The Stone Gods

  ‘God believes that it is, and so do I’, she said, with the finality that comes of never having to think things through.

  ‘We are compatible’, said Spike.

  ‘We are! We are!’ cried Nebraska.

  ‘That is, humans and Robo sapiens are compatible. I do not need a soul.’

  ‘No soul, no salvation’, said Sister Mary.

  ‘No sin, no need for salvation’, I said, and that shut her up because she was going to have to think about it.

  Friday came pushing through the party at speed. ‘Billie, I want to show you something right now. Come on. Bring the robot.’

  We went towards the campanile. Friday unlocked the little wooden door in the base of the tower and we walked up the stone staircase without speaking. At the top, in the bell tower, he went round opening the wooden shutters. ‘See for yourself’, he said, pointing out across the no man’s land towards Tech City.

  All I could see were troops, tanks, police with riot shields.

  ‘MORE-Peace, a private army under the control of a private company. Do you still think this is better than democracy?’

  ‘Is this all because of me?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself – you and a delegation of Japanese busybodies – but MORE-Media has put out a press report to say that they have uncovered a terrorist cell, of which you are a part. You have been planning this for two years, apparently.’

  ‘I planned it at nine thirty this morning – because the door into the street was open.’

  ‘No one will believe you – and even if they do believe you, it’s too late now. The machine is in motion. You walk out there with your hands up, holding your robot, and they’ll arrest you, storm us, and by tomorrow we’ll be in a new state of national emergency. Then MORE will really move in – new powers, new controls, and all unelected and unaccountable.’

  ‘You don’t talk like a World Bank Capitalist,’ I said.

  ‘That’s exactly what I am. I want the market to do what it does best, and I want government to do all the rest. MORE are running us like a private state. Tomorrow they’ll be all over the media telling us that a street curfew would be a good idea until things get back to normal – though what is normal about the way we’re all living beats me.’

  ‘If this hadn’t happened …’

  ‘It was going to happen – soon, in some way.’

  ‘I am being designed so that this cannot happen’, said Spike.

  ‘You were being designed like some twenty-first-century Wizard of Oz.’

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Spike. She hasn’t done Film yet.

  ‘So now what?’ I said.

  Friday pointed upwards to the helicopters circling the Playa. They were filming the party. ‘They think we’re a bunch of cokeheads with motorbikes. Fine. This is a diversion. We’ve got our own cameras filming what happens next, and at midnight we’re going to black out MORE-Media on every station and show some footage of our own. Call it Wreck Reels.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to leave? Alaska said you did.’

  ‘It’s too late now – it’s moved much faster than I thought. I’m not protecting you –’

  ‘Thanks. Heroic of you.’

  ‘But you have no martyr value, as no one will believe your story. Leaving now will make things worse.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘For this chance to wake people up to what’s really going on and to change things.’

  ‘I was at the telescope’, I said. ‘It was picking up a signal.’

  ‘Your robot’s a double agent – she was sending a pick-up signal and you picked it up.’

  ‘Wrong’, I said.

  ‘Untrue’, said Spike. ‘I have no transmitting equipment without Mainframe, and I am not a double agent – I am objective.’

  ‘And I threw away my WristChip’, I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Dead Forest.’

  ‘If you went back in there, you’re more stupid than I thought. It’s not exactly a health cure, a walk in that forest, as you will see.’ He checked his watch. ‘Here they come.’

  The party stopped – suddenly, completely. No music, no shouts, no laughter, no bottles. Silence of a deep-space kind.

  Then I saw them, coming in through the dark at the far edges of the Playa. Coming in on all fours, coming in on crutches made from rotten forest wood, coming in ragged, torn, ripped, open-wounded, ulcerated, bleeding, toothless, blind, speechless, stunted, mutant, alive – the definition of human. Souls?

  They lived in the Dead Forest. They were the bomb-damage, the enemy collateral, the ground-kill, blood-poisoned, lung-punctured, lymph-swollen, skin like dirty tissue paper, yellow eyes, weal-bodied, frog-mottled, pustules oozing thick stuff, mucus faces, bald, scarred, scared, alive, human.

  They bred, crawled out their term, curled up like ferns, died where they lay, on radioactive soil. Some could speak, and spat blood, each word made out of a blood vessel. They were vessels of a kind, carriers of disease and degeneration, a new generation of humans made out of the hatred of others.

  There were children holding hands – or what stumps and stray fingers they had for hands – limping club-footed, looking up from the hinge of their necks, uncertain of their heads, wrong-sized, misshapen, an ear missing, a nose splayed back to a pair of nostril holes. Some no holes at all. Breathe through your mouth like a panting animal – pursued, lost, find a hole, live there, rot there.

  There were women, traces of finery, traces of pride, a necklace saved from the smash, the sleeve of a blouse, fastened on one arm. A woman, breasts open, the nipples eaten by cancer, the soft inside exposed, raw pink. Her eyes bright blue from a better time.

  There were men, skin so burned that the muscles underneath were on show like an anatomy textbook: deltoid, rhomboid, trapezius, veins leaking like a crucifixion. A man with skin to his knee and not beyond – a skeleton walk, a thing dug up from the grave, but not dead, alive. Human.

  A small boy and a small dog, the dog hairless and pink, tongue lolling, body worn thin like hope, the boy with a bad stomach wound sewn up at his home or his hole, subcutaneous fat pushed on the outside like a roll of tripe. He had the dog on a lead and he was still managing to be a boy with a dog and the dog was still managing to be a dog with a boy because not even a bomb gets to wipe out everything, and this little bit was missed in the blow-up, the fall-out, the death-toll, the regrettable acts of war.

  They came, creatures with mossy eyes, their stones kicked over, forced out into the light. They came, blinking, twisting, slimy, exposed. They came from the private graves of public ignorance, out of the column of statistics, and here, to be seen, though they did not want to be seen, preferring the decay of what they knew, the thing they had of their own that no one would take away now, not worth the trouble of the kill.

  They had food dropped in every day – cardboard parcels of soft stuff because they had no teeth. Helicopters lowered the bags and flew away. No one looked down and no one looked up.

  They sat by their fires and ate, creatures on another planet – from another planet, lost on this one, as though a line of creatures long extinct had resurfaced through shale layers of time, and come here, accusing, a witness to what should not be.

  The crowds in the Playa parted. Many people bowed their heads. We were the lucky ones, the not-these, we were the ones who had survived the aerial bombing and fire-clusters, the final flash.

  Regrettable, unavoidable, a war to end all wars, a war for democracy, a war for freedom, peaceful war. Sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes war is right.

  But to the broken and the dead, to the wounded and the maimed, to the exploded and the shrapnel-shattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tears can wash away, it hardly matters that the dead language of war repeats itself through time. The bodies that can say nothing have the last word.

  What is it – the last word? No.

  No more war.

  I did not think to be here.
I thought my life would pass under the shelter of ordinary events. Conflict was elsewhere. Things were bumpy, things were tough, but this was the West: conflict was elsewhere. I did not think to be here.

  My mother, just learning to talk at the end of World War Two, where is she now, Post-3War? Still alive? Bombed dead? Bewildered because they promised her – promised all the children of the war – that their own children, their children’s children would never face war again?

  By 1960 it had looked like melt-down. Cuban Missile Crisis, 1961. President Kennedy making a speech, 1963 – problems man-made, therefore man can solve his problems.

  1960. The beginning of my world. My mother – love’s image and love’s loss.

  They came past, out into the Playa and on, through into the no man’s land that separates Tech from Wreck. On the other side of the railway carriages, they stood facing the Peace Force, in their riot gear, a solid, well-armed humanoid wall of Plexi-shields, full-facers, batons and guns.

  One of the mutants, a man with what was left of a tattoo now stretched like barbed wire across his chest where he had bloated with fluid, broke the rank of his kind and stepped forward, right up to the immobile line. He tapped on the head-visor, tried to force it open. The wearer did not move. There was no violence – no sign of life at all.

  The big, bloated man opened his mouth and laughed. ‘Toxic,’ he said, ‘me or you?’ He laughed, and spat a gobbet of something fermenting on to the sleek face of the helmet. He turned his back to turn away. Someone shot him.

  Then it happened.

  From the tops of the carriages, hundreds of Wreckers started hurling petrol bombs into the troops. The troops charged the carriages. The tanks came forwards. The helicopters dropped Tear Gas.

  I ran down the steps of the tower and into the Playa. Chic X on the low-loader were throwing semi-automatics from crates piled behind the speakers. A woman was carrying grenades in a red plastic laundry basket.

  I didn’t want a gun, I didn’t want a grenade, I wanted to get away.

  The old man was sitting where I had left him – he didn’t seem afraid.

  ‘The tanks are coming in’, I said. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  He got up. He was slow. There was no running to be done.

  I saw the small boy with the small dog. ‘Go back into the Forest’, I shouted, but he stood still, wouldn’t move.

  There was a blast overhead – deafening – and a rain of slate, metal, wood. I slung Spike on my back, grabbed the boy by the wrist – he had no left hand – and pulled him with me, through the noise, out of the Playa.

  There were others fleeing, black shapes with bundles. Our progress was slow, but it didn’t matter: the Wreckers were hard to fight, they were organized, no one was coming after us.

  Out now, through the dark so dark that the sky and the land slope into each other, stars like hand-holds, marking the way, the way someone has been before.

  I should be safe in the city, watching the news in my flat, watching the troubles happening elsewhere, a regrettable and unavoidable clean-up operation; insurgents, terrorists, rule of law and order.

  I shouldn’t be here, fugitive, lost, but time has become its own tsunami, a tidal wave sweeping me up, crashing me down. You can change everything about yourself – your name, your home, your skin colour, your gender, even your parents, your private history – but you can’t change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.

  This is our time.

  The small boy was whimpering. I gave him the bottle of milk. He knelt down and poured some into his one good cupped hand, and gave it to the dog to drink. When he had done that with half of the milk, he drank the rest straight off. We went on.

  I knew we would come back to the telescope.

  Far out, too far to see with the human eye or to hear with the human ear, is everything we have lost. We add to that loss feelings that are unbearable. Send them out into deep space, where we hope they will never touch us. Sometimes, in our dreams, we see the boxed-up miseries and fears, orbiting two miles up, outside our little world, never could rocket them away far enough, never could get rid of them for ever.

  Sometimes there’s a signal, and we don’t want to hear it: we keep the receiving equipment disused, we never updated the analogue computer. Shut off, shut down, what does it matter what happens if we can’t hear it?

  But there it is – repeating code bouncing off the surface of the moon. Another language, not one we speak – but it is our own.

  I don’t want to recognize what I can’t manage. I want to leave it remote and star-guarded. I want it weightless, because it is too heavy for me to bear.

  Sometimes I think it would be better if I had no feelings at all. Like Spike, I could be neural and not limbic. Like her, I would have no need of emotion. I associate feeling with sadness; and sadness is a void, my empty space. Feeling is empty space. But space is not empty.

  Above me, the sky is drilled with stars, ancient light, immense distances, new worlds. If we found another planet, we could leave everything behind, start again, be safe. It would be different, wouldn’t it? Another chance.

  There’s my father leaving for Ireland. There are the Pilgrim Fathers sailing for America.

  The new world – El Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfoundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc’d upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found …

  The telescope was tilted. The beacon at the tip of the radio antenna was lit up. There was a light on in the hut.

  ‘I am picking up the signal’, said Spike.

  The old man was standing, hands in his trouser pockets, looking from the dish to the hut. He went towards it, opened the door. He went inside. I could see his shape moving across the window. He seemed to be talking to someone.

  ‘Billie,’ said Spike, ‘why are you crying?’

  ‘Because it’s hopeless, because we’re hopeless, the whole stupid fucking human race.’

  ‘Is that why you are crying?’

  ‘And because I wish there was a landing-place that wasn’t always being torn up.’

  ‘Is that why you are crying?’

  ‘And because I feel inadequate.’

  ‘There’s a story about a princess whose tears turned to diamonds.’

  ‘I’m not a princess and my tears are tears like everyone else’s.’

  ‘But they are not everyone else’s, Billie. They are your tears.’

  And my tears are for the planet because I love it and because we’re killing it, and my tears are for these wars and all this loss, and for the children who have no childhood, and for my childhood, which has somehow turned up again, like an orphan on my doorstep asking to be let in. But I don’t want to open the door.

  ‘Billie,’ said Spike, ‘leave me here and go on.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you. Go where?’

  ‘Find your way home.’

  ‘It’s not home – it’s where I Iive. That’s different.’

  ‘At least you have somewhere to live.’

  I looked at the small boy and the small dog. ‘I could take them with me.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let you look after them. They’d take the boy to hospital, where he will die, and they will have the dog put down.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘They’ll say it’s in the best interests of the boy.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘But it will break his heart.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And his heart is the one thing they haven’t broken.’

  ‘Spike?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why do you say these things now?’

  ‘I am among humans.’

  ‘That must be depressing for you.’

  ‘I can’t be depressed.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘But I will lea
rn.’

  ‘Spike – this is never going to work. Humans can’t do it – either we kill each other or we kill the planet or both. We’d destroy the lot rather than make it work.’

  ‘It’s taken you a long time to get here.’

  ‘Sixty-five million years since the dinosaurs.’

  ‘That’s when the signal was sent.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It is dated.’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t read it.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It doesn’t say anything as such. It is one line of programming code for a Robo sapiens.’

  The old man came out of the hut. He was waving his arms, excited. We went over to him. The room was humming. ‘The analogue computer is driving the dish,’ he said. ‘I have found what can only be described as a message in a bottle – except that it isn’t in a bottle, it’s in a wavelength.’

  When we approached it, polar-swirled, white-whirled, diamond-blue, routed by rivers, we found a world still forming. There was evidence that carbon had once been the dominant gas, and after that methane and, finally, oxygen, thanks to the intervention of cynobacteria. Oxygen creates a planet receptive to our forms of life.

  Like Orbus, Planet Blue is made up of land and sea areas, with high mountain ranges and what appear to be frozen regions. We have landed two roving probes on the planet and expect a steady supply of data over the coming months. The planet is abundantly forested. Insect life, marine life and mammals are evident. It is strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million years ago, with the exception of the dinosaurs, of which we have no record on Orbus.

  ‘A new planet’, he said. ‘Imagine what we could do if we found a new planet.’

  There it is, travelling through the sky, the winning ball with the lucky number on it – not the proto, the almost, the maybe, but this one, Planet Blue, which wanted life so much she got it.

  Ranging through the wrecks of stars, burned and blasted, would you find it, alone in the Milky Way, a landing-place?

  And if you did find it?

  The old man was sitting at the data-print of the computer. I took the manuscript out of my bag, dropped the pages, picked them up again, shuffled as a pack of cards.