Bête

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I’ve always thought it’s not well named,’ I said. ‘The New Forest. Makes it sound like it was planted in 1922.’

  ‘It wasn’t?’ But Preach was joshing with me.

  A seagull settled on a plasmetal traffic bollard, ten feet from us. It squawked, ‘Sick! You are sick!’

  This riled me. ‘I’m not sick, you rat. I’ll outlive you. Go peck an egg.’ I threw a pebble. Missed.

  ‘It is in sickness that you stri-i-ive,’ it called, extending the vowel in that last word and, as it were, descanting upon it. Gulls have a limited vocal range – that sounds like dit, b and m are beyond them – but their chips compensate for that with the word choice. ‘Tied! Tied! Tied to a creature from a different realm, the land, the land!’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I advised it, and threw a second pebble. Missed. The gull climbed its invisible hill into the sky with a clattery unfolding of white wings, shrieking at me, ‘The law! The law! The law!’

  Jazon scolded me for swearing, though not for throwing the stone. In reply I said: ‘Whatever you say Jaze-on,’ which annoyed him.

  Put a chip in a car and it sounds like HAL from 2001. Put a chip in a bête and it sounds like a person. I’m not a philosopher of mind. I couldn’t tell you why there’s that difference. There is, though.

  For a while the news was full of humans who ingested chips. They were mostly eco-activists, hoping to bond with our bête brothers and sisters. Some were kids having a laugh. Since the result was – in nine times out of ten – schizophrenia, the laugh often changed timbre and jollity halfway through.

  After my divorce I cared less and less. I trudged my path; I did my job – or, rather, I picked up such piece-work here and there as I could. Some of the people I butchered for were old-school types, who just liked meat the old-fashioned way. Some were paranoids who thought Vitameat a governmental conspiracy, or soylent green, or whatever. I did a lot of halal work. I didn’t mind this, actually; for though a bolt-gun would be my abattoir tool of choice, for its dispatch and cleanness, I didn’t carry one about with me, and not many venues had one on site. So I got good with the knife, which suited my halal customers. The advantage was that they were much more scrupulous about not eating canny animals than some less religious folk. I don’t think I ever killed and butchered a halal cow that talked back to me; or – as sometimes happened – that opened its mouth wide to reveal that its tongue had been torn out before my arrival. The older I got, the less comfortable I got killing animals that could talk to me. I suppose I grew less hardcore, whilst Preacherman grew more.

  After he converted to the Church of Christ the Carnivore, Jazon devoted less of his time to watching gameshows on his iSlate and more to haranguing me. ‘The plague is coming!’ he told me. ‘Repent, whilst there’s still time! Before your innards scar over and you die in agony!’

  ‘I’m already in agony,’ I told him, ‘listening to your fucking blather. Put a sock in it, Preach.’

  Once I butchered a goat for a group of World of Satan gamers. The goat’s tongue had been pulled out with pincers prior to my arrival. I asked if the beast was canny, and was told not, although the leader – a broad-browed woman who called herself Brassneck – added, ‘and would it bother you if it were?’ I remember this, because it always gives me pleasure to hear the subjunctive correctly used. Language is a field, and it is pleasing to a farmer to see that field well tended. ‘Once upon a time, not,’ I conceded, as I hooked the hooves together and winched the hairy body up. ‘Now – maybe.’

  I told Jazon this, and he grew wroth. ‘It’s not them! The dumb animals are the ones you should feel guilty about killing. They’re innocent! It’s the ones with chips we should be killing. They’re the devil! The software algorithms are using these various animals as tools, as cat’s-paws, that’s all. And they’re wielding them for the devil.’

  We were being put up in a caravan – Brassneck’s group had twice as many caravans as members – in part-payment. It was an ancient model motorhome: with little pleated curtains on a bare rail, and frayed unplumped cushions on plastic benches. Still, it was better than being outside. We were sitting sharing a bottle of whisky, and eating crisped turnips. ‘Cat’s-paw,’ I retorted. ‘That’s how DNA is using us, anyway. I’m just a tool. The genes pull my strings to use me to make more genes.’

  ‘Anus!’ he snarled. ‘You’re worse than those Greens. Christ orders us to eat flesh – God himself compels it – it is an offence against God to— What … that, that goat? That faecal goat you killed fed on nothing more than herbage and it was the devil. The devil! Be like unto the lion of Judah. It’s the end times, Graham!’

  ‘And yet, ironically, there’s no end in sight to your ranting.’

  ‘O Graham!’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘The mark – the arithmetic of the beast, 666 yeah?’

  ‘God.’ Said wearily; not devoutly.

  ‘The Jews wrote out numbers as letters,’ he said. ‘You know what the letter for 6, was? The Hebrew letter Shin. Here—’ And he wrote it out on the tabletop in whisky: ש. ‘Don’t that look like a W to you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘All right, never mind that. There’s a Phoenician letter called Wav, which is behind our modern W. It’s where our modern letter comes from. And that stood for 6, too.’

  ‘The Phony Phoenicians.’

  ‘The rise of the internet – double-you, double-you, double-you, three sixes! You think it’s a coincidence it corresponded with the collapse of religion and the triumph of new atheism? It’s the mark of the beast, don’t you see? And how do the bêtes communicate with one another? Answer me that. I’ll tell you: they’re all plumbed into the world wide web.’

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I heard anybody say double-you double-you double-you,’ I said. ‘Do you also talk about ­musical recordings in terms of the gram-o-phone?’

  ‘Grammar-phoenician!’ he agreed, enthusiastically. ‘That no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Isn’t the internet at the heart of trade, now? Nobody can trade without a ’bsite or an app or – these chips, yeah? With our money in them. It’s the urine end of everything! The beasts, just like in Revelation. Exactly like that.’

  ‘Fuck you, Jaze,’ I said, growing angrier myself to match his enthusiasm. ‘You are a proper fool.’

  His dark face fell. ‘What?’

  ‘I will pay you the courtesy of honesty, fuckface, and say how intolerable you have become since you joined that cult.’

  ‘Cult!’ he said, his eyebrows very high on his forehead. ‘Oh! Oh – you anus.’ He got up and stormed out of the caravan, taking his beaker of whisky with him. ‘Oh very mature,’ I yelled after him. ‘Oh super mature.’ Two middle-aged men, bickering like kids. He wasn’t gone long. We were in the countryside, and there was no light save what little leaked through the curtained windows of the other caravans. He tripped into a bed of brambles and came back sans beaker, criss-crossed with thin red scratches. He was in a sulk, and didn’t speak to me. Instead he rolled himself fully clothed into one of the two narrow beds, angled his back to me and pulled a blanket around him. I sat for a while until I had finished the whisky before turning out the light and settling myself in my bed.

  The quarrel had not cooled, come morning. ‘You know your problem, Graham?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I told him.

  ‘You know what your problem is, Graham?’ he pressed. There was a high-pitched hissing sound, which wasn’t doing my hangover, or my temper, any good. It was coming from the kettle.

  ‘Don’t believe I do, Jaze-on. Why don’t you let me into the secret?’

  The kettle went flob-flob-flob and pumped gouts of white into the air. Preacherman got slowly to his feet. ‘Your problem,’ he said, as he poured himself – and, pointedly, not me – a cup of tea, ‘is that you’re not really human.’ He made this last word trisyllabic: He-you-man.

/>   ‘Am I not?’

  ‘Human beings are pack animals, Graham. We stick together, Graham. We’re defined by that – but not you. You’re a loner. What you call a cult is actually a community, Graham. People coming together to worship God. But community is intercoursing anathema to you, isn’t it.’

  ‘Only the people close to me call me Graham,’ I warned him.

  That’s not what broke us up, mind you. When people hang out together there’s bound to be friction, and usually a few days dissolved the point of the argument to nothing and we would forget about our row. He was an arsehole about his new religion, it’s true, but mostly I felt nothing but amused tolerance for his cultic ways and his sermonizing about how Christ would redeem the flesh we ate in this life with nectar in the next. What broke us up was him. He fell in love (he told me) and went off after his inamorata. By that stage, I told myself, I didn’t care. I was happy enough moving about on my own, shouldering my kit and striding out; a canvas roll in the pockets of which were knives, hooks, a winch and two plasrope cords. I washed my apron in the streams, and stored my money chip in my sock. I walked a circuit from town to town. I slept under cover if I could and rough if I couldn’t.

  My daughter had married and settled in Droitwich, so I made my way from the west through the south of England, over downs and through woodlands, to stay with her for a few weeks. She had twins, and then she had a second set of twins – coincidence, she assured me, though I doubted that. It rendered her house a chaos, and I had never liked her (it seemed to me) entirely ineffectual husband. Not that it was any of my business.

  What about my son? He had elected not to go to university after all, despite being on track to do just that. He preferred to travel he said. I didn’t care, so long as he was working. He was in New Zealand, or it may have been Old Zealand (I’m vague on the specifics, except that it was overseas). He linked me occasional vlog pieces in which he talked about the fishwork he was doing. Fish, I learned, have tongues, although the evolutionary efficacy of this development was hard to understand. Activists were chipping fish too, it seemed.

  Was Albie an ‘activist’ at this stage? I tend to think, whatever he became later, he wasn’t yet a true believer. But work was work, and his company was doing consultancy for some well-funded Olive Green – as they were called – organizations. The idea, of course, was to tackle the last remaining area of human (pardon me if I bring out the sugar-tong scare quotes) ‘exploitation’ of the natural world. People ate Vitameat, but they still ate real fish; and real fish were still being scooped out of the water and mashed into fertilizer for use on crops. On the other hand, seeding the creatures of the seas was not hard – indeed, chipping whales and dolphins had happened early on. But fish cannot talk, and the legal gold standard was still the Turing test, so fishing companies were able to tie up exemplary prosecutions in courts for long years. That the nets were full of computationally augmented fish didn’t mean they were full of canny fish, according to the meaning of the act, and so on, and so forth. Albie’s MicroCorp was being paid to find a way of loosening the piscine tongue. Or something. I can’t say I paid much attention.

  I picked up news here and there. I preferred it that way, to the tyranny of an iSlate and its endless beeping stream of breaking headlines. I heard about the Fish Wars that way: sitting in the garden of a pub smoking a pipe made from an old-style metal computer mouse with a tube stuck in it. Other people were rolling joints, or drinking, or sniffing u-powder. It started with the trade of tuna between Japan and Malaysia. It is permitted for a Muslim to eat tuna, for that fish has scales; but it is not permitted for a Muslim to eat a fish – or any animal – that has been beaten to death. Footage circulated of fishermen clubbing tuna to death, supposedly because it was more humane than letting them asphyxiate in air, but actually to try and destroy the evidence of chips in the head. The tuna, lacking tongues, could not speak; but schools of canny fish were spelling out words and icons as they swam. Malaysia complained, and the International Umma took the complaint seriously. The fish got wind of this, and began spelling out allah and mohammed in Arabic script – there’re are hundreds of clips of this. It’s simultaneously lamentable and beautiful. The IU insisted Japan stop fishing these creatures, and concentrate on dumb fish only. But how to tell which was which? Anyway it escalated pretty rapidly. Japan wanted to flex its military muscles, I guess. There were various firefights in the Pacific – many more fish got killed, I reckon, than would have been the case if they’d just been harvested. Hearing this, it suddenly mattered to me whether my son was in the New Zealand or the Old, for the former was worryingly close to the warzone. I borrowed somebody’s iTab and sent him a message. The owner sought me out the following morning – inside my tube tent, slung hammock-style between the boughs of a large old tree – to pass on the reply. He’d moved on, he said, and was now working on a company project on the coast at Madagascar. Everything was fine. This left me none the wiser as to whether he had originally been in the antipodes or not. I was relieved he was safe, though.

  I remember this: I was walking along the road, one afternoon. To my right was a field of cattle, which I studiedly ignored. The road had been empty for half an hour, but a minibus passed me. Seeing a vehicle was a rarer event than it had once been, but was not at this point unprecedented. The electric van was, at a guess, ferrying kids from one school activity to another. One of the kids in the back seat had the rear passenger window down, and had his grinning head out. ‘Moo!’ he howled at the cows, as they passed. ‘Moooo!’

  One of the cows put his big head over the fence. ‘This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration,’ he bellowed back.

  I remember having lunch in a pub. The news was being displayed on a screen that all the animals in London Zoo had been chipped. Eco-activists had smuggled chips into Monkey World, in Dorset, tucked into pallets of bananas. The chip was barely visible to the naked eye, and moved from the mouth to the roof of the mouth whilst the animals chewed, and implanted itself far back, afterwards growing calcium connective filaments that webbed into the brain. This latter process took a week or so, but soon enough the monkeys all became talkative bêtes. Three circuses had closed because their performing animals were, quote, making inappropriate invitations to audience members, unquote. A man was put on trial in Newcastle for bestiality: he had been having sex with his pet Irish setter, which was illegal under the meaning of the act. His barrister was able to call the dog as a witness; its paws hooked over the top of the witness box, its hindlegs shaking a little with the effort of standing. The hound confirmed its consent in the matter. The man walked free. On the court steps he made a long speech about the love that dare not bark its name, and of the need to petition Parliament to make the marriage between a human and a canny bête legal. ‘Humans have loved animals for hundreds of thousands of years,’ he said. ‘It’s time for people of my orientation to come out of the kennel.’ When the pack of TV crews and reporters all babbled their questions at him, individual queries indistinguishable in the noise, he put his head back and howled melodiously at the sky. Then he dropped to all fours and ran, a little awkwardly, across the pavement and into a waiting car.

  For a month or so everybody was talking about this case. I heard about it first in a pub, where an elderly man was expatiating on how Jehovah would strike down with furious despite at such uncleanness. I couldn’t see the problem, myself. It’s not like he fucked a non-speaking dog. Love-shack-on a son gout. At the same time, humans have loved animals for hundreds of thousands of years struck me as a disingenuous line. Some humans have loved petting animals – which is, after all, only foreplay by a more family-friend name. Some few have even taken that physical love past first base. But most humans, for most of human history, have not loved animals in this fashion. They have loved eating animals. They have loved hunting, killing and butchering animals. It’s difficult to see how the animals, now they w
ere learning to talk, would be anything other than annoyed by this deep history.

  What the pigs told me

  Still, I had to work. That’s a portion of Adam’s curse that all the cleverly programmed chips in the world won’t remit. I worked in a large shed in Shipburn butchering two pigs and a cow, and took payment in money. The beasts were tongueless. ‘The geezer who sold ’em me said they had cancer of the tongue, and had to be removed,’ the client told me, anxiously. ‘Do you think the meat itself might be affected? I mean, tongue cancer sounds nasty. Right?’

  I was washing my apron down with a hose, whilst the client’s son (I think he was) hauled the bones and offal to the inciner­ator. ‘I’ll bet you a rouble to a rice grain there was nothing wrong with their tongues.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the tongues?’ wheezed the client.

  ‘I’m guessing they were only too fit and nimble, those tongues,’ I told him. The client stared at me. I don’t suppose he was stupid. I think he preferred not to understand what I was getting at.

  I helped him and his boy load the packed meat into the back of his Ford Shuttle. ‘My uncle used to go into London to the speciality butchers in Stoke Newington,’ he told me, wheezing with the effort of lifting the boxes. ‘You know: for special occasions. Not for a long time, though. The prices have just gone insane. In. Sane. Everything’s Vitameat, Vitameat, Vitameat. My old lady still calls it Vatmeat. Only rock stars and millionaires can afford to shop-buy real meat. Now,’ he added, ‘I’ll eat Vatmeat with the rest of them – breakfast, dinner and tea.’ From the way his torso wobbled I could see this was true. It was a hot day, and he was dressed in shorts and a too-tight T. He looked to be wearing a flak jacket of fat under his skin. This is not a garment one acquires from a vegan diet. ‘But my daughter is getting married, and for some special occasions – well, you know how it is. You got a daughter?’ I nodded my head, and then again I nodded my head. ‘I want to do the right thing,’ he added. ‘The traditional thing.’ He was an estate agent, I remember, that guy. More respectable figures than he had been driven to the black market by the change in things.