by Adam Roberts
He sighed. ‘All right, I’ll sort it. For you, I’ll sort it. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy! Let me go to the town hall, ’cause I’ll need to do it in person.’
This surprised me. ‘You don’t even know what the favour is, yet!’
‘You want somewhere to stay,’ he said, in a what else? tone of voice. ‘You’ve been away from the city for a while, and now you want accommodation. Well join the blinkin’ queue, mate.’
‘Not that,’ I said.
‘Of course, that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want accommodation. I don’t want you to sort out my accommodation. I’ll shift for myself on that score.’
‘Unless someone like me does it, you won’t get any. There’s a real squeeze on property, Gray.’
‘That’s not,’ I insisted, ‘the favour.’
‘Yes it is,’ Preacherman said indulgently. ‘I’ll get us both another pint.’ He stood up, and I had to grab his arm and drag him forcibly down into the chair.
‘Listen to me, you dog-collar dog-breath, I don’t want you to sort my accommodation. I have a big favour to ask you, and it has nothing to do with fucking housing allocation. Will you listen? Or should I take you into the lavs and flush your head in the bowl to sober you up a little?’
‘Sheesh, Gray,’ he said, in a hurt tone of voice. Then his eyebrows bunched. ‘Oh, wait. I shouldn’t say that!’
He was being infuriating, and it was an effort of will on my part preventing the red mist from descending. ‘Say what?’
‘Sheesh. And now I’ve said it twice!’
‘Sheesh is hardly a fucking swear, Jazon!’
‘It’s a version of the name of the Saviour,’ he said. ‘Taking the Lord’s name in vain. Isn’t it? Or is it something else? Wait. Maybe,’ he mused, staring into space, ‘it’s, like, a version of shush? You know: like shhhh.’
‘Shhh,’ I hissed at him.
‘Yeah, that could be it.’
‘No, you shush. Listen to me. Do you know what I did after Anne died?’
He looked blearily at me. ‘I don’t even know who Anne is.’
‘Anne was the woman who died.’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘You know what? I could have intuited that fact from the question you asked, by a process of logical induction, if I’d put my mind to it.’
‘After Anne died I went native. I lived in the forest – best part of a year. Just me in a tent, living off the land, not another human being anywhere around.’
‘Which forest?’
‘What? Bracknell forest. Does it fucking matter?’
‘Just trying to pain’ the picture,’ said Preacherman, defensively.
‘Anne had a cat – a bête. Garrulous little bastard, actually. But she loved him.’
‘Who’s Anne, again?’
‘Anne was the woman who died,’ I said again, hotly. ‘Try to focus, Jazon, this is really important. The cat took a liking to me. I mean, Christ knows Anne loved that cat as only a cat-lover can. But I’ll tell you: I think the cat loved her back.’
‘OK, so two things,’ said Preacherman, holding up his right hand like a policeman directing traffic. ‘One, bêtes are devils and machines and are incapable of love, which comes only from God. And two, I’m not appreciating you taking the Lord’s name in vain, my friend. I don’t approve.’
‘You don’t approve, Mr Sheesh?’
He looked pained. ‘Fair point, well made,’ he said, in a smaller voice. ‘Proceed.’
‘Look, I heard your sermon. Maybe I don’t agree these bêtes are signs of biblical end times, but I’ve no love for them. You know? What little fame I have amongst their kind derives from the fact that I was one of the last people to kill a bête before the law changed and they were granted citizen status.’
‘Thousands of soldiers combing the north country as we speak,’ said Jazon, ‘killing bêtes left right and centre.’
‘Sure. But that’s war – right? And you know what? That’s exactly what I want to talk to you about. War. And peace.’
He looked momentarily confused. ‘You want to talk about Tolstoy?’
‘No, you prick, I want to talk about us being peacemakers. I’ve no love for bêtes. You know that.’
‘I know that,’ he said.
‘Well, this cat found me in the forest. It turns out it was … well connected.’ I thought about telling Jazon about the Lamb; but thinking back to the earnestness of his sermon, and his present beery state, I decided that would be a bad idea. ‘There was a kind of … moot.’
‘Moot?’ said Preacherman.
‘Yeah, you know. A bête moot.’
‘A bemoot?’
‘A meeting. A parliament. Lots of animals for the tribes to the south of here, I guess. I can’t say I’m entirely sure of the internal political dynamic of it all. But, you know: dogs are running farms.’
At this Preacherman nodded sagely. ‘Not just dogs. Of the eleven big farms that ship vegetables into Reading, eight are bête-owned. Eight! And of those three have no human staff at all. You think I’m happy about this? I’m not happy about it. But the people of the town must be fed. They need their bread and sermons, as the Romans used to say.’
‘I don’t believe the Romans said anything of the sort,’ I said. ‘Just concentrate on what I’m telling you. I was present at this moot. They met for my benefit.’
‘They met at the moot? They met you at the moot?’
‘They want to open negotiations. They know what’s going on up north, and they don’t want that happening down here. Nobody, nobête, wants that down here.’
‘There are military officers who do,’ said Jazon. He appeared to have sobered up a little. ‘At the last council meeting we had a presentation from a government observer. He said— Look, this is official secrets, so you can’t blog it. But the human collateral from the Big Push is high. High. You can’t fight a war without civilian deaths. So,’ he looked at me. ‘You’re right. We don’t want the push extended down here.’
‘Despite it being the end of the world, and all?’
‘That’s God’s business. Our business is to follow Christ’s teachings. Ploughshares, not swords. Even if the ploughshares are being used by bêtes. I’ll tell you what I think, Gray. I think the Archangel Michael will do a better job of smiting the devils than the British Army. And he won’t accidentally kill a bunch of women and children on the side, the way the BA, sometimes, the way, or so the reports say, the way they are reportedly … yeah.’ He shook his head.
This seemed hopeful. ‘So that’s why I’m here. I’m an emissary.’
‘So you’re a diplomat now,’ said Jaze, nodding. ‘I wouldn’t have thunk it of you, Graham. But here you are!’
‘Can you put me in a room with people in authority? I have,’ I added, with a little flutter of nerves, ‘a peace proposal from the animal kingdom. I mean, in my pocket. My understanding is: the bêtes of the south are ready to make a number of concessions, in order to secure peace.’
‘It’ll be irrelevant when the angels blow their trumpets and roll up the corners of the world,’ Jaze said. ‘But that may be months away.’ He stared at his empty pint glass. ‘I worked on the earliest chips, you know,’ he said.
‘Of course I know that. Have you forgotten who I am? I’ve known you for years, mate.’
But he didn’t seem to be listening to my words. ‘Nobody anticipated the feedback loop. Loop’s not the word, actually; it’s infinitely more … feathery than that. Do I mean feathery?’
‘No idea what you mean.’
‘It’s like feedback vortices. Anyway: put a chip in a vacuum cleaner, or a high-rise elevator, or a cellphone and it will talk to you in ways you can predict. It will work within its programming parameters. But put a chip in a working brain, even a simple brain like a cow’s brain or a dog’s brain, and it steps up to something else. Something unpredictable. Sumit used to say: proves there’s no soul, don’t you think, Jason? Sumit was,’
he added, for my benefit, ‘a fellow programmer at Forth and Nate.’ He peered at me. ‘Forth and Nate was the company I used to work for.’
‘Get on with it, for Sheeh’s sake,’ I pressed.
‘Sumit was an atheist. He thought the bêtes showed that higher consciousness was just a functioning of a structured chaotic system of programming subroutines. But I say the opposite. I say it shows that we are something special. The thing that bêtes have that phones and lifts and hoovers don’t have – that thing is the devil. And the thing that we have that phones and lifts and hoovers don’t have is: God. I’ll put you in a room, Graham.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I feel weird asking. Man, I feel weird just being here. I think they chose me because they know I hate bêtes. I guess they reckon I’d be more listened to than some tree hugger.’
Jazon brought out his cell phone.
‘Those still work?’ I said. ‘I thought they turned off the wifi, to stop the bêtes from linking to one another.’
‘There’s a firewalled and protected in-system, here, obviously,’ Jazon replied, his pomposity returning to him. ‘Obviously I’m in on that. I’m a very important townsman. Your regular phone wouldn’t work, no. Unless it’s got a wire.’ He tapped the screen and waited. ‘Hello? Yes, yes, me, yes. Look, I’m having a chat with an old pal of mine, and he says he has a message from our hairy friends.’ A long pause. ‘I think so. It’s real. It’s a real overture.’ He looked at me. ‘I think so.’ The phone went back in his pocket. ‘They’re sending a car.’
‘A car, eh? How exciting.’
We sat for a while, in silence. ‘I’d like another beer,’ Jazon said. ‘But I’d better not. Don’t want to breathe beery breath all over the bigwigs. Graham?’
I felt a strange elation within me. It occurred to me that I’d got past the tricky bit. ‘Yeah?’
‘Why, though?’
‘What?’
‘Why are you doing it, though? I can see the bêtes think you’re a good choice. Only Nixon can go to China, after all.’
‘That’s weird,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly the phrase they used.’
‘No, I mean – what’s in it for you?’
‘The greater good and a peaceful countryside not reasons enough?’
‘C’mon.’
It was the elation, I think, that encouraged me to tell him. ‘All right: I’ll tell you. The cat is called Cincinnatus. So, the cat is a fucking cat, but the chip in its head is called Cincinnatus. And it lived with Anne for many years. It has precise, digitally crisp memories of Anne. It has years’ worth of those memories. If I broker peace talks between us and then, Cincinnatus will give me its memories of Anne.’
‘I see,’ said Preacherman, nodding slowly. ‘And which one is Anne, again?’
‘Fuck, Jazon. Who died. All right? The one I fell in love with. All right?’
After a while, Preacherman said. ‘How?’
I knew he meant: How will the cat give you its memories of this woman? So I said: ‘I eat it. It gives itself up to me, and I eat it. That’s “how”.’
It was hard to see whether he was pondering deeply the enormity of what I had told him, or whether he was staring at the tabletop with powerful intensity only on account of being drunk as a skunk.
Eventually, though, he spoke. ‘Bad idea, my friend,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Bad idea. There are—’ And he caught my eye. ‘Mental health implications, you know.’
‘Of course I know.’
‘But more than that – it’s blasphemy. It’s blasphemous, Gray. You’re deliberately infecting yourself with demons.’
‘Not everybody has the same religious views that you do.’
‘You may not believe in God, Graham,’ he said, sitting up straighter. ‘But he believes in you! You may not believe in devils, but they definitely believe in you. You don’t want them in your head, whether you believe or not.’
I couldn’t think of anything to say to this that would connect with Jazon on this level, so I let it go. In a little while his phone buzzed in his pocket. ‘They’re here,’ he said.
We went outside, and I was surprised to find that it was dusk. More time had passed than I had thought.
The sky overhead was sealed with walnut-coloured clouds, and the horizon glowed tomato-orange and gleaming in the west. The crowds milling through the centre of town showed no signs of diminishing. I followed Preacherman a little way, through the milling crowds, under the concrete railway bridge and along a lay-by to where a blocky, six-wheeled vehicle was waiting. One of the rear doors opened, and I stepped inside. ‘Please be sure to fasten your seatbelt,’ said the door. ‘Even when a passenger is seated in the rear of a car, collisions can have serious consequences!’
‘The day I take advice from a fucking door,’ I said. But there was a uniformed soldier sitting in the back – a woman – and I aborted the rest of my sentiment. The door didn’t care one way or the other, of course. I stowed my stick on the floor, and fastened the belt. Preacherman climbed in beside me.
‘I’m Graham Penhaligon,’ I said. ‘How do you do?’
‘We’ll be at HQ in a few minutes, Mr Penhaligon,’ she replied.
And the car whoomphed into motion, and I was pressed into the upholstery. We moved along as smoothly as a hovercraft.
‘Been a long time since I was in a car,’ I said, to nobody in particular. ‘In fact, it’s been so long since I had ridden in anything other than a tractor, I feel like a millionaire.’
The indicators clacked like death-watch beetles. We pulled out onto the main road. It was a smooth ride. Somebody (it may have been Albie) once showed me a graph of automobile usage plotted across last century and this. It’s a perfect inverted U. It used to be a common complaint about the government that it should have put in place a nationwide disposal programme for all the obsolete petrol cars when their fuel became first more expensive than whisky, and then more expensive, weight for weight, than silver. But there only so many crushers in the country, and only eccentrics went to the bother of ripping out the engine and replacing it with a leccy – as expensive as buying a new one, and you end up driving a rust cage. And then the culture shifted away from cars as forcefully as it had originally shifted towards them. Rich people bought them; some companies supplied them to their staff; a family might take out a second mortgage to run one. But most people found they could do without them. Freight suffered, but the economy was contracting savagely before the lack of transport fluidity kicked in anyway. And there were the zeppelins.
We drove along a dual carriageway. The windows were tinted, but I could see the shadowy intimation of the world outside through them: the occasional bus; a few trucks; one or two cars. But people were everywhere, alongside the road, camped in tents on the central reservation. Then the deathwatch ticking began again, and the car swerved to the left and climbed an exit ramp. A sharp left, and suddenly we were advancing at less than walking pace down a road crowded with folk. Then we stopped, our way blocked by the crowd. For such a colossus of a car, its horn sounded ridiculously weak: tinny and far off. I would have expected something carried by Joshua’s army at Jericho. Instead it peeped and parped. We sat for a long time.
The soldier sighed, unholstered her sidearm and climbed out of the car. The hefty door opened, swung back, but did not shut completely. Through the gap I saw people coming and going.
‘It would have been quicker just to walk,’ I said to Preacherman.
He nodded slowly. Then he said: ‘I’m sorry to hear about your woman, Gray. That’s sad.’
I wasn’t expecting that. ‘Thanks,’ I said, awkwardly.
‘Eating the brain of her pet cat is not going to bring her back, though,’ he said. I glanced at him. He looked very grave. ‘It’s necromancy, Gray, pure and simple. Don’t do it. I beg you. I urge you.’
‘I’ll take your urge,’ I replied, looking away, ‘under advisement.’
‘Seriously, Gray. You don’t want to taunt God. God is not
taunted. Tauntees never prosper. Blasphemy.’
‘Blasphemy,’ I said absently. ‘Blasphe-you.’
The soldier climbed back inside again. ‘Not long now,’ she said, belting up. We sat there for another five or more minutes – a very long subjective stretch of time. Finally the car shuddered and started forward; stopped, waited, moved a little further forward.
My heel was hurting.
Eventually we pulled into a courtyard, and got out again. More guards; with rifles this time. The sky overhead was the colour of red brick. Two spotlights fitted to the wall of the blocky building ahead drew a Venn diagram in light on the courtyard ground. I plocked over concrete with my walking stick and followed the soldier and Preacherman inside. A draughty entrance hall, marble floor, beige walls. I was invited to take a chair, and was glad to take a load off. We were offered coffee, an offer I enthusiastically accepted. We sat and waited.
Preacherman did not seem to be in a talkative mood, and I was content to let him stew. He may not have been pondering my prospective blasphemy; he may only have been digesting his beer.
The casing of the overhead light was spotty, inside the plastic, with the carcasses of old flies. All four corners of the high ceiling were curtained with the fine-weave gauze of ancient spiderwebs.
Eventually a junior officer came to fetch us. ‘You all right going upstairs with that stick?’ he asked me, in a voice plumped with the peculiar smugness of the very posh. ‘It’s just that the elevator is on the fritz.’
‘I can walk,’ I replied. ‘Unless you fancy giving me a fucking piggy back, lard-face.’
He handled this question after the effortless manner of his class, by simply pretending I hadn’t spoken. ‘Splendid!’ We went up three double flights of stairs and along another corridor before we were ushered into the presence of Major General Hetheridge.
He was standing, not sitting, behind a desk; and the room was large and busy. A dozen people were occupied at computer terminals. ‘So, you’re the diplomat!’ Hetheridge boomed, striding over to me. He offered me his hand, and I shook it.
