by Adam Roberts
‘You’re wrong, my friend, wrong. The chip melds with the animal mind to create a tertium quid. You know what a tertium quid is? It’s Latin.’
‘Spero autem et in suffocat et guttur tuum a canibus membra masuclina,’ I told him.
‘It’s special. It’s a new thing. We’ve always been frightened of what we don’t understand, and now we’re trying to stifle this new voice. Instead of listening to it!’
My bad leg twanging with pain at the motion, I sat up. ‘Why are you in here?’ I asked.
The fellow clammed up at that. For a while there was silence. Then Bill piped up. ‘He tried to lay a bomb.’
I’d never heard this idiom before. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Lay a bomb? Like an egg?’
‘It’s a war, Bill Hubbard,’ the man said to the other. ‘Never mind your legal quibbles. You only quibble because you think they won’t shoot Barack Obama until the war is officially declared. I tell you Bill—’ Bill whimpered every time his name was uttered ‘—they’re more likely to shoot him before. Most likely they have already shot him.’ Whimper. ‘To sort it out ahead of time, to have had him pre-shot. They probably didn’t even shoot him – probably chucked him alive into an incinerator.’ Whimper. ‘To destroy the chip, that’s all they care about. But once war is officially declared, then I’ll be a proper POW and even Barack Obama would be a POW and they’d have to treat him legal.’ Bill was scribbling so rapidly on his invisible iTab now his finger was a blur. ‘Obama’s,’ the other man explained to me, ‘his only friend, really. He’s shy. It’s an affliction.’
’You,’ I said, ‘are cruel.’
‘Me! They’re firebombing herds of cattle in Northumberland and I’m the cruel one?’
‘What about you, Bill?’ I asked. ‘Why’ve they banged you up?’
Bill looked quailingly at me, and was (I thought) about to reply; when the first fellow butted in again.
‘Never you mind about Bill,’ he told me, ‘you leave him be. What are you in for, eh? If you’re not a plant?’
I met his gaze. ‘Growing facial hair without a licence.’
He looked at me. Suddenly he grinned. ‘I like you! There’s not many Homo sapiens I can say that of, but I like you.’
‘I can’t begin to say how delighted that fact makes me,’ I replied, lying down again.
‘There are millions of us!’ Bill blurted out. We both looked at him, and he retreated back into his invisible iTab.
‘My pal overstates,’ said the first man. ‘Tens, probably hundreds of thousands of us. England is a nation of animal lovers. You can’t suddenly tell us animals are the enemy. We know better. We—’ and he emphasized his point by drawing an imaginary cross over his heart, with twitchy, emphatic gestures ‘—won’t believe it.’
‘When I consider the nature and future of my homeland,’ I told them both, ‘the words of Dad’s Army’s Private Frazer come ringingly into my head.’
‘What? Don’t panic?’
‘No,’ I said, feeling very tired. ‘Not that one.’
With a startling growl the lock unslid and the door opened. Two soldiers came into the cell, took firm hold of the first man – whose name I had not been vouchsafed – lifted him off the bench and marched him out. The door banged doomily behind them.
I tried to make conversation with Bill, but he only whimpered, and brought his face very close to the palm of his left hand (not, I noticed, the other way around, although that would surely have been easier). I napped again. Then I sat up. My time in the forest had habituated me with doing nothing, and sitting in the cell didn’t bother me.
At some point they shut off the lights. Night, I supposed. I lay on the floor; for though it was harder and colder than the bench, it was not ridged, and I slept more easily. Bill curled up foetally on his bench, and slept like a dog. Morning was announced by the sudden snapping on again of lights, and the door opening again. Water, bread and butter was delivered, and the two of us broke our fast without speaking. The tray on which the necessaries were delivered had a chip in it, but it only spoke once: ‘Please don’t put me in the dishwasher, or my laminate will peel!’ The tray was decorated with a repeating tessellated design of interlocking parrot shapes.
After a while, Bill spoke up. ‘I’ve always been meek,’ he said.
‘And you shall surely inherit the earth,’ I replied, aiming for a kind tone. My instrument isn’t well adapted to kindness, though. I suspect it came out sarcastic and aggressive.
‘Shy,’ he said, not meeting my eye. He brought out his invisible iTab, looked at the imaginary screen for a few seconds, and then put it away again.
I waited.
‘Always been more comfortable around animals,’ he said eventually. ‘I do not know why. I’ll tell you what: when the first bêtes got citizenship, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. It was like Christmas. Like Christmas is for a kid. Lion, Witch and Wardrobe all on one day! It was like a thousand Christmases.’ He stopped, and blushed port-wine red.
After a long pause, I said: ‘I’m sure your dog is fine, you know.’
He didn’t reply.
I suppose we were there half a day – long enough for me to grow hungry again – before the lock growled once more, and the door once more squeaked open, and soldiers took Bill away. He went out on a long, almost musical stream of whimpers.
I was alone.
I wondered, naturally, about whether the Lamb had used me – tricked me into carrying some unimaginably dangerous Independence Day style virus into the firewalled protective space of the military net. But of course maybe not: maybe it was a false alarm. And maybe, even if the system crashed, it wouldn’t inconvenience the army too severely. There was no wireless outside the city anyway, or so I assumed. Could the bêtes really leverage any military advantage from infecting the in-house system? I didn’t know. I could see, mind you, how it looked from the outside. Catweazel walks into your military headquarters, spins you some story about negotiating with the Lamb himself, and the next thing you know the lights are flickering in their casing and all your computer screens show graphics of mockingly laughing skulls.
Or, you know, whatever.
What would they do to me? I said the words, ‘shot at dawn’ aloud, in effect trying them out for size. There’s an old joke. A prisoner is brought out of his cell at dawn, and marched out into the courtyard where he will be blindfolded and shot. The troops are already there, leaning on their rifles. As he starts across the yard it starts to rain. He looks to the sky. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘This is a fine start to the day.’
Perhaps Major General Hetheridge would summon me for a second interview. He would say: ‘After revolving the matter for some time we are disposed to trust you, Graham.’ He would say: ‘A terrorist actively trying to plant a virus in our system would hardly draw attention to him doing that, in the manner you did! After all.’ After all. But of course, nervy, stressed, that’s precisely what a terrorist might indeed do. Why, after all, had I said what I said? What imp of the perverse grabbed the tendons of my tongue and formed those words? I’m the last person able to tell you that. So maybe the second interview would go a different way. Maybe it would be: We can’t afford to take any chances, Graham. Or: Nothing personal. Graham. Or: Drumhead justice, Graham. You understand. I do understand. We have to shoot you, Graham? Are you cool with that, Graham? Are you like the Fonz in the face of your personal extinction, Graham?
I am cool.
I tried to blank my mind, but my brain kept rolling back into life. The stakes were high. War would not go well for us, if we allowed it to run out of control. But, say we managed to form an alliance with the bêtes of the south, Major General Hetheridge! Think what tactical advantages that could give us, for the pacification of the north! I was thirsty, but the water jug from the morning yielded up only droplets.
I thought about Anne. I tried to remember exactly what she looked like, but her features evaded my mind’s eye. I thought of her sitting on the back step of her empty
B and B, smoking into the night air, and then very carefully disposing of the ashes as if they were nuclear waste. The friability of my memory of her made my gut tremble, butterfly-afraid in the core of my being. If I never got back to Cincinnatus, if I never sealed the deal I had been sent with, then my own individual memories of her were going to rust over and cease to work. I was going to lose her again as my mind decayed and I grew older and less capable, and the mere thought of that made me more afraid than I have ever been in my life. Dying at the hands of the Major General’s soldiery was a trivial matter by comparison.
I tried to sleep again, but couldn’t. The long sculptural face of a horse. The kindling in its eyes. A cat, out of the corner of your eye, appearing from and then disappearing into the shadow of which it is made. As faithful as a dog. As wily as a fox. As strong as an ox.
I tried to distract myself from myself by telling myself a story. I told myself the story of Oedipus.
The Sphinx was a beast. It asked one question of humankind, and it is the same question all animals ask – dumb or bête, herb eater or carnivore, all animals that have eyes that can look into our eyes. It asks: What are you? And it is the same question as What am I ? What do we do? We walk. We live through the day, day by day. We grow strong, and we grow weak. We pass through birth, but we never pass through death because there is nothing on the other side of death to pass into. Homo sapiens, Homo loquens, Homo bête. All the same. Oedipus knew the answer not because he was a king, but because he had been abandoned. Kings in their panoply are human attempts to evade the truth of the Sphinx, attempts to convince ourselves that we are grand, important, elevated above the rest of creation. But Oedipus’s father threw him out, and he grew up in the wilderness, a lame man creeping through the undergrowth. He saw the cosmos from the ground, not the raised dais of the royal family. When he met his father at the crossroads the old man didn’t recognize him. How could he see his son in this lowly fellow, dressed like a beggar, dirty and with a crippled leg? He took Oedipus to be a nobody, and he was right. Oedipus was that nobody we call Death, the thin man who has no flesh and so robs us of ours. Oedipus was that nobody we call Wisdom, that is general and does not belong to any one person. He killed his father, and he fucked his mother, and the Sphinx came to that land. She came padding on cat paws, and her tail was a sine wave behind her. She was the size of an ox, and stronger, and her human breasts were covered with downy hairs, and her human face was of the kind of beauty that only comes in dreams – long, dark-eyed, lips the colour of cranberries and eyes the colour of death. She said to Oedipus: ‘You are dressed in royal robes, now; but beasts have no need of clothes, and you are a beast.’ And Oedipus said to her: ‘You ask me this question in words, but beasts have no need of words.’ And the Sphinx said: ‘We are equally beasts, Oedipus, but you are the lesser of the two. When you were a toddler you walked unsteadily on two legs; and when you became a man and your cock grew long you swaggered more confidently because of it; but the day will come when you become me, and walk on four legs, and only then will you have matured.’ At this, Oedipus took his sword and aimed a blow at the Sphinx’s chest, between her tempting breasts. But she danced to the side and instead Oedipus’s blade carved through her left foreleg. She howled, and rolled over, and again Oedipus ran at her with his sword, and again she struggled out of his way, and his sword only cut through the knee of her remaining foreleg. At this she collapsed, unable to raise herself from the dust, and let out a pitiful wail, until the blood fled from her and she died. But Oedipus was filled with regret at what he had done – for these three things are the distinctive features of the human animal, as a turquoise tail is of a peacock and a horn that of a rhino: clothes, names and regret. He ordered a great tomb to be built, and laid the corpse of the Sphinx within it, and a mighty statue raised above it. Oedipus knew that great though his wisdom was, the Sphinx’s wisdom was greater. For she said: ‘We are the same kind, you and I; we are your father and mother because you evolved out of us. You kill us as your father, and make pets of us to love us as your mother, and in this you are trying, as children do, to distance yourself from us. You will come to understand that there will always come a time when you will look from pig to man and man to pig and not be able to tell the difference.’
I slept. I woke. I waited.
Finally the lock growled for a third time, and the door squeaked all the way open.
III
•
Four legs in the evening
‘The study of Nature makes a man
at last as remorseless as Nature’
The Island of Doctor Moreau, H. G. Wells
6
The Homo sapiens was laid out on the table, and he was dead. His skin was white as lard. His name had been Graham Penhaligon, but he didn’t have a name now, because names are uniquely properties of the living. This is because names are not things to survive beyond death, like pebbles and fingernails. Rather names are what call us out, interpellate us, and no matter how long or loud you call a dead person they will not respond.
There is a riddle here.
Graham Penhaligon lay naked on the table, His flesh was the same temperature as the wood beneath it, as the unheated room in which he lay. When he had been alive his flesh was a blend of white, red and yellow; now that he was dead the red had faded, and a buttery colour and rubber-like marigold texture had taken possession of his skin. He looked less than dead. There was no dignity in his laying out. His toenails, for instance: how unlike human cuticles, how very like razor-clam shells, hard and ridged and protruding. His toes as sea-potatoes. His slab-like buttocks. These miniature stretch lines and cellulitic grooves on his white thighs, where the skin is tugged like a fabric snagged on something – a nail protruding from the wall, a heel. Vanilla ice cream. His large-featured visage not looking at the ceiling, although his eyes are open. His mouth not breathing, although his lips are parted. Too old and lifeless and dead for pity, or humour, or honour, or hope. But not too dead for memory. What is the one thing that survives death? We’re sidling up to the riddle now, that’s a good entry-level question for this riddle.
What is stronger than death? Memory.
What’s the heart of memory? Devouring.
There are no other Homos sapiens in the room. The whole house is as cold as the winter landscape outside, but all the people in the house have hair and fur in sufficiency to keep them warm. Wifi is a legend to them, now. To communicate they must talk to one another. Outside, the aspen poplars carry their own weight in snow instead of foliage. Drifts sculpt the roadway, smother the fence, fill the garden. Snow had pushed a giant white python shape in through one broken ground-floor window. The bêtes inside the house don’t care about broken windows. They’re not like Homo sapiens in that regard. Inside and outside isn’t a dyad that structures their thoughts in the same way that it does humans.
There are seventy-six bêtes inside the house with the corpse of Graham Penhaligon. Most are dogs, cats, foxes and birds. There are a few other creatures. There are also a number of dumb beasts, but we’re not interested in them. Except one: a red-backed, dog-faced llwynog, a vixen chased into the kitchen by a group of bête foxes. She stands, wary, her tail up. To keep her happy, a cat sitting on the table tosses down small morsels of food. It is winter, and food is scarce; and although the vixen is not comfortable at least she is not surrounded by humans. She stands, she stays vigilant, and from time to time eats.
Outside, a hail of birds lands on the guttering with the breezy sound of their wings flapping. A sparrow has a snail in its beak, and is looking for something to serve as anvil – something not softened by a covering of snow. The other birds want the snail, because it is winter and food is scarce. There is a touch of avian tussling. Nothing is ready, the sparrow curses and flings down things from the gutter. Fuck, says the bird. Fuck, and hurls itself down amongst all the falling birds to chase the morsel. So flute-like a sound, that one English language syllable.
Inside the house,
the vixen puts out her tongue, silvery against the blood-orange fur.
Some come to bêteness by chance, devouring a chip inadvertently in the course of feeding. Others are selected. I was the latter. Except that I am not yet. She is still vixen.
I heard a story that, in the West Country and Wales, some horses carry seven chips in their heads, and parlay the inner dialogue into wisdom. They can, it says, see the future. I do not believe it myself. Except that I am not yet.
I grow alarmed at the entry of a Homo sapiens into the kitchen. Adult male, swaddled up in strange fabrics with a horseshoe shape of fur tufts poking from the rim around his face. He came and stared at the body on the table for a long time, concentrating on the face. Like any animal’s face, a Homo sapiens’ face is activated by many muscles under the skin. Death takes away that activation, and the muscles petrify. Lines become stone-carved, the right and left end points of the mouth move a little way from the eyes and in towards the chin. The newcomer breathes fern-like tendrils of white breath into the room. He speaks, but all I hear is gabble-gabble-gabble.
Later he goes. I creep out from behind the fridge. There are fewer bêtes in the kitchen now, and fewer animals too. I am hungry, and eye the dogs and cats and the other foxes to see if any of them look infirm, or toothless, or otherwise easy prey. All are lively, sharp-toothed, well clawed. A cupboard door is open, and inside is a mess of straw (actually it is shredded cardboard, from the boxes of breakfast cereals ripped open by earlier animals – years earlier, perhaps – to get at their edible contents. But I don’t know that yet). I contemplate climbing inside and napping; but I’m not comfortable enough in this strange place, with these strange bêtes. Perhaps another repellent Homo sapiens will come in. I stay wary.
Later they explain to me that the living Homo sapiens was the son of the dead Homo sapiens. He is living a denuded life, they say; shunned by his own kind, but too ineluctably human to be accepted by bêtekind. He came to observe his dad. It was hard to see, because his hood was up, but he wept.
