The Man Who Would Be Kling

by Adam Roberts

  ‘It’s his actual forehead,’ Chillingworth clarified, ‘is the point. It grows into a unique pattern based on your underlying bone structure and so on. It’s real.’

  ‘Real,’ I said. I looked at them again. ‘So are you a – couple?’

  They looked at me then, and both of them had exactly the same expression. Though no words were spoken their faces communicated in unison two distinct syllables the first puh- and the second lease.

  ‘Friends, then?’

  ‘Fellow fans,’ said Chillingworth, ‘in the same fellowship as yourself.’

  I took another slug of brandy. ‘There’s an official spiel,’ I told them, ‘but you know what? I’m going to spare you that. All I shall say is: don’t go. People who go upcountry never come back, or more rarely they come back with severe mental impairments. If you go inland then you’re on your own. We can’t come in after you, no air ambulance can fly through to pick you up. All I shall say is: there are much more pleasant ways to kill yourself, if killing yourself is what you’ve decided upon. Your bones will bleach under the Afghan sun until somebody figures out how to turn the zone off, and who knows when that will be.’

  ‘We won’t die,’ growled Dallas.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I get it. Those others were weak and you’re – I get it, I truly do – you’re strong. But the zone doesn’t care about that. Strength is irrelevant to it. Weakness likewise. Hope is irrelevant. Curiosity is irrelevant. There’s nothing there. No man needs nothing. That’s the point I’d like most to stress, actually: there’s nothing to go questing after. There’s no there to get to. No there, there.’

  In a previous era there would have been government fences preventing entry to the zone, at least some of the way around it. But the political logic nowadays is permissive, and I’ll tell you for-why: because it’s cheaper. Fences are expensive, and so are guards, and so is incarceration and the issuing of passports and all that. Let adults do what they want. They want to walk to their death? Up to them.

  ‘Friend,’ said Chillingworth. ‘We know what we’re doing.’

  ‘The others who have ventured into the Afghanizone,’ said Dallas, in his low and rumbly voice, ‘were human beings. What happened to them happened because they were human.’

  ‘And you’re not human beings,’ I said. I meant it sarcastically, but somehow it came out as simple endorsement. Chillingworth smiled thinly, and nodded, and the whole shape of their crazy fantasy came clear to me in an instant.

  There are various theories about the zone, as of course you know; but three have the most purchase. The bald fact is that nobody knows, and it’s proving very difficult to garner the kind of useful data that would diminish our ignorance. But of course people have theories. The leading theory, if I can put it that way, is that the zone is an artefact of war – some weapon that no government will officially confess to having developed, some unintended consequence of experimental battlefield tech, something along those lines. The most obvious consequence of the zone is that it interferes with electronics in unpredictable ways. It will mostly shut electronics down, but on occasion it will, shall we say, monkey around with electronic-based technology. The circuitry and programming of complex machines may still function, but in radically reworked or dumbed-down ways; simple circuits may suddenly acquire fractal complexity and come alive. It’s deeply odd. Many experts think that all this is the consequence of some weapon designed to attack electrical operation. Then again, nobody is quite sure how it would work, this weapon. I once spent an afternoon in a Mumbai airport bar with a young military officer and she told me her theory. Since the zone is, empirically, operational (she said) then there must be something inside generating this effect. ‘But one day,’ she said, ‘a high plane will drop a bomb and knock that whatever-it-is out, and then the zone will switch off and we’ll get all that real estate back – not,’ she added, lifting her wine glass ‘that we’re really missing anything by being deprived of it.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said and clinked her glass.

  Since human consciousness is, fundamentally, an electrical activity, entering the zone has unpredictable consequences on live test subjects. There are ethical problems in sending even volunteers in, even if you’re only sending them a couple of hundred yards with a rope tied to their ankle, so they’re easy to retrieve. The EU sent in some chimpanzees, apparently: simians who had been trained to use sign language. But they all died.

  At any rate, that’s the closest thing we have to an ‘official’ theory. A second theory is that the zone is something natural, some excrescence from the landscape, some hitherto unknown blip in the Earth’s electromagnetic field, or something like that. The problem here is that, well, there’s no precedence for it, no evidence for such a blip and no explanation as to how it could have come about. But there are perfectly reputable scientific conferences on the subject, trying to link the phenomenon to the Tunguska event or the periodic switches of north and south poles or whatever.

  And then there’s the third theory, which, evidently, was the one in which Chillingworth and Dallas had invested. Aliens. But ‘aliens’ is even more of a black box explanation than the Earth’s mysterious electromagnetic whatnot or secret superweapon X to which no government will own up. And aliens, as explanation, attracts a certain kind of nutter.

  ‘What we can offer you, my friend,’ Chillingworth was saying, in what I now recognised as a voice aiming for a level rationality of tone, ‘is knowledge. The most precious commodity of all.’

  ‘If you come back,’ I told her, ‘then your main business will be figuring how much saliva to drool.’

  ‘That might happen to humans, see,’ said Dallas. ‘But we ain’t humans.’

  ‘The way I figure it, the zone is an invitation,’ Chillingworth said, beaming a smile that struck me as, frankly, lacking in logical dispassion. ‘From them. The mistake we have made, hitherto, is in believing that human beings were the ones being invited in. But why would they need to create a special zone just to invite in human beings? Human beings are everywhere.’

  ‘Ever’where,’ agreed Dallas.

  ‘Common as weeds. I think they are not interested in what we are. I think they are interested in what we can become. And what we can become is other than humans – more than mere humans.’

  ‘No offence,’ drawled Dallas, and grinned. He had had all his teeth replaced with sharp little sharktooth pegs. Must have cost a fortune.

  ‘So you’ll come back, with the key to the mystery of the zone,’ I said, ‘and in return you want, what? Bars of gold-plated latinum?

  Once again with the Dallas’s rake’s-teeth grin. ‘One or two wouldn’t go amiss.’

  ‘Really we’re offering you something very special,’ Chillingworth said. ‘First access to our knowledge. After you, and the UN, then we’ll be V.I.P.s, globally speaking. We’ll be the ambassadors for the next stage in human evolution! We’ll bridge the earth to the stars! Queens. Queens and Kings, all of us!’

  ‘You can talk to the powers that be,’ Dallas urged. ‘Arrange the, you know. The appropriate.’

  ‘Maybe a private jet,’ suggested Chillingworth. ‘We’ll probably need an apartment near the UN building. We’ll need a publicity person, a handler for the press and such – because when we come back every media outlet in the world will want to talk to us. But you can say we went in under your aegis!’ She brought a tablet out of her backpack.

  ‘Risky,’ I said, ‘bringing one of those in here. We get small-scale interference from the zone all the time, and it fritzes equipment like that.’

  ‘Oh, we’re not taking this upcountry,’ she replied, as if she hadn’t heard me at all. ‘We only need you to autosign.’

  I glanced at the ‘contract’. Was there any point in telling them that it had no legal standing whatsoever? I shrugged, signed. It included a clause on film rights, bless their hearts. I tried one last time to save their geeksome lives.

  ‘Let’s talk about this again over breakfast,�
� I said. ‘Do you have somewhere to stay? We do have guest rooms here, if you’re in need.’

  ‘We wouldn’t presume,’ grumbled Dallas, his immensely bushy eyebrows deepening their V.

  ‘Thank you, friend,’ Chillingworth assured me, earnestly, ‘but we have rented a house on the Kuchi Murgha.’

  ‘It means Chicken Street.’

  ‘We have done,’ growled Dallas, ‘our research.’

  His tone irked me. ‘Make the most of it,’ I told him, ‘because once you go upcountry your brains will be turned into slushie, and all that research won’t mean jack rabbit.’

  ‘Good night, friend. Have a word with your superiors,’ said Chillingworth, getting to her feet. ‘They’ll be excited. We’re excited.’ I was silently willing her not to say make it so, but she added: ‘make it so!’ and they clonked down the wooden stairs and passed out into the night.

  The next morning I felt bad about being so dismissive of them, and worried that I hadn’t done enough to try and persuade them out of their suicidal idiocy, so I put on my boots and went out into the cool morning. It didn’t take me long to locate them. There are fewer shopkeepers on Chicken Street nowadays than there used to be, but visitors still do sometimes check out the lapis lazuli trinkets and authentic Afghani rugs. Two crazy Westerners, one iswadda, both in fancy dress, oh yes sahib, they hired a room over Sadar’s shop I believe, thank you, no thank you, and I was knocking on the street-door and Chillingworth, still in cosplay, was leaning out of the streetside window and telling me to come right up. So I went right up, and made my peace with the two doomed souls.

  Dallas’ augmented forehead looked even more impressive by daylight: a huge Mars bar melted into the structure of his skull. Dust sifted down through the gaps in the ceiling-boards. Somebody upstairs was singing tunelessly in Farsi. Sunlight through the window tunnelled a shaft of beauty out of the impure air.

  ‘Mr U.N.,’ Chillingworth exclaimed, and showed me her right hand, on which she was counting 2 fingers + 2 fingers + 1 thumb. Which adds up to oh for crying out loud.

  ‘I’m sorry if I was short with you last night,’ I told them. ‘You’re still set upon going upcountry, then?’

  Dallas showed me his full set of wide-spaced shark teeth. Chillingworth said, ‘It would hardly be logical to back out now. We have bought two mules.’

  ‘Well, I admire your courage, my friends,’ I said.

  ‘It does not require courage to buy mules,’ Dallas growled. Then he made a series of noises like somebody choking on an unchewed segment of toblerone, which display of linguistic accomplishment made Chillingworth smile broadly. ‘You are worried, Mr U.N. You should not be. They will recognise us for what we are. And we are no longer homo sapiens.’

  ‘Funny things happen to animals upcountry,’ I said, trying my best not to sound too offputtingly automatically negative with regard to their suicide mission. ‘You’ve done your research, so I’m sure you’ve read about it. They go crazy, sometimes they die. Often,’ I corrected myself, ‘they die.’

  ‘It is an interesting question,’ Chillingworth agreed, putting all her left fingertips precisely against her right fingertips and circling her thumbs about one another. ‘After all, electricity is part of the natural world. Insects, say, they have nervous systems, don’t they? Are they all killed, or strangely complexified, by the Afghanizone? Does lighting never strike in this territory? According to the Rabbi of Jerusalem, electricity is a fire inside every single atom – does the landscape itself decompose and recompose according to its own logic in this place? No!’

  ‘At any rate,’ I said, rather regretting coming, and deciding it was time to leave them to their fate. They were adults, after all. ‘I wish you luck.’

  Before I could go, Dallas insisted on showing me the contents of his saddlebag. The most unmissable element was a two-yard-long piece of sharpened metal, shaped like an art nouveau reindeer antler, with two inset hand-holds upholstered with pads of leather, so that the thing could be grasped without slicing one’s fingers off. He gave me a quick demonstration, swishing it alarmingly around the confined space. He assured me that it required no electricity to function.

  ‘Bat lathe,’ I said. ‘Yes, he never did like guns, did he, old Batman.’

  Dallas’s epically crumpled and ridged brow crumpled a little further in puzzlement. ‘No no,’ he said, urgently. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Batman.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was joking.’

  ‘You were,’ he returned, in a dangerous voice, ‘whatting?’

  Chillingworth put her hand on his arm. ‘It’s Okay, Dach’las. He is one of us.’

  ‘Besides,’ Dallas grumbled, fitting the blade back into its saddlebag. ‘We also have guns.’

  ‘Which,’ Chillingworth hastily added, ‘we earnestly hope we will not need. We are on a mission of diplomacy, to meet with the creators of the zone as equals, one to one.’

  ‘And good luck with that,’ I said, and left them.

  I caught one last glimpse of them making their way up the Salang Road, the mountains before them, peaks dusted with a great many sieve-shakes of new snow, fine and tempting as sugar. The sky was that unearthly blue you don’t see in any other portion of the globe, although presumably it’s the same sky stretched over us all. Unclouded. Blue as your first-love’s eyes. Blue as a primrose during a luminous dusk. Uncountable acres of pure blue over everything.

  Two

  I was on my way to the University, or more specifically to the UN communications hub – an eight-metre by eight-metre room staffed by one person on Mondays and Tuesdays – which was where I filed my preliminary reports, and logged all upcountry tourists. In my early days of the zone there were plenty of tourists in Kabul; or at least plenty of sightseers, scanning the distant mountains with all manner of sight-magnifying technology. You could sometimes see the corpses of people who had strayed into the zone, lost their minds and wandered around until thirst, or a fall, or a snake bite (or whatever) had killed them. You could make out the ruins of abandoned houses, some close enough to count as the suburbs of Kabul. It was very rare to see movement, although kites occasionally circled through the air, and once in a while a wild fox darted across scrubland, like a flame running down a fuse. But the flow of people diminished, since there was, really, nothing to see, and nothing to do. In the early days many foolhardy or tomhardy types ventured into the zone, and some died in full view of the people watching, and some made it to the mountains and died there. It didn’t take long for the numbers of people ready to attempt so perilous a trip to fall away.

  Still, I had my orders. Any people proposing to enter the Zone were to be logged. I should restrain them only if they were patently sectionable, or a danger to others. But if they seemed rational enough then the UN operated a permissive policy. Sometimes folk came wearing home-made protective gear they were confident would shield them from the zone: white-haired absent-eyed men, mostly; men of the ‘it’s my own invention’ type. Sometimes they relied on the power of Christ, or on special oils rubbed into their skin, or a map downloaded (they stressed) from other dimensions that promised routes of safe passage. In each case I tried, in a more or less desultory manner, to dissuade; and when I failed I reported them to the section chief, who logged them. Satellites observed their passage, I suppose; or high-flying spy-planes, and how far they got and in what manner they died was impartially noted down. It was data of a kind, though think about it for a moment and you’ll see that it is all the same data.

  This being neither a Monday nor a Tuesday the comm-hub was empty, so I phoned through the details myself. The hand-crank on the phone goes round-and-round, round-and-round, round-and-round, crank on the phone goes round-and-round, round-and-round, all day long, or so it seemed. Then: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. I’m reporting two tourists entering the Afghanizone.’

  Then: ‘Wait it’s buffering, what is this slow motion replay something, this is no use. Piece of crap machine. Wait till I ge
t a pencil, or a pen. A pen or -cil. There we are. So?’ Crackles and fizzing on the line made it quite hard to follow his words.

  Names, identifying features, last seen location. I added, ‘They’re dressed as space aliens.’

  ‘Anus did you say?’

  ‘Aliens. One in grey, the other in a sort of black and gold number. They reckon that E.T. is behind the zone, you see, and that by becoming aliens themselves the zone will leave them be.’

  There was a weird repeating clicky noise layered over the hissing and fizzing. It took me a moment to grasp what this new noise signified. It was the man at the other end of the line laughing. Cruel, really.

  And that was that. I got on with my duties, and heard nothing more about Chillingworth and Dallas. About a month later I did my stint at the annual Zone conference, in Neuchatel, Switzerland. In the early years of the phenomenon this conference was a huge jamboree, with saturation media coverage and days and days of papers and press-conferences and scientists in low-ceilinged bars discussing the ramifications of this and the likely causes of that, strategies for containing it if containment proved needful (it didn’t), strategies for eliminating the zone, if the state powers of the world decided such an approach was justifiable and achievable (it isn’t). But year after year the conference met, and the amount of knowledge we accumulated about the zone, as a species, plateaued, and moreover plateaued at a very low level, and there was nothing more to say. By the time I was sent, covering for somebody more important than I who had better things to do with his or her time, it had shrunk to a two-day small scale going-through-the-motions exercise. There was nothing to say, and a few groups of bored people said it. At any rate, I was instructed by my bosses to attend this conference, and so I sat through four or five terribly dull presentations, and afterwards drank kir with an attractive EU official who casually dropped her marital status half an hour into our chat, leaving me to wonder if this was a come-on, or a back-off. ‘You handled the two space alien folk, didn’t you?’ she said.