Most of the world got along fine without the doors opening. The planet was well used to failure. Religious groups flourished, formed and reformed, attacked each other in the street with rolled up magazines, inspired by a steady flow of MIRACLES, from the shrinking holes in the ozone to the spectacular diversion of hurricane Roxanne off the east coast of Florida. Acts of God were attributable to the aliens. If there were any. Insurance companies chose not to set a precedent, being content to set a premium instead. But then nobody believed in them, either.
Scherzo overheard this conversation in a pub.
‘They were in Kansas City and Sydney. A world tour, is what I think; checking places out for, you know, for possible...er...’
‘Colonization?’
‘Yeah. I read it. And everywhere they go people disappear; sometimes whole families.’
‘They must collect 'em, all different species from around the galaxy. A zoo, like in that film. And perform experiments, that sort of thing. Makes your stomach turn. Whose round is it?’
‘Right. My brother, in Canada, he saw one. Reckoned it looked like rubber. A man in a suit, he said. He thinks it's all a hoax, something dreamed up by ad-men to sell something.’
‘What kind of something?’
‘No-one knows. That's just it. But all this hype, that's to get us to buy it when it comes out.’
‘Maybe they're going to resurrect the space program.’
‘Could be. It's anyone's guess. Someone tried to shoot it.’
‘What? The alien?’
‘Yeah. In Ontario. My brother saw the man who did it. He was arrested and then released. Someone must've paid him to do it. The bullet bounced right off, he said, like it were some kind of special substance.’
‘You don't think it's real?’
‘Now, I didn't say that. I'm only telling you what my brother told me, and that's the impression he got, that it's rubber.’
‘And there was just the one alien?’
‘All he saw. I read there were six in Peking. The Chinese had a satellite link with the ship. Something about Chairman Mao...’
Scherzo neared the river. A couple of school kids, they story went, had dragged him from the murky water. Scherzo guessed that he'd passed out midst the decaying husks in the incinerator basement and the powers had fired him, ejected him for reasons only they understood. In the days immediately following his forced stay in the strangely empty hospital, where a host of ancient doctors had run endless, repetitive tests on him, he'd toyed with the idea of exposing the plant, stripping its cover, revealing its hidden depths and illegal activities and laying it prone before the clustered boots and gathered bayonets of the local environmental generals. It was a lingering affection for the massive ovens rather than any corporate loyalty which stayed him. If he closed his eyes and breathed deeply he could still smell the rubbish burning, see the fading after-image superimposed over retinae, feel the scalding furnace. The ash was monochromatic and powdery and the heat, stroking through his moulded helmet, cooked his brain. But Ruth, his locker, the few belongings in it, were as detached now from Scherzo as the moon.
To his left there was a faint splash. Someone was watching him, hunched on the far bank about thirty feet away, whipping a sapling in and out of the water. Scherzo peered intently at the figure in an effort to sex it. The figure stared back. Scherzo began walking slowly in its direction, the river dividing. The figure pulled its hood down over its eyes. Remained, but for the action of its wrist, unmoving.
Scherzo hunched opposite and smiled.
Downstream, the bridges grew in size and quantity, the traffic they bore making impossible any bird noise, throttling the sucked and compacted air. Moses and Rosemary wandered beneath the tallest, staring up through ironwork and masonry, glancing in reflection at the few boats moored or channelling the muddy water.
Scherzo, meanwhile, attempted a crossing. The river here had a different name, one of countless pseudonyms adopted at the behest of cartographers the world over, the liquid itself always happy to oblige: today a puddle, tomorrow an ocean, a party in the clouds. A short distance from where he and the figure had taken position on either shore was a haphazard ford, rocks adjusted years past to permit anyone willing a mostly dry passage. Only recently these steps had shifted, moved by flood and time, cracked and broken, fragments the offspring of meteorites and volcanoes - so they'll tell you, being old and grand; at any rate, loose teeth in rotten gums. Scherzo perched on the first, skipped to the second, stood and (they were all molars) examined the probable way forward. He glanced at the figure squatting, proceeded to the next rock and felt it wobble. The one after, its successor, was firmly, reassuringly rooted. Then a gap. He was in the middle. Could he jump to the following step and would he dislodge it? There were trees on either side, branches dangling in and above the bubbling flow. His situation altered his perspective greatly. He could see houses, terraced and detached, red brick and yellow, china chimney pots like hats or crowns. He could trace the curve of the field with an intimacy he hadn't suspected before, realize and appreciate the true folds of the land, witness how over the years man and nature had shaped it. The contours of the dread incinerator were clearly definable, buried in a latter-day cist to his left, enthroned beneath the earth like a forgotten king, one whose power never waned, although there were few (one was enough) to call him up. Scherzo dreamed of robbing that grave. Perhaps with Ruth's help? What they might steal...
A diving bird shattered the water and he fell in, was pulled out by the watcher who'd waded to his rescue, identifying himself as a native of warmer climes, a man of stocky build and tautened skin. He said nothing. Scherzo flapped wetly. The man kept the company of a large sack out of which he produced a fat ripe orange, wonderful and round, Scherzo thence staining thumbnails to peel, dripping juice and river on what appeared to be a map of roads but was in fact a map - crumpled and marked with slashes of vague pencil - of watercourses, brooks and streams, folded after a shake and a snort and returned to the sack from where it, like the marvellous fruit, had sprung.
‘Thanks,’ said Scherzo, wringing his shirt.
The figure reproduced our hapless swimmer's smile, accepted three bursting with goodness segments of orange, stuffed them as one into his silent mouth and rambled off. He wove erratically, Scherzo observed, as if in strict adherence to a bathymetric path.
Scherzo wondered how he was going to cross the river once more; why, indeed, he had crossed it in the first place.
He was stuck.
11
On the planet Formalhaut, tucked neatly into a hillside and smothered with amber blossom, the blue sun at its permanent zenith, one of a pair, and the yellow-green clouds spiralling languidly through the creamy firmament, Austin Pearce lay in his hammock composing songs and star charts, organizing the galaxy into units and segments, each a different size and shape to its neighbours, each unique in constitution, delineation, ethos.
Fat cat
sittin' on the windowsill,
doesn't know the time of day
pays no bills;
maybe chase a mouse later,
maybe a butterfly -
fat cat
watchin' the world go by.
He had been arranging and rearranging the universe, galaxy by galaxy, for years. Time was one thing he didn't measure, however. It was distance that mattered.
Fat cat
listenin' to the radio,
cannot sing the blues
rolls no dope;
maybe sleep an hour or two,
maybe three or four -
fat cat
ain't got no game to score.
He calibrated distance by a variety of means, employing an array of mathematical and ontological devices. And he was almost finished. Just one galaxy to go. His own. Austin felt reluctant to carve it up as he had the others, sad that his task neared completion. Apprehensive, but also excited, that he would be going home soon
, back to Pulchritude. He'd make it time for the roses, he was sure.
Fat cat
stretchin' as the day grows long,
won't budge till food comes
waits like Death;
gonna run the wild later,
gonna prowl the dark -
fat cat
callin' on Moon's guiding heart.
He licked his pencil, a 4H, and wrote a note to himself. Life is a bone, the note said, and we, as dogs, are in the habit of burying them, lives that in the future can be dug up again.
Fat cat
risin' as the night creeps in,
stomach loud as a new shoe
tight as a coiled spring;
gonna raise hell over fences,
gonna fight till dawn -
fat cat
knows it's time to be born.
Austin stood by the yonderscope, toed its gilded pedals. The mirrors shone and the wires writhed, and it wasn't even plugged in.
He would be going back soon, home to blue-green Pulchritude.
12
Rosemary glared with shock at Moses and the fear in her eyes transmitted an icy chill to his heart, a seeming accompaniment to the high wailing sound emanating from the girl between her shoe'd and his naked feet. The child, for that's all she was, had fallen from the window of a speeding car. It's driver hadn't slowed or stopped, but sped on, drawing crude black initials on the tarmac. It was late afternoon and the city street appeared suddenly to have emptied, as if someone had announced curfew. Rosemary and Moses were left outside, ignorant of the decree, prey to the trigger-happy security forces in their patent leather uniforms and not knowing what to do, which way to turn, who to approach for a resident's permit, which queues to join and which to avoid, whether to agree to samples being taken, tests run, results classified. A light flickered up ahead, casting its shapes in a puddle, fractured red and yellow neon, gateway to some cheap, gaudy bar or unfashionable café-cum-restaurant. Moses knelt and raised the girl's broken head. Her cheeks were torn, lips and chin gashed, nose cut and bruised. He could feel her warmth leak into his hand. Rosemary ran back to where her haversack lay and dragged it over, panting, tears refracting vision. She witnessed the girl jerk, heard her wailing grow louder, then froze where she stood as the delicate creature lapsed and died.
Later, beside a lake, observed by ducks and rodents, they held each other, rocking. No ambulance had arrived to spirit the child away. Instead, Moses had wrapped her too small body in his wiry arms and walked with her to an overgrown, derelict graveyard with a view of the bridges. And there he’d set her, propped and quiet, with her distorted spine to the weather-eaten church wall, dim face against an ancient lattice whose spindly vines might chance her pasty limbs in a month or so, whose flowers might grow in her hair.
13
His bedroom was on the ground floor, its view mostly blocked by a misshapen hedge from the undulating road with its rusty autos and rotting lamp-posts, aerials and wires bent and sagging, paintwork and creosote in terminal decline, flaking and lifting tiny ears. During the strangest hours, before and after sunrise and sunset, those ears listened with curious fascination to the warbled conversation of birds, dogs and groping adolescents, all with procreation on the brain, striking matches, poses, sparking cigarettes, cocking brows and legs, shedding feathers and fur, spilling laughter and guts as the light switched - indeterminable light, a photographer's wet dream, the uncatalogued illumination of souls.
Someone kicked a can down a street. Virginity was lost, somewhere. It had rained from six in the morning when Scherzo woke till six that evening, washing litter and hair from the surface and locking it beneath, plaited in a sewer the direction of which was never certain, whose incline and depth were variable, a work of man imitating a work of nature. He'd tried to get back to sleep but by seven had risen. Wilson entered the kitchen just as Scherzo filled the kettle and began hunting in the drawers for smokes, loose or in packs of ten or twenty.
‘You quit,’ Scherzo reminded him.
Wilson paused. ‘Why aren't you at work?’ he asked, one hand lost amid bin-liners.
‘I'm sick, remember? I haven't been to work for ages.’
Wilson grinned. ‘The mystery illness, eh? Maybe it's what did your old man in. Did you think of that? Maybe it's so bad nobody wants to talk about it. Maybe that's what you've got; but you don't know.’ His voice was slurred, pumping cheap vodka as he wandered off.
Scherzo ignored the man, mated the kettle flex to the kettle and switched it on. Wilson's odour would follow him around the house all day if he wasn't careful. And it would be worse upstairs. But there was no way of avoiding that. He needed the bathroom, wanted to shower. A slow pulse in his right temple encouraged him, guiding his feet rise by rise, each ten inches minus worn carpet. These brought him to the landing with its loose rail, and face to face with a monstrous woman whose naked breasts squatted on her ribcage like giant scoops of raspberry ripple. Her nipples were wide and stippled, obviously tooth-marked, even from eight or ten paces, the backdrop to a firing squad, upturned bowls out of which extinct quadrupeds might have drunk.
He could hear Wilson pissing. Not wanting to retreat down the stairs he walked, more reached by two long strides, his sister's vacated bedroom at the front of the house, looking upon the same vacated street, changed by height, as his room below. It smelled wonderfully clean, oddly free of dust as if in daily use. Scherzo charged his lungs and forgot his grime. He sat on the bed, the creases he impressed in the quilt the first for many years. He squeezed the mattress like it were flesh, a residual warmth held there, a heat surviving against time and pervasive winters. With the door closed, brass clothes' hook askew, he could hear nothing of Wilson and his woman. It was like he'd entered a newer world, his sister's realm of noiseless space. Around him books and sample cases awaited ghosted hands, pages and lids to be turned, words and contents exposed to light and eye, thought and scrutiny. Scherzo lifted a leather bound case from one shelf and carefully opened it. He sat once more on the bed, the precious item, when revealed, on his knee. It was Annie's favourite, a footprint that seemed almost deliberate, clawed and the size and spread of his palm, fixed into sediment on a beach, some muddy strand, in the bed of a swamp millions of years ago. There was a story that went with it, a story with every book and find, every fossil and piece of fragile bone; stories, but for those fragments lodged in Scherzo's brain, Annie had returned to the librarian. She was eighteen when she died, a bright young girl whose dreams had coloured his drab mind. Death took her one afternoon, still in a box, little brother wishing his goodbyes, rolled by wheel and belt to a place underground.
Scherzo gazed at that footprint for hours. He'd made it with a hoof of his own, aeons past, fleeing the lunchtime embrace of a precarious carnivore.
The rain plucked relentlessly at the tuneless window the sun-masked day through. The swelling heat and pressure of his bladder eventually brought Scherzo home, a failsafe of his time machine which manifested in a variety of ways, as may be seen in the future.
14
The moon rose out of the sea.
‘It's a trick of the light,’ said Poorman, rising creakily from his chair of white wicker, insulating tape and string. ‘The ice does it, has that effect; the ice and the aurora. You'll soon get used to it. It'll grow on you like a luminous mould - get you stoned, that and the slow noise, it's proximity.’
‘You mean to say the ship exaggerates these phenomena?’ Dreep hugged his coat about him, afraid of what he might feel beneath, his own withered frame or some other's. It had been so long since he'd removed it that the spectral green mass of his parka had become, to Dreep's way of thinking, like a second, vital skin, an all over protection against an all over opposition.
By contrast, Poorman wore a T-shirt with the legend Jesus Saves Money, one of a pair, the twin yellow to this one's blue, reading Funky Uncle's Citrus Kangaroo. There had been a third, pink, which Poorman had set on fire a few by-the-clo
ck days ago during a flare shooting contest; BACKSLIDER, its flame-written logo. ‘Cold?’ he asked Dreep, smirking, immune as he himself was to extremes of negative temperature. Poorman loved it up here; he even had a tan to go with his muscles.
The younger man hopped from foot to booted, fur-lined, zippered, buckled, Velcro'd foot.
‘I can feed you coffee. Always plenty on the go. A shot of rum?’
‘No, no,’ replied the college journalist, panic washing his brow with thoughts of alcohol and retained body heat.
Poorman frowned.
‘What I would like,’ Dreep continued, gathering his skins and his glassy courage about him, ‘is some sleep.’
Poorman shrugged, a spontaneous gesture which rattled the prefab on its floats. ‘Okay,’ he said obligingly, saving the boy for another moment, some later than usual breakfast. ‘If you don't want to ask me any further questions I'll have one of my scientists tuck you in.’
Theodore Dreep loathed the Arctic, despised the big man, hated himself and his drooling eagerness to accept what was fast turning out to be the worst possible assignment. He'd already spent two days in a foul-smelling snow-cat due to adverse weather conditions making it impossible to fly, the tracked vehicle breaking down continuously, on average every sixty circuitous miles, its driver a crazed Nipponese who smoked cheroots and pilloried Dreep's unsophisticated senses with a constant barrage of lurid sexual detail; one man's unedited account, the whole of his warped concupiscence, the reality of experiments hungrily discharged.
His name was Shin. He had green eyes, brown lips (that's cheroots for you) and the kind of sickly purple-bruise stubble that gave Dreep an uncomfortable sensation in his rectum, his arse tightening as if in anticipation of his father, an overtly hairy man and a major reason, if he was honest, why Theodore had plumped for this most distant of escapes originally.
‘Wait till you see the tits on this marine biologist,’ Shin said north of Baffin Island, the ice disturbingly thin, the cat so obviously heavy. ‘Talk about jugs! These babies'll shake your fillings. I tell you, if I could get my teeth into them it'd take fucking dynamite to shift me!’