Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  José looked disappointed. Hue suspected he had been looking forward to the fun when El Jefe arrived. Hue didn’t have long to wait. A pounding at the door announced Emilio, who barged in, a small mob pressing behind him.

  “Encantado, Jefe,” Hue greeted him formally. “Please ask them to leave.” Hue was more anxious than he dared show, and needed to establish his authority.

  The Jefe hesitated, and Hue called out: “Leave now. My home is not the Village Square!”

  Emilio turned, and nodded. “El Médico is right: Outside.”

  They muttered, and some shook their heads, but they left.

  One voice shouted, “You mad old bastard!”

  Martin, Hue thought wearily, who else?

  Emilio waited until they were alone. “Are you crazy?” he hissed. “They’ll come looking for it. We’ve survived by minding our own business, not interfering where we shouldn’t. You’ll bring them down on us.”

  “I don’t think so, Emilio,” Hue answered calmly. “It’s hurt. We’ve helped it. If anything, they should thank us.”

  “You know they don’t think like us!”

  “And you’re not thinking at all.” Hue added gently, “There’s nothing to fear, as long as we don’t harm it.”

  Emilio shook his head, unconvinced. “Why?” He asked plaintively, “Couldn’t you have left well alone?”

  “I’m a doctor –”

  “I know. You’ve done so much.”

  “No,” Hue answered firmly. “It’s not my occupation. It’s what I am.” He paused: “I took an oath to save lives. You’ve said how much I’ve done for you. Now it’s your turn.” He nodded at the doorway. “Calm them. Convince them there’s nothing to fear.”

  Emilio stood looking at him, as if he were a stranger. “I must convince them of something I don’t believe myself. By God, this uses up all the goodwill you’ve ever earned.”

  The next morning as usual Hue checked the tumour in his groin. Six months, maybe a year, he thought. He’d survived longer than he’d ever dared hope, but he felt the shortness of time weighing heavier every day.

  He made a simple breakfast, while talking constantly to the creature, perhaps the result of years spent on his own, or a touch of nerves: or simply the need to communicate, almost as great as the need to heal.

  He talked of his childhood in Hanoi: of growing up in a cratered cityscape, streets still pockmarked by American bombs, having to use and re-use everything again until it wore out from exhaustion; of thirty-year-old Citroens packed like mini-buses, and buses packed like sardine cans; the smell of ginger and pak choi, garlic and chilli. He talked of school days, of medical school, and meeting Tranh.

  When he’d performed his morning rituals, he visited his patients and noticed the first change: people behaved differently. They drew back, or watched him like hawks. A few scowled. He had lived amongst them for more than twenty years, and in one day he’d jeopardised their trust. He wasn’t surprised, just a little hurt; though he knew that was foolish. They had always been a suspicious people, and the Occupation had done nothing to improve that.

  “Where’s your pet devil?” the bravest of the old women asked.

  “At home,” Hue answered. “Recovering.”

  The old woman snorted contemptuously. “You’re a soft fool.”

  “Maybe,” Hue said. “But if I weren’t, Mabel, I’d have kept walking all those years ago. And you’d have no one to insult.”

  The woman cackled. “And you’d have been dead long ago.” She softened briefly. “You’re a good fool, but still a fool.” Her face hardened again: “I hope you’re not the death of us all.”

  In truth most of his doctoring was just common sense, a good manner, and the judicious use of herbs: in the Middle Ages any witch could have done as much. His real status was his surgery, the penicillin growing in a fermenter, a still brewing home-made anaesthetic, and his herb garden. He was currently irreplaceable.

  Hue stumbled, and looked down at a foot. Looked sideways, and upwards, at the small black eyes set in a glowering face.

  “Martin,” Hue said. “Buenos días. Are you unwell?”

  The youth shook his head, scratched the bumfluff on his chin. He only needed to shave once a fortnight, but wore his wisps of beard with pride. “José works today.” Martin spat on the ground to punctuate the sentence, clenching, unclenching his great hams of fists.

  “Emilio has agreed?” Hue kept his tone mild, lest he provoke a beating. Emilio had agreed Hue could teach one child. Children worked beside their parents, but Martin and José were orphaned. There were few births, and most were mutants. José was no exception: he had only one testicle and a pair of extra nipples below the regular ones. But the boy was brighter than most, and his youthful energy lit up Hue’s day. If he and Tranh had had children, he would have liked one like José.

  “José is my brother!” Martin scowled, and strode away. “I decide when he works!”

  By mid-morning Hue’s work was done. Facing an empty day, he went home.

  The Nzaghi sat by the window, watching the village.

  “You’d better close the shutters,” Hue said. “They’re nervous enough without thinking you spy on them.”

  Hue’s examination the day before had revealed a few burns that he’d covered with cold compresses, and what were probably the after-effects of shock. Otherwise, the alien was miraculously unscathed. It had cut the sleeves and legs from the flotation jacket to make a tunic, and sat immobile, as if in a trance; only the watchful eyes moved. He had no idea what it ate, and it had refused all food.

  Hue watched it, hoping to provoke a response. The creature sat there. Eventually Hue gave up and went into his garden.

  The next day followed the same pattern. Rain set in, though fortunately not acid-laden. He could cope with being wet; that reminded him of his youth. Rain was rare here. He did his rounds. Then home, to write his diary, and check on the surgery and the garden.

  The rain stopped the day after that, and Hue worked in the garden. The alien watched him. Hue held each item up, naming it.

  Watching him impassively, the alien leaned forward, tasting each item in turn. Once it spat something out, but mostly it swallowed. Only when it tried the Oregano did it indicate a desire for more. Hue had to stop it eating every Oregano leaf he had. Experimenting with his meagre larder confirmed the creature to be vegetarian, with a fondness for mushrooms and peppers.

  Hue had noticed an increase in the amount of alien activity offshore since the crash. There were a few of the bee-like Qell, far rarer than the Nzaghi, and Hue watched their ponderous dancing with fascination. The aliens were always around, busy moving whales and dolphins to the orbital habitats, but this was different: Hue suspected they were searching for the Nzaghi’s flyer.

  Two days later, the Nzaghi joined him on his rounds. Ignoring his misgivings, Hue pointedly introduced it to Mabel. “This is El Silencioso,” he said, making a point of its normality – a risk, but necessary. “It doesn’t speak.”

  Mabel and others looked unhappy, but didn’t openly object to its presence, though Hue was unsure whether that was fear of speaking in front of the alien.

  It seemed to work, though: the next day José approached Hue shyly.

  “Mama says I can resume my reading lessons, Señor médico,” Mama was the boy’s maiden aunt: their mother had died giving birth to José, and their father had been swept to his death fishing from the rocks. “She says only if I learn to read can I be a doctor like you, Doctor Hue. I told Martin that that is what I want.”

  Hue felt a surge of joy. “You’ll be a better doctor than me.” He ruffled José’s hair.

  Over the next few days the alien walked with Hue on his rounds, but only in the mornings, and always near cover. Hue suspected the smoke that had belched from El Silencioso’s flyer wasn’t from an accident.

  His suspicions were confirmed one morning when a larger craft hauled the wreckage from the sea and presumably carried it up
to the Mother Fleet. Just before dusk another flyer approached the village, flanked by a flight of Qell.

  Every evening the villagers lit pitch lamps in the central square. The lamps flickered, shadowdances casting a roseate glow on the white stone buildings. Tonight the flyer hovered over the square, whilst the Qell circled. Hue counted eight of them. They looked like metre-long bumble-bees with an extra pair of wings, and tiny paws at the front of the thorax. They buzzed like bees, but Hue felt an irritation that he suspected might be due to ultrasonics. The flyer landed, and from it climbed another Nzaghi, markedly different from El Silencioso.

  This one was shorter, and Hue thought it was hunch-backed. Then he realised that a Qell rode astride its shoulders. He shuddered in disgust.

  “Humann.”

  Hue was the only one left in the square. He bowed.

  “We search for an Nzaghi.” The alien’s voice was toneless, though that could have been the vocoder. “A machine crashed. What did you see?”

  Hue swallowed. “We saw it come down. Nothing came ashore.” It was reckless, but he couldn’t resist the dig: “If we could launch boats without you sinking them, we would’ve helped you search.”

  The alien turned away, surveying the square.

  “It was venting smoke,” Hue said. It turned back to him. “It was damaged. Perhaps deliberately.”

  “It iss illl,” The Nzaghi said. “If it survived, it iss dangerous. You should not approach. We will search here.”

  Hue shrugged, showing no emotion. He prayed no one would tell the aliens, and that they would miss his house. It was a vain hope, he knew.

  The aliens spent an hour checking the village. He kept expecting someone to shout, “It’s at the doctor’s.” His house was last. He made to follow them, but another Nzaghi barred his way, while two searched his home. He held his breath, his heart beating a panicky tattoo.

  To his astonishment they reappeared without El Silencioso, and left empty-handed.

  Hue sat on a bench, his legs turned to jelly. It was a long time before he was able to stand. The villagers watched his walk home silently, from their doorways. Emilio passed, walking his daughter Victoria: a pretty seven-year old with vestigial arms.

  “Our debts to you are cancelled, Hue,” Emilio murmured. “You now owe us.”

  His house was neat and tidy. El Silencioso sat as if everything were normal.

  “What the –” Hue checked himself. “You must have hidden beneath my bed. They can’t have searched very well.” He shook his head in bemusement. “We risked our lives tonight, and for what? A lunatic, they said.”

  “They were right.” The alien’s voice was like a bucket of bolts. “I opposed the consensus, which by definition, makes me insane.”

  Hue jumped. “What?”

  “You do not understand the principle of –” the vocoder could not translate the word, turned it instead into a sizzling hiss. “I believe that their interpretation is not correct, and acted.”

  “What did you do?” Hue asked, so quietly he barely breathed it.

  “I worked on one of the micro-worlds with a chimpanzee colony.” The alien spoke slowly, as if weighing every word. “One day a youngster fell, its back broken. Our medicine is sophisticated. But there are things we cannot heal. Smashed spinal columns are beyond us. The creature was in agony. I ended that agony.”

  “You killed it.” This was not a question.

  “I killed it.”

  There was a long silence, before Hue said, “You can talk. Why now?”

  “Now is appropriate.” Its voice was harsher than the Nzaghi /Qell’s vocoder.

  “El Silencioso. Is that right – are you male? Female? Neuter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what? You’re male? Female?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Hue shook his head. Aliens. He changed tack. “So you’re a lunatic?”

  “Like your species.”

  “Oh?” Hue’s voice was velvet. “When you walked out of the UN, you called us a criminal species. Yet you bombed us into barbarism and killed many of the species you claimed to protect. Isn’t that a lunatic act? Who set you up as combined judges, jury and executioners?”

  “I am a criminal,” The creature said. “But the habit of living is a hard one to give up.”

  “Oh yes,” Hue agreed fervently. “We know that.”

  There was a long silence.

  Hue spoke: “When I finished my post-doctorate in the States, I came to Spain. I was studying paediatrics at the Javier Gomez Institute in Seville, when these huge ships of yours just… appeared.” He continued: “There were all the great hopes, the talk of exchanges of medicine, science; I thought we had the means to conquer disease and famine, anything!” He calmed himself. “Then there was talk, that things had gone wrong. That you just walked out of discussions. Whaling offended you. It offended a lot of humans, but we didn’t bomb others back to the Stone Age because we disagreed with them.”

  “Nor did we,” the alien replied. “We identified four near-sentient families at risk from you: Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Whales, Dolphins. When we took chimpanzees from their local habitat for their safety, your ground troops attacked us.” It paused; Hue thought about interrupting, but he had learnt more in minutes than in years, so kept quiet. “We defended ourselves; your people made air attacks. The conflict spread like a fire. We used lasers against aircraft, but then a missile was launched. If it had penetrated our defences… So we struck back using low-rise explosives; but we hadn’t calculated on how fragile your civilization was – how reliant on your electronic communications, and your cars and petrol you were. Your world fell like… what is your word in another of your languages? Dominoes.”

  Hue had no idea what the word meant, but he got the alien’s gist. “Still… half the continent vaporized, and thrown up into orbit,” Hue breathed, the enormity of it sinking in. He remembered the double sunrise he’d seen even from down South, the distant thunder, the heat.

  “Had it been much worse, none of you would have survived,” the alien admitted.

  “We did what we had to, to keep some of you alive… but no more.”

  “It was bad enough,” Hue replied. He had been in Granada on a weekend break, stopping at a street bar for tapas; it was a pure fluke that he saw on the television screen the views of Tokyo, Beijing, New York; what could have been the same pictures from three different places. An almighty flash, and as the static on screen stabilized, the low-lying shockwaves radiating outwards from the blast site – but barely upwards at all. That was what had convinced him that these were indeed alien weapons – they seemed to disobey all that Hue knew of the laws of physics. The buildings amputated a few floors above the ground, falling into the maelstrom of dust below.

  “And we’re supposed to be grateful?” Hue remembered the panic, the desperate night-time ride train through Spain, the hope that he might make it to Paris, from there back to his family in Hanoi. The crammed carriages, and forced disembarkation at Barcelona. “The midday skies darkened, temperatures plummeted. Millions died, from plague, from hunger, maybe even despair.” The bodies washed ashore at Sitges beach. The pork taste, when the will to live overcame even that last taboo: the never-ending guilt of the survivor.

  “We needed survivors to run factories to manufacture habitats. We helped as many as we could,” The alien said. “It seemed fitting…” it paused “…that your species should work to atone for your actions. Not everyone believes this is right, or that those factories should pollute so heavily.”

  “Yet you do nothing now,” Hue snapped. “You leave us to freeze, to die in our millions from starvation, plague, and exposure. As I could have left you. Think of that.” He went to bed, unable to continue.

  That night he dreamt of Tranh. The vivid nightmare stayed with him when he awoke. Thank God, at least she was spared having to live through that, he thought.

  El Silencioso was already up when Hue rose.

  “Why did you help
me?” it asked.

  Hue continued eating while he pondered.

  “Why?” He wondered how much he could bear to say. “You see the picture?” He nodded at Tranh’s faded portrait. “That’s all I have to remind me of her. That and my Hippocratic Oath.” He paused. “All doctors swear to save lives, to assist in any way they can. I betrayed my oath.”

  He paused again. Resumed. “I was a doctor; she was my nurse. It was all she ever wanted to be. We married. We were going to go to America, the land of milk and honey one English book called it. Even then, when America was a declining giant, all we had ever heard was how wonderful it was. Hollywood and Motown, Broadway and Coca-cola.” Hue smiled, but it was more the grimace of a wounded animal.

  “She became pregnant. But we feared they’d deny us entry. We couldn’t afford that. There would be time later on for children, we said.” He exhaled a long slow breath. “But for years the abortion rate had rocketed upwards, and only a month before the government had banned it. We were so close! So… damned… close. But no one dared touch us.”

  Hue paused, swallowed.

  “We couldn’t afford the clinic fees. So I performed the abortion. She begged me not to… but I told her, ‘I am a doctor.’ In my pride, I thought that I could do it… could do anything.” He fell silent, remembering Tranh’s tears, then her increasingly strident cries, the copper smell of blood from the womb. Then silence – before he could even call for help; broken only by his crying, rocking backwards and forwards, cradling the vessel now empty of her life.

  Hue said none of this, simply: “It went wrong. She died. I fled in panic. I swore then I’d never allow harm to befall another, if I could help.” He paused. He’d exhausted his tears long ago, but needed to collect himself.

  “You could have told them where I was last night,” El Silencioso said.

  “I could have,” Hue agreed. “But any form of resistance, no matter how passive – even hiding something they want, is fighting back.”

  He left then, to visit his patients.