in a tight embrace.

“Thank you,” Alejandro stepped back, his eyes filling with tears. The old man wiped roughly at his face. “Thank you so much. You always were a good boy.”

Alejandro pulled out a small fold of neat bills and pressed them Gideon’s palm.

The boy, as gently as he could, refused them.

“No Mister Marichal – “

The old man pushed them back.

Gideon looked at the notes. He peeled away the top two and handed the rest back.

“That is enough.”

Appeased, Alejandro nodded then he reached up to grab Gideon’s face. He pulled the boy’s head forward and craned to kiss him on the forehead, his lips touching a cool metal stud.

“Thank you for giving me back my Teresita.”

The old man turned and walked out the door.

“Mister Marichal?” Gideon called after him but he was gone. The young man stared, confused for a moment, looking around the room.

Then he went over to the low table with the scroll.

The download from the Muninn was complete, the copy ready to play, unused.

If he returned it, the old man could have his precious memories one more time. Gideon fiddled with the mesh cap in his hands then turned towards the door, intending to chase after Mister Marichal and explain there had been a mistake.

Then he remembered how the old man had looked and he paused.

Thank you for giving me back my Teresita.

Gideon sat down in the old, battered armchair and gently ran his fingers along the studs in his skull.

Mister Marichal had been happy and that was enough. The old man didn’t need the download.

He already had everything he needed.

“The First Dance” was first published in Solaris Rising 2, edited by Ian Whates

THE FIRST DANCE was originally published on Welcome To My World

#science fiction #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

FREEDOM

Gull idled. This was what she lived for, these moments high above Freedom, released from the city’s grasp. Pedalling just fast enough to keep her paracycle in the air, she circled and ignored the stall light fluttering orange on its console. The city span slowly around her, but Gull was not part of it.

Even here where the black towers of the corporations pressed against the dome’s sharply sloping roof, she could glimpse The Elle through the city’s artificial canyons. The needle at the heart of Freedom rose from Rhaeticus’s floor to the dome’s roof. Close up it was too large to comprehend, it was overwhelming, but from out here, on the edge, it seemed slender and graceful.

Lifting off her goggles, she twisted her head and stretched to look upwards to the point where The Elle met the top of the dome and passed through. It glowed, sunlight reflecting off its smooth white walls, throwing light into the shadows between the towers. It lifted Gull’s heart. The Elle was the only way out of Freedom. The Elle was escape.

Charlie’s plink-plink chime dragged Gull’s attention back to business. Confirmation had been received. Gull looked down and saw the delivery platform lowering, like an ancient drawbridge, below her. She pushed forward and the paracycle’s nose dipped.

Charlie’s carbon-fibre skeleton groaned softly as they picked up speed. Gull smiled, patting the cycle’s side. Charlie could take it. Gull pedalled harder into the dive, struts straining as she pushed closer to the cycle’s limits.

The wind ripped at her clothing and slapped at her cheeks. Gull’s smile broadened and curled, suddenly reckless, at one corner. She loved to fly. At her back the propeller blurred, its whine all but lost as the wind whipped at her and roared away.

Gull came in fast and tight, pointing Charlie’s nose directly at the landing platform. A warning sounded but she slapped the manual override. At the last possible moment, when it seemed certain she would dash herself against the platform, she yanked back on the stick all her might, hauling Charlie’s nose up and slapping him down hard on to the landing platform. The paracycle bounced once then twice – long, looping and languid in the Moon’s low gravity – then began skidding towards the edge of the platform and a three hundred metre drop. Gull leant against the stick, bringing Charlie’s nose round, bleeding speed, letting the tail slide out until it seemed certain the little glider would topple over the edge. Then she flicked on the magnetic anchor.

The paracycle juddered to a halt slamming Gull forward against her harness then back into her seat.

Gull leant back, dragged her goggles off over her shaven scalp, and pushed back the sweat from her forehead with both palms. The only sound was the soft whine of the paracycle’s propeller, still spinning freely. She patted the frame of the paracycle.

“Good boy, Charlie.”

She reached back and grabbed the parcel, popped the console from its docking port and stepped between Charlie’s carbon fibre ribs onto the landing platform.

The guards were obviously groundhogs. They were clumsy and squat in a way only those born in high gravity could be. Still wrapped in bulky muscles, they were fresh from Earth.

“Do you have a death wish?” One of the guards bounced awkwardly towards Gull. He cradled his rifle in one arm – like a pet. It was a sleek, black M10 and Gull’s opinion of the guard dropped even further. The M10 looked impressive but it had a kick like a jackhammer and if the dumb guard ever actually fired the thing on The Moon he’d be flying arse over tit all the way to Copernicus.

“A girl has got to have some fun,” she said, trying to keep the contempt from her voice.

The guard leered, something dirty on the tip of his tongue, but Gull looked into his eyes and met his gaze nervelessly. She dared him. The joke died, dry in his throat.

“Identification?” The guard tried to reassert himself.

She handed him her company ID.

The guard snapped opened the little case.

On one side was a chip containing her biometric details. The guard ignored it. On the right was a credit chip. He scanned the chip and checked the read out.

“One hundred dollars?” There was contempt in his voice.

Gull sighed. She knew this was going to happen. Groundhogs were always the most trouble.

“It’s one hundred dollars for you, one hundred dollars for the next guy, one hundred dollars for everyone. It’s the going rate. Check the market board.”

The guard shook his head. “This is a free market, I can charge what the market will bear.”

“Well, this market will only bear one hundred dollars,” she stepped away from him, lifting her parcel. “And one of your bosses is waiting for this. If you want to go to arbitration, you can explain to him why his package was late. Is that what you want?”

“Okay! ” The guard raised a hand, suddenly smiling. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

She could, but she wouldn’t.

“Can I go now,” Gull read the name on the guard’s badge, “Castor?”

“Sure,” he waved her away. “Look after yourself.”

“No one else will.”

It took several moments, but eventually Paitoon was able to open his eyes again. His lips were still making the shapes of a mantra as he tried to calm himself.

A man in a blue uniform was standing in front of him, a sympathetic smile on his face. Paitoon’s head only reached the level of the golden shield emblazoned on his chest. “Freedom Constabulary Inc.” it said.

“Sawatdee-krap,” Paitoon said, performing the wai – placing his hands together at chest height and bowing slightly.

“Constable Hayek, sir,” the man bowed slightly, he had sandy coloured hair and blue eyes. “Do you speak English or should I send for a translator?”

“Pardon,” Paitoon flushed. “No translator necessary. I speak English. My name is Paitoon, Paitoon Chattaponsiri“

The guard looked over his shoulder at the seething mass of people on the station concourse.

“Overwhelming isn’t it?”

“Incredible,” Paitoon nodded, letting his eyes close again for a moment. “I never imagined it could be so huge, so busy…”

“Is this your first time in Freedom?”

“My first time off Earth.”

“I thought so,” Hayek grinned. “You have family here?”

“No. Not yet,” Paitoon looked away. “I have escaped the war. I hope to earn enough to bring my family here soon.”

Constable Hayek nodded slowly.

“You have a job arranged?”

“Not yet, but I’m sure –”

Constable Hayek shook his head.

“Do you have the means to support yourself?” Hayek asked. Paitoon looked at him blankly. “Money? Do you have much money?”

“I spent almost everything I had to get here.”

The constable sighed. “Well then, I’m afraid I must mark you as an indigent migrant. Freedom does not restrict entry, but those who cannot pay for air and water must –”

“But I am a programmer,” Paitoon protested. “I am very good. I earn lots of money in Bangkok. I do good work.”

“How many of these people do you think programmers, Paitoon?” The constable said, shaking his head. “There are no jobs. Without money or a company registration you cannot get insurance. Without insurance you cannot get credit, you cannot rent property, you cannot get work. You will have no status. You would be better to go home.”

“Please…” Tears welled in Paitoon’s eyes. “My family. The war.”

Hayek ran a finger over his chin, thinking.

“I’m not supposed to do this,” the constable said. “But there might be a way. I know some people. It won’t be cheap.”

Paitoon reached into his pocket and showed Hayek a small bundle of credit chips.

The constable nodded and gave Paitoon a card and pointed to the back.

“Give this to a man called Kush at this address,” Hayek turned the card over and tapped it, an animated map sprang to life. “That’s how to get there from here.”

Paitoon bowed.

“Thank you very much,” he said, then remembered what the flight attendant had said to the passengers as they left The Elle. “Take care of yourself?”

Hayek laughed, shaking his head. “Look after yourself.”

“Sorry. Very sorry,” Paitoon bowed again. “Look after yourself.”

The constable nodded.

“No one else will.”

Dropping the package off took longer than Gull expected. The wage slave behind the reception desk seemed to have had a lobotomy.

By the time she finished her console was flashing frantically with queries from Buck about where she was and a list of jobs she was to bid for. She sighed and shoved open the door to the landing platform.

The first thing Gull noticed was that the guards were huddled in one corner giggling and scanning chips.

Then she saw her paracycle drop away from the landing pad.

“Charlie!”

At first she thought they’d turned off the magnetic tether and let the cycle be blown away, but then Charlie turned sharply right, his wings wobbling, and began to gain height. Gull saw a flash of black hair. Then the cycle swished around the edge of the tower and was gone.

“My ‘cycle,” she turned to the guards. “You bastards let someone steal Charlie.”

The guards had straightened up. They weren’t laughing anymore. Their rifles were levelled at Gull’s belly.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Shit!” Gull turned back to the now empty open space of the landing pad. “Bastards!”

“If you don’t have any more business here madam, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave.” The big guard, Castor, stepped forward. He was grinning.

“I paid you,” Gull said. “We had a contract.”

The guard shook his head and tossed her credit chip back to her. She caught it. It hadn’t been drained.

“It can be very dangerous up here. We wouldn’t want an accident, would we?”

Gull’s shoulders slumped. She nodded. The guards escorted her to the lift.

“Look after yourself,” the guards chorused as the doors slipped closed.

“No one else will,” Gull whispered to herself as she began her journey to The Floor.

“Freedom is a dream.”

Everyone who came to Freedom believed it, at least for a moment.

Clutching his only bag and the card the constable had given him, Paitoon forced his way through the mass of people milling around the elephantine columns at the exit to the Elle station.

He stood before The Monument to the Founders, a slender pile of polished golden chains rising fifty meters above the ground. Each chain was at least as thick as a man’s leg and every link had been burst open.

Beneath the monument was a plaque, ten meters tall, with the proclamation of the three laws.

“Freedom is a dream built by man’s imagination,” it began. Paitoon didn’t need to read the words. He knew them by heart. “The dream will be built on three laws. The market is free. What can be bought, may be sold. Do what you want, and so will I. From these simple rules will flow liberty and justice for all.”

Paitoon stood before those broken chains and thought of his family on Earth and of what he’d given up to get here. His father had told Paitoon not to leave the monastery. He had begged him to keep his promise and complete his three-month’s retreat in the sangha. But the war had come so close and there was no shame in leaving.

Paitoon took a final look at the monument and closed his eyes, offering a prayer that his father and his family would soon see it too.

Gull was pushed out through what felt like an airlock – one small metal door clanging closed behind her before another swung open – and stepped into what appeared to be a busy street market atop a dump.

This was The Floor. Rotting rubbish fluttered in tottering heaps and the stink forced Gull to pause and fight back the urge to puke. Crowds swept this way and that in fast-moving torrents, each eroding its own path through the rubbish. Between the mounds of detritus, market stalls were wedged up against the side of the towers or huddled on eyots in the heart of the flow of people. Some of the stalls sold food, fresh and cooked, some of them sold clothes or electronics or drugs or people. One or two appeared to be trying to sell the rubbish on which they were built.

She had survived down here before, she told herself, and got out. She could do it again. She could feel the comforting weight of Charlie’s console in her jacket. As long as she still had that, she had a link to his transponder and she could find him.

She needed a Mission. She needed The Church of Christ the Entrepreneur.

Kush greeted Paitoon with a broad smile, placed a heavy arm across his shoulders and swept him inside the hostel.

It was not as Paitoon had been expecting.

The ground floor was a busy club. Music thumped loudly, so that the whole room seemed to throb, and a large group of bored looking young men lounged by the bar. Paitoon could make out a few couples leaning close together in dark booths arranged against the wall and on a second level above.

Kush rushed Paitoon through to an elevator.

The elevator pinged and the doors opened onto a narrow corridor, thick red carpet covered the floor and walls.

“I’ll show you your room,” Kush led the way. “And then we can talk about your new job and how you can pay your way.”

Missions weren’t hard to find, signposts were on every corner. But the guys blocking Gull’s path meant that getting through The Mission doors was going to be expensive.

Gull could hold her own in a street fight, if she had to, but she was giving a hundred pounds to even the smallest of these guys. Anyway, the ordinance conspicuously strapped to their hips suggested they didn’t do fistfights.

The biggest guy grinned and held out his hand, palm up. Another groundhog. His skin even still had that brown tint that suggested naked, non-fatal exposure to the sun.

“Pay up.”

Gull’s mind raced. She couldn’t afford street tax.

The second thug stepped forward, he could have been the first one’s brother, or clone. He let his hand drop to rest on the handle of his pistol.

“Come on! Don’t waste our time.”

The third one held back, at first Gull hadn’t notice him. He was tall and slender and pale. A Lunie, born and bred, Gull reckoned. He had the lean, rat-like face of someone who’d spent too long on The Floor.

Gull wondered.

“I am looking for escort to The Mission. I cannot pay street tax but I have enough credit to pay one of you the going rate.”

The two groundhogs grinned stupidly at each other, shrugged, reaching for their guns.

“Contract?” The Lunie asked.

“Contract,” Gull replied.

“What?” The first groundhog turned in time to see the butt of the Lunie’s gun catch him flush on the bridge of the nose and drop him, his face a bubbling, bloody mess on the floor. He was trying to scream, a mixture of fury and pain, but his throat was full of his own blood.

As the second groundhog fumbled to drag his gun from its holster he found the sudden blade of a razor-thin knife pressing on his Adam’s apple.

“Drop the gun, Ronnie.” The heavy weapon thudded to the ground. The Lunie nodded at Gull. “Pick it up – and strip Duke as well, before he works out he isn’t dying. Make sure you get the piece in his boot.”

“You better kill me now, you piece of shit,” Ronnie was trying to talk without moving his throat, a trickle of blood was running down the groundhog’s neck.

The Lunie laughed.

“Ronnie, I’m going to take every weapon and credit you have and then I’m going to leave you down here on The Floor. If you pair of witless groundhogs survive long enough to see my face again – and I doubt it – then you’re welcome to do you worst. This lady is not paying me to kill you but, if there’s a next time, I might just do you for free.”

The Lunie kicked out the back of Ronnie’s knees and he collapsed to the ground.

“Thank you,” Gull said.

“No need for thanks as long as you can pay,” the Lunie said, then smiled. “I’m Laslo.”

“I’m Gull,” she looked at the two groundhogs. “What do want to do now?”

“Empty their pockets, then I’m all yours.”

They kept Paitoon awake for six days. Someone would punch him, someone would be nice to him, someone would kick him, someone would feed him. At first he’d been overwhelmed by the horror of it all. He’d cried and begged and promised them anything. But by the sixth day, Paitoon had gone cold. The pain and the misery were still there, but he had become detached. His real self was somewhere else.

The first time they raped him, tying his hands and feet to the legs of a table, he had frozen in horror and disbelief. He’d simply refused to accept that this could be really happening. Later he’d kicked and bit and scratched and screamed, fighting them with every ounce of his strength, to no effect. Finally he’d fallen silent again, numb and beyond the kind of pain they could inflict on his body.

“Will you take the job?” Kush asked him.

Paitoon just nodded. He’d been saying yes almost since the moment the beatings had started. He’d have said anything to get them to stop.

But this time he just nodded.

Kush grabbed a handful of Paitoon’s hair and pulled his head up, staring into Paitoon’s eyes.

“Will you take the job?”

“Yes,” Paitoon’s voice was a whisper.

Kush stared at him for a moment longer then let Paitoon’s head drop. Paitoon heard him leave the room.

Paitoon had said yes a thousand times, but this time Kush seemed satisfied. And Paitoon knew that it was because he meant it now. He’d do whatever they wanted. He should never have left the monastery. It was karma. He knew it.

Kush came back, holding a hypodermic.

“This is Zoom,” Kush said, pressing the needle into Paitoon’s arm. “You’ll like it.”

The world began to dance.

The lay accountant in The Mission had to check with a Brother before he let her access the grid without paying in advance. Gull explained that they’d make no money if her credit was stopped and the Brother smiled sweetly and nodded.

Gull called base and cleared things with Buck. Technical problems, she’d said, and promised to be back on station tomorrow. He bought it. That gave her credit for another day.

Behind her, the Brother coughed politely.

Gull turned. “I need to find a paracycle.”

The Brother bowed slightly.

“There are many paracycle dealers, the nearest –”

“No,” Gull cut him off. “I need to find a particular paracycle. Mine. It’s been stolen. Can you help?”

“I have sworn to help others,” the Brother said, reaching into his robes for a retinal reader, “and make a profit.”

Gull swiped the reader across her eye and keyed in a figure. It was everything she could afford. She handed it back to The Brother. He checked the figure and then showed it to the accountant.

“And I’ll need a taxi.”

“I am certain that the Lord will look favourably on your gift, my child.”

Castor was a regular. He came to the hostel twice a week and, since their first time together, he always asked for Paitoon. Paitoon didn’t mind Castor. He was quick, didn’t talk and always left a generous tip.

This visit started like all the others. Paitoon began to undress, thinking of the money and trying to judge if Kush would think he’d done enough to deserve today’s fix. He could feel the need slithering behind his eyes.

He wanted to zoom.

Paitoon turned and was surprised to see Castor unmoved, sitting on the bed, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the floor.

“I don’t even know your name,” Castor said.

Paitoon closed his eyes. He could cope with the sex, and the beatings, and the humiliation. Zooming helped. He could cope with the violence and the pain. For the times between fixes he’d built a wall in his mind. The things that happened outside the wall happened to someone else, not to him. But he hated the customers who wanted to talk, who behaved as though he was their friend. They chipped away at the wall. They made it all feel real. He hated them.

“I’d like to help you,” Castor said.

Through the window of the hostel room Paitoon could see down a long open canyon between Freedom’s high towers. A flyer bobbed and swooped like a bird.

“Can you get me out of here?” Paitoon said it bitterly, sarcastically. He knew he was trapped. He turned to face Castor. “Can you?”

The big man nodded. “I think so.”

Paitoon paused. That wasn’t what he’d expected.

“Why would you help me?”

Castor looked up, meeting Paitoon’s gaze for the first time. He was a boy.

“I love you,” Castor said very softly.

Paitoon turned back to the window.

“You could live with me,” Castor insisted.

Paitoon turned back.

“I love you too.”

“I knew it,” Castor leapt across the room and grasped Paitoon, pulling him closer. “I knew it!”

Gull had no time for the Church’s religion but she had to concede that they were efficient. Within ten minutes the Brother had returned with a small tracking device and an address.

“Your initial payment covers the use of this device,” he held out the tracker, “for a twenty-four hour period. If, by the end of that period, it has not been returned to a certified representative of The Church of Christ the Entrepreneur you will be charged at these additional rates.”

The Brother held out a pad. She thumbed down through the terms and conditions. The rental rates for the tracker were exorbitant but it didn’t matter. If she didn’t have Charlie back in twenty-four hours, The Church could join the back of the line of creditors who’d be queuing up for a pound of her flesh.

She blinked into the pad and handed it back.

The Brother nodded.

“A taxi has won the bidding for your contract. Are you ready to leave?”

“Tell him I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” Gull said. “There’s one more thing I need to do.”

Stealing the paracycle had been easy. Castor bribed the security crew to get Paitoon into the building and the receptionist to delay the girl while they busted the locks.

Flying the paracycle, though, was altogether more difficult. Paitoon wobbled off the tower’s landing pad easily enough and turned quickly to get out-of-sight, just in case the girl was armed, but almost at once he realised he was dangerously out of his depth.

The little flier was being buffeted back and forth between Freedom’s immense towers. Paitoon was swept back and forth, up and down, on an invisible, violent roller coaster of rocketing updrafts and plummeting downdrafts.

Paitoon gripped the control-stick in two pale-knuckled, sweat-slicked hands, hunched down in his seat, and pedalled harder. He looked down at the computer’s controls and, timidly, twitched the control stick to the left, altering course as instructed.

The console he’d plugged into the paracycle’s computer had been expensive but it was old and not perfectly compatible with these more modern systems. He had, however, been able to create a simple emulator to allow him to get most of the basic functions working. Later he’d reprogram the whole thing.

Suddenly, a slicing crosswind burst from between two towers. It caught the raised wingtip of the paracycle and flipped the flier over, filling the wings like a sail.

All across the computer console lights flashed a frantic red. Paitoon jerked at the control stick. The paracycle refused to respond. It wrenched, twisted and turned. Helpless, Paitoon was thrown about in his harness.

A downdraft ripped at the flier, tossing it, nose down, towards to distant floor. Paitoon felt the wind rip at his face. To one side a silver tower was so close he felt sure that he could reach out and touch it. Looking down, the gap between the tower and its neighbour appeared to narrow. Somewhere, down there, was The Floor. Paitoon closed his eyes. How long will I fall, he wondered.

But after a few moments he felt himself tugged sideways. The console beeped.

The paracyle jerked again.

The flier was levelling off.

The lights on the computer turned green.

Paitoon looked at the console screen. A message was flashing.

“Warning: Do not exceed aircraft tolerances. Emergency recovery procedures in effect.”

For a long moment, Paitoon gawped helplessly. He had not known that was possible. He patted the computer box and began to pedal again.

“Khawp khun, little flier.”

Getting inside had been easy. Gull showed the guards an empty parcel, her company identity and paid them with credit. They waved her through.

Inside, she tried to look like she knew where were she was going. She made confident, but not aggressive, eye contact with each of the groundhogs she met in the corridor. This was a company building. The same company that she’d called at this morning. Someone there had set this whole thing up. One of the guards? They hadn’t seemed smart enough.

She glanced at the tracker again. She was on the right floor. It must be just down that corridor.

Then the signal went dead.

Gull tapped the tracker against her palm.

Nothing.

She reset it, waiting nervously in the narrow corridor, trying to look like she belonged.

Still nothing.

She sighed.

She’d have to try every door on the floor and hope that someone recognised her.

Paitoon had finished making all the modifications and was getting ready to leave when the doorbell rang. He checked the room’s security system and saw a messenger girl in the corridor holding a parcel. He opened the door with his hand out, wondering whether Castor had ordered something else that he might be able to sell.

He stood there for a moment, arm extended, wondering why she wasn’t giving him the parcel? He looked up into the girl’s face. She was shaven-headed and had that deathly white shade that marked out real Lunies. They all looked the same to him.

Then the pieces clicked into place. He looked left, to where the paracycle sat folded against the wall and a wave of panic broke over him.

“Yet mang!” Paitoon tried to slam the door but it bounced back off the girl’s foot, jammed into the frame. Paitoon grabbed the door with both hands and tried to force it shut, but the girl slipped her body between the door and the frame.

“I want my cycle,” the girl said softly. “Just give me Charlie.”

Suddenly the pressure on the door increased. Paitoon was driven back across the room, scrabbling to stay on his feet. He crashed with a thud against the far wall. His hand brushed a bag full of Castor’s stuff. His gun was on top, just out of reach.

The girl was standing inside the doorway.

“I just want my ‘cycle,” she said.

Paitoon lunged for the gun.

Pfft!

An insect bit the side of his neck.

No. That was wr-

Gull weighed the stunner in her palm, looking down at the little Asian lying on the floor. She didn’t know enough about Earth to be able to say exactly where he was from, but she was fascinated by how fragile he seemed. He could have been a Lunie.

Gull checked the other rooms. She was cautious but, she reckoned, if there’d been anyone home the sound of the struggle at the door would have brought them running.

Her plan had been to take Charlie and leave, but when Gull saw that little guy had been hacking at the console, she realised she was going to have to wait until he woke up. He’d done something to the systems. She couldn’t make her console fit and she couldn’t fly the paracycle without it. He’d have to fix it.

Finding the bag full of credit chips, a stash of Zoom and a good quality pistol, all the way from earth – worth plenty of credits – had made her pause. That was an extra complication she’d liked. It wasn’t what she’d come for, but she decided she’d deserved the money for what the little guy had put her through. Today had been expensive as well as frustrating.

She propped the bag next to the door. She pushed the little thief up against the sofa on one side of the room and sat in an armchair opposite him, setting the stunner on her knee. Then she sorted out her insurance.

When Paitoon awoke he was slumped on the sofa. His arms and legs were numb. He could feel a stream of warm spittle pooling at the base of his neck. It was strangely comforting.

He looked up.

The girl, the one he’d stolen the paracycle from, was sitting opposite him. She had the stunner levelled at his chest.

Paitoon tried to move his arm, but it flopped uselessly at his side. He noticed the girl’s eyes flicker at the movement. She was nervous.

“Tell me what you’ve done to Charlie,” the girl said.

Paitoon shook his head.

“Whomf?” His lips and tongue felt as unresponsive as his arms and legs.

“The paracycle,” the girl waved the stunner towards the machine. “What have you done to the systems?”

“Maggin’ it c’mpabable…” Paitoon shook his head in frustration. The stuff was wearing off, but it was hard to speak.

The girl ignored him walking over to Charlie, poking suspiciously at the changes he made.

“Fix it.” She turned back towards him, waving the stunner. “Put it back.”

He shook his head.

“’s beddah!”

“What?”

“Beddah!” Paitoon tried nodding at the console.

“Better?”

Gull watched as Paitoon started working on Charlie.

Something was bothering her.

“How did you plan to get jobs?”

“Wha?” Paitoon looked up over the edge of the magnifying lens he was using while working on the electronics.

“Jobs?” Gull waved the stunner around. “How were you going to get jobs with the paracycle. You haven’t got a company registration.”

“I do not need one,” the little guy was smiling broadly. He tapped the console he’d jury-rigged to Charlie’s systems. “I’ve set it up to adopt a different registration identity for every bid. Each one looks like a platinum-rated ID. No one ever checks up on identities with a high-trust rating but even if they did, by the time they’ve blocked one bid I would have already moved on.”

“But the whole system depends on the market being secure, everyone knows it can’t be hacked. The encryption -“

“The encryption is intact. I cannot read other people’s messages. The network is secure, but people are not,” Paitoon was suddenly quite animated. “Each bid is supposed to be authorised with a unique registration identity as it leaves each company. But people get bored or lazy so they do them in batches with the same code key. My console scans the network for clumps of messages from one node sent at the same time. It can then compare the identifier codes and construct a valid pattern that fits within the pattern of the clump and attaches it to my bid.”

“So you can bid without a company?”

“Yes.”

“But someone will work it out eventually?”

“Perhaps. But by then I should have enough money to incorporate – and I’ll have a trust-level based on delivering platinum-rated contracts.”

“I don’t…” The girl’s forehead creased in concentration. Paitoon watched, interesting to see if she could work it out. “Ah, I get it. The bidding and the trust rating systems are separate. You bid with the fake corporate identity for the bid, but when you complete the order you present the console and take the payment and trust-points to you own identity –”

” – just like any sub-contractor,” Paitoon smiled.

“Smart,” the girl shook her head. “And you worked this out by yourself?”

“I’m a good programmer. No one would believe me when I arrived,” Paitoon looked away, a mournful expression on his face. “I earned a lot of money in Bangkok, before the war.”

“You know what that means,” she pointed to the console.

Paitoon nodded.

“Freedom,” they both said together.

Then the door opened.

Gull watched the guard come through the door, dumping a bag of gear on the floor, unaware of anything unusual. She recognised him at once.

“Hello Castor.”

“Huh?” Castor turned, confusion spreading across his face. It took a moment for him to spot Gull sitting in her seat opposite the door. It took a moment longer for recognition to be flash across his face. And it took longer still for him to realise that he should be reaching for his gun.

“Don’t move, Castor,” Gull waved the stunner as menacingly as she could. “Your friend Paitoon can tell you what sort of sting this thing can deliver.”

“How did she get in?” Castor was looking at Paitoon.

The little guy opened his mouth but Gull hushed him.

“You concentrate on my flier, Paitoon,” her eyes never left Castor. “You know for a building full of company guards, security around her is a joke.”

Castor grumbled something, and started scanning the room. His eyes fixed on the bag of credits and the gun. He took half a step.

“Don’t do it Castor!”

The guard just leered and began to reach down.

Pfft!

The stunner’s compressed air jet fired a needle into Castor’s chest.

Dunk!

That wasn’t right.

Castor laughed – opening his jacket to reveal his work uniform – mesh and body-armour – beneath. Gull could see the little needle futilely trying to pump its sac of venom into the unfeeling plastic.

He put his hand on the gun.

“Don’t do it Castor.”

Castor laughed harder.

“How long do you think it will take that little peashooter of yours to recharge? A lot less time than it will take me to load this – so screw you, you’re dead.”

Castor checked the pistol, it was unloaded. He reached into the bag, looking for a full clip. Then he stopped. He pulled out a watch and some jewellery.

“This is my stuff! But this was all in the vault. How did you get this stuff?”

“I didn’t,” Gull shrugged, looking at Paitoon. “He had it all packed up when I arrived.”

“Paitoon?”

“I was almost free,” the little guy didn’t look up from the work he was doing on the console.

“After all I did for you?”

At this Paitoon did look up and Gull could see the hate in his eyes.

Castor rocked back, his face an image first of abject misery that morphed quickly into fury. He delved into the back, coming up with a full clip.

“Stop, Castor,” Gull stepped towards him. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Shut up!” The guard swept out a heavy arm and caught Gull across the side of the head. She sprawled across the room, tripping over a sofa and dropping to her knees.

Gull reached for for her stunner, but it was gone.

“I think I’d like to invoke my insurance policy now,” she said.

Laslo stepped from his hiding place in Castor’s bedroom, two pistols levelled.

“Put down the gun, Castor,” Gull said.

Paitoon saw the stranger, another Lunie, step out of the darkness of the bedroom and heard Gull warn Castor but he could tell that, even if the guard was aware of what was happening around him, he wasn’t paying attention.

He watched Castor finally succeed in slamming the clip into the pistol, flip the safety and pull back the slide to put a bullet in the chamber.

“Stop it Castor!” Gull was shouting.

“Castor!” Paitoon tried to put himself between Castor and the Lunie. “Don’t do this!”

Castor’s eyes were fat with tears. His chin was trembling. He looked like a child having a tantrum. Castor brought the pistol up, pointing at Paitoon’s chest.

Gull said something that Paitoon couldn’t make out over the pounding of blood in his ears.

Crack! Crack!

Castor slumped back against the apartment wall. Two roses of blood blossomed on his chest. His pistol flew across the room, landing at Gull’s feet.

For a moment there was absolute silence.

Paitoon found himself kneeling beside Castor, cradling his hand, gazing into the piercing stare of dead eyes.

“You silly boy,” Paitoon whispered and found his throat constricting and his eyes burning.

“Does he have insurance?” Laslo leant over Castor’s dead body. Gull took the opportunity to dip and scoop Castor’s pistol from the floor. She slipped it into her waistband at the small of her back.

Paitoon looked up, trying to compose himself.

“Does he have insurance?” Laslo pointed one of his pistols at Paitoon’s head.

“Yes… no…”

“Which is it?” Laslo pressed the gun barrel into Paitoon’s forehead. “Retard!”

“Not for this,” Paitoon took a deep breath. “His company provided him with investigation and retribution insurance but it only covered him while he was on duty.”

“Good,” Laslo smiled, poking Castor’s arm with his boot. Then, satisfied that Castor was dead, he turned to Gull. “So, contract fulfilled?”

Gull nodded, suddenly aware that two pistols were pointing at her midriff.

“Well you can keep your cash,” Laslo grabbed Paitoon by the collar and dragged him to his feet. “I’ll take this retard, his little console and that bag, and we’ll call it quits.”

“No! Please!” Paitoon squirmed but the Lunie pressed the gun to his neck and he settled down.

“Get your console,” the Lunie pushed Paitoon across the room. “You are going to make me rich.”

“I can’t you let take him,” Gull said.

“You can’t stop me,” Laslo smiled broadly.

Slowly Gull began to reach around behind her back, feeling for the butt of the pistol. The smile disappeared from Laslo’s face.

“And if you so much as touch that gun you’ve got tucked back there, I’ll blow your stupid head off.”

Gull froze and was suddenly aware that she’d underestimated the Lunie.

“In fact, I think I might have to kill you anyway,” Laslo walked across the room, his spidery limbs picking a path between overturned furniture.

“There’s no profit in it,” Gull said, trying to meet Laslo’s gaze.

“But maybe I think that you know too much about the retard’s clever little machine,” Laslo raised a pistol. “Maybe you’d report me to the Chamber, just to get your own back.”

Gull tried to take a step backwards, but she was already pressed against the wall. She raised her hands.

“Laslo, I…”

The Lunie put a finger to his lips.

“Stop!” Paitoon yelped.

“Shut up retard!” Laslo didn’t even turn round and Gull’s view was blocked.

“This is your last warning!”

Laslo laughed.

“What are you going to do, little man?” Laslo glanced over his shoulder then stopped laughing, taking a step to one side.

Paitoon was clutching Gull’s stunner.

“That thing isn’t even charg-“

Pfft!

Laslo’s eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth dropped open. Then his knees trembled, gave and, slowly, he collapsed to the floor.

“That bastard was going to kill me,” Gull said, lashing out with her boot against Laslo’s unprotected sides. Then she stopped, and turned to look at Paitoon. “You saved my life!”

Then she turned to the wall and puked.

Paitoon brought the girl a drink of water and she rinsed her mouth.

“Thank you.”

“Mai pen rai,” Paitoon dipped into a wai. “You’re welcome.”

“So I guess we should get out of here.”

“I certainly do not wish to be around when he wakes up,” Paitoon nodded at Laslo.

“Mmm,” Gull wiped at her mouth, then she looked over at her paracycle, Charlie. “Is he fixed?”

“Yes,” Paitoon looked away. “I am sorry for the trouble I caused you.”

Gull wandered over to the work table and picked up Paitoon’s hacked console.

“Do you really think this thing will work?”

“I am certain of it, at least for a while.”

Gull took another three steps to where Charlie lay folded against the wall. She stroked the paracycle’s wings.

“I won’t be your slave,” Paitoon said. “I won’t live like that any more. If that’s what you expect, then you’d better kill me now, because I won’t work for you.”

“I’m not going to kill you.” Gull scratched at the stubble on the top of her head. “Did you enjoy your flight in Charlie?”

“It was terrifying!” Paitoon’s complexion paled visibly at the memory.

“Then maybe we do a deal,” Gull said. “You run the technology, I’ll do the flying and we share the profits. We’ll call it a cooperative.”

Paitoon’s eyes narrowed.

“But I thought you Lunies only looked after yourselves.”

“Can your scam make both of us rich?”

“I think so,” Paitoon nodded. “With luck.”

“Then if I look after you, I am looking after myself. Right?”

Paitoon smiled.

“Contract?” Gull held out a hand. “Contract,” Paitoon replied.

“Freedom” was first published in Jupiter SF #12

FREEDOM was originally published on Welcome To My World

#science fiction #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

PALACES OF FORCE

Our journey to Paris and the Exposition Universelle de 1889 did not begin auspiciously. The trip required us to catch a train from Victoria Station, which is a terrible place. From Victoria Street the station appears to be nothing more than a shabby wooden shed, held together only by the many layers of paint that have been plastered on it over the years. The station’s exterior, however, offers barely a hint of the horrors within. The inadequate walls conceal the most chaotic, the most crowded and, assuredly, the dirtiest place I have ever seen.

And I am from Calcutta.

Everything was stained black by the smoke and clouded by billowing steam. I felt certain that, if I could but find a moment’s pause to contemplate it, I should be able to feel the station’s grime smearing itself across my face.

But there was no pause. The crowd heaved back and forth between the great hissing beasts of the engines. Men pushed and grunted, women screeched and shoved, and the children scuttled like rats and bellowed like savages. In terms of both volume and shrillness the noise of the crowd was almost a match for the whistling, rumbling, rattling, and hissing of the great steam engines that loomed over us all.

Though I have lived here now for somewhat more than sixty years, I still find it impossible to reconcile England’s conception of itself as the world’s most civilised nation with the wolfish mob its people become when gathered together. It is as though the English, by constant repetition of their claim to an excess of refinement, hope that it will become reality. It is plainly a deception, though perhaps not without a certain admirable intent.

My companion and I struggled through the noise and press of the station to our appointed platform and the night train to Paris. The distinctive yellow-ochre of the Brighton and South Coast Line trains took on a sickly pallor in the dim light and smoke-laden air. A discreet display of coin caught the attention of a somewhat reluctant porter, and we made our way along the platform.

My companion, Mohandas, was a quiet man, shy and softly spoken even in his native Gujarati and more so when required to converse in English, though he was quite fluent. You will have heard of him of course, as he is now more than famous. Then, however, he was simply a student hoping to be called to the bar. Like many of the Indians who came to England to study at that time he affected to become, in appearance and behaviour, a more precise instance of the idealised English gentleman than any I have ever encountered amongst the native population. However, unlike the majority – including, I freely confess, myself – Mohandas maintained the proprieties of diet and religious observance. This religious bent and his somewhat serious manner had led some of our fellows to abandon him as a prig and a bore. I fear he pricked their consciences. For myself, having no conscience, I found him honest and intelligent, and we became regular companions.

He dressed in the most proper fashion, taking the utmost care with his appearance. Those who know him only from the newsreels may imagine that Mohandas only ever dressed in the simplest of clothing, but when I think of our youthful days together in London, I see him in the clothes he wore that day: a chimney-pot hat and suit bought in Bond Street, with a gold watch chain across his chest.

Assisted by the porter, we installed ourselves in a compartment in the first class carriage and settled down. We had, thanks to my habitual punctuality, arrived a little early and our train was quite empty so we were able to pick our compartment and arrange ourselves before the majority of passengers arrived. As the time of our departure neared, the train became quite full, crowded even, and I waited with interest to see who would share our compartment. I watched as several of our fellow travellers peered through the glass of the door, then turned away with expressions of distaste.

I dismissed it with a shrug, and if Mohandas noticed he gave no sign. As has always been his way, he spent any spare moment reading voraciously. He had galloped through the Daily News, The Daily Telegraph and The Pall Mall Gazette, and was absorbing The Times when there was a roar from the guard on the platform and a blast from the engine’s whistle, and the train juddered forward. We were leaving at last. I stared out the window, watching the dark and crowded platforms slip away. And then we were out of the station and, for a moment, I was blinded by the early evening sun.

I blinked several times, and when I recovered the most handsome man I have ever seen was standing in the doorway to our compartment.

He was several inches taller than my own six feet, with beautiful deep-set blue eyes. Though he was obviously Caucasian, his skin was almost as deeply coloured as my own. His hair was black and, growing slightly longer than might everywhere be consider proper, it tangled into curls. His full beard was lightened by a faint, reddish touch. He was tall, but even through his fashionable pinstripe suit I determined a slender boyishness about his body.

I nodded and the stranger smiled. There was a shyness about his demeanour that only enhanced his physical beauty. He sat next to me, facing Mohandas.

“It seems you have offended some of your fellow travellers,” the man said.

Mohandas looked up sharply.

“But we spoke to no one,” I said.

“Some people need only the slightest of excuses to become offended,” he said. His accent was marked and I assumed he was Scottish, though I would later learn he had been born in Ireland.

“Such as?” It was Mohandas who had spoken. I was quite surprised for it was usual for him to require a lengthy courtship with a new acquaintance before overcoming his natural reserve to address them directly.

“Oh, the usual. The cut of your suit, the style of your shoes…” he paused, and looked around as though searching the cabin for examples of things that might offend a polite sensibility, then he smiled. “The colour of your skin?”

I grunted a laugh and even Mohandas grinned.

“Casement,” the young man thrust out an open hand and I shook it vigorously. “Roger Casement. Very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Sanjit Kamath,” I introduced myself. “And this is my friend and colleague, Mohandas Ghandi.”

“I believe I have heard of you, Mister Casement,” Mohandas said as they shook hands.

The young man cocked his head to one side.

“Really?”

“You have been in Africa? One of Stanley’s men, in The Congo Free State?”

“I was, but how could you know?”

“Your friend, Henry Ward, has spoken most highly of you, at our meetings.” Mohandas pulled out a pamphlet on vegetarianism and I barely suppressed a groan.

“You know Henry?”

“I have attended meetings of the Vegetarian Society with him.” He waved the pamphlet at young Casement; Henry Ward’s name was on the front. “Hearing your name, I could not fail to know you by his description.”

Casement leant back in his seat, stretching his long legs. He seemed, suddenly, entirely at ease. “Well, if you’re friends with Henry, then I am sure this trip will be most pleasurable.”

Our eyes met for a moment and a smile curled my lips.

“Most pleasurable,” I said.

I have forgotten much of the conversation that passed between the three of us on that journey to Paris, but I do remember that we talked about Livingstone and the Congo, and about the prospects for establishing a genuine commonwealth in Africa that might serve as a beacon for the whole continent and perhaps the world. Casement was passionate and sincere in a way that only young men who have found a true cause can be. I found him immensely likable and attractive, and we chatted endlessly.

Mohandas spoke rarely, but one of his interventions sticks clearly in my mind, for it was my first insight into the political ideas that were coming to the boil inside his head.

I had asked young Casement what he hoped to achieve in Africa.

“Why, to end slavery, to ameliorate the most awful conditions that the natives must endure, and to spread enlightenment of the ways of the modern world.” Casement said. He spoke so straightforwardly and earnestly that it was impossible to doubt his sincerity and difficult to resist his beautifully simple vision.

Mohandas laid the book he was reading onto his lap.

“And what if the people there do not want your enlightenment, Mister Casement?”

Casement looked surprised. He stared at Mohandas for a moment, opened-mouthed. The idea had clearly never occurred to him.

“But you have not seen the terrible conditions in which they live,” he said. “Each new tribe we discover suffers an existence a civilised man would not wish upon a dog!”

Mohandas smoothed out his suit trousers. It was, I thought, a very lawyerly motion.

“I believe I have seen such conditions in my own homeland,” he said. “Are you to tell me that the poor natives of India or Africa are better off for the coming of the white men?”

“No,” Casement didn’t hesitate. “Not yet. But that is because they are being exploited. We, that is those of us who support the Free State, wish to liberate the Africans from such exploitation and to establish them as a modern nation amongst the peoples of the world.”

“And what if they do not wish to be modern in your ways?” Mohandas turned to look out the window as Kent, low and lush, rumbled past. “Has it occurred to you that their traditions and their way of life may be as valuable as yours?”

It clearly hadn’t, for Casement fell silent.

After a moment I changed the subject and we talked of happier subjects, perhaps of cricket – my true love – or mutual acquaintances and our plans for our time in Paris.

Later, the young Mister Casement and I spent two hours together in his cabin on the steamer that carried us across The Channel. He was a strong and fierce lover. It is my clearest and most cherished memory of our time together.

I will not dwell on the details of the 1889 Exposition, except for those that impinge most pertinently on this tale. None who were not in Paris that summer can hope to comprehend the scale and opulent magnificence of the display that girdled the Seine. And, even these many years later, those who journeyed through its many wonders will not require my aid to recall the impression that the city and the Exposition made upon everyone who took in its sights.

Suffice it to say that those who consider these things, experts who have attended similar events all across the globe, judged the Paris Exhibition of 1889 to be the most extraordinary and comprehensive gathering of mankind’s many achievements in the fields of art and science. Subsequent years may have witnessed mankind’s increasing ingenuity and the blossoming fruits of many great minds, but there are still those who insist that the Paris Exposition has never been surpassed or even matched. All man’s greatest achievements to that point were on display on the Champ de Mars that summer and the path that would lead us into the next century was set out for all to follow.

The once-controversial symbol of the exhibition, Mister Eiffel’s great tower, remains in place – now synonymous with France herself – but the Exposition left a more subtle mark in the souls of the many millions of visitors lucky enough to have explored its wonders.

The planet span serenely at our feet. First, one noticed the vast white ice cap of the Arctic, then, as we circled slowly around and down past the equator, the great expanses of Asia were gradually dwarfed by the ungraspable hugeness of the Earth’s oceans, until at last the Southern ice cap was above our heads, and we had passed below the planet.

It was a most disconcerting experience.

The globe, as high as a three-storey house, dominated the huge room, and a single walkway spiralled around it as the planet itself rotated. By some fluke we had entered the room when it was otherwise empty, and in the church-like silence I found myself deeply moved by this vision of our planet.

The sense that the globe represented something fundamental was profound. The immensity of the world on which we live, and our own smallness within it, was made plain. Its scale – one millionth of the planet’s actual scope – staggered the mind. Only when faced with such a sight, the vast globe encompassed in a glance, can one comprehend how insignificant is humanity. But, more surprisingly, I was at the same moment struck by the fragility of the planet, a tiny haven of life in an unimaginably larger universe. We were insignificant specks on the face of a planet that, itself, seemed suddenly no more than a full stop in a lost volume on a forgotten shelf in some great library.

The great mountain ranges appeared as but wrinkles on an aged face. The greatest rivers seemed to be no more than trickles into oceans that were themselves made simple pools that a child might splash through. The portion of our planet that is habitable, squeezed between expanses of ocean and ice, driest desert and sterile mountains, seemed reduced to so small a sliver that the distances that divide race from race seemed meaningless.

I dare say that no man capable of reason could have gazed upon that globe and not been moved by the essential unity of humankind.

Casement was stroking his beard, looking up at the planet, his eyes followed southernmost tip of South America as it passed across his field of vision. Mohandas had paused further up the walkway. I can still see him, in my mind’s eye, standing just below equator, one hand slightly out-stretched as though he would scoop up the waters of the Pacific Ocean

In that moment the only sound was the gentle rumble of the machinery that drove the great globe.

Then the door above us opened and a group of giggling girls entered the chamber. The spell was broken.

“Shall we move on?” I said.

Our next steps took us into the future. From the chamber containing the globe we crossed to the Galerie des Machines.

This hall, dubbed the “Palace of Force” by one Parisian commentator, was itself a symbol of man’s power over nature. One knew, logically, that innumerable tonnes of iron anchored the great vaulted roof that arced high above us, but under acres of glass and in the summer afternoon’s sunlight that flooded everywhere, that mass of metal seemed to become attenuated. It was possible to imagine that the whole building could simply waft into the Parisian sky. We descended a wide staircase to a viewing platform dominated by a tall, skeletal clock tower. We paused there; we had entered through the western end of the Gallerie and stretching away below us was the first of two great wings that met beneath a glass dome that was larger, lighter, and more impressive than anything in Europe’s ancient cathedrals. My own reaction was reflected in the gasps and exclamations of my fellow visitors. The torrent of people divided on the platform and swept downwards to the Gallerie’s floor via two sweeping staircases.

There was a moment’s respite then, as one recovered from the shock of this extraordinary building. We regrouped, sharing glances that, at least on the part of Casement and myself, revealed that we were almost awe-struck. That this temple of light and iron had made an impression on Mohandas was obvious, though whether it was favourable was not at all certain.

No sooner had we become accustomed to the magnificence of the great exhibition space than we began to become aware of the wonders it contained.

Looming over the entrance stood the engine of an ocean liner – a cathedral of steel and brass, dwarfing all who entered and impressing on everyone the power now in the hands of man. Elsewhere hundreds of smaller engines wheezed, slapped, and banged, illustrating the many tasks man’s ingenuity had found for them.

For myself and Casement the Hall of Machines was a delight. We jigged from stand to stand, gasping at each toy or gadget, thrilled by the endless possibilities that opened up with each new discovery. Everywhere electric lamps flickered even in the sunshine, and the exhibition was filled with swarms of photographers who went about their task with a fervour, recording every miniscule detail. Moving pictures flickered in darkened booths. Recorded music blared from Berliner gramophones. Daimler motorcars trundled amongst the wide aisles between walls of machinery. Everything that we later took for granted – the whole future – was here.

In the centre of the hall, beneath the vast dome, two balloons were suspended. The smaller example was a model of the gaudy device that had first born the Mongolfier brothers aloft just a century before. Dwarfing that, however, as Jupiter does its many moons, was its modern equivalent – a great crimson orb below which was suspended a wicker basket.

We paused beneath it. Casement smiled to himself then signalled to the balloon’s attendant.

“What are you doing?” I asked, but he ignored me and took the attendant to one side and began a whispered discussion that commenced with a regretful but firm shaking of the attendant’s head and concluded with a handshake and a discreet exchange of francs.

“Come along.” Casement held aside a thick red rope and waved us towards the balloon’s basket.

Mohandas stopped and looked toward the attendant who bowed respectfully.

“What have you done?” I asked.

“I told him Mohandas was the Rajah of Peshawar,” a huge boyish grin split Casement’s face. “And that he was interested in buying a fleet of balloons to enable exploration of the Himalayas.”

A look of outrage spread across Mohandas’s face but we rushed to his side and Casement shuffled him into the basket before he could splutter a word. I distracted the attendant with a most elaborate namaste.

Once the wicker basket was raised above the floor of the hall of machines, Mohandas’s outrage dissipated and his natural curiosity asserted itself. Casement stood alongside Mohandas, and the two of them could hardly have presented a greater contrast. Casement was tall and hale so that even standing still he seemed to vibrate with barely restrained energy. Dwarfed beside him, and fragile, Mohandas held himself so perfectly still that the world seemed to pivot about him. Even then I worried whether his slight frame could carry the burdens he took upon himself – yet he never buckled.

Casement seemed quite transported by the sights and sounds of the great machines now at man’s bidding. “Impressive, isn’t it? These engines are power incarnate. They are the way to the future.”

“Certainly,” Mohandas did not look at him. “They are the way to a future.”

Casement caught the barb; clearly he had not forgotten their brief exchange on the train. He swept his hand across the scene below them. “Do you really mean you believe that the people of Africa or India would be better off if we denied them all that this could offer?”

“What does it offer, my friend?”

“They’d have the strength to build, the ability to control their lands, the power to protect themselves against the predation of the white nations or their fellows.” Casement was counting off the obvious benefits on his fingers. “They could ensure comfort from want and safety from exploitation. And with ease from such fears comes the ability to devote time to art and science and the true fruits of civilisation.”

“These machines could do that for the poor of India and Africa?” Mohandas was smiling.

“Of course! Look around this room. Think what they have done for Britain and France.”

“So you believe that these great machines could make the poor of the rest of the world as fortunate as the poor of Limehouse or Manchester or Birmingham?” Mohandas shook his head. “How happy they will be that such luxury has only cost them their lands and their traditions.”

Whatever response Casement was planning stuck fast. He stared out across the exhibition, gathering his thoughts.

“Of course, the present organisation of our society is far from perfect,” he said.

“I hadn’t taken you for a communist.”

“I am not,” Casement visibly bristled, pulling himself to his full height. “But I will concede that there are ways industrial society could better provide for its people.”

“And who will care for the people when these great machines rust, when the land has been abandoned and the crops fail?” Mohandas’s hand chopped the air. “When these machines become scrap, Mister Casement, how will your Empire feed our people then?”

“I have said that changes are necessary,” Casement met Mohandas gaze and held it, visibly trying to restrain his anger. “But I hardly think an Irishman needs a lecture from anyone on the consequences of famine.”

There was silence then, for what seemed like a very long time. Even the sound of the machines in the exhibition hall and the thousands of people moving just a few dozens of feet below us seemed to fade away. I found myself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to intercede, for I felt certain some crucial struggle was taking place. But there was to be no victor here and, after an eternity, it seemed, the two men reached some silent accord and smiled.

The mood immediately lightened and Mohandas, looking out over the Galerie des Machines, pointed to some stall that caught his eye.

I signalled to the attendant of the balloon, who set to winching us back to earth.

“You shouldn’t have lied,” Mohandas said, nodding towards the attendant. Casement’s face was a sudden mask of utter contrition.

“I did not mean to-”

Mohandas rested a hand on his arm, leaning close, smiling.

“I have never even been to Peshawar.”

Casement’s laughter rang out across the Palace of Force.

The next day we took a journey into the past. Our trip through time took us down a boulevard illustrating the history of human habitation presented in exquisitely detailed reconstructions or large models. We began in the familiarity of the present but quickly passed a delightful hostelry of the Renaissance, the rougher dwellings of the Dark Ages, the glory of Rome and the simpler elegance of Greece, back through the cruder dwellings of the stone ages and, ultimately, to the troglodyte beginnings of mankind in caves lit by guttering flame. Nor was only European history presented, for the display featured civilisations from across the globe, from the tepees of the Red Indian and the adobe homes of the Americas before the Europeans arrived, to the homes of ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians. Perhaps unsurprisingly Mohandas and I were particularly fascinated by the reconstruction of the Brihadisvara temple in Thanjavur. We were most impressed by the attention to detail in the reproduction which included the great bull and the Periya Koil.

Finally we reached the end of the boulevard and, rather tired and hot in the afternoon sun, we were drawn to the shade of what appeared to be a small copse of exotic trees from which strange music floated.

Beneath the trees we found reconstructed a village of the native people of Malay. At first glance it was little more than a scattering of bamboo shacks thatched with palm-leaves, and yet there was something in the grace of the buildings that spoke of a simple life in a bountiful land. Rather than the construction of man, the village seemed to have formed organically from the very stuff of the forest and it seemed that to live life in a place like this would be to become an organism in service of the trees.

We followed the music to an open theatre, roofed with more palm leaves but open at the side, and watched a traditional dance performed by a group of native girls. They were such slight creatures that it seemed impossible that they should dance with such grace while encumbered with head-dresses and thick bracelets, brooches, buckles, and embroidered garments. But graceful they were, and they moved with such entrancing charm that the three of us stood quite transfixed as their arms and fingers etched intricate, exotic patterns on the Parisian air and their musicians beat out rapid yet oddly plaintive rhythms.

How long we stood there I cannot tell, but when the show finished the first hint of evening could be felt on the air and the feeling of being transported to some distant shore was complete. Silently we made our way back to the huts of the village and dipped inside the first one, finding low benches set around the wall. We spoke not a word as we arranged ourselves, perhaps fearing to break the spell that the dancers had woven around us. We were entranced.

“This is how life should be,” I said eventually, stretching out in contentment.

“Exactly!” Mohandas suddenly leaned forward. “This is the life for which we are intended. This is the level at which our moral and economic life should be organised. We cannot understand the world in a city where every neighbour is a stranger – we have no feeling of kinship. But in a place like this, where everything is shared, men could see the consequences of their actions and be held responsible for them. In a place like this, justice would be a reality.”

“You’re a romantic!” Casement was laughing but not mocking.

“You think so?”

“You think this thing,” Casement took in the village with a flick of his head, “is real. It isn’t. It’s a fiction.”

“Not this place, perhaps, but places like this are real.”

“No,” Casement’s voice rose slightly. “I hadn’t seen it before but your background has made you as distant from places like this as mine.”

“You know nothing of my background.”

“I think I do. You are a child of privilege – more so even than I, I think–”

“My family were not wealthy.”

“No? But you have been privileged. You have had an education, a chance to travel, and all the while protected by your family’s position. You said your father was a politician, so you have grown up amidst the exercise of power.”

“That hardly invalidates my opinions.”

“Of course not,” Casement stood up and walked to the door of the hut, bending to look out into the village beyond. “But you know nothing of what it is to really live in places like this.”

“And you do?”

“More than you, I think.” He dipped beneath the roof of the hut and stepped out. Mohandas followed him. Reluctantly, I trailed behind – regretting what I had started. “At least I have lived amongst these people – though, I confess, always apart, always with the knowledge that I could walk away. But I saw enough to see that their life was not one of harmony with their surroundings but a struggle just to gather enough to live. One poor harvest and a generation may be lost.”

“Then we should temper our society to live by what nature can provide.”

“Why, when we have the power to set these people free from nature’s tyranny?”

“You think your work sets the poor free, but you simply bring them another form of imperialism,” Mohandas’s lawyerly training had taken control; he spoke evenly and with confidence. “The ideas of progress you force upon them are as alien and destructive as any imperial army.”

“Perhaps,” Casement conceded and, for a moment, Mohandas broke his stride – surprised. “But the ideas I bring them are no more alien than yours, and no more dangerous.”

“Dangerous? How could it be dangerous to live within one’s means?”

“How could such communities protect themselves from the true imperialists – whether amongst their neighbours or the white men?”

“But what would an imperialist want with a poor village?”

“Wealth.”

“But a place like this would have no gold, no jewels,” Mohandas smiled. “I think there would be nothing here to bring the conqueror.”

“I think you misunderstand the nature of wealth and the desire for power.” Casement did not return the friendly smile. “Riches aren’t built on gold but on people. What use is gold if you have no labour to dig it from the ground? How can palaces be constructed if you have no slaves to build them for you? And what good is wealth if there are not masses of people possessing nothing to gaze upon your fortune with envious eyes? What is power if it is not exercised in the subjugation of others to your will?”

Mohandas opened his mouth to speak, but Casement did not pause. He was striding around the little village now, hands clenched behind his back, his body tense, his jaw firmly set. His voice was loud, his accent becoming quite nasal and pronounced, and his eyes were ablaze.

“But this all starts from a false premise. Those with power would never let your dreamy villages exist, for they would bring gold and trinkets and buy your villagers first, and if that did not work they would bring rifle and horse and force their compliance. The only way that a village like this can be free is if its people are given the tools of the modern age and made as powerful as anyone who would threaten them. It is the job of those who care to construct a decent world to give them those tools.”

“No!” Mohandas’s voice was gentler than Casement’s and he habitually spoke so softly that the fact that he raised it now visibly shocked the young Irishman. “Guns are nothing without men to wield them. Gold is nothing without people willing to be bought. You underestimate the power of resistance.”

“And you underestimate the determination of the powerful to stay that way.”

There was a rustle in the trees. I looked up to see the Malayan girls whose performance we had recently watched peeking from between the leaves of the plantation’s vegetation. How long they had been there, I could not guess. From the bewildered looks on their faces, it had clearly been long enough to understand that the two smartly-dressed gentlemen before them were arguing furiously.

One of the girls noticed me and I doffed my hat to her. She giggled and nudged one of her companions who, in turn, began to laugh. My companions, however, were so entirely engrossed in their debate that they squabbled on, unaware of their audience. One of the bolder girls began to imitate Casement’s mannerisms, which set another girl to imitate Mohandas’s air-cutting hand movements.

The giggling turned into outright laughter.

At last there was a pause.

The argumentative pair turned towards me, confused. I nodded towards the trees. The Malay girls howled and suddenly the two lions of debate became blushing boys. In a moment, I was roaring more loudly than any of the dancers.

“I must go on to Brussels tomorrow,” Casement said as we paused on the Pont de l’Alma. We were alone, Mohandas having gone in search of vegetarian food, and the streets of Paris suddenly emptied. “I must see if there is work for me back in Africa.”

He placed his hands on the low balustrade and I rested my hand on top of his. He looked around furtively and then leant his shoulder against mine. We shared a smile.

Paris had pulled down the stars and draped them around herself. The banks of the Seine glowed with all the majesty of the Milky Way. The river, blacker than the night sky, ripped silently against the bridge’s buttresses and reflected a uncountable points of light in every swirl and eddy. Further down the river the city’s other bridges were ribbons of light leaping across the darkness. Boats of every shape and size, brightly lit and filling the night with laughter and the clinking of glasses, seemed to dance at the feet of the great statues that guarded our bridge.

“At least tonight will be memorable,” I said.

Casement, his eyes on the rippling river, nodded and smiled softly, but I sensed part of him was already back in Africa.

Now, almost seventy years after our trip to Paris, Casement is long gone – executed in an English jail – and my friend Mohandas is dead these ten years – assassinated by a fool. Both lived their beliefs, turning ideas into actions, and both were killed because of them.

Though the history books show that their lives followed quite separate trajectories, I have recently come to think that they led to rather similar places. Both fought for independence for countries that would ultimately be divided by religious enmity that was stronger than they could conceive. And their dreams of justice and equality have been betrayed by those who used revolutions to replace one corrupt set of rulers with another. Neither man would be content with the continuing penury and exploitation of his nation’s poor and both would, I am sure, find themselves fighting the very governments they struggled to create. In revolution or resistance, progress or simplicity, Irishman and Indian were both victorious and defeated, and they have become symbols that embarrass those who have come after them.

Today I found myself wandering with my friends through the Paris of the Exposition and that great model of the globe was spinning, once again, at our feet. Somewhere above my head a Russian device is circling the globe. I have heard its frantic, crackling warble on the wireless. I wonder if allowing all humanity to stand above the Earth and watch it turn might not have the same profound effect on all the world that it on the three of us so long ago. However we die, we live together and now we can see the world now as it truly is, just a speck. Yet even this mote – significant only to us – is so massive that it overwhelms our petty differences.

I see the great engines of the Galerie des Machines and laugh at how impressed we were by toys that have been entirely surpassed in the years that followed. I think of our journey into the past, to that most distant village, and my companions’ disagreement. I am surprised that my strongest memory is not of the words of two great men putting forward their visions for a better world but of the laughing Malay girls who mocked them before going on their own way through their ersatz forest and away into the Parisian night, quite unaware of the weight of the discussion they had witnessed.

Finally, I am back on the Pont de l’Alma and the smell of roses rolls across the water from the gardens constructed on the Trocadéro. I turn back to gaze at the Champ de Mars; Eiffel’s slender tower knifes the night sky with twinkling diamonds and the great palaces shine brightly. The South Bank is ablaze with the light of man’s greatest achievements. I reach out and, just for a moment, I seem to have gripped all time and space and that I might manipulate an awesome power to remake the world.

I could set free the engines that Casement so admired. Unleashed at last, their energies might set men free. Or I could crush them and cast us all back to innocence. Mohandas believed that those machines were as much the tools of slavery as chains and rifles.

The choice is mine. If I can make it.

I hesitate.

And then Casement is beside me, urging me onwards into the Parisian night. I follow him into the gardens on the Trocadéro and we lose ourselves again amongst tall hedges and the perfume of flowers.

“Palaces of Force” was first published in Aeon SF #8

PALACES OF FORCE was originally published on Welcome To My World

#science fiction #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

SEVEN-SWANS-A-SWIMMING

Lir was a great lord who ruled the lands of the white hill. His fields were bountiful, his rule prosperous and his people content. Lir and his wife Aodb were happy and they had two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, when Aodb fell pregnant again. This time she bore twins, two fine boys, but in childbirth Aodb was lost and darkness descended upon Lir and his lands. During these dark days the king’s only solace was his children.

Alice stared at the rain streaming down the car’s windscreen and absentmindedly drew patterns on the misted glass. Boxing Day was starting damp and grey and Alice, nursing a bad hangover, felt the weather was reflecting her own life back at her.

How had it gone so wrong?

She’d had such plans for the holidays. This Christmas was going to be perfect. Just this once, everyone was going to be happy.

The presents were wrapped. The fridge was crammed with food and drink. She’d spend far more than she should have, but it was going to be worth it. The little ones were excited and she really thought that she and Bill were happy together.

And then it had all fallen apart.

Bill’s youngest, Tommy, had sulked because she’d bought him the wrong sort of computer game. Katie, all teenage contempt and bile, had just laughed at her attempts to bring them together as a family. And pretty little Sally had just cried all day, longing for her real mummy.

And Bill?

Bill got drunk, fell asleep at the dinner table and, when the rows started, woke up just long enough to say that he was going to the pub.

He didn’t come back.

All night.

Again.

Aodb had been the ward of the great king of Ireland. The king grieved for her loss and for the sadness it brought to his friend Lir. To raise his spirits, the king suggested that Lir should marry Aoife, the sister of his lost wife. Lir agreed and, for a time happiness returned to the lands of the white hill.

Alice had driven her car to the park on the edge of town. The road curled around a small lake and on the corner there was enough space to pull over and look down across the water to the far shore. She had sat here many times and watched the birds – grebes, ducks, geese and even a heron that swallowed the fish in a single gulp. But she loved the four mute swans best. They built their messy nests around the low island that rose from the middle of the lake and cruised across the water with effortless grace and unshakeable confidence.

But in the first light of the morning the lake was still empty. The sun hadn’t quite risen although the sky in the east, beyond the water, was brightening fast. Only the pattering rain disturbed the surface of the water.

On the far shore, a few minutes earlier, she’s spotted a lone man walking his dog and a fox, wandering home after a night on the prowl, had sauntered past her car.

From behind her she heard a soft snuffling.

Alice made up her mind.

She slipped off the handbrake.

Aoife loved Lir and devoted herself to making him happy. But soon she realised that, while he was kind to her, his greatest affection lay with the children of her dead sister. At first this realisation made her sad but soon the sadness turned to jealousy and in time her jealousy to madness. She took the children to the countryside, determined to kill all four. But, standing over them with her dagger drawn, she found herself unable to strike. Instead, she used magic and condemned the children of Lir to live for 900 years as swans.

As the car juddered and bounced down the bank, Alice watched and felt surprised at how easy it all was. It had been easy to put a few of her sleeping pills in the hot chocolate. Easy to push the car over the edge. And now it was easy to watch as it slipped into the water.

It struck her that there was something jaunty about the way the car bobbed on the surface for a moment before the sudden rush of bubbles seemed to drag it down.

She’d expected someone to try and stop her.

She’d expected more noise.

The man with the dog rushed up, his chocolate covered Labrador straining excitedly on the leash.

“Do you need help?”

Alice shook her head.

“I’ll call the police,” the man said. His dog was whining, trying to get down to the water’s edge.

Alice sat down on a little bench.

It would all be easy now. Bill would be upset, of course, but without the children causing trouble between them, they’d soon settle down. The kids had been the cause of all the friction, she could see that clearly now.

“Is there anyone else in the car?” The man asked.

Alice smiled at him and then stared out at the water, waiting for seven swans to come swimming by.

SEVEN-SWANS-A-SWIMMING was originally published on Welcome To My World

#Ireland #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

ESKRAGH

We buried Thomas’s da today. We put him in the same patch of ground that we had pretended we were putting Thomas. Eighteen months. I never thought the old man would last so long.

The day was bright, clear and warm but there wasn’t much of a crowd. A couple of the fellas that he’d started drinking with, after Thomas, and his wife. She came up and shook my hand, afterwards, thanking me for coming.

She looked more relieved than sad.

“These are hard times,” she’d said. “But at least the priest didn’t take long about putting him in the ground.”

I stood for a while, after everyone else had gone, and admired the view.

I remember the funeral, the other one, for Thomas. It rained hard, there was no wind and the water fell in heavy sheets across the graveyard. That place is on top of a hill and normally you can see for miles. On a fine day you can see from Lough Neagh in the east to the Sperrins in the west and all the way to Louth in the South. That day, you couldn’t see as far as the grey stone wall that penned-in the dead.

The ground around the grave sucked at our feet and the wooden boards beneath our soles were swollen and soft, like decaying flesh.

Not that there was any of that in the coffin we were putting in the ground.

The priest droned on for an age about the young man we’d all lost and ignored the shuffling and the grumbling in the crowd as we got wetter and colder and the mud crept higher and higher up our legs and threatened to drag us all down with the empty box.

Thomas’s dad turned to me after his heavy clod of earth had bounced hollowly on the coffin. He grabbed my arm, his fingers hard as stone, and he fixed me with sunken grey eyes.

“No man should live longer than his children,” he said. I’d been Thomas’s friend for twelve years and that was maybe the first time he ever spoke directly to me. He only spoke to me once more.

This is how we lost Thomas.

The sky was the fiercest blue with a single skiff of white cloud scraping the edge of space high above us. We were at Eskragh Lough, six of us. We’d dumped our bikes in the long grass that grew right to the edge of the water, tossed our clothes behind us and dived in.

Eskragh’s not a big lough, but it’s deep and the water was still icy.

We roared at the shock of it and made for the big wooden raft that was tethered near the middle of the lough.

And then we lay, for an hour or two or more.

Sometimes we talked. Bullshit about girls or football or the Brits or music.

I remember Dec’s house had been raided by the army about a week before and he kept telling everyone about waking up with a huge British soldier, his face all blacked out with camouflage paint, looming over the end of the bed and staring down the barrel of the soldier’s rifle.

“All I could see were teeth and eyes,” he roared. “I shat myself.”

Sometimes we swam.

Sometimes we just lay and let our fingers and toes trail in the water.

We watched the army helicopters, big ones lumbering like fat bumblebees and sleeker ones that zipped like angry wasps, as they buzzed across the sky. And we watched the swifts and house martins rip the air, twisting and turning and swooping after insects. Sometimes a fish would break the water and we’d cheer and pretend we’d seen it leap.

Then, at some invisible signal like a flock of birds suddenly rising, we were up and off and swimming back towards the shore and our bikes.

But only five bikes were picked up.

We called and shouted. I swam back out to the raft. We swam deep into the lough.

We looked and looked. And then we went for help. And they looked and looked.

They never found Thomas.

Eskragh isn’t big, but it is deep.

I went to Thomas’s wake. I stood in the line that snaked out the door and down the path of the wee garden while we edged closer and closer to the house. I stopped in the doorway and watched the people wander around with their cups of tea balanced on hardly-used saucers whose absences left holes in the display of the little china cabinet in the hall. Tidy little sandwiches, cut in triangles with the crusts removed, rested beside their dainty cups. These people, far more used to mugs and whole rounds of bread, looked uncomfortable and confused in their best clothes. Up they stepped, each one repeating the same mantra: “sorry for your loss… sorry for your loss… sorry for your loss…”, the same grave shake of the head, a firm handshake and pursed lips as they traipsed past. Thomas’s ma and grandda sat on the sofa and nodded each of them through.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cross the threshold.

The line crept on. I let other’s pass me.

I’d turn around, I’d go home.

But I couldn’t leave.

I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go back.

Thomas’s ma looked up and saw me. I was trapped. She rushed across and grabbed my hand, patting it gently.

“You’re alright,” she said, softly.

“I’m sorry,” I felt my throat tighten and my eyes sting. And then I was crying, tears hot on my face and gasping for breath, leaning heavily against Thomas’s ma. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright.” She stroked my hair and whispered. She lead me through the kitchen, busy with women, aunts and neighbours, making sandwiches and tea, and lead me out into the quiet evening on the back step. “It wasn’t your fault.”

We sat on the step, the two of us crying for a long time. She held my hand in her lap. She smelled of earth and lemons and she rested her head on top of mine.

After a while someone coughed in the doorway behind us and Thomas’s ma straightened up and smoothed out her skirt.

“I have to go back,” she said, not letting go of my hand. “I want you to have something of his, before you go.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t – ”

She stopped me.

“Go up to his room, it’s just like he left it, I haven’t been able to go in there yet,” she patted my hand again. “Take something. Anything. Something that you can keep, that will remind you of him.”

“There isn’t anything – “

“Kathleen?” The voice came from inside, it was soft, slightly worried.

“I’m grand, I’m coming,” she said, then turned back to me. “I have to go back. You go on now.”

I dreamt of Eskragh. I dreamt of something pale and cold moving in the depths. It was fast and sleek and it shimmered slightly in the moonlight.

I followed in its wake as we moved through the water, down and down we went in the darkness and never reached the bottom.

And then the thing was gone and I was deep in the freezing lough and my lungs were burning and behind my eyes a terrible pressure was building and building as I began to rise, too slow, too slow, surrounded by a halo of silver bubbles.

I looked down.

The pale thing looked at me. For the first time I saw a face and sad, familiar eyes.

I woke with a gasp

The sweat that soaked my bed was icy cold.

I had been in Thomas’s room plenty of times before. We used to sit here listening to the charts on a Sunday afternoon and taking turns to play Deathchase or Manic Miner on his Spectrum.

He had a collection of page three girls cut out and hid between the pages of an old Warlord annual in his cupboard, we used to look at them too. I riffled out the yellowing newspaper pages and jammed them into the pocket of my jacket. It felt important that his ma didn’t find those.

Then I sat on the bed.

Was there anything I wanted here?

We’d long copied each others records, cassettes and computer games and, anyway, those weren’t the kind of things that his ma had meant.

There were books and comics, Thomas was a reader, but I didn’t have much use for them.

There were Thomas’s medals for football and hurley. The harp his uncle had made him when in the Long Kesh. There was the picture of Thomas Clarke signing the Proclaimation of the Irish Republic before the Easter Rising. Thomas’s ma was a Clarke, and Thomas had been named after her ancestor. And there was the picture of the Sacred Heart his parents had put above the bed.

None of this meant anything to me.

I stood up, rubbing my forehead, kneading my temples.

There was nothing here for me.

Then the door opened.

Thomas’s da was standing there.

I jumped and suddenly felt guilty. I was trespassing.

“Missus Toner said I could come up,” I said. “I wasn’t… I didn’t mean to –”

He just stood there, holding the door open.

I edged forward, ducking out beneath his arm.

As I passed him he stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. He was holding out something. I took it. I tried to say thank you but the old man wouldn’t look at me. He stepped into his son’s room and, without a word, closed the door.

I looked down.

I was holding Thomas’s Saint Christopher’s Medal. He always wore it. The silver medal on a leather band with the neat silver clasp, it was his favourite thing.

I weighed the medal.

Why hadn’t he worn it at Eskragh?

I wandered down the stairs and out of the house, the medal gripped tightly in my hand.

I was walking past Fallon’s, it’s an old man’s pub full of serious drinkers – men whose faces burn red with the tracery of veins spreading from their nose. The sacred heart lamps.

Thomas’s da came stumbling out, hard drunk on a Thursday afternoon. I was walking home from school, still in my uniform, and almost walked into him.

He looked at me. Did he recognise me? I don’t know.

I opened my mouth to say something but found I didn’t have any words.

“Eskragh took my son,” he said. “It won’t give him back.”

He didn’t last another week.

It’s dark. Eskragh is black and slick and smooth and it laps stickily at my feet, spreading a sickly chill up my body.

I take off my shirt and stand naked and shivering before the lough.

I take a breath and then I wade in fast, knowing that I must move quickly before the cold takes away my will. Another breath, almost a gasp as the water grips my chest, and then I dive in.

Down.

Already my lungs are aching.

Down.

I have Thomas’s St Christopher’s Medal gripped in my hand, the leather band wrapped around my wrist.

Down.

Eskragh isn’t a big lake, but it’s deep.

“Eskragh” was first published in Albedo One #39

ESKRAGH was originally published on Welcome To My World

#Ireland #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

PROPER LITTLE SOLDIER

Solomon and I had tried to push too far the previous night and so we spent the daylight hours lying in a ditch at the side of the road. It had seemed a comfortable enough spot to start with, a slightly deeper hollow hidden by the branches of a willow and an ancient, overgrown hedge. It was out of the wind and pleasantly shady in the early morning sunshine. But the rain started falling heavily from about midday and the ditch quickly filled and the hollow became a freezing pool.

Solomon refused to move on – he was certain there was a pod nearby but the rain and the whipping wind were making it difficult for him to pin them down. So he sat and strained to hear and I just got soaked, too afraid to make a sound and getting colder and more miserable as the day went on.

The rain stopped just before nightfall, the clouds cleared and a sparkling frost began to crisp the grass and spread rainbow crystals across the tops of small pools of rainwater. It was too early, the Western sky was still a stripe of burnt orange, but we had to move or we were going to freeze.

We took the chance that the cold would have sent any pod back wherever it had come from and clambered out of the ditch.

We stripped off our clothes there on the road, swapping into some of the relatively dry gear we’d hidden under our tarp. We were both shivering hard.

“Let’s not do that again,” I said.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Solomon spat the words at me.

“I didn’t say-”

“You picked the stupid place,” he said.

“Sol-”

“You know, Maggie, I don’t know why I bother,” he started to stamp off down the road. “You can be such a bitch.”

“Oh for god’s sake Sol!”

And off I plodded after him.

He stayed in a foul mood all evening and we bickered like an old married couple. Not that we were a couple. Not like that. Sol was a handsome man, with high cheekbones and beautiful dark eyes that, when he was in a better mood, he insisted he got from his father, a Somali sultan. But before things got bad I’d always said that all the good men were either married or gay – and Sol was both. His partner, Patrick, had been in London when it was hit and so with any luck he had been dead for almost eighteen months. I know sometimes Solomon had nightmares that Patrick was alive and was being hunted in the ruins of the city.

We were aiming to head north, into the cold, but we were staying off the main roads, keeping to country lanes and tracks where we could. Tonight we seemed to be heading more to the east, but the road was old and sunken between deep banks on either side, offering a feeling of comfortable protection. We walked on through the night our conversation limited a series of long and sullen silences interrupted by bouts of furious half-whispered bickering.

The arguments were good. They kept us warm and kept us moving when it would have been easier to stop and shiver and feel sorry for ourselves.

We were in the middle of a particularly good row about who was carrying the heaviest pack when Solomon stopped, turned and shoved me hard.

“You bast-”

The crossbow bolt ripped the air where I’d been standing and hit a tree in the hedgerow with a crack.

Solomon dropped to the ground and I followed.

“Don’t shoot!” We yelped together.

Another bolt pinged the tarmac between us and tumbled off into the dark.

“Go back!” The voice was a high-pitched squeak. A child.

Solomon and I shared a look.

I stood up, raising my hands.

“Maggie!” Sol made a grab for my ankle but I shook him off. “You silly cow!”

“Go back!” I heard the kid grunt as he snapped the crossbow string back into position.

“We just want to pass through.”

I saw his silhouette against the moonlight, peering out from behind a tree where the road turned sharply ahead. He was small – I’d have guessed nine or ten but the past two years had been tough and food could be hard to come by. He might be older and half-starved. The crossbow was big, but he handled it confidently enough.

I tried an experimental smile then realised that in the shadows of the deep-cut roadway it was probably too dark for him to see my face.

“We just want to follow this road and go on our way.”

“This road doesn’t go anywhere,” the boy shouted out. “This is the end of the road.”

I looked back at Solomon. He had the map. He shrugged.

“Then we’re lost and could use some directions,” I said.

“Go back!” He gestured with the crossbow.

“Oh come on kid,” Solomon stood up and took a step forward. “Just let us past.”

A third crossbow bolt flashed past.

“Sod this!” Suddenly Solomon was running, his long legs eating up the distance to the boy.

The boy was struggling with the crossbow, heaving at the string.

Solomon snatched the crossbow and smashed it against the tree.

The boy cowered back. Solomon raised his fist.

“Sol!” I shouted.

“He tried to kill me!”

“He’s a scared child!”

“He tried to kill you!”

“Let him be.”

I walked up to the pair of them. The boy was crouched at the foot of the tree. Solomon was glaring at him with an impressive impersonation of fury.

I put a hand on Solomon’s shoulder, and reached the other one out to the boy.

“We’re not going to hurt you.”

“I am,” Solomon growled.

The boy cowered back further.

I shoved Sol with my shoulder and he turned away, laughing.

“We’re not going to hurt you.” I knelt down and reached across. “We just want to pass through.”

And then he started crying.

Sol’s map reading was hopeless, we were miles from where he thought we were. The road we’d been following took one more sharp left turn and opened into a farmyard. The house had been hit hard. You could see where at least two pods had done their best to clean the place out.

The boy, Alf, had abandoned the house when the first attack had taken his parents but had made himself a surprisingly comfortable shelter high up in one of the barns.

It was well camouflaged, we’d never have found it without his help and even then we had a hard time scrambling up after his tiny frame.

The space was big enough for all three of us to lie down, but though Solomon and I were exhausted, the boy just wanted to chat.

He’d been alone for a long time.

After an hour or so of constant interrogation I tried to shush him with the threat that a pod might hear us talking.

“There’s no monsters around today,” he said, cocking his head, listening. “I can hear them when they come.”

I looked at Solomon, who just raised an eyebrow and shrugged. Sol’s ears were sharp – his ability to hear the creatures before they heard us had kept us alive for the last six months. Perhaps the boy had the same gift.

“Anyway,” the boy said, “we can see from here if they’re coming this way.”

He showed me where he’d cut out little viewing slits in the roof of the barn then disguised them. From up here he had a panoramic view of the surrounding fields.

The boy was right nothing was moving out there except the low grey clouds that swept westward.

The boy had plenty of food too – apples and vegetables from the garden behind the house, and jars of homemade raspberry jam. Solomon sat solemnly dipping his finger into the sugary mush and licking it slowly, rolling his eyes back and moaning softly with each new slurp.

“I used to take this for granted,” he sighed.

The day went by slowly. Alf, exhausted at last, fell asleep with his head in my lap.

I stared down at him, feeling totally helpless.

I looked up, Solomon was staring at me with a wry smile.

“We can’t leave him here,” I said.

“He might be safer here,” Sol said.

“Nowhere is safe.”

Sol nodded.

“I can’t leave him on his own.”

“What if he doesn’t want to come?”

“He will.”

Eventually I slept.

And that night the three of us set off. Heading north, to where it was colder and where, rumours said, there were still safe places.

We rarely managed more than four or five miles a night – we were being cautious, finding places to bed down for the day early on, setting out only when we were sure the creatures had retreated for the night. The going was slow, but the first chill of autumn turned the trees gold and lifted our spirits. Dusk was coming earlier, night lasted longer and it was getting colder. We felt that the planet was on our side.

After a week we came to a small village and found a shop that was almost intact. We helped ourselves to the stock on the shelves and made a little camp.

We hadn’t seen or heard from the creatures for days. We had full bellies and we were feeling good. We were happy.

Solomon shook me awake. The sun was shining straight down through the gaps created by missing slates in the roof, so I guessed it was around noon. I turned to Alf, reaching a hand across to cover his mouth in case he made a sound but he was already awake, staring at me.

He raised a single finger to his lips.

I smiled.

Then we sat and waited. I could hear the scuttling of rats and the steady drip of water into a puddle from a broken pipe. It was hot and I was thirsty and that water, no matter how stale, was very tempting.

The sun moved slowly across the sky, pools of light from the holes in the roof shifting across the floor. We were in an attic that was perched precariously on top of the slumped ruin of a suburban house.

How long passed before I heard the creature’s distant screech? It felt like hours but it might have been fifteen minutes, though I never doubted they were coming. Sol’s ability to pick out the high-pitched sounds the monsters used had saved our lives often enough. I kept silent and very still

Alf had heard them too. I felt him shivering next to me, but he jammed his tongue between his teeth to stop them chattering. The day was too warm for him to be cold. I reached my hand across and placed it on his chest. He gripped it tightly.

I hoped they might slip off to the side of our little village. The resistance sometimes baited places like this, a vulnerable little hamlet stuffed full of thermobarics could take out everything for half a mile and was enough to make even the creatures cautious. But these things seemed confident today. We heard their thump and squeal and shriek as they came closer and closer.

The creatures used sound. They used it to communicate, like we did, though I never met anyone who claimed to understand what they said to each other, constantly chittering and squealing and mewling.

They used sound to see – echo-location, like bats – even though they had things that looked like eyes. I’d heard people say that you could stand still in front of one and they’d slither right past so long as you didn’t make a sound. I never felt the urge to find out if that was true.

And they used sound as a weapon.

The first one was almost right below us when it boomed.

We’d known it was coming. The only time a pod was silent was just before a boom and just after. We’d known it was coming, but still it was like being smashed in the chest by a hammer. We’d known it was coming, but it was still hard not to grunt or moan or gasp.

And that would have been death.

All around us we heard the things pounce. A spear-like tentacle crashed through the floor of our hiding place, impaling a surprised rat through the throat before flashing away again. Across the road we heard a dog yelp and something that, for a horrible instant, sounded like a baby’s squeal but was probably only a cat, or maybe a fox. The things snuffled, unhappy with their pickings.

The second boom came quickly, faster than I’d expected. Too soon. We weren’t ready.

“Unff!”

Alf? I looked down, gripped with a sudden terror that mixed an almost maternal desire to protect the boy with the shocking awareness he has his arms were wrapped tightly around mine, making us both a target.

The boy looked up and I looked into his wide, wise eyes. He shook his head.

Not the boy. I felt relief, then a sudden, cold shower of sickening certainty.

Sol.

I turned my head.

The look of surprise on his face slipped into one of disappointment.

“Ah fu-”

Three spears splintered the slates and wood of the roof. One slammed through Sol’s skull, two pinned him in the chest. They whipped back. Sol disappeared, leaving just an after-image of his shredded body and a mist of blood.

The boy and I watched but made not a single sound.

For hours the pod circled our building, warbling their delight at their catch and booming, hoping for more, but the boy and I were still.

As morning turned to afternoon they seemed to move away, though every now and then one would suddenly unleash a boom nearby. The desire to move became an urgent pain and then a constant agony, but we sat motionless and silent. The sun went down and the village became still, but we did not move. Only when it was fully night and the moon was high and clear and frost stung the air did I allow myself to shift.

Alf smiled at me, then gasped, then sobbed and collapsed forward.

His trousers were slashed open across his hip and his leg was soaked with blood. One of the spears that killed Sol must have glanced off him.

“I didn’t cry!” He said.

I gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“You’re a proper little soldier.”

My first instinct was to flee that village as fast as I could, but Alf couldn’t walk and we had plenty of supplies.

So that night I ferried our stuff across to another attic, I couldn’t stand to look at the dark stain of Sol’s blood on the floor, and then carried the boy across.

In the new attic I washed out the boy’s wound and stitched it up as best I could. Through it all the boy bit his lip but never whimpered or cried. No sound left his lips except, when it was over, he whispered “Thank you” before falling asleep.

The creatures didn’t return but Alf developed a fever and the wound on his hip turned red and swollen.

That night I did something I hadn’t risked in nearly two years – I lit a fire, just a small one in a tin downstairs. The warmth and flickering light were shocking. I boiled some water and used it to wash out the wound. I’d taken antiseptic cream from the little shop, it was out of date but I didn’t see that that could do any harm, and slathered that onto Alf’s hip, then wrapped it in gauze and tape.

Alf’s temperature rose. He slept night and day for a week. I tried to feed him and give him sugary drinks but most of it seemed to end up on the floor.

A lot of the time there was nothing I could do but wait and watch him.

He never moved. He never cried out. He never made any sound, even when the fever was at its worst. He was silent and still.

And, as his fever broke and he started to come round, I began to realise something.

These creatures, whatever they were, wherever they’d come from, they had the power to wipe us all out. They’d destroyed our cities and our armies and shattered our civilisation and left us scrabbling in the dark.

They could wipe us out.

But they hadn’t.

Those of us they left alive survived because they thought we could do them no harm and because they enjoyed having us to hunt.

They believed we were beaten.

But they didn’t realise what they were creating.

After ten days Alf opened his eyes and smiled weakly up at me.

“Was I quiet?”

I nodded, and wiped a strand of hair out of his eyes.

“You were a proper little soldier,” I said.

They were making us stronger.

They were making the children who would one day defeat them. All over the world children were learning to use silence as a defence and silence as a weapon. One day, it might not be soon, but one day we would become the hunters again and the booming beasts would pay for their mistake.

“Proper Little Soldier” was first published in Conflicts from NewCon Press, edited by Ian Whates (and yes, it was before A Quiet Place came out, thank you for asking).

PROPER LITTLE SOLDIER was originally published on Welcome To My World

#science fiction #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

PATHFINDERS

Chen was outside, blowing the dust from the mirrors of the solar collector. The sun was low and distant and gave no warmth. The ground was hard and barren. The job he was doing was tedious and pointless. The damned solar collector barely worked, a failed experiment that was already half-forgotten by the engineers at Earth Control.

Everything was made more complicated by Chen’s suit. The gloves were stiff and hard and Chen had already lost one fingernail to their predations. A little stream of sweat burbled between his shoulder blades, an itch he couldn’t scratch though he twisted and shrugged in an effort to get some relief from the growing discomfort. Chen would have been happier in one of the old Orlans he’d lumbered around in while training in Star City and on the ISS. He was going to write another memo about the Mars suit to the design committee. Maybe they’d listen this time.

When his suit radio buzzed to life and Commander Arsenyev told him to stop what he was doing and come to the living quarters, Chen’s first reaction was a sigh of relief… which distracted him from the peculiar tone of the commander’s request. By the time he registered that there was something wrong, Commander Arsenyev had cut the connection.

Chen thought about contacting Brad and asking him what was going on, but he decided against it. The commander had said he was calling the whole crew together. That had never happened before. The commander liked his schedules, and if he was breaking them it meant there was something urgent he felt they all needed to hear at the same time.

So Chen did his best to hurry back to the base, but nothing was easy or quick. By the time he’d secured the solar collector’s mirrors and struggled back over the broken ground to the airlock, stowed his gear, gone through the recompression cycle, climbed out of his suit and put it in place, set the life support pack aside for recharging and pulled on a pair of blue overalls, almost an hour had passed. He arrived to find the rest of the crew already bored from waiting and his apologies met with a chorus of friendly barracking. He caught Brad’s eye as he went to his seat and was rewarded with a broad smile and a wink.

The dining hall was the only large open space in the base. The long table at which they ate their communal evening meals had been opened out and the crew were settled around it. Despite their various poses of exaggerated relaxation, Chen recognised an unusual brittleness in their chatter and a tautness in some of their expressions.

Commander Arsenyev climbed into the room from the corridor that led to the communications centre. He was a tall man, his hair the colour of steel, his blue shirt and chinos neatly pressed. Fourteen months into their mission, the commander still took meticulous care of his appearance and remained cautious of the effect his easy charisma still inspired amongst most of the crew. Roman Arsenyev had been in space a handful of times before Chen had been born. He had held records for the longest spacewalk and the longest time in orbit, and he’d trained most of Russia’s working cosmonauts. And yet he had always seemed unaware of the awe he inspired in those around him.

Today, though, his expression was tightly controlled and his movements brisk. The crew recognised the stiff formality in their commander’s attitude and responded almost at once by settling to stillness, the chatter and laughter dying away.

Maheesh Sahni, the Indian communications specialist, followed Arsenyev into the room. He was nervously rubbing one hand on the side of his jeans and refused to meet the eyes of anyone at the table.

“I’m sorry to pull you all away from your work,” Arsenyev said. “But I wanted you all to hear this directly from me.”

The crew straightened up in their seats.

“Approximately six hours ago we stopped receiving signals from Earth Control. The orbiter crew is reporting the same break in communications. Neither base has been able to establish a cause but we’ve been able to rule out the most obvious problems at our end. We don’t have any reason, at the moment, to suppose this is anything other than a technical glitch that will be sorted out by Earth Control; I propose we stick with existing protocols and to continue the mission schedule as planned.”

The crew nodded automatically. They were all used to taking Arsenyev’s orders without comment.

“I want to make one exception,” the commander went on. “I want Chen and Yohan to devote some of their time to working with Maheesh on this problem. I’ll post a revised rota for domestic chores, I’m afraid the rest of you will have to pick up some of the slack.”

Brinkmann, the German geologist, groaned theatrically and the rest of the crew laughed, releasing the tension they all felt. Even the commander grinned, briefly.

Chen was sitting on the edge of the bed when Brad knocked lightly on the door and stepped inside. Chen shuffled up and Brad sat beside him, kissing him softly. Chen ran his fingers across Brad’s cheek and into his tightly-curled hair.

“You need a shave,” Chen said when they eventually pulled apart.

“That’s not all I need.”

Chen smiled and they kissed again.

They made love quietly, as was their habit. They didn’t suppose any of the rest of the crew would have cared much but they’d made the decision to keep their affair to themselves almost unconsciously. Privacy was a rare commodity on the base, so to have something that was theirs’ alone was precious and part of the pleasure. But, also, Brad was married with children and neither of them had ever pretended that the relationship had a life beyond the mission.

It was fun but it was best to be discreet.

Later, Chen lay with his back to Brad, enjoying the heat of the other man’s chest pressed against him in the narrow bunk and the security of being wrapped in his heavy arms. He marvelled, again, at the contrast between his own pale, narrow fingers and Brad’s teak-stained hands, which seemed massive by comparison.

“What do you think has happened?” Brad said.

Chen shrugged, knowing instantly what he was talking about. They’d spent two days and two nights trying to re-establish contact with Earth Control, so far to no effect. The longer the problem persisted the more it began to fill up the thoughts of the crew. Chen suspected that Maheesh had been right from the start, there was no problem at their end, but he was also coming to suspect that whatever had gone wrong was much more than a simple malfunction at Earth Control.

“I thought it might be someone’s idea of an exercise. Control is always throwing us curveballs to keep us on our toes, but they wouldn’t have stretched things this long without letting the Commander in on their games.”

“Do you think it…” Brad trailed off, unable to bring himself to say what he was thinking.

Chen’s mind had started conjuring up disaster scenarios almost from the moment they’d learned about the breakdown and they had been growing bigger and more intricate ever since. He assumed that was true for everyone.

Chen shuffled around in the bed, turning awkwardly to face Brad, and rested his palm against the bigger man’s chest.

“We don’t know anything,” he said. “The simplest explanation is that it’s a technical fault, and Occam’s Razor is usually the best rule to follow.”

Brad bowed his head and Chen leaned forwards and kissed him on the forehead.

Maheesh was sitting at the communications console. Chen wasn’t sure, in the four days since they’d lost contact with Earth Control, whether he’d seen the soft-faced engineer move from that desk for longer than it took him to walk the length of the living quarters to the lavatory and back. Yohan was outside working on the communications array and swearing softly at his colleagues through his suit radio. Most of the swearing was in French but every now and then Yohan got creative and threw some English and Russian into the mix. Chen was working on the code for the communications software.

An hour passed, Yohan completed his checks and came back into the base, his Tt-shirt sweat stained and his mood foul. The communications room was cramped and hot with the three of them in there, and it was doing nothing for their tempers. They ran some more tests.

“Nothing!” Maheesh sat back and slammed both hands down onto his desk, sending the accumulated detritus of their work marathon—coffee cups, paper, food packaging—swishing and clattering to the floor. “There is nothing wrong.”

“Maheesh?” Commander Arsenyev stood in the doorway. His expression was firm but something in the way he took half a step forward suggested concern. Chen noted that he’d taken to wearing the formal mission uniform. His blue overalls were spotlessly clean and neatly pressed.

Maheesh straightened up.

“Yes, commander?”

“I take it things are not going well?” The commander smiled gently.

Maheesh snorted. “We’ve replaced every component from here to the satellite dish. The satellite is responding, but beyond that is a black hole.”

“Are you ready to take down the filters?”

Maheesh looked at Chen.

“Yes, commander,” Chen said. “But I’m not sure it will make any difference.”

“Can it hurt to try?” Arsenyev flashed a smile.

“No, commander.”

“Okay then,.” Arsenyev leant against the door jamb. If he was tense, there was no sign of it. “Let’s do it.”

Maheesh spoke briefly to the crew on the orbiter base, letting them know comms was going offline, then nodded. Chen took his cue and, with couple of taps on the screen and a rattle on the keyboard, he shut down the base’s communications software, changed the system settings and flicked away a cloud of warning dialogue boxes. He hit the power button.

“Resetting the system,” he said.

They waited for a moment.

White text scrolled down the black screen as the system re-initialised. Chen watched carefully as the code slipped past. The screen blanked for a moment and then the operating system popped into life with a soft chime. The communications software interface came online. Chen checked it carefully then looked up at Commander Arsenyev.

“Filters have been removed. The buffer was empty, and has been disabled. It contained no incoming messages. We have direct access to the satellite.”

“Thank you, Chen,” Arsenyev smiled. “Maheesh?”

But Maheesh was already eagerly battering his keyboard with heavy fingers.

They waited, but it didn’t take long and Maheesh didn’t have to say anything. They could see his shoulders slump as his hope and enthusiasm quickly faded.

Commander Arsenyev didn’t wait for Maheesh to turn around.

“I think we need another crew meeting,” he said, turning to leave the communications room, and climb through the tunnel back towards the living quarters. “Get in touch with the orbiter and arrange a link up.”

“Commander?” Yohan spoke softly. Arsenyev stopped but didn’t turn around. “Commander, we need to discuss the protocols.”

It was Arsenyev’s turn to allow his shoulders to slump slightly. He raised a hand and rested it on the back of his neck.

“I know.”

The meeting had gone badly. The crew had split three ways over the crisis. The Americans—Brad, the red-headed engineer Killen, and Harding, the commander of the orbiter crew, all wanted to take action now. Brinkmann sided with the Americans. The Russians, led by the commander, with the base doctor Komolov and Manev on the orbiter argued that they had air, food, power and water for as long as they needed it and that it made sense to sit tight and keep to the mission profiles. Maheesh sided with them. Chen, Yohan and the Englishman, Bryant, also on the orbiter, found themselves caught in the middle.

The dread that had been gestating inside every member of the crew over the last four days began to push its way to the surface as the debate went on. After forty minutes of increasingly pointless bickering, it exploded into the room in bright bursts of rage and recrimination.

Chen had found himself the focus of the Americans’ anger when it became clear they weren’t going to get their way. Although he was officially on the mission as an Italian citizen he had been educated at MIT and had worked at NASA before joining the European astronaut programme. The Americans had assumed he would be on their side. Killen had said some nasty things.

Commander Arsenyev had been forced to end things by restating his ultimate authority and making it clear that, for now, the mission protocols remained in place. Nobody had been satisfied. The commander’s final words were firm but it was clear he was disappointed with the way things had gone. Harding, however, had been furious and had cut off the orbiter link with a snap.

Afterwards, Chen went to the gym.

He turned on the treadmill, starting slowly but steadily ramping up the pace until he was working hard, feeling sweat prickle his forehead. Soon he was in a rhythm and the regular beat of his feet on the rolling track began to soothe him.

He was just passing the six-kilometres mark when Brad slipped into the room, closing the door behind him. Chen signalled his friend to wait and changed the programme, finishing his run with a brief sprint before winding down to a gentle halt.

Chen grabbed a towel and took a long drink from his bottle. Brad had stayed by the door, leaning against it, his hands behind his back.

“What’s up?” Chen walked over and, rising up on his toes, kissed Brad lightly. Brad didn’t respond.

Chen stepped back.

“Brad?”

“Why are you doing this?”

Chen was startled by the coldness in Brad’s eyes and the harsh edge to his voice.

“I don’t—”

“I can’t believe you’d be so selfish.,” Brad cut him off.

Chen wiped the sweat from the back of his neck, draping the towel around his shoulders.

“Don’t. Brad, please.” Chen wanted to go, to get back to his room, lock the door and pretend this wasn’t happening. He tried to get around Brad but the bigger man grabbed him by the arms and shoved him back across the room, pressing him against the cool outer wall. Brad’s grip was powerful and Chen had to force down a yelp of pain.

“You can’t keep me here,” Brad said. “I have to get home.”

Chen refused to meet Brad’s gaze. He just stood there.

“I have a wife and daughters,” Brad’s voice was rising. “We don’t know what’s happened to them.”

Chen said nothing.

Brad released him with a shove.

“Damn you!”

“Brad…”

Brad raised his hand, clenched into a fist, but didn’t strike. There were tears in his eyes.

“Brad, you know I’m not trying to keep you here,” Chen said. “Even if I wanted to keep you away from your wife—and I don’t—I wouldn’t let that get in the way of making the right decision now. Our lives might depend on this.”

“I’m scared,” Brad said.

That caught Chen by surprise. Fear wasn’t something any astronaut liked to admit. You left fear behind in training, that’s what they said. Brad caught the change in Chen’s expression.

“Not for me,” he said. “My girls…”

“I know,” Chen said, and then regretted it. They both knew Chen didn’t know what it was like to have kids. “But we don’t have enough information to make any decisions yet. We don’t even know if there’s anything really wrong.”

“We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

Brad turned away. Chen raised a hand to rest on his shoulder, but stopped himself. His hand hovered over his lover like a benediction.

“Yes we can. We have to,” Chen said. “Anything else could be suicide.”

“Harding said—”

“I heard what he said, but what if he’s wrong? What if it is just a glitch and all Harding’s half-thought-through bravado achieves is to leave your girls without a father?”

Brad slumped onto the bench used for lifting weights. He sat, head down, his elbows resting on his knees, his palms together as though in prayer.

“Komolov said something to me earlier,” Chen said. “He said the difference between Americans and Russians is that when the Americans went west to find their wild frontier they found Iowa and California and they conquered it and tamed it. When Russians went East they found Siberia and it was never conquered and never tamed,; they could only ever come to a compromise with the land.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Brad looked up. The anger was draining from him and, perhaps despite himself, a smile flickered on his lips.

“Komolov was saying that Americans expect to conquer everything. Russians expect to live with it. The Russians will wait things out, wear things down and survive. Americans want to do everything now. They expect to keep moving forward.”

“And you?”

“Well, my Chinese grandma had an old saying—”

“Chen!”

“No, really, she always said: Qí lǘ zhǎo mǎ!”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I have no idea, I grew up in Florence.”

Brad laughed. Chen liked that sound. He sat beside Brad on the bench, resting a hand on the other man’s knee. Brad tensed for a moment, then relaxed and put his hand over Chen’s.

“The translation is something like: when you go looking for a new horse, ride the mule you already own.”

Brad stared blankly at him.

“It means that even when you’re looking for something better, you shouldn’t neglect what you’ve already got,.” Chen nudged him back. “We’re safe here. We have time. We’ll work out what’s happening. But we can’t do just something stupid because we’re scared. We mustn’t panic. We’re no use to anyone—neither your daughters nor to my father—if we’re dead.”

Brad bowed his head again and clenched and unclenched his fists then he leant over and kissed Chen on the cheek, but there was sadness in his eyes.

“You might be right,” he said. “But I don’t think it will matter.”

The crew argued amongst themselves for another week. The European team wavered back and forth, unable to agree a joint position and caught between two blocs who seemed unshakeable in their determination to follow different paths.

In the end it was the orbiter crew who broke the deadlock and shattered the mission protocols.

It was just after midday on the tenth day of radio silence when Chen, not long after finishing a nightshift in the comms room, was woken by shouting in the corridor outside his room. He staggered drowsily to his door and looked out to see Komolov, the Russian doctor, red-faced and screaming insults in a crude mix of Russian and English. It took another few moments for Chen to recognise the object of the doctor’s tirade.

It was Harding, the American commander of the orbiter base. Behind him trailed a sheepish looking Bryant and, further back, Manev stood with his head bowed as though in shame.

Chen could smell something familiar but it took a moment to place it. It was soft, damp earth. They hadn’t smelt that since the mission had started nearly four hundred days ago. Then he noticed the breeze. The airlock doors were open.

Komolov was still shouting, but there were less swear words now and he was being more coherent—though he was still switching freely between English and Russian. Chen caught the words contamination and breach.

Brad and Killen came out of their rooms. They were both dressed in uniform. Chen tried to catch Brad’s eye but he looked away, embarrassed or ashamed.

He knew, Chen thought. He knew and he didn’t tell me.

Chen was surprised by the intense and intimate sense of betrayal that swept through his body.

Harding nodded towards his countrymen but ignored Komolov as he made his way towards Commander Arsenyev’s room. His expression revealed no emotion but there was something triumphant in his movements and the way he threw back his shoulders.

Komolov stepped in front of the American and tried to shove him back up the corridor, towards the airlock.

Harding, bull-chested, thick-shouldered and blunt-headed, didn’t even take a step back. The look on his face remained blankly calm but he brought his fist up fast and hard into Komolov’s midriff. The Russian gasped and doubled over. Harding walked past him.

Commander Arsenyev’s door swung open.

The old man stood there. He was in uniform. His mouth was a thin line of contempt, his blue eyes glacial. He took in the doubled up Komolov and the swaggering Harding.

“Idiot!”

“I think we need to reconsider the mission protocols,” Harding said. His tone was flat but there was a noticeable pause before he added: “Sir.”

Chen closed the airlock door. Killen snorted something about that horse having bolted, but it made Chen feel better. Even so, he knew there was no going back to their cosy old routines now. They gathered in the dining hall. The Russians hugged one wall, the Americans the other. The Europeans sat at the table. No one spoke.

Eventually Arsenyev and Harding came in. Harding looked pleased with himself.

They both sat at the head of table.

“We have decided—” Harding started.

Commander Arsenyev lowered a hand onto the table, palm down. It was a slow movement but it drew the attention of the rest of the crew. Harding, noticing that he’d lost his audience, stopped and turned to the commander. Then he nodded and sat back.

Commander Arsenyev smoothed the front of his uniform, pausing for a moment over the roundel of his mission badge—a red Mars encircled by eagle wings. The word Pathfinders picked out in gold letters with translations in Russian, German, French, Italian, and Urdu running around the circumference. The commander looked up, taking in each member of the crew. Chen noticed that many of them could not meet his gaze, only Killen looked him squarely in the eye.

Harding shifted impatiently as the silence lengthened. At last the commander spoke.

“The ongoing communications situation and the…” the hesitation was brief but pointed, “… action by the orbiter crew requires us to reconsider our situation. It seems clear that the mission protocols are no longer relevant and there is nothing in the emergency mission procedures that covers our current situation. I have agreed to Commander Harding’s request to bring you together so we can discuss our next step.”

Harding tapped on the tablet in front of him and an image blinked to life on the wall. There was a map. Ross Island, McMurdo Sound and the dry valleys. A red line tracked a route from the Mars Base, in Beacon Valley, an isolated outcropping of rock to the east, down the Ferrar Glacier across the New Zealand territory via Lake Fryxell and down to the coast via Camp Chocolate, the Bratina Island Refuge and then over the ice shelf to McMurdo. Having reached its destination the red line reset and started all over again. It looked so simple.

“I propose that we make for the base at McMurdo and—”

“How far is that?” Komolov asked.

Harding’s irritation at the interruption was obvious. He looked over his shoulder to the map.

“On foot, if we don’t get too sidetracked on the glacier, about one hundred and eighty miles.”

Brinkmann whistled.

Komolov sat back and folded his arms.

“With winter closing in?”

“You’d rather wait six months for the possibility of nicer weather?”

“How long do you think it will take?” Yohan asked.

“I believe we can make at least ten miles a day,” Harding said. “We managed the four-mile crossing from the orbiter base in five hours.”

Chen shook his head.

“We can build sleds, our suits are insulated, we have emergency survival gear.”

“And what happens when you get there?” Yohan asked.

“We get in touch with home. We find out what is going on.”

“There’s no one there,” Maheesh said.

Attentions shifted. Maheesh kept his gaze on the table, refusing to look up.

“You can’t know that,” Harding said.

“There’s no one there,” Maheesh repeated. He put his own tablet on the table and started an audio recording that played over the room’s speakers. “This is from McMurdo, five days ago.”

There was a muffled sound. It might have been the wind or it might have been someone sobbing. Then there was a crack that could have been a gunshot or a door slamming and then there was silence.

“The radio channel is still open, there’s power, but no one is broadcasting.”

Suddenly everyone was shouting.

Chen looked to Commander Arsenyev. He did not look surprised.

“Where did you get that?” Chen asked.

Maheesh cocked his head, unable to hear over the noise.

“Where did you get that?” Chen shouted. The others turned their attention back to the table. Everyone looked at Maheesh.

“I instructed him to use the emergency short wave radio,” Commander Arsenyev’s spoke softly but everyone heard him.

“Radio?” Harding voiced was suddenly high pitched. “Why didn’t you tell us there was a radio?”

“There wasn’t any point,” Maheesh said. “I tried to contact the other bases—”

“We should have been told!” Killen was leaning over Maheesh, practically screaming into his face.

“He was acting on my request,.” Commander Arsenyev stood up and raised his voice just a notch. It was enough to restore a semblance of order. “The radio was provided for use in an emergency. When we shut down the buffers on the communications array and still could not contact mission control, I gave Maheesh permission to use the radio to try and contact the local bases. I asked him to keep the recording secret because I didn’t want to damage morale.”

“Damage morale?” Harding stood up. “So what was your plan? Were you going to lie to us forever? Or did you only care about keeping your little empire in one piece?”

“I was going to tell you when we understood what it meant,” Arsenyev said. He sat down again,and began to gently massage his temples. There was something very like resignation in his voice. “Something bad has happened and it has happened quickly over a very wide area. The radio is picking up nothing except some official automated alerts and the occasional number station, which I’m also assuming are automated. There was nothing to report and little to be gained from further feeding all the useless speculation that has been going on.”

Harding walked to the door of the living quarters.

“You should have told us,” he said, and left.

Killen, Brinkmann, Bryant and Yohan followed.

Brad paused to look at Chen.

Chen shook his head. Where was there to go?

Brad left.

Three days later, the three Americans and three Europeans left Mars Base to make for McMurdo. They’d decided amongst themselves that the radio communication changed nothing. They needed to know what was happening. There were some angry exchanges about the division of equipment and food but Chen kept to his room. Brad did not visit him.

Yohan and Bryant visited him once and tried to convince him to come with them. Chen wished them luck, but said no.

On the final morning, Chen helped with some minor changes to the communications software. As the time for their departure approached resentments cooled and some of the group’s old camaraderie re-emerged. The Russians and Europeans exchanged hugs, and Harding shook hands with Arsenyev and said he was sorry about how things worked out.

Brad and Killen stood apart from the rest and did not speak to anyone.

The commander wished them all good luck, and then the Russians went inside and Maheesh followed.

Chen watched them walk across the rocky, broken floor of the dry valley towards the distant white line that was the glacier. It was early and the sun had yet to rise above the wall of their valley but the ice was already bathed in morning light.

Their progress was slow. They would dip down out of sight and then rise again on the undulating landscape, each time slightly further away, slightly smaller. And then they were gone again.

Chen watched, but Brad never turned to look back.

They stayed in contact for almost a week using the base’s communication system before they were out of range and the signal faded. When they reached Lake Fryxell they got in contact again using the research base radio. The camp was deserted, but that was normal with winter edging in. There was still no response from McMurdo.

They got in touch again when they reached Cape Chocolate.

The weather was worsening and they spent three days in the small refuge; it was cramped but they were in good spirits. They were making better time than expected and though the huts, which weren’t in regular use, were battered, they were intact and offered good protection.

On the fourth morning the weather cleared and Chen listened over Maheesh’s shoulder as they got ready to make for the Bratina Island Refuge.

Chen heard Brad laughing in the background. It made him smile.

They never heard from them again.

“We’re almost finished,” Chen said as he came in to the living quarters. “Komolov asked if you’d like to say a few words?”

Commander Arsenyev didn’t look up but he nodded. He’d been sitting with the lights off, his face lit from below by the tablet screen he was pretending to read.

They were silent for a while. Chen drank a glass of water and tossed a meal pack into the oven—he didn’t even bother to check what was inside. He watched it slowly turning and then, when the oven pinged, he ate it from the packaging, standing up, leaning against the work surfaces. The food was salty and sour, the chicken rubbery and the vegetables overcooked.

Eventually the food was gone. Chen waited a little longer then turned to go.

“Do you miss Flight Engineer Washington?” Arsenyev said.

Washington? Chen had to stop to think who the old man meant.

“I miss them all,” Chen said. “I miss Brad.”

“You were close.” Arsenyev looked up. The light from the tablet screen highlighted every crease and wrinkle on his face. The Commander looked tired, he had become very old in the six weeks since they’d last heard from the rest of the crew.

Chen nodded.

“I miss them all too,” Arsenyev said. “Do you suppose there are others, like us, waiting?”

Chen came back and sat next to the Commander.

“There must be.”

“You are an optimist,” Commander Arsenyev smiled and patted him on the shoulder.

“Maheesh thought he’d picked up faint signals,” Chen said. “People babbling in languages he couldn’t understand.”

“Maheesh was working too hard,” Arsenyev said.

“Did he say why he did it?” Chen nodded to Arsenyev’s screen. Maheesh had left a message for the commander’s eyes only before he’d opened his wrists.

“No,” Arsenyev said. “He just wanted to say goodbye.”

A deeper loss revealed itself on the commander’s face. Chen felt a sudden shock of recognition.

“You and Maheesh?”

“If I had not been commander…” Arsenyev smiled but shook his head. “But I have always been too ambitious…”

“Ambitious?” Chen couldn’t imagine what the commander still hoped to achieve.

“They promised me Mars. It would be a one-way ticket, just me and some equally useless old American, sacrificed to beat the Chinese. But Mars!”

It seemed as if a new light had been ignited behind the commander’s eyes. For a moment the old man was gone and the cosmonaut re-emerged.

“But what about the base? Our mission?”

“This? This was always impossible! This is all far too grand and too expensive for these mean times. This was a show, a distraction. But I don’t suppose it matters. None of us shall touch that rusty soil now.”

The old man coughed. He was suddenly frail again.

“All my life, I dreamed of space,” the commander said.

The Russians settled in to wait, a routine took shape and weeks passed. They monitored the radio in shifts, they ate meals together and watched films—though most of the Russian films left Chen bewildered, even with Manev’s running commentaries. They even kept some of the science projects going, though the solar collector was quietly abandoned without discussion or protest.

Then one morning the commander did not wake up.

Chen helped Manev carry the body outside. The old man seemed weightless and Chen had thought of the buzzard he’d once found injured and stunned beneath an electricity pylon in his father’s fields. Chen had marvelled at how something so huge and fierce could be so insubstantial. His father had scolded him for bringing the wounded bird to the house, blaming it for killing his lambs, and broke the raptor’s neck.

They laid Arsenyev next to Maheesh. The ground was too hard to dig a grave, so they covered the bodies with a cairn of stones. No one spoke.

When they went inside Komolov pulled out a bottle vodka. He said it was medicinal. Chen sipped from his glass while watching the Russians get drunk, sing old songs and then slump into sleep.

The door of the airlock rolled open. The wind, cold as a blade, sliced through Chen and he began to shiver at once. It was dark outside. The days were shortening fast and, though it was still early in the afternoon, the sun had long dipped below the valley walls.

He stepped out onto the valley floor.

The sky was bright and clear.

Chen tried to ignore the cold but it was already biting hard at his nose and fingers, the wind ripped at his flimsy blue overalls. His feet numbed, the frozen ground sucking the heat from his body. It took a conscious effort to control his breathing, the air was so sharp that he gasped with each breath and wondered if his lungs might freeze and shatter. The shivering shook his whole body. Chen wrapped his arms around his ribs.

He looked up and took a moment to identify some of the unfamiliar southern constellations. There was Centaurus and Reticulum and the Southern Cross. The syrupy band of the Milky Way was a reassuringly familiar blanket. He would have liked to look at the Moon once more, but it had not yet risen. He couldn’t see Mars.

He thought of Brad, out there. Would the ice preserve his body? There was a kind of immortality in that, and yet it seemed impossible to Chen that the last heat might have been sucked from that broad chest. It was ridiculous that those powerful arms might be forever still.

Chen wondered how quickly his tears would freeze. How soon would grief blind him?

He turned away from the stars and walked into the night. He found that being alone was not so frightening. He felt as though he was emerging from a deep cave that had kept him safe and warm but that had also kept him in the dark and had prevented him from seeing the world as it really was. Everything that had gone before had been fake, shadows flickering on a wall.

He stumbled over a rock, but kept walking.

How far could he go?

Chen looked up at the stars one last time and smiled.

“Pathfinders” was first published in Rocket Science: Science Fiction and Fact, published by Mutation Press, edited by Ian Sales

PATHFINDERS was originally published on Welcome To My World

#science fiction #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

KING ROOK

I grew up in a housing estate that was built on a gently-rising hillside. The top of the hill was ringed with trees, ancient sessile oaks, wych elm and horse chestnut. You wouldn’t call it a forest, it’s not that big, but it’s a bit more than a few random trees. We called it Hangman’s Woods because in the old days they didn’t bother building a scaffold in town, they just dragged people from the courthouse down the road, stuck a rope around their neck and pulled them by the neck over a branch of the biggest oak in the wood.

Justice. So they said.

The rooks were probably there then, watching and waiting for a feed. They still rule the place today.

These were big birds with heavy black beaks and bodies matt as coal dust but their hoods shone like satin and framed beaded eyes that saw everything.

Every evening the rooks welcomed the night with a great performance. The clamour, at first just one or two birds, grew quickly as groups returned from their day’s scavenging. Soon dozens and then hundreds and eventually maybe a thousand rooks swirled in one black cloud around the treetops. In the valley below the housemartins and swifts zipped and flitted between the rows of our houses, but we all lived in the shadow of the rooks.

Finally, at some unknowable signal, the gyring mass would all at once drop from the sky to their roosts in the trees. For a few minutes the branches swayed and rattled as the birds settled down. And when, at last, all went quiet, night had come.

Al McCourt was waiting for me when I got home from the last day of my Saturday job in Woolworths. He was leaning on the fence outside our house and annoying the dog, Nipper, who was lying on the concrete slabs of the short path between the gate and the house, ears flat, teeth bared, growling like an angry bear. It’d have been impressive if the mutt had been more than ten inches high.

“Shut up, Nipper!”

The growling stopped, but Nipper didn’t take his eyes off McCourt. He could hold a grudge that wee dog.

Al was a prick. He was thin-faced with a nose like the thick end of a hurley and a way of standing side-on so he was always looking at you out the corner of one eye. His voice was high and wheedling and it made the back of your neck crawl like metal scraping metal. He didn’t care that people hated him, he seemed to take pride in the way they shuddered at his approach. He mistook fear for respect. But Al was also my uncle Seamus’s man, and that meant that no one got to give him the kicking he obviously deserved. Except for the one night, a couple of years before, when the Brits had caught him out on his own.

They beat the shit out of him.

McCourt walked with a limp to this day. He wore it like a badge of honour and claimed a fortune off the DHSS for it. He was never out of the Citizens Advice place.

Economic warfare, Seamus called it. Taking the Brits for every penny.

Scrounging, my Da said.

Anyway, the day the Brits put Al McCourt in hospital was about as close as the two communities in Ardowen ever got to a moment of harmony. If we could have turned his beating into a spectator sport the whole Troubles might have ended there and then. We could have made a few bob too.

McCourt pulled himself up to his full height, flicking a pebble at the dog as he turned to me. I wasn’t tall but he barely came up to my chin. He scratched at his ear through a mass of greasy hair and grinned.

“Your uncle wants to see you,” he said. “Pronto, Tonto!”

I hated being called Tonto, a childhood nickname because my freckles made me a “redskin”.

“No can do, kemosabe,” I said, shaking my head. I wasn’t going to let the little shit know he’d annoyed me. “I’m away out the night.”

That wasn’t a lie. It was the last Saturday before we all left for university and I was going to a disco in Cookstown with Paddy and Aidan and the lads from school. We were going to get lashed and see how many girls we could persuade to let us stick our tongues down their throats. And maybe cop a feel. You never knew what we might get away with before we crossed the water. That was the plan for me and Paddy anyway. Aidan’d be out the back dry-humping his girl from Ballygawley and then trying to persuade us he’d really done it.

“Y’can get your end away later, wee Connolly,” McCourt seemed very pleased with himself, like he knew something I didn’t. “Your uncle says it’s urgent.”

“Can I at least get a wash and a change first?”

McCourt shrugged.

“The back bar–”

“-in O’Neill’s,” I cut him off. I knew where Seamus would be, it was where he always was.

“By seven, Tonto.” McCourt turned away, his bad leg dragging behind him like some doomed bird’s broken wing. “Don’t keep the big man waiting.”

“Yeah, and fuck you too,” I whispered softly as I opened the gate.

Nothing on the estate was safe from the rooks. Cats, small dogs, rabbits – any kind of unwary pet or careless wild thing was a potential target. A ruffling of feathers, a chorus of rough croaks and something vulnerable would squeal. Afterwards the rooks would stride casually across the road or on the little patch of scrubby grass that was our Croke Park, our Old Trafford, our playground, and they would dare us to challenge them, their beaks still glossed with blood.

I was the first baby born in our estate. It was newly built, still smelling of concrete dust and paint, the white stones of the pebbledash gleaming in the weak spring sunshine. The whole place had been a frantic response to a civil rights campaign that was rapidly turning into the bloody Troubles. It was a hopeless attempt to jam shut a box from which the nightmares had long since fled. Years later it would turn out that all the houses were slowly sliding down the hill into the bog in the valley below. You can take that for a metaphor of how rotten things were back then if you like but it was also the truth.

Whatever came later, my Ma was proud of her new home. They’d moved from a two-up-two-down built into the side of a railway cutting so steep you practically needed a ladder to climb the street outside. That house, she always said, had been so small you couldn’t peel a spud without opening the back door. The new house had three bedrooms, an inside toilet and a garden. She loved that house.

My parents moved in while the houses around them were still being built. I was born, she said, before the paint was dry. And before people learned what it was like to live with the rooks.

It was a bright spring morning and Ma left my pram in the garden – for all the violence on the television it was still a safe thing to do. She left me there and went back into the house to clean or cook or do whatever one of the thousand other things she did to make our lives that little bit better.

When she came back, just a few minutes later, a huge rook was sitting on the handle of my pram, staring in at me.

She screamed and rushed forward, waving frantic arms, trying to scare the bird away.

The rook just stared at her.

My Ma stopped.

Small, bottomless, eyes took her in and then turned down to me as I lay gurgling in the pram. There was a moment of stillness. Then the bird spread its wings and launched itself into the air and setting my pram rocking.

My Ma described the rook as a monster – vast as an eagle, darker than the night.

“The King Rook,” she’d called it and my dad had laughed his head off at her.

But I know the King Rook is real. It left me a gift, a pebble, smoothed and polished by running water until in shone like a jewel that my Ma kept for me. And he came back, again and again. Sometimes he took my things. He took my Action Man from the garden, my toy car from the playground, a schoolbook with my homework in it and a cassette of songs I’d taped off the Sunday afternoon chart show.

I knew it was the rook because, whenever he took something, he always left a gift behind.

A pyramid of snail shells, each one punched neatly open with a single round hole and emptied. The pale skull of a rat. A delicate blue egg, hollowed and cleaned. One morning, planted in the centre of our tiny front garden like a banner or a sign of ownership, I found a single black feather with a gloss so perfect that it reflected light like a mirror.

And there were other things. Bloody things.

They were magical signs. Signs that no matter how bad things got around me – and there were times when things got very bad – I was protected.

The King Rook was watching over me.

O’Neill’s bar was a fortress. The windows were protected by shutters made from thick-gauge wire that were kept permanently closed. The inside of the windows had been blocked up with breezeblocks and a string of bulbs, white Christmas tree lights, hung in the gap between the wall and the glass to make the place look a bit less grim from the outside. It didn’t work. The pub’s walls – rebuilt after a UVF bomb attack – were thick reinforced concrete skimmed over with rough plaster and painted a grimy brown and there were bright lights and cameras covering the car park and every approach.

I didn’t want to miss my bus to Cookstown so I’d rushed getting ready. It wasn’t, officially, opening time yet and, for form’s sake, the outside door was closed when I got to the pub – not that that meant anything. I pressed the bell and looked up into the camera. The buzzer went and I pushed my way in. Michael Molloy was sitting on a stool in the hall, a baseball bat leaning against the wall beside him, and he nodded me through as I turned left into the public bar.

When things get going, the front bar in O’Neill’s is a busy place, full of people enjoying a laugh and a drink. Later on there’d be a bit of singing and a lot of noise but it was early yet and quiet as the hardcore set about their beer and shorts with a steady desperation. The Sacred Heart lamps we called them, laughing behind their backs, because the drink had given them all red noses.

Even this early the smoke was hanging thick between the yellowed walls so that it obscured the big pictures of the local heroes, Thomas J Clarke – one of the Easter Rising crowd – and Martin Hurson – one of the hunger strikers – that took pride of place behind the bar. Between the pictures was an ornamental harp that Sean, the owner, had made in the woodwork lessons he got while he was interned in the Long Kesh. He’d painted tiocfaidh ár lá in white Gaelic lettering on the brown varnished wooden base.

Sean smiled at me as I walked through to the back bar.

“Pint?”

“I’m not staying,” I said.

“Smithwicks?”

I nodded, resigned.

“I’ll bring it through.”

The thick fug of cigarette smoke was about the only thing the back bar of O’Neill’s had in common with the front. The walls were painted a dark green that seemed to swallow the light and there was a damp and rotten stink from the drains of the toilets next door. It was grim.

My uncle Seamus sat in his usual place in a booth with his back to the wall, so he could see who was coming in. The only other way out was a long narrow corridor that lead to the toilets and ended with a door so heavily wrapped in metal armour that it took two people to drag it open. There was a peephole cut into the door and a monitor, showing a picture of the back car park, sat on a shelf above the lintel.

Half-a-dozen hard men sat nursing whiskeys and pints at other tables. They all wore black leather jackets and aggressively stone-washed jeans and a few sported impressive displays of what they, no doubt, imagined to be authentically Gaelic facial hair.

“What’s the score, wee Tonto?” Seamus said.

“Ach, the usual, you know me” I said, trying to keep it light. “How’s about you, Uncle Seamus,”

“Same old same old,” he said. “Come in. Sit down. You don’t want to be making me nervous now, do you?”

“No way,” I said, and laughed.

Seamus was a funny fella. When he was in a good mood, he had a great sense of humour and always had some story or a comeback. In a country where slagging off your neighbour was practically an Olympic sport, there weren’t many could beat my uncle. Of course there weren’t many that tried either. You didn’t want to be the one who went too far or said the wrong thing. It wasn’t a mistake you’d make twice.

Seamus didn’t look like much at all. He was a short, slightly stocky man with a shiny bald head and a neatly-trimmed, snowy beard. He dressed well, favouring slightly old-fashioned tweed suits and he devoted special attention his shoes – always the best Italian leather and always polished to a gleaming finish. You could have imagined him as a dapper off-duty Santa Claus – if Santa had turned out to spend his spare time moonlighting as a psychopath.

You never forgot the first time you saw Uncle Seamus lose his temper.

He was a man who moved in circles where a lack of regard for the well-being of others was an entry-level requirement, but even amongst that crowd Seamus stood out. He was fearsome as an individual, precisely and thoroughly vicious, but it was his talent for dreaming up acts of exquisite brutality and the enthusiasm with which his brigade of volunteers made those dreams real that had made his name.

The Cripple Feeney could tell you about what Seamus and his lads were capable of doing. Or rather, he’d write down what Seamus did to him, and then he’d make that sick sucking sound that he does instead of laughing when you went pale reading his words.

Sean came in and put the pint of Smithwicks in front of me.

“That’ll tighten you, Tonto,” he said, a bit too loud, and slapped me on the shoulder. He was nervous. I could smell the sweat on him even over the cigarette smoke. “Can I get you anything, Seamus?”

My uncle shook his head but said nothing. He stared at Sean, his face blank, his pale eyes fixing the barman. I looked between the two men and then looked down, determined not to get drawn into whatever was going on. I liked Sean, I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t want any bit of it.

“Dead on, so,” Sean said and let slip a peal of laughter that was pitched too high. “Well, if you need anything, you know where I am.”

“Oh I do, alright,” said Seamus and then said nothing else.

Sean turned to go, stopped, turned back as though to speak, and then shook his head and left.

The silence dragged. I picked up my pint and took a heavy gulp from the glass even though the head hadn’t quite settled out. My throat was dry. The beer was cold and sharp and I needed it.

One of the lads on my left – one of The Cripple Feeney’s brothers – mumbled something and another one, I didn’t know him, snorted and laughed.

My uncle turned his head and the silence snapped back into place.

I took another drink. The pint was two thirds gone.

“Right, Tonto,” Seamus said at last. “I’ve got a wee job for you.”

He nodded and the stranger who’d been doing the laughing came over and put something that was wrapped in a greasy cloth on the table between me and Seamus. He went back to his seat, my eyes stayed on the thing on the table. It was small but obviously heavy.

Seamus reached over and with fingertips, as though determined not to let the thing soil his hands, he pushed the lump of metal towards me.

I reached for my pint again and closed my eyes.

Fuck.

I spent my thirteenth birthday at the same place as I’d spent all my birthdays since I’d been old enough to go to school – at Colm Hagan’s birthday party.

Colm Hagan’s dad and uncle were lawyers. The richest Catholics in the county, everyone reckoned. When I was young they bought the hill and Hangman’s Wood and they chopped down a dozen big trees to make room to build two big, ugly, square-sided houses that looked down over our estate.

Colm Hagan joined my class and, it turned out, he had the same birthday as me. At first we both though that was cool and for a while we were friends. Then came our birthday and Colm Hagan invited the whole class to his fancy house and I found myself spending my birthday there because that’s where all my other friends had gone.

What could we offer? A slice of Battenberg cake, a fig roll, a glass of orange squash and a game of musical chairs – if they were lucky.

When Colm was nine he got two go-karts and his dad built him a track through the woods so he could have races. I’d have chosen his party over mine too.

We stopped being friends.

He probably never even thought about it.

I hated him.

But not so much that I was happy when I found his dead body, eyes pecked out, lying at the foot of a big oak in his own back garden on the day we both turned thirteen.

The party had been great. Everyone was having a brilliant time. We watched Colm play Elite and Chuckie Egg on his BBC Micro and then we rode around the woods on our bikes so Colm could show off his BMX and there was loads of food. By the time the cake came out I’d had enough of watching everyone else having a good time so I crammed a load of wee sausages and bread in my pockets and went out to feed the birds.

I’d emptied my pockets and was heading back to the house for more when I found Colm, lying face up on the ground next to his bike, with a big purple bruise on his forehead and his skin as pale and thin as paper.

On his chest, lying on the crest of his Man United football jersey, was another gift for me.

Feeling the bile burn in my throat, suddenly glad I hadn’t wanted any cake, I picked up the liquid sack of Connor Hagan’s eye and slipped it into my pocket, shoving the slick cord of the optic nerve in after it.

And then I started shouting for help.

“Ah you’re fucking joking!” I said, but no one was laughing. In fact everyone else in the room was suddenly very serious indeed – like birds waiting for the barely moving thing before them to sit still and become carrion.

“It’s just a wee parcel I’m asking you to help me deliver, Tonto,” Seamus said. “Would you not do this for me… and for the struggle?”

I bowed my head.

“Remember what the Brits did to my sister,” he said. “God rest her soul.”

“Don’t bring Ma into this!” My voice rose sharply and I looked up. Seamus met my gaze with a flat stare and dared me to hold it. I looked away, feeling the hot blood rush to my cheeks.

I was screwed. I could see from the look Seamus was giving me that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I was family, and that bought me some leeway, but Seamus couldn’t let anyone get away with anything that looked like defiance. He had a reputation to maintain. If I wasn’t careful, I’d be lying, blood-soaked and maimed, on the other side of that armoured door. Seamus wasn’t going to let a pup like me challenge him in front of the others, sister’s boy or not.

“The Brits’ll go through everything. You know what they’re like,” I whined. “They’re bound to find it.”

“Why would the Brits be interested in some fucking student?” Laughing-boy, the one I didn’t know, asked.

“Because I’m related to him,” I said, nodding at Seamus. “Fuckin’ twat!”

Laughing-boy stood up and took a step forward, his fists balled.

I pushed back my chair, rising to meet him.

“Stop,” Seamus barely whispered. We both froze.

“Sorry,” I said to Seamus. The other fella mumbled something and sat back down.

“Of course they’re going to check you, Tonto,” Seamus said. “Just stick the thing in one of your wee friends’ bags. What they don’t know, won’t hurt them.”

“If they get caught–”

I started to protest but Seamus cut me short.

“They won’t,” he said. “And if they do, sure I’ll look after them. They’ll be grand.”

He pushed the heavy thing across the table to me.

“Now do as you’re told and piss off out of my sight.”

I didn’t get to Cookstown or the disco. I met the lads at the bus station and told them they’d have to go without me. Paddy moaned for bit about ending up on his own but I mentioned Seamus and Aidan told him to shut up.

I watched the blue and white Ulsterbus pull out of the station and cross the old railway bridge. Aidan and Paddy sat in the back seats and made wanker gestures at me until they were out of sight. Then I went home.

I have collection spread in front of me now. If I concentrate hard, I can still feel the sense of security it once promised. I can still feel like someone is watching over me, that I am protected. But it’s getting harder. My dad calls it rubbish, and sometimes I can see it with his eyes.

This will be my last day in this house. Tomorrow I will leave for university. Tomorrow night I will be sleeping in a different country and I will be surrounded by people I was always told were my enemy. I know I won’t be able to come back, not for long time. Some part of me already knew that this was never going to be my home again and part of me can’t wait to get away.

And part of me does not want to go.

It’s the end of September. The summer has been long and hot and, even though you can already feel the days shortening, today has been warm. The evening sky is bright and sharp with only the spreading contrails of jets looping north on their way to America dividing up the expanse of deepening blue.

I wrap each piece of my collection carefully in sheets from yesterday’s copy of the Daily Mirror and place them in a plastic tub that used to be my Da’s lunchbox. Then I put the tub carefully in the centre of my rucksack so it will be safe on the journey.

I drag Seamus’s package out from beneath my bed. I hold it for a minute between two fingers, staring at it from different angles. How can something so small feel so massive? Just picking it off the table in O’Neill’s back bar has ruined me, changed the track of my life, and yet it hasn’t even been used. What more damage will be done if I follow Seamus’s orders?

I hate it. I hate him.

I put the thing down on the bed. Pick it up again. Put it down. I put on my coat then take the rag-wrapped thing and jam it into my inside pocket.

I have made a decision and I am relieved to find that I have no doubts.

I go down stairs, kiss the picture of my Ma in the hall, like I always do, and wish she was still here, like I always do. My Da’s there too, at the bottom of the stairs with the paper, heading to the toilet. I give him a hug as I go past and tell him I love him. His surprise quickly turns to fear.

“What’s going on?” I hear him say, but I’m outside before he can drag me back.

The rooks are coming home to roost, the first few already circling high above the woods, and tonight I want to watch them for the last time.

Al McCourt is sitting outside our house in an Austin Maestro that’s the colour of stale piss. He leans out the window, his face twisted into a smile.

“Going somewhere, Tonto?”

“Just going for a walk up in the woods,” I say, nodding to the hill. “You coming?”

Al eyes the hill suspiciously. The light is starting to fade. The dead eyes of the Hagan’s houses, long abandoned their gardens slowly being reclaimed by the wood, stare down at us. The gyring mass of birds is thickening.

Al knows those birds, knows how they flock, how they prey upon the people of the estate. And, because he recognises them, he fears them.

“Don’t you be playing any funny games,” he says.

I smile at him and turn away.

Let Al choose his own fate.

I am going to climb the hill into Hangman’s Wood and go to the spot where I found Colm Hagan. I want to see the King Rook. I’m bringing him a final offering, but this time I want to choose what I get in return.

I want him to let me go.

“King Rook” was first published in the Irish science fiction magazine Albedo One #45

KING ROOK was originally published on Welcome To My World

#Ireland #Short story

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

AND DUBLIN WEPT

They sent me out to Swords to get Willy O’Brien. I handed him the message and watched his lips form a tight line. He looked up, rubbed his nose where his glasses rested, then climbed into the cab of the lump of an Austin lorry I’d borrowed. We bounced along the road back to Dublin, the truck leapt and bucked on every rut and pothole but I drove as hard as I could. Willy was quiet. Every now and then he’d take out the bit of paper I’d given him and read it again.

Maybe he was hoping the words would change.

No survivors, he muttered once. Later, they’ll blame us. I turned to say something, but he wasn’t with me. He was watching Drumcondra through the rain.

It had been Jim Larkin’s idea to send the children to stay with the families of union men across the water. Archbishop Walsh had torn into him, said he wanted to turn the children into communists and atheists or, worse, protestants. But those youngsters got trampled on Sackville Street, the winter bit hard and the strike dragged on. No one wanted to watch their children suffer so, in the end, we could have filled the boat three times over.

I couldn’t get the lorry down Gardiner Street through the crowd, so we dumped it and jumped some fences to get to the back of Liberty Hall. The union’s headquarters was full of men smoking hard and staring at their feet, none of them wanting to look Willy in the eye. He paid no heed, barging his way to the front of the building. Larkin was on the steps with James Connolly beside him. Willy went out. I stopped in the doorway.

Beresford Place was heaving, the crowd pressed tightly to the foot of the hall’s low steps and stretched back over Butt Bridge and under the Loopline Bridge towards the old harbour. Rain was coming down in thick cords and sliding off the iron railway bridge in sheets, but no one seemed to care. They were quiet but not really listening to Larkin, who was waving his arms and roaring at them. He was talking politics and he’d lost them.

Hugh, a thick-necked Ulsterman, put a hurley in my hands and nodded towards Custom House. There was a different crowd moving in the gardens there. It was Murray’s Free Labour boys – scabs and strikebreakers – sensing an opportunity.

“Laaarkin, baby killer… Laaarkin, baby killer.”

Some of the crowd took up their chant and started to surge towards us. There was pushing and shoving and scuffles were breaking out. Larkin was still shouting about winning the strike.

A woman broke through the front of the crowd.

Her hair was wild, her bonnet trailing behind her. She had no coat on and her dress was soaked through. She was mad looking and one of our lads went to stop her, I pulled him away.

“William! Is it true William? Are our boys drowned?

Willy turned and I saw his knees go, and his face greyed. Whatever strength had been holding him up just evaporated. The two of them fell to the ground and she was screaming the names of her lost boys.

The scabs missed this. They pushed on, still shouting, but some wee woman turned round and slapped the first of them. All at once the grief in the crowd turned cold and hard and focused itself on Murphy’s men and it was only that they had the sense to go scrabbling back towards Custom House that saved them from a bad beating.

The people turned to us.

Larkin was ready to start again but Connolly put a hand on his shoulder, shaking his head. Some of the lads came over and helped to get Willy and his wife up and guide them into Liberty Hall. Connolly turned back to the crowd.

“We are, as we have always been, a people united by grief,” he said. “We are sorry for your loss.”

At last, Dublin wept.

The truth soon came out. The destroyer HMS Tartar had sailed up from Kingstown with orders to force the SS Connemara back to Greenore and the children back to Dublin. The sea had been rough, the captain of the Tartar had misjudged the currents in Carlingford Lough, and the ships collided. The British captain had panicked and steamed for port. The Connemara turned over and eight hundred children drowned less than a mile from shore.

Then Dublin burned.

“And Dublin Wept” was first published in Pandemonium: Big Jim’s Shadow, Jurassic London

BACKGROUND

In the early Twentieth Century Dublin was a rapidly growing city in which large numbers of workers endured abject poverty in disease-ridden slums. Two charismatic socialists, Jim Larkin and James Connolly, came together to build the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. They were romantic figures who live on in (near) legend and, indeed, song. The union grew quickly, alarming some of Dublin’s employers, led by William Martin Murphy – owner of, amongst other things, three newspapers and a tram company. In August the employers locked out tens of thousands of workers they suspected of being union members. A long, bitter and often violent dispute had begun.

Jim Larkin did suggest sending the children of Dublin’s strikers to England and Scotland to live with the families of union members. He hoped to ease the burdens on striking families but, more importantly, he hoped to spread support for the strike to the rest of the UK and thought the children would elicit sympathy. However, the combined forces of a hostile press and an equally hostile Catholic Church scuppered the idea.

The lock-out petered out in 1914, with both sides exhausted and forced to compromise. The ITGWU was badly damaged and things got worse when Larkin went off to North America and then, in 1916, James Connolly was killed by the British for his part in the Easter Rising (Murphy used his newspapers to agitate for the execution of his old adversary).

William X O’Brien was the man who emerged to rebuild the ITGWU, turning it into a major force in Irish politics. As far as I know no songs have been written about William X O’Brien.

The SS Connemara, a ferry plying the route from Greenore to Liverpool, did sink in Carlingford Lough but not until November 1916. All aboard were lost, including my great uncle, Private Robert Kenna, who was returning to France after recovering from injuries.

AND DUBLIN WEPT was originally published on Welcome To My World

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

What will "living with the virus" actually mean?

Over the last few weeks, and especially since the end of Matt Hancock’s tenure as Health Secretary there has been a notable shift in the government’s language regarding the future of the UK’s response to Covid-19. When he announced the further extension of restrictions at the start of June, the Prime Minister used a phrase that hadn’t been much heard since the disastrous Christmas relaxation. He said we were going to have to learn to “live with the virus” – a line he has repeated again this week and which was taken up by new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, and others.

As infections accelerate again and new variants continue to emerge, what does “living with the virus” actually mean?

Those who want to move out of restrictions are keen to point out that we live with risks as a society all the time – you could get hit by a car or struck by lightning at any time – but we go on living our lives and cope with that risk.

That is true. But living with those risks is not the same as ignoring them or doing nothing about them.

About three people in the UK, on average, die of lightning strikes every year (about 50 are struck in total) – but we take significant action to protect ourselves. We put lightning rods on high buildings, we built our electric supply system to minimise risks of passing surges on, my mother (and perhaps yours) would unplug every item in the house when a storm passed over and we tell each other to do practical things (like not standing under tall trees or poking the sky with metallic poles). All this for a risk that is infinitesimal.

And we do far more to protect ourselves against injury in car accidents. We force people to pass tests to drive. We teach children rules for crossing the road. We tightly restrict speeds and create a whole complex set of rules that people must abide by and then we spend vast amounts of money policing those rules. We force people to have insurance to discourage careless driving. We force carmakers to pursue ever more onerous rules to make their cars safer. We make ourselves wear seatbelts. We dig up roads and reshape towns. All to live with the risks posed by cars. And it has worked. Despite the fact that the number of people travelling on our roads has steadily increased – nearly trebling since the early sixties (in the early 1960s only around 25% of households owned a car, now it’s closer to 80%) – the number of fatalities on British roads has fallen from 8000 a year to under 2000. We have changed our whole society to manage the risk of living with cars – and continue to do so – even though the number of road traffic deaths are far lower than the number of people currently dying each day from the Covid-19.

So, if “living with risks” that are relatively small have required such deep responses (how we build things, how we think, how we behave) why is it that the language of the increasingly lockdown-sceptic government appears to suggest that “living with risk” means doing nothing, removing all restrictions, letting the disease rip?

We are going to have to live with this virus – it’s not showing any signs of going away and, even with widespread vaccinations, it’s going to continue to infect relatively large numbers of people (because the vaccines don’t offer perfect protection) and small numbers of people are going to get seriously ill and small numbers are going to continue to die. Even if the vaccines continue to be effective against new strains, then the final level of risk is probably going to end up significantly more than getting struck by lightning and probably higher than getting killed in a car crash.

The question, then, is what does living with that risk entail? Vaccinations programmes certainly, the government has accepted that, but we modify our behaviours and our environment for lesser risks: we do not let road traffic accidents rip because they are just a natural effect of having cars. So what are we expecting to change to mitigate the risk from this virus? What should our future look like? What is the post-pandemic equivalent of seatbelts and speed bumps? The continued requirement for ubiquitous hand sanitizer and masks would not be popular amongst some, but they’d save more lives (not just from Covid-19, but as we’ve seen this year from flu and food poisoning, both of which have declined precipitously, amongst other transmissible diseases) than any road safety measure.

Instead of pandering to the lockdown sceptics and making rash promises about irreversible steps and never going back, government and ministers might be better planning for and preparing society for the changes needed to “live with the virus”.

What will “living with the virus” actually mean? was originally published on Welcome To My World

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

AYCKBOURN'S ARTIFICIAL PEOPLE

McGrath, Martin (2017) “Ayckbourn’s Artificial People.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 46 (128) . pp. 60-72. ISSN 0306-4964

This article explores how Alan Ayckbourn’s science fiction, in particular the use of androids/gynoids in the plays Henceforward… (1987), Comic Potential (1998) and Surprises (2012), casts light on the themes that run throughout his work. It looks especially at how Ayckbourn characterises power relationships between men and women, and suggests that Ayckbourn’s use of science fictional tropes brings his recurring concerns into sharpest focus. Although Ayckbourn’s themes remain constant, the props of science fiction allow him to achieve a precise rhetorical effect not available to him in the straightforwardly domestic plays for which he is most famous.

In any discussion of Ayckbourn or his work it seems obligatory to begin by noting that while he is, by some distance, Britain’s most successful living playwright, he is rarely the subject of critical analysis. There are numerous suggested reasons why this might be the case, and it is useful to take a moment to reflect on them as they help illustrate how Ayckbourn’s writing is often categorized.

One common suggestion is that Ayckbourn’s sustained and impressive popularity arouses the suspicion of the ‘intellectual classes’ who dismiss the popular as automatically second rate and unworthy of study (Billington 1990: 40). A second theory is that Ayckbourn’s resolutely middle class settings, ‘the sleepy atmosphere of a semi-detached’ (Almansi 1984: 109), immediately mark him out as unfashionably orthodox, and apart from his contemporaries, such as John Arden, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, who were pursuing a more radical theatrical agenda in the early 1960s. A third suggestion is that Ayckbourn’s focus on technical, as opposed to formal, innovation in his plays gets dismissed as trickery, and his intense familiarity with and exploitation of the intricacies of theatrical production does not win him artistic credit (Holt 1998: 31). Michael Billington also suggests that Ayckbourn’s prolific output suggests a lack of depth: ‘a dramatist or novelist who reluctantly squeezes out a single work every decade […] is going to be more highly regarded than one who produces two or three major pieces a year’ (Billington 1990: 130).1 A fifth possible explanation is that Ayckbourn’s traditional approach to ‘dialogue, individual characterization, theme and action’ (Brown 1984: 8) has meant that his reputation has never escaped its early, rather damning, attachment to old-fashioned boulevardier playwrights such as Terrence Rattigan. Ayckbourn himself offers a sixth, and final, reason why his work may have been overlooked: his attachment to comedy. Critical appreciation only comes long after the death of the comic writer: ‘By which time, of course, most of the comedy is incomprehensible and can only be laughed at by scholars’ (Ayckbourn 2004: 4).

Some of these criticisms of Ayckbourn’s work have undoubted force. The world of his plays does hark back to an earlier era and can seem old-fashioned. His cast of characters reflect a rather distant England, overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, suburban and circling constantly around the institution of marriage. Aside from Drowning on Dry Land (2004), which was the first of Ayckbourn’s plays to feature a black actress in its opening cast, Ayckbourn did not specifically write for a black character until My Wonderful Day (2009), his 73rd play.2 The suburban town of Pendon, the fictional setting of many of Ayckbourn’s plays, was unusually homogenous in the 1970s – in the second decade of the twenty-first century it seems preternaturally so.

But, if some of these theories really do represent reasons that scholars have neglected Ayckbourn’s work, then it is possible that academics and critics have missed the point. For example, commentators and reviewers frequently refer to Ayckbourn as a non-political writer. Simon Trussler describes him as a ‘non-political Priestley’ (Page and Trussler 1989: 6), writing apparently conventional plays about apparently conventional people, while Guido Almansi cites an (unnamed) critic who describes Ayckbourn as having the sole aim of making audiences laugh: ‘His plays contain no message, offer no profound vision of the universe, tell us nothing about how to live our lives’ (Almansi 1984: 120).

Such attitudes seem, at best, superficial. It is possible, perhaps, to watch one Ayckbourn play and to miss the gnawing sense of wrongness that pervades the lives of most of his characters, distracted perhaps by the audience’s laughter. But it is surely not possible to pay serious attention to the body of his work and miss that he has chronicled a distinctively British revolution. While playwrights like Pinter and Wesker were trying to change the world through radical theatre, Ayckbourn was recording the transformation that was actually taking place. Even as the working-class communities beloved of kitchen-sink dramatists were being obliterated by economic and political forces beyond their control, Ayckbourn was writing about the lives of those who looked like they were winning. He was tracking the rise of the classes that the advertising men who advised Margaret Thatcher called C1 and C2, the people Tony Blair’s spin doctors called ‘Mondeo Man’. Their votes were assiduously pursued and their appetites were endlessly studied, and they formed the vanguard of profound social change.

Ayckbourn records their aspirations and their deepening discontent. As one profile in The Economist put it, his work ‘profitably holds a mirror up to his buyer’s destructive weaknesses’ (Anon 1998). If his early plays do seem to retain a lightness, a sense that things might turn out okay, the arc of his work through the second half of the 1980s and beyond is towards an ever darker sense of disillusionment. Ayckbourn’s middle class lose faiths: faith in God, yes, but also in society and community, in love and friendship, in each other and even in themselves. They try to compensate, stuffing the gaping hole in their lives with money, technology, power and sex. But none of it satisfies or sustains them.

Ayckbourn is in no sense a radical writer. Billington calls him a ‘reflex libertarian’ (Billington 1990: 10), but it is a particularly English libertarianism – of the Ealing comedy, such as Passport to Pimlico (1949) The Lavender Hill Mob and, perhaps most pertinently, The Man in the White Suit (both 1951). The frustrations, anger and bitterness he chronicles are no less fundamental for being constrained by the expectation of a particularly English self-restraint. His focus has remained unflinchingly on the sometimes uncomfortable but overwhelmingly familiar suburbs of Middle England, even as Britain has become ever more politically divided and culturally diverse. In 1987, at the height of Thatcherism, he reflected: ‘I sit, I suspect, in the middle of most English opinion. The Tory party right wing fills me with total despair, as indeed does the Labour party left wing. I suppose the nearest I get to being political is that I’m rather attracted to things like the Social Democrats… I really like things to be fair’ (Watson 1988: 90). It is precisely this desire to be ‘in the middle’ that makes Ayckbourn’s work essential as a record of a moment when his country changed. The political content of Ayckbourn’s work is important precisely because, for so many of his critics and much of his audience, it is invisible, masked by the day-to-day background noise of their own preconceptions.

Ayckbourn’s Science Fiction Given Ayckbourn’s reputation as an intimate chronicler of the British middle class, it is notable that, since writing Henceforward… in 1987, Ayckbourn has frequently included elements from the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres in his plays (see Appendix). Of the 32 adult plays Ayckbourn has written since Henceforward…, 15 have contained some genre element – including time travel, body swapping and ghosts – making him possibly unique amongst major British playwrights in the depth and longevity of his interest in science fiction and fantasy. He has also written a further 13 family plays in that time that contain elements of the fantastic.

The roots of Ayckbourn’s interest in science fiction run deep. One of his earliest surviving works is The Season, a juvenile play written, at the latest, in 1958 when the author was 18 although never performed. It is a time travel story which, seeming to anticipate a more famous British time traveller, follows The Girl and The Traveller as they move from medieval England to a post-apocalyptic future (Murgatroyd 2013: 91). Aykbourn’s fourth professional play, which came close to being his first to transfer to the West End, was Standing Room Only (1961) set in a distant future – 1997 – in which overpopulation has run rife and a family dodge bureaucratic interference in their lives while living on a bus caught in a permanent gridlock on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Standing Room Only would, however, be the last science fiction play written by Ayckbourn for almost thirty years. In those three decades he established himself as an acute observer of middle-class domestic dramas and as a chronicler of the tensions of a class in transformation. Although earlier plays, like Absurd Person Singular (1972) and Way Upstream (1981), had indicated Ayckbourn’s concern with the damage wrought by growing materialism, by the second half of the 1980s his work was becoming darker and more violent.

Disenchantment with the costs of the Thatcherite reshaping of British society had become a recurring theme in his plays. At this point Ayckbourn returned to science fiction with Henceforward…, a near future dystopia. It marked the start of a new period in Ayckbourn’s work, one in which he would increasingly intersperse his familiar domestic comedies with plays that made use of tropes from the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres.

However, while Ayckbourn’s set dressing changed during this period, the essential concerns that motivate his writing have remained remarkably constant. At the heart of Ayckbourn’s writing has always been the relationships ‘between men and women and the particular strains which the process and state of marriage inflict’ (Holt 1998: 12), and the abuse wrought by the strong upon the weak. As Paul Allen puts it, the stakes are ‘not life or death, or even love […] but mental health, sanity, hope or despair; the possibility of happiness and the probability of messing it up. In an age of relative material well-being our ability to make each other and ourselves wretched is a major issue facing advanced society’ (Allen 2002: x). Far from offering escapism or watering down Ayckbourn’s preoccupations with human relations, the fantastic elements in Ayckbourn’s later works have served to allow him to repeat his primary messages with greater force in ways that are more challenging for his audience and more difficult to ignore.

Henceforward… Henceforward… is set in a dystopian future London where the all-female gang, the Daughters of Darkness, battle the all-male Sons of Bitches for control of the streets. Jerome is a composer divorced from his wife, Corinna, who he has driven away – ironically due to his obsessive quest to ‘express the feeling of love in an abstract musical form’ (Ayckbourn 1989: 30). He lives on his own behind heavy steel shutters, surrounded by technology with only a malfunctioning robot nanny, Nan 300F, for company. Jerome wants his daughter, Geain, back, largely because he believes she is the key to lifting the mental block that has prevented him writing music since his divorce. He uses Nan to impersonate his notion of a perfect partner in the hope of tricking his wife into believing that he is responsible enough to care for Geain.

A number of Ayckbourn’s works features women who have been so damaged by their circumstances that they retreat into eccentricity or madness. Absurd Person Singular (1972) features Eva, who spends much of Act 2 failing to commit suicide while being ignored by her friends and her husband. Woman in Mind (1985) is told from the point of view of Susan, whose fantasy world bleeds into her banal everyday existence as she suffers a nervous breakdown. Ayckbourn’s frequent use of mental breakdown is not just a simple portrayal of hysterical women incapable of coping with their world. Instead his portrayal of women slipping into madness seems to echo the way in which some feminist authors have embraced insanity as a legitimate form of escape from the inequalities and iniquities of a patriarchal society. Carl Freedman, discussing the work of Joanna Russ, notes a ‘kind of Foucauldian feminism […] after a certain point there are few, if any, possibilities for feminine development that can wholly escape the taint of madness’ (Freedman 2000: 143). Madness becomes, then, not just an issue of mental wellbeing but a political statement – a refusal to be bound by hegemonic limits on acceptable behaviour. If the world in which you have been forced to live is made unbearable by the relationships of power that bind you then any escape, even into madness, would seem to be preferable.

Nan may be a robot, but it is clear that she – like Eva and Susan – has been brutalised beyond her capacity to cope by the expectations and limitations placed upon her by the role she is forced to play. In an early stage direction, Ayckbourn describes her as a ‘Jekyll and Hyde creature. Her sunny side is the result of her initial “nanny” factory programming, her darker side the result of subsequent modifications by Jerome himself’ (Ayckbourn 1989: 5– 6). But perhaps it is not just Jerome’s tinkering that explains Nan’s Jekyll and Hyde nature.

Nan is ‘unfulfilled’ and Jerome wonders if ‘the biggest mistake they made was to make a machine so sophisticated and then give it too small a function. I mean I think a machine that complex needed more than just a child to look after. Otherwise there’s bound to be stress’ (Ayckbourn 1989: 19–20). Ayckbourn’s target here is not just Nan’s programming but the restrictions placed on many women in a patriarchal society. Jerome, meanwhile, is unable to ‘distinguish between substance and shadow, between the things that affirm our common humanity, and those which isolate us’ (Wu 1996: 126).

When forced to choose between Nan and human company, he cannot come up with a good reason to opt for humanity. ‘That woman,’ he declaims when Nan’s honour is impugned, ‘has more dignity, more sense of loyalty and responsibility than any other fifty women you can name put together’ (Ayckbourn 1989: 66). It is an outburst that reveals more than just Jerome’s inability to relate to other people, it reveals the limiting expectations that men like Jerome place on their partners.

Nan gets a brief moment to fulfil her basic programming through Geian, who has arrived dressed as a member of the Sons of Bitches and demanding to be called a boy. Nan takes the adolescent wild child in hand and, almost instantly, transforms her back into a ‘normal’ child. It is a moment of triumph in which she demonstrates that she is more capable than any of the humans around her. Her true potential is revealed and, for an instant, she is no longer a thing of comedy but something formidable and accomplished. However, outside the situation is worsening. The Daughters of Darkness are furious that Jerome is giving refuge to Geain, who they have seen entering dressed as one of their enemies. Corinna and Geain leave, offering Jerome the chance to come with them, to give domesticity another chance, but he abandons them to the gang. As the Daughter of Darkness storm Jerome’s fortress he fiddles with music that will never be heard. Nan, meanwhile, sits ignored gradually counting down to her own oblivion. Her maintenance has been neglected by Jerome, she has been pushed beyond the bounds of her programming and, in a final indignity, just at the moment when she can finally fulfil the role for which she has been created, the opportunity is ripped away from her. Ignored by Jerome ‘Nan’s countdown reaches zero and she shuts down’ (Ayckbourn 1989: 75).

Nan has been created to carry out a job that is far beneath her capabilities – a job which, even in its most challenging and seemingly intractable form, she completes in moments. But even this satisfaction is denied her. Instead she has been forced to attempt to adapt to the desires of a man who never takes seriously what she needs or the limits of her endurance. She is reshaped to serve Jerome’s selfish goals, pushed beyond her ability to cope, neglected and, ultimately, destroyed by him. As Holt points out, many of the women in Ayckbourn’s work are victims of self-obsessed men who do not notice the damage they are doing. Nan may not be an actual woman, she may even be a figure of fun, but like many of Ayckbourn’s other women she seems ‘doomed to disappointment and lack of fulfilment. Small wonder that they frequently reach breaking point’ (Holt 1998: 27). Her quiet, ignored expiration is chilling.

Comic Potential First performed in 1998, Comic Potential is in part a satire of television production, born of Ayckbourn’s own frustrating experiences, and part a comedy about the importance of a sense of humour in relationships. In ‘the foreseeable future where everything has changed except human nature’ (Ayckbourn 2001: 5), Adam Trainsmith visits a television studio owned by his uncle’s company. He has come to see a once talented but now washed-up director, Chandler Tate, who is producing low quality soap operas using defective ‘actoids’ (android actors), one of which, JC F31 333 (Jacie), keeps laughing at unexpected moments. Adam is hoping to make a comedy rather like those of Ayckbourn himself, but there is no room for that kind of material in an age where executives like the fearsome Carla Pepperbloom hold sway.

Adam is a familiar Ayckbourn character: the innocent young man who blunders into a situation and upsets the status quo simply through his naiveté, echoing characters like Greg in Relatively Speaking (1965) and Guy in A Chorus of Disapproval (1984). Adam treats Jacie as a human, endeared to her by her laughter and her appreciation of humour – characteristics which others (including Jacie herself) regard as a fault. This sets in motion a chain of events that change Jacie’s life forever. Towards the end of the play, Chandler tells Adam that ‘She was only a poor machine. You screwed her up Adam. It was your fault entirely. Poor thing didn’t know whether she was coming or going. Just another sad victim of cupid’s custard pie’ (Ayckbourn 2001: 110). Both men, however, have underestimated Jacie.

Jacie, like many Ayckbourn women, is superior to the men around her, even if she is not at first aware of her own capabilities. She learns quickly, however, and rapidly surpasses Adam in everything he attempts to teach her but, before she can reach her full potential, she has to overcome the limitations imposed on her by her status in society. She learns to read in moments, aided by Adam and a Bible in a seedy hotel room, but the first passage she reads on her own is Genesis 3:16, which tells her that ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow though shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee’ (Ayckbourn 2001: 93). While Adam thinks he is offering her freedom, Jacie quickly realises that what he is actually offering is just another role, one that she can’t fulfil: ‘I can’t be what you want me to be. You’re asking too much of me Adam. Yes, I can play your Jacie. I can play her just as you want her to be. I’m good at that. That’s what I was built for. But I can’t be your Jacie’ (Ayckbourn 2001: 94).

Jacie is stronger than Adam physically (she saves him from a pimp who believes they are trying to muscle in on his operation) but also mentally and emotionally, better able to grasp the reality of her position. Adam is injured during the fight with the pimp and, while he is unconscious, Jacie decides that she cannot cope with the demands Adam has placed upon her and leaves to have herself melted down and her supposed faults rectified. She returns at the end of the play, but the separation has changed her. She has come to terms with her own strength and she is poised, self-possessed and entirely in control. When she is offered the role of executive she confidently displaces the disgraced Pepperbloom. Adam naively thinks that this is his happy ending and that he is now going to get his own way – that Jacie will naturally allow him to make his comedies – but, as we might now expect from Ayckbourn, this is only an almost happy ending. Adam will get his show but only in the style that Jacie permits. She has again surpassed him.

While most reviews have assumed that the play ends in a straightforwardly romantic fashion, Allen is right when he insists that Comic Potential actually reflects ‘our longing for paradise and our capacity for spoiling it’ (Allen 2002: 301). This is not a straightforward retelling of the Pygmalion myth and Allen argues that its conclusion owes more to the expulsion of humanity from the Garden of Eden, and the ending leaves us ‘with that sinking recognition that the innocent idyll of their love will not be allowed to last’ (Allen 2002: 301).

The ending of Comic Potential places Jacie in a position of pre-eminence, which the audience recognise as a moment of victory, but it also contains both the promise of Adam’s future disappointment and the seeds that will destroy any long-lasting relationship between the two would-be lovers. Jacie’s ascent carries her beyond the romantic notions contained in Adam’s hopes.

Surprises Another of Ayckbourn’s future stories, Surprises, was first performed in 2012. Lorraine Groomfeldt is a high-powered lawyer trying to avoid being reminded of her sixtieth birthday while dumping her unfaithful husband. Unlike the robots discussed so far, the play’s android, Jan, is male: a janitor with a serious crush on Lorraine. Jan’s modifications comprise a subroutine inserted into his programming which, unlike most androids, allows him to lie harmlessly on occasion. But the modification comes with a serious drawback, if it is used too frequently it will shut down the modified unit permanently. If Jan lies too much, he will drop dead. The situation is complicated by Jan’s belief that the modification may also be responsible for his ability to feel love for Lorraine.

Franklin, an older man who has his own troubled relationships, tells Jan: ‘If you happen to row – and believe me, if you spend any time in a woman’s company, you’re both of you bound to argue eventually – never ever try to win. On the rare occasion you’ll that you do win, you’ll almost certainly live to regret it’ (Ayckbourn 2012: 68). Jan takes him literally.

By the end of act two, Jan and Lorraine are dancing together and, by act three – set decades later – they are married, though it is a marriage of companionship since, like all Ayckbourn’s artificial people, Jan is not equipped for physical intimacy. Still, Lorraine and he are ‘still very much in love […] Fifty years and never an argument’ (Ayckbourn 2012: 91). But, the marriage has taken its toll on Jan. Lorraine had always been used to taking charge and being right – and Jan has fed this need by always avoiding confrontation. But as Lorraine has got older (life extending technology means she is now 120), she has become forgetful and cantankerous. Jan, locked into a set of behaviours that has ensured fifty years of happy companionship, is forced to bend the truth more and more frequently to keep her happy. He is lying himself to death. Jan’s inability to change his ways or renegotiate his relationship with Lorraine is an example of the way in which many of Ayckbourn’s characters are ‘quite incapable of traversing the boundaries of their circumscribed lives’ (Page and Trussler 1989: 6). At the same time, Jan fears that tinkering with his modification will alter his feelings for Lorraine. So, trapped between his limitations and his love, he faces destruction. Lorraine, meanwhile, is blissfully unaware of the damage her behaviour is doing to her partner.

Surprises reverses the usual relationships in Ayckbourn’s plays – for once the woman is in the position of power – but the mechanics are the same. The lower status partner – this time the power differential is based on class relationships – is being ground down by the other person in the relationship. As is often the case in Ayckbourn’s work, this is not through malice, or even deliberate action, but simply through the accommodations necessary to maintain a lengthy marriage and inattention to the needs of a partner. As Laura Thompson argues, Ayckbourn moves ‘his usual cast of anxious suburbanites into a world of time travel and hyper-longevity’ (Thompson 2012), but he does not see human nature significantly changing. We will continue to be obsessed with, and damaged by, love.

A Modest Catachresis Ayckbourn’s introduction of elements from sf and other genres does not represent a shift from his foundational concerns with ‘the destructiveness, the incomprehension, the predatoriness of marriage; the failure of men to understand women’ (Billington 1990: 51).

But if Ayckbourn’s concerns are unchanged then, what is the point of using science fictional imagery? Are Ayckbourn’s artificial people merely window dressing? Despite the continuities in theme, Nan, Jacie and Jan do bring something unique to Ayckbourn’s work. These artificial humans allow him to push his core concerns further, to make literal the metaphors he has used in other works. Nan can actually die of Jerome’s neglect, Jacie accelerates beyond Adam’s grasp far faster than a natural woman could, and Jan can really destroy himself to preserve his love.

In this sense, Ayckbourn’s artificial people allow him to perform an act of catachresis. In rhetoric ‘catachresis’ is the misuse of language – choosing the wrong word or mixing a metaphor – for rhetorical effect (King John’s begging for ‘cold comfort’ in Shakespeare’s play, for example). The term was taken up by Michel Foucault to represent a fundamental property of language. He argued that as there is no inherent link between meanings and signs so words can ‘change positions, turn back upon themselves, and slowly unfold a whole developing curve’ (Foucault 2001: 126). Even allowing for language’s unavoidable fluidity of sense, catachresis remains potentially subversive. The abuse of signs threatens our sense of an ordered universe. When the symbols that are supposed to apply to one thing (and that carry with them an array of expectations and understanding) shift to something quite different we are left momentarily adrift. This disturbance opens a space in which the subject is allowed to look again at those things that are taken for granted – questioning the labels and categories that are applied to physical and social hierarchies. It achieves, if only for a moment, ‘the irruptive extension of a sign proper to an idea, a meaning, deprived of their signifier. A “secondary” original’ (Derrida 1982: 255). This act of violence maps out the fault-lines in our understanding, creating a language of its own that ‘emerges at a given moment as a monster, a monstrous mutation without tradition or normative precedent’ (Derrida 1982: 123).

The violence of catachresis threatens our ability to distinguish between proper meanings and the deviational and in this moment of disturbance we are able to see the world differently. It allows, as Foucault says of philosophy, the ‘displacement and transformation of the limits of thought, the modification of the received values and all the work done to think otherwise, to do something else, to become other than what one is’ (Foucault 1988: 201).

In a modest way, this is what Ayckbourn does for his audience when he takes the themes of love and suffering, marriage and relationships, and substitutes his defective, obviously inhuman, androids and gynoids. They are a misused sign that subverts our sense of order. If these unreal, comic, mechanical things can suffer so much damage by being caught up in the relations that we take for granted, then a space opens in which his audience can consider their own behaviour, their treatment of others and how they, themselves, are treated.

By tracing the faults of our familiar world onto these inappropriate new landscapes Ayckbourn seeks to lead his audience to read the maps by which they have understood the world in new ways, to see the world as other than they have taken it to be. This is not to heap too heavy a weight of meaning on Ayckbourn’s work which remains, after all, popular comedies of relationship and manners. But it is to recognise that, as a playwright, Ayckbourn has worked a consistent theme of estrangement and domestic desperation that cannot lightly be dismissed. Further, it is to argue that when a playwright like Ayckbourn – deeply versed in theatrical tradition and somewhat more than comfortably successful in a particular genre – systematically deviates from his well-worn path, it is worth exploring what he might hope to achieve.

Conclusion Ayckbourn is a writer who deserves to be taken seriously. He has established a unique niche for himself as an acute observer of an English class during a period in which they were afforded significant influence, transformed their nation and suffered significant trauma. But he has also assiduously mined themes that are fundamental and familiar even if the aggressively homogenous society in his imagined worlds has always been, and has become rapidly more, anachronistic. The significance of Ayckbourn’s increasingly frequent use of the tropes of horror, fantasy and science fiction is not that it marks a break with his long-term and rigorous thematic focus, but that it marks a playwright who has been willing to pursue new methods of making his concerns strange and affective for his large audience even at the risk of alienating them by disrupting a successfully lucrative formula.

Ayckbourn’s artificial people – Nan, Jacie and Jan – bring into sharpest focus the playwright’s on-going preoccupation with our ability to damage those around us, even as we believe we are cherishing them. They demonstrate Ayckbourn’s concern with the unequal distribution of power in relationships and the casual, often unwitting, cruelty of those who can exercise power over others. And they show Ayckbourn’s belief that, too often, the limitations attached to the social roles imposed on women by the structures and expectations of our society are damaging, not just to women (though clearly it is most often the women who suffer) but to men as well.

Through his creation of these artificial people Ayckbourn offers a modest catachresis – a moment in which by breaking familiar metaphors his audiences, though already intimate with his cast of put upon women and hopeless, casually cruel men, see the world they know mapped onto the absurd. It is surely Ayckbourn’s intention that, in this moment, his audience might become open to difference and that they might, however, briefly, break from their usual assumptions and think otherwise of the relationships of power in which their lives are enmeshed.

Appendix: Ayckbourn’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Android plays Henceforward… (1987) Comic Potential (1998) Surprises (2012)

Family plays Callisto #5 / Callisto #7 (1990) The Champion of Paribanou (1996) My Sister Sadie (2003) Other plays with horror/fantastical or sfnal elements Standing Room Only (1961) Invisible Friends (1989) Body Language (1990) Wildest Dreams (1991) Dreams from a Summer House (1992) Haunting Julia (1994) A Word from Our Sponsors (1995) Communicating Doors (1995) Virtual Reality (2000) Snake in the Grass (2002) If I Were You (2006) Life and Beth (2008) Awaking Beauty (2008) Additional family plays Christmas V Mastermind (1962) This Is Where We Came In (1990) My Very Own Story (1991) The Boy Who Fell into a Book (1998) Whenever (2000) The Jollies (2002) Champion of Champions (2003) Miss Yesterday (2004)

Endnotes 1 A ‘definitive play list’ of Ayckbourn’s produced and unproduced work is available at: http://plays.alanayckbourn.net/page-4/ (accessed 16/12/20). 2 Simon Murgatroyd, ‘Drowning on Dry Land: In Brief’, URL: http://drowningondryland.alanayckbourn.net/styled-9/index.html (accessed 16/12/20).

Works Cited Allen, Paul. 2002. Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge. London: Methuen. Almansi, Guido. 1984. ‘Victims of Circumstance: Alan Ayckbourn’s Plays.’ In Modern British Dramatists: New Perspectives. Ed. John Russell Brown. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 109-20. Anon. 1998. ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Ayckbourn.’ The Economist, March 5. URL: http://www.economist.com/node/115646 (accessed 22/09/17). Ayckbourn, Alan (n.d.) Alan Ayckbourn’s Official Website. URL: http://www.alanayckbourn.net/ (accessed 16/12/20). —– 1989. Henceforward… London and New York: Samuel French. —– 2001. Comic Potential. Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Leipzig: Klett Ernst /Schulbuch. —– 2012. Surprises. London: Faber. Billington, Michael. 1990. Alan Ayckbourn. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, John Russell, ed. 1984. Modern British Dramatists: New Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Derrida, Jacques. 1982 (1972). Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. ‘The Masked Philosopher.’ In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. Ed. Lawrence Kritzman. London: Routledge, 323-30. —– 2001 (1966). The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Freedman, Carl. 2000. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Holt, Michael. 1998. Alan Ayckbourn. Plymouth: Northcote House. Murgatroyd, Simon. 2013. Unseen Ayckbourn. S.l.: lulu.com. Page, Malcolm and Simon Trussler. 1989. File on Ayckbourn. London: Methuen. Thompson, Laura. 2012. ‘Surprises.’ The Daily Telegraph, July 18. URL: http://surprises.alanayckbourn.net/styled-8/S_Reviews.html (accessed 22/09/17). Watson, Ian. 1988. Conversations with Ayckbourn. 2nd edn. London: Faber. Wu, Duncan. 1996. Six Contemporary Dramatists. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

AYCKBOURN’S ARTIFICIAL PEOPLE was originally published on Welcome To My World

#academic #Ayckbourn #Foundations #science fiction #sf

0 notes

martinmcg · 3 years

Text

Getting Started in Public Relations

So, a few months ago a student on Middlesex University’s journalism degree approached me with some questions about how a journalism student could prepare for work in public relations. Anyone who knows me will be entirely unsurprised to discover that I answered at somewhat stupid length. I think some of the stuff here might be of more general use to those at the start of their careers (although some of it is particular to students at Middlesex) so I thought I’d put it up here.

What are the most important skills you need to work in PR?

Rather than try to answer this myself I’m going to defer to the annual “State of the Profession” report from the Chartered Institute of Pubic Relations (CIPR – attached, along with the 2019 “PR and Communication Census” from the PRCA – Public Relations & Communications Association) which will both give you some insight into the current state of the profession.

The CIPR report (p28) sets out the top five skills most valued by recruiters as:

Copywriting and editing

Social media relations

Media relations

PR programmes/campaign planning

Research, evaluation and measurement

Writing well, being able to write in a variety of voices for different media, and having a working grasp of grammar and punctuation are still the fundamental skills for PR staff. Increasingly, those working in public relations have shifted from being “content prompters” (encouraging others to create material) to being “content creators” and while there can be lots of bells and whistles to this in terms of production skills, the basic requirement is to be able to craft a convincing message – and, most often, that requires a skill with words. No one (almost no one, anyway) is born a good writer – writing is a muscle that is strengthened by reading good writing (and paying attention to why it is good) and practice.

There’s still an assumption amongst some – older – people working in PR that the young (being “digital natives”) have a sort of innate understanding of how social media works that older generations lack. I’ve, generally, not found this to be true (being a consumer is not the same as being a creator) but you can take advantage of this prejudice if you can demonstrate an ability to use social media effectively. Having your own accounts with strong followings and interesting content (but possibly not too interesting) will be regarded as a definite positive by many employers.

Media relations – being able to demonstrate that you understand the needs of journalists, influencers and clients and that you have the ability to develop networks, manage relationships and build contacts remains a fundamental part of the PR role. The way these relationships work is different from sector to sector (financial PR works differently from fashion PR which works differently from political PR). The old-fashioned idea of schmoozing clients over long, expenses-funded, lunches (that, on a good day, became long, expenses-funded dinners) is, in these more austere times, very sadly, largely a thing of the past. But managing professional relationships is still crucial. Some people have a natural talent for the personal connection stuff, other people (like me) have to fake it by keeping meticulous files on contacts, their interests and previous collaborations.

Programme and campaign planning is not something I’d expect a new hire to be able to manage off the bat, but it’s useful if they have an idea how planning works and how their contributions have to fit into the broader scheme of things. If you want an introduction to the theory and basic outline of planning, I highly recommend Anne Gregory’s “Planning and Managing Public Relations Campaigns” – they’ve just published a new edition.

Increasingly pubic relations is expected to demonstrate a clear “return on investment” to managers or clients. So, the measurement and evaluation of projects has become more and more important. In journalism – where clicks tend to be king – measurement tends to be relatively straightforward. For PR it can be more complex – since individual public relations activities are often part of a longer-term strategy. The PR industry has developed the “Barcelona Principles” (introduction here: https://www.prnewsonline.com/barcelona-principles-2-0/) and the AMEC framework (https://amecorg.com/amecframework/home/framework/introduction/) as attempts to standardise and regularise measurement across the industry – but even where these are not formally applied, it is increasingly expected that PR campaigns and individual pieces of work will have clearly defined and measurable outcomes.

Is there any advice you have for me changing from a journalism field to pr?

So, as noted above, the ability to write and to manipulate words remains a key connecting tissue between the PR and journalism industries and if you have other content creation skills from your journalism background (audio, video, social or digital media) then you will definitely be able to leverage those in the PR field.

One of the most common complaints about PRs from journalists is that they get bombarded by useless stuff that isn’t relevant to their job (https://www.prweek.com/article/1668923/pr-pros-dont-understand-story-is-say-majority-journalists) and I think this is a fair criticism of a lot of bad PR. If you can demonstrate an ability to do the research into what the journalists/influencers you are targeting need and can use, then you’ll be doing your clients a favour.

I think one of the things that most journalists don’t get about PR is that, when done well, it is (usually) a much longer term and more strategic role than journalism. Good PR isn’t just about churning out today’s story (in the form of a press release) but developing long-term approach that establishes your client in a particular niche or as having a particular relevance. So, good PR isn’t just reactive – it involves being prepared for events and having crisis plans and developing campaigns that fit into strategies that deliver results over relatively long periods. You do, sometimes, get the buzz from tight deadlines and needed to respond instantly to crises but in between it’s about creating relationships that sometimes don’t pay off for years.

Do you have any suggestions on how you stand out in the industry?

My instinctive response to this – because of my background – is don’t stand out. My experience is in PR for political/social campaigning (unions, charities, causes) and one of the mantras on that side of the industry is “never become the story” and, as such, I’m always a bit suspicious of PRs who spend a lot of time promoting themselves.

That said, I recognise that not all areas of the PR industry are like that and that you do need to build a reputation within the industry.

I’m a big believer in professional standards – I’m a Chartered member of the CIPR – which means I do my “continuous professional development” (CPD) each year and get a little badge that says (to me, and I hope to others) that I’m a good boy who takes his job seriously.

As a student at Middlesex you are automatically entitled to membership of the PRCA – you can sign up here (https://www.prca.org.uk/membership/join – make sure to use your Mdx email address). Their website has lots of interesting and useful links and (in normal times) lots of opportunities to connect with others. You can also, I think, get free access to view their online training – which is normally £200 or so a session.

I’m very sceptical about specific “networking events” as they very often attract people who only have a very instrumental view of building contacts (what can they get out of it for themselves) but – in normal times – London is great for attending industry related events where you can rub shoulders with, get to know and maybe build up relationships with people at high-levels in the industry. Again, the PRCA website is a good place to start – if we’re ever allowed to gather in the same room as other humans again. But right now it’s actually easier to attend things because Zoom calls tend to be a bit less exclusive or exclusionary and – at least for me (I’m not great at the schmoozing bit) – a lot less stressful, though clearly the intensity of engagement is lower online.

Managing your own PR persona is important. A professional website (don’t do what I do, do what I say!) that shows off your skills/abilities/personality can be useful – especially if you can keep it up-to-date with something like a blog that discusses issues in the industry. Similarly, a strong LinkedIn profile can help and good, professional social media accounts that you use to engage in discussions about the industry and build up connections (not just spam people for job opportunities).

Finally, and I say this to all my students, there’s a mindset amongst some people that you can’t do PR or show off your abilities unless someone else has given you instructions – so students sit around complaining about lack of internship opportunities or the chance to show what they can do. This is not true. I am an internship-sceptic – too many of them offer poor opportunities to learn or a real foot in the door. Rather than waiting for the perfect internship, I encourage professionals starting out to “intern for themselves” – find a cause or an issue you care about (a local charity or a community group) and volunteer. Develop a portfolio of stuff that you’ve done that shows you are a self-starter and that you have the skills employers are looking for so that you’re starting to define your future career on your own terms. I graduated into he middle of a recession in the early 1990s and spent two years volunteering – building up a body of work and contacts while doing jobs I didn’t much like (barman, supermarket shelf stacker…) – until I made my first break into working in journalism.

Lastly, is there anything I can do or read to keep myself informed?

This lot should get you started…

MAGAZINES PR Week (https://www.prweek.com/uk) is probably the key industry magazine. It’s online content is mostly behind a paywall but you can register for free for limited access and there’s the blog (https://www.prweek.com/uk/blog). I also like the CIPR’s magazine “Influence” – but the print version is only available members and the online version is relatively limited in content (https://influenceonline.co.uk/).

BLOGS Stephen Waddington is a key UK commentator and writer on PR in the UK https://wadds.co.uk/

Famous campaigns: https://www.famouscampaigns.com/

Power & Influence: https://ellaminty.com/

Comms2point0: https://comms2point0.co.uk/

All Things IC: https://www.allthingsic.com/blog/

Neville Hobson: https://www.nevillehobson.com/

Dan Slee: https://danslee.wordpress.com/

Jessica Pardoe: https://jessicapardoe.com/

Wildfire PR: https://www.wildfirepr.com/blog/

Scriba: http://scribapr.com/blog/

PODCASTS

PR Week’s “The PR Show” is a good general interest effort: https://soundcloud.com/prweekuk

#FuturePRoof Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/futureproof-podcast/id1176718600

PR Moments – https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/prmoment-podcast/id1334739765

Talking points – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-talking-points-podcast/id900363572?mt=2

For Immediate Release – https://firpodcastnetwork.com/for-immediate-release/

SpinSucks: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-spin-sucks-podcast-with-gini-dietrich/id1356305060?mt=2

PRovoke: https://www.provokemedia.com/latest/podcast

PR Resolution: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pr-resolution-podcast-with-stella-bayles/id1423627061?mt=2

Today In Focus: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/todayinfocus

Getting Started in Public Relations was originally published on Welcome To My World

0 notes

martinmcg · 4 years

Text

Pandemic and the Limits of Entrepreneurial Government

Once again the government has used a high-profile announcement of an apparent technological breakthrough (the “game-changer” this time is the promise of ninety-minute diagnostic tests) to try to distract from their general failure to effectively address the pandemic (and, in this particular case, to grab front pages from the embarrassing story of a former minister being accused of sexual assault/rape). This raises a number of points. One of them is the persistent failure of journalism during this crisis to meaningfully question repeated and obviously spurious government claims about “magic bullet” technologies – indeed they’ve repeatedly played the part of loud, credulous cheerleaders. I’m going to come back to that one day soon. But what I want to focus on here is why these initiatives have, so far, all failed – spectacularly and often expensively.

The reason is simple. Despite the loudly-stated enthusiasm of key figures in this government (most notably their éminence grise Dominic Cummings, but also from ministers such as Raab, Gove and Hancock) for the language and trappings of “disruptive capitalism” their understanding of how this system works appears limited to a fascination with the glossy hagiographies of tech bro billionaires and little grasp of how disruptive capitalism works as a system and as part of a wider economy.

The government’s attachment to an ideology of disruptive capitalism goes beyond a traditional Conservative preference for private sector provision of public services and embraces a belief that the creative destruction of existing economic relationships is inherently good. It is not enough that businesses do the work of government – through the contracting out of services, for example. The revolution must go further and deeper. Existing patterns of thinking, ways of working and relationships must be broken down and rebuilt. All sectors of industry and government will be made more effective and efficient by bulldozing existing safeguards and embracing the buccaneering, free-for-all approach of their idealised vision of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism. It is an approach that, typically, lionises a handful of high profile (if not, always, high-profit) companies and a tiny number of billionaires.

The pandemic forced the government to make decisions that required practical responses to urgent public needs. Their response has been, in almost every case, to reject “orthodoxy” and to promote “new approaches”, putting faith in longshot technological solutions in place of existing institutional structures. The results have not been encouraging – an extraordinary density of failures has been packed into a remarkably short time.

Magic ventilators

Instead of buying ventilators from existing contractors (or asking new producers to build up capacity by licencing and building existing models) the government launched a scheme to “disrupt” the ventilator market by encouraging new producers to develop radical new models and approaches to constructing these devices. The result was 20,000 useless machines and £450m thrown away and a load of wasted effort and goodwill. Luckily this remained an embarrassment, not a human disaster, as treatments to Covid-19 have developed over time.

Pinprick antibody tests

The pinprick antibody test was going to immediately let everyone know how whether they’d been infected and allow those people who had immunity go back to work. The government ignored standard procedures and placed orders for as many as two million tests and paid at least $20m to two Chinese firms. None of the tests worked to the degree required. They are now repeating this gung-ho approach with their introduction of “90 minute diagnosis tests” that are untried and untested but which have been purchased blind and are being sold as “gamechangers”.

Test, track and trace

The UK went into this crisis with pandemic preparations that had been widely praised and were copied/adapted and used successfully by countries around the world. In the UK these plans were ignored. Responses were made on the fly and key services were removed from the control of public health oversight in the NHS and (particularly) local authorities and put into the hands of new bodies or private companies who had to build capacity from scratch. The result is that the UK’s testing capacity is uncertain (still not meeting targets set at the start of the outbreak), slow and unstable and, six months into the outbreak, track and trace systems are failing to reach up to one quarter of those testing positive and are (potentially) fatally slow.

Track and trace App

Announced as a “poster boy” of this government’s radical new approach to public services – much was made of the NHSX tracing app (“the X stands for user experience” – Matt Hancock said, meaninglessly) commissioned by an in-house team but built (at significant cost) by VMware – Go Pivotal, who are owned by American tech giant Dell. It would be, we were assured, able to replace long established but resource intensive contract tracing procedures – despite no convincing evidence from anywhere in the world that it was likely to be as effective as promised. As well as placing an unusual burden of expectation on the app – other countries have used apps as an alongside, not as a replacement for, traditional processes – the UK chose a radically different technical approach to other nations. The app was first promised for May, then June, then autumn and then scrapped.

Why have all these projects failed?

The central problem with the Cummings approach is that it fails to understand how disruptive capitalism “solves” problems (actually it more usually create problems for which it has produced solutions, but that’s another article) and how it works within society as a whole.

The Cummings approach starts with a simple faith that markets are efficient.

This position is not entirely without merit. If you want to ensure a supply of cheap bread or to create a system that can deliver a fresh mango for me to eat in the UK in the middle of January, then market mechanisms have proven remarkably effective. There are, of course, often externalities, costs within those exchanges that the price mechanism at the heart of markets does not adequately account for (environmental, social, etc) – but, as a system for delivering commodities, markets are, in normal situations, a successful tool. As a means of communicating relatively straightforward information about demand and consumer preference to producers, they are undeniably successful. And I see no a priori reason why some elements of government provision should not make use of the strengths of markets where they do not conflict with other priorities.

But relative efficiency in price setting does not imply that markets are universally efficient – though this is an often-made mistake.

Indeed, a moment’s thought reveals that disruptive capitalism’s mechanics are unavoidably wasteful. For every “tech unicorn” there are vast numbers of failures – there is a reason why these successes are named after hard-to-find, mythical beasts. Fifty-seven per cent of new UK companies fail within five years of starting up. In the technology and ecommerce sector, the rate of failure is even higher. One commonly quoted estimate is that ninety percent of ecommerce companies fail in the first 120 days while Fortune puts the failure rate for start-ups at 90% in the first two years.

That’s a lot of wasted money, time and effort.

On a systemic level this approach to problem solving is sustained by the willingness of individuals to take huge risks in chasing massive rewards and in the tendency of a certain type of person to believe, in the face of all reasonable evidence, that they are destined (through hard work or fate or genetics or their own innate value or whatever hokum they put their faith in) to be successful. With a (for practical purposes) near infinite supply of wishful thinking and people willing to risk everything, chance, circumstance and timing will eventually return winners. Someone will, eventually, be in the right place at the right time. And, from the constant churn, leviathans rise and fall. This mix of good fortune, timing and occasional inspired guess work is, almost inevitably, subsequently mythologised into a post hoc narratives of inevitable genius rewarded – whether for the self-aggrandizement of the lucky few or by those keen to encourage the idea that this way of organising a society makes sense.

Proponents of disruptive capitalism will argue that this is an evolution-mimicking process that results in the “survival of the fittest” and produces the best possible solutions to consumer demands. This may be so, but while we can wonder at the marvels produced by evolution, no one sensible ever claimed that it was an efficient way to create animals suited their environment. Misfires, misfits, extinctions, curious left-overs and more steps away from effective adaptation than towards it are inherent to the evolutionary process in nature and in business.

A system where only a tiny minority of ideas blossom, and where much effort goes into failure, may solve problems. It may even be the best way to encourage creativity and innovation in new technologies. But, for all the positive aspects that it may possess, it is not a system that can meaningfully be described as “efficient”.

This creation by attrition it is not a viable strategy for the governments of medium-sized democracies when faced with a pandemic. It requires too many resources.

So, the failure of the government’s start-up-inspired approach to solving pandemic-related problems should not be a surprise. The overwhelming majority of start-ups fail. What would have been a surprise is if any of them had been one of the small proportion that survive their initial exposure to the world. It would have been a near miracle if even one of them had turned out to be a public sector “unicorn” and been a runaway success.

Markets can be useful. Marketisation, with appropriate safeguards, can even be useful in informing some government services. But markets have limits and demands that don’t always mesh with the needs of government. And governments are not always able to bear the burdens that markets demand. One of the big burdens, especially of disruptive capitalism, is the built-in necessity of widespread failure.

Governments do not have the resources to recreate the manic, scatter-gun approach of the technology sector. They cannot replicate the wasteful evolutionary environment of failure and collapse necessary to create vanishingly rare unicorns. And, most crucially, they cannot continue to pursue enterprise after enterprise that throw away public money (or citizens’ lives) in the hope that the next longshot will deliver. Caution is not a weakness of old-fashioned government institutions or a bureaucratic mindset, it is an innate quality of restrained power.

Governments can promote entrepreneurship, they can even sometimes harness the energy of entrepreneurs, but it is not the job of government to take risks like an entrepreneur.

If you need ventilators, buy or build ventilators that you know will do their job.

Pandemic and the Limits of Entrepreneurial Government was originally published on Welcome To My World

#2020 #cummings #Politics #technology

0 notes