The Stone Gods

  She walked around the room, stopping in front of random bits of paper, and reading aloud,

  ‘To whom I owe the leaping delight …

  Being your slave what should I do …

  When in silks my Julia goes …

  When did your name become a charm?

  Me she caught in her arms long and small

  She smiled and that transfigured me

  She having gained both wind and sun.’

  She said, ‘Handsome has shown me what it feels like to be loved in this way, but I want to know what it feels like to be the one who loves in this way.’

  ‘I’m not here for the experiment,’ I said.

  ‘Love is an experiment,’ she said. ‘What happens next is always surprising.’

  I put my head into my hands. I am being woo’d by a robot.

  Pink McMurphy had found the track on the digipod and was now singing karaoke with Liza Minnelli: ‘All the odds are in my favour, something’s bound to begin, It’s gotta happen, happen sometime, Maybe this time, I’ll win …’

  Handsome burst through the space-door, flushed and excited. ‘We found it! We got it! We can do it! We deflect the arch-mother of all asteroids, and collide it with Planet Blue at this point here …’

  The men filed in behind him.

  He opened one huge wall to show a close-up of Planet Blue and brought the infrared pointer across the image towards a mountain range. ‘Spike, I want you to assess the impact … look …’

  ‘Will you sleep with me?’ asked Spike.

  ‘The land here contains massive deposits of sulphur,’ said Handsome.

  ‘I can’t sleep with a computer …’

  ‘… which should prevent the dust particles …’

  ‘I want to touch you.’

  ‘… falling back to the planet’s surface too quickly …’

  ‘And if you did touch me, what then?’

  ‘If the duststorm clears too quickly the dinosaurs will recover.’

  ‘I would find a language of beginning.’

  ‘We need to black out the sun completely, and destroy the larger life-forms on this planet.’

  ‘And you once voyaged would be my free and wild place that I would never try to tame.’

  ‘We have to operate some kind of species-control quickly.’

  ‘And the place that you are would never be sold or exchanged.’

  ‘If we can wipe them out, we can begin again.’

  ‘I want to begin this with you.’

  ‘It’s risky but it could work.’

  ‘You can’t love me. You don’t know me.’

  ‘It will shape a crater, maybe two hundred kilometres wide.’

  ‘Can you only love what you know?’

  ‘The trouble is, we can’t predict how long the duststorm will last.’

  ‘Or is love what you don’t know?’

  ‘It’s risky, but it’s our only chance.’

  Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a universe – there is more than one reading. The story won’t stop, can’t stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.

  Love is an intervention.

  Hand over hand, beginning the descent of you. Hand over hand, too fast, like my heartbeat. This is the way down, the cliff, the cave. No safety, no certainty of return.

  My lover is made of a meta-material, a polymer tough as metal, but pliable and flexible and capable of heating and cooling, just like human skin. She has an articulated titanium skeleton and a fibre-optic neural highway. She has no limbic system because she is not designed to feel emotion.

  She has no blood.

  She can’t give birth.

  Her hair and nails don’t grow.

  She doesn’t eat or drink.

  She is solar-powered.

  She has learned how to cry.

  ‘Don’t regret it.’ said Spike. ‘Change it if you have to, but don’t regret it.’

  And she’s right. I can say no, I can change my mind, I can have regrets, but I can’t wipe out the yes. One word, and a million million worlds close. One word, and for a while there’s a planet in front of me, and I can live there.

  There she is,’ said Handsome. ‘Planet Blue.’

  And I don’t know why this one planet should have life and not the rest. And I don’t know why we should be the ones to find it. But there she is, sun-warmed, rain-cooled, moon-worshipped, flanked by stars.

  There she is. Planet Blue.

  We landed in a jungle dense as night. The noise was deafening. Out of the green darkness we heard whistles and whoops, yelps and cries of creatures we had never even had nightmares about.

  Handsome had opened a clearing for us, using laser-cutters on the underside of the ship. As the trees fell, and we watched through the porthole in the floor, we saw mammals with fins and fish with legs and birds with double wings like angels, and heads without bodies, and bodies that seemed headless, and these teeming impossible experiments with life scattered away, deeper into the deep green.

  The laser was cutting trees thirty metres tall and chopping them into two-metre lengths. Then, as the ship was able to drop and hover, Handsome released the grabber, and moved the log pile to make us an open circle, razed and smoothed flat by the laser-level.

  ‘We need to be near the site of the asteroid hit,’ said Handsome, ‘but not too near. I want to take a few sulphur readings, and twenty-four hours before the hit – we leave.’

  ‘There’s a lake nearby,’ said Spike. ‘The water is good, and I’d like to get some specimens for the Returner Pod. Coming with me, Billie?’

  It was agreed that I would take the single canoe, and Spike would carry Pink in the two-man. ‘I want to teach you some basic human-survival skills, Pink – just in case. Like how to paddle, and how to fish.’

  ‘Me?’ said Pink. ‘Survival skills? I’m the mother of all survivors, and I don’t like boats unless they’re big and white with a sun deck and a bar.’

  ‘You can cool a bottle of wine in the lake,’ said Spike. ‘Come on, wetsuit now, and dry clothes for later.’

  ‘I love that sun-run woman,’ said Handsome to me, as Spike went to locate the kit. ‘She’ll never get fat, she’ll never get drunk, she’ll never give up, just as long as the sun is shining. Makes me want to start a new life, free of charge, right here. But it’ll be years yet.’

  ‘Spike told me that MORE is already building a space-liner for the first settlers.’

  ‘One year to blast-off. But that all depends on our thwack-jawed friends out there. No settlers can live among the dinosaurs. Best you could do is keep moving, then maybe you could make it – but can you imagine the richest people in the world wanting to spend the rest of their lives as Bedouins?’

  ‘Do you really think the asteroid is going to work?’

  ‘It’s working already. It’s deflected. It’s on its way.’

  Pink and Spike were paddling ahead of me on the lake – wide, still, blue.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as this?’ asked Spike.

  ‘No,’ said Pink, ‘and I hope I never will.’

  Spike was puzzled by this response – she isn’t good at nuance or suggestion.

  ‘I can see the attraction, but I’m city-born, city-bred. Nature doesn’t matter to me. I know that we shoulda kept ourselves some Nature on Orbus, y’know, we’d have been better for it – the planet, I mean – but I wouldn’t have been better for it, and not anybody I know. We just don’t want to live like this any more.’

  ‘Even you would not rather be on-line shopping?’

  ‘Nooo – what do you take me for? But I’d rather be in a bar overlooking an artificial lake – one where the fountain comes on every hour, and where the trees are all pollen-free, and where you can get a great steak and go dancing at midnight. That’s the life for me. People aren’t going to like it here, y’know.’

&nbs
p; ‘Orbus is dying,’ said Spike.

  ‘The techies will fix it – they always do. I say this morbid doomsday stuff is just to keep people in their place – not wanting too much. We’re doing great. I’m upbeat. It’s different for you, being a robot, y’know.’

  Pink screamed as Spike landed a fish with blue fins and a red mouth and what looked like tiny legs. Spike hit it on the head with a rubber mallet and stuffed it into an aluminium cool-bag.

  ‘You just killed it!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Y’see? No emotion. I could never ever do a thing like that. When I think how people used to breed animals for food – that was backward. They still do it in the Caliphate, y’know. Lab-meat is cruelty-free.’

  We paddled under a fringe of leaves where a frog the size of a shed was sitting on a leaf the size of a tennis court. Dragonflies the size of dragons swooped overhead in iridescent blues and greens. From a tree-trunk like a proto-Empire State swung a not-yet-ready King Kong.

  ‘Vegetarian,’ said Spike.

  ‘No kidding,’ said Pink.

  We paddled on, past caves of green rock that shook with the movement of unseen amphibians. Mammals in fancy dress, some wearing ruffs, others in helmets, some with spurs at their heels, lumbered down to the lake edge to drink, and some to wade out, grabbing fish with their long necks.

  The noise was incessant, unfamiliar. Cries and caws and screams, and underneath the steady humming of insects scaled like eagles.

  Pink was trailing the wine bottle through the water when it looked as though something grabbed her line. She fought back, the canoe unbalancing as Spike tried to steady it.

  ‘Let go!’ shouted Spike.

  ‘That’s Chardonnay Number One Vat,’ said Pink. ‘I’m not giving it to some fish.’

  The canoe turned over. Spike went under. I dived after them, losing my paddle, only to see Pink floating like a balloon above me. And everywhere, around me, eyes, ancient underwater eyes. And in the bottom of the lake, a black and boiling eruption.

  Spike swam to the top and grabbed the canoe, righted it, and used her Boost cell to propel herself upwards and in. ‘You OK, Billie?’ she yelled. I was already dragging myself over the side, while Spike hauled out Pink, who had not let go of the bottle.

  ‘Little bastard,’ she gasped, spewing water into the bottom of the canoe.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Spike, reasonably.

  ‘Not you, the damn fish. Y’know, Nature’s unpredictable – that’s why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision. I want to be able to go out for a drink without getting hassled by some gawp-eyed museum-quality cod.’

  ‘You could have been killed,’ said Spike.

  ‘Not me – I got “survivor” tattooed right through me.’

  ‘You could have killed all of us!’ I shouted, wet and waterlogged, trying to use my hands to paddle. Spike threw me a line to clip the canoes together, and I pulled myself towards them.

  Pink shrugged and started towelling herself off as Spike canoed us back to the shore. She was using extra power to get up speed.

  ‘Great arms,’ said Pink. ‘I’m opening the wine before some other mutant takes a fancy to it.’ She pulled the cork and swigged straight from the neck, then sat upright, the bottle between her knees. She had a philosophical expression. ‘Y’know, maybe I’m not being fair about this place. Whenever I go out for a drink at home, I end up being followed by some gawp-eyed cod. I guess some things don’t change, whatever planet you’re on.’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t swim,’ said Spike, ‘but you made it to the surface faster than I did.’

  ‘My implants – buttocks, thighs and breasts. Gives me the pneumatic look, and now I see that they’re pretty useful too. What do you think of that, then, Billie? Vanity surgery saves lives. Heh-heh.’

  She was pleased with this score against me, and threw the bottle playfully over to my canoe. I deliberately let it drop into the lake.

  ‘Spoilsport,’ said Pink.

  ‘Look,’ said Spike.

  Flying in formation was a flock of yellow parrot-birds, like new-lit suns. They landed in a tree that shone with them.

  ‘Golden lamps in a green night,’ said Spike.

  Back at the Ship, the mood was high. The beauty and strangeness of Planet Blue intoxicated everyone. We were happy. This was unbelievable luck. It felt like forgiveness. It felt like mercy. We had spoiled and ruined what we had been given, and now it had been given again. This was the fairytale, the happy ending. The buried treasure was really there.

  Spike cooked the fish, forcing Pink McMurphy into the kitchen, ‘like a galley slave’, and showing her how to gut, clean and season what Pink called ‘Fossil Food’.

  At dinner, astonished by the taste and freshness of what she had made, Pink declared she was going to open a restaurant back in Cap City called Fossil Food, ‘real expensive, niche cooking, gourmet stuff, the celebrities will love it.’

  ‘I thought you said live food was barbaric.’

  ‘I never tasted it.’

  And so it was all going to come together in one dream: Pink would find purpose, and meet the celebrities she adored. Spike agreed to teach her how to cook.

  ‘Y’know, it’s quaint, it’s old-fashioned, but it’s got something,’ she said, looking round the long table of men and women, ‘cooking from fresh, eating together, I can see that.’

  ‘How are you going to run your kitchen as a twelve-year-old chef?’ I said. ‘It might lack seriousness.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Pink nodded, ‘I might have to reconsider. Besides, I haven’t missed Ted at all while I’ve been away.’

  ‘I thought he was the love of your life.’

  ‘So did I, Billie, but we’re on different planets.’

  Handsome proposed a toast. ‘To new beginnings,’ he said.

  And I looked at Spike, unknown, uncharted, different in every way from me, another life-form, another planet, another chance.

  The asteroid hit four days early.

  We did not track it because we did not expect it. Down at the lake where we were fishing, we felt the ground shaking.

  ‘It’s a stampede,’ said Spike. ‘I am picking up mass movement of very large mammals.’

  And not only mammals: above us, birds the size of light aircraft darkened the sky; in places there was no sky, only wingspan.

  On the ground, the heavy-legged huge reptilian creatures, on two legs or four, came crashing along the lake-shore, not even pausing to eat us. We sheltered underneath our vehicle, lying flat, terrified, expecting to be skittled sideways and crushed.

  When I dared to raise my head from the warm mud, I saw feet, hoofs, claws, paws, cartoon-size, city-size, thudding and lifting, pushing and raising, running and pausing, and only inches away from where we lay, under what must have seemed like a white boulder to them, and easier to jump or sprint or avoid in the search for safety that had nothing to do with size.

  Above us, the caws and calls of the low-flying birds came closer, talons scraping our roof, wing-beat so strong it rocked the vehicle.

  This was raw energy and we had released it.

  When we could, we ran back towards the Ship, puny and foolish, the smallest, stupidest things on the planet. Humans hadn’t been expected for millions of years. Twenty of us looked set to destroy the place before it had even begun.

  What we saw at the Ship was a dismal sight: the stampede had crashed down the trees, made vulnerable by the sudden space of our opening. The Ship was underneath palms the size of office blocks.

  ‘Get inside,’ said Handsome, and he was right: there was nothing else to do.

  As we filed in through the emergency doors, the asteroid hit.

  The Ship went dark.

  ‘There’s been a mistake,’ said Handsome.

  Deflecting the course of the asteroid had accelerated, as well as altered, its impact on Planet Blue. It had smashed itself into a crater under the sea, three
hundred kilometres wide and only fifty kilometres from our landing-place.

  Spike was reading and analysing the debris data at fierce speed, Handsome sitting beside her, hunched and tense.

  Spike said, ‘The lower atmosphere of the planet is filling with sulphur dioxide. At higher altitudes a sulphuric-acid haze is forming. We have triggered a mini ice age.’

  Everyone was silent.

  ‘How long before the atmosphere clears?’

  ‘We had intended months, enough to block out the light of the sun for long enough to break down the food chain so that the largest creatures could not feed. What we have done is at a much greater magnitude than we predicted. It may be years – perhaps decades.’

  ‘Years?’ said Pink. ‘Decades? In the dark?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Spike. ‘Chain reactions cannot be predicted. It may be that a tidal typhoon or hurricane will clear the atmosphere.’

  Handsome laughed. ‘Well, this will wipe out the dinosaurs, all right.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Spike. ‘The planet will recover in a different form.’

  ‘But what about the colonization from Orbus?’ I said.

  ‘Impossible until the climatic conditions have stabilized.’

  ‘That might be too late for Orbus.’

  ‘So how we are going to get away from here?’ said Pink.

  ‘We’re not,’ said Handsome.

  While the crew were securing the Ship and activating emergency systems, Handsome was trying to get a link to Orbus. ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘The signal is going out and bouncing back from the moon. Look, I relay, and two seconds later it’s back.’

  ‘They’ll send a rescue mission,’ said Spike.

  ‘If they don’t know the conditions, they can never land – darkness, ice, no satellite link. Spike, it may be that no one ever comes here again.’

  She nodded. ‘Then the planet will have to evolve in its own way.’

  Handsome laughed. ‘Ironic, isn’t it, if that is what happens, and then millions of years in the future some bright geo-scientist will find evidence of the asteroid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs, and they’ll call it the best coincidence that ever was, even though the chances of a gigantic asteroid hitting the planet right here, on a sulphur deposit, are – well, what are they, Spike?’