by Adam Roberts
‘[Name deleted],’ I called. But the noise of the chopper was much louder now, and I could barely even hear my own voice.
He was getting slowly to his feet, saying something that I couldn’t hear over the noise of the rotor blades above me. I saw movement again in the hole.
Then bullets started pounding into the ground. The helicopter’s side-mounted Gatlings were thrumming and spinning, and sparks and puffs of detonation were splashing all around the hole and inside it too, throwing up white dust, chalk-like fragments of snow, and such an enormous noise that it overwrote even the crash of the rotors.
I threw my arms about my head in terror and danced away from the hole, away from the tempest of bullets. The snow was turned, in short order, into a kind of fog, as if powder-fine snow were falling again. Everything went misty, I could see nothing. I was screaming something. I don’t know what I was screaming.
The noise of the Gatlings stopped, and the powder swiftly arranged itself in flowing lines and curls under the force of the rotor blades. In moments the air was clear again.
Something broke from the snow. It popped up as neatly as a flying-fish through the surface of the ocean, a brown-edged trail of smoke through the sky arcing swiftly up and coming down. It missed the airborne ’copter by feet and hit the snow a few hundred yards further away with a grand, fiery explosion. An oval of fire swelled quickly, turned brown and grey with smoke and sent out skeetering tentacles of smoke. In moments it was over, except for a rising plume of black and a crater, except that the shockwave pushed out, an invisible hand, and shoved me over onto my back.
I lay there, my ears ringing, and heard a second projectile descending, and heard a second explosion. The chopper’s noise was receding, as if its pilot had decided to fly away from this attack. The throb of the motors became quieter and quieter and then I couldn’t hear them at all. The tinnitus in my head faded.
I picked myself up from the snow. Particles of snow were all over me, as if I had been dusted with sugar. All over my arms and hands, my legs and body, my face and head.
The white light reflected from the snow all around me made it hard to see the craters left by the explosions. Even the hole that had appeared right next to me seemed to have gone. Perhaps its walls had collapsed and snow had filled the hole. I couldn’t see [Name deleted] anywhere. In fact I couldn’t see very much at all. The white of the snow was brighter than usual, too bright, lit not by the sun but by some inner element that pushed a sharp and a washing-over whiteness everywhere. I shielded my eyes with my mittened paw, but it did no good.
The sky was bleached, blank as bone. The snow was shining on the sky, instead of the other way around. I thought to myself, what’s happening here? I thought to myself, have I got snow blindness?
I thought I heard [Name deleted] talking. He sounded close, no more than six feet away from me. He was saying, ‘They’re not all the same, any more than we’re all the same.’ I turned, turned, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. The voice had the ghostly burr of hallucination. ‘They don’t present a unified front,’ he was saying. ‘They can be hostile to us and friendly to us at the same time. Don’t we act the same way?’
I felt afraid. I felt very alone, on this shining white plane. I couldn’t for the life of me work out where [Name deleted]’s voice was coming from. I was no longer even sure where I was.
‘Where are you?’ I called.
‘What we have to do,’ he was saying, his voice smaller and less distinct as if he were retreating from me as he spoke, ‘is understand the imperial mindset. Now that’s not a straightforward thing.’
There was nothing. There was a silence so perfect it felt artificial; not the sound of wind in my ears, not the thread of my own pulse in my inner ear, nothing at all.
‘Hello?’ I called, and the word crashed like an explosion. My own utterance made me flinch, it was so loud.
My spoken word did not echo.
I turned slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees, and on all sides I was faced with the mathematically flat plane, the sharp whiteness, the bleached sky. I dropped to the floor and slipped my hand out of my mitten, and the snow was cool to the touch but not icy, a granular whiteness like cold sand. It was as if my fingers’ nerves had been dulled somehow, and could no longer register the sharpness of their sensations. I couldn’t understand what had happened. It occurred to me that I had been killed, or fatally wounded, during the helicopter attack, or during the explosions afterwards, and that I was now lying on the actual snow as on a deathbed. Perhaps I was experiencing death. Perhaps this is what death feels like. This blank white plane, this could be the afterlife – a life in the wastes of the snow, an afterlife there too. I tried to make sense of it, and in a strange way it did make sense. Warrior religions like the Vikings’ promised a warrior’s afterlife of feasting and slaying. Hunter religions like Native American faiths promised an afterlife in eternal hunting grounds. Shepherd religions like Christianity promise a shepherd’s heaven of safe green fields and mild weather. What if our afterlife is wholly determined by our life? What if people who live amongst the snow spend eternity in the snow after they die? The thought was nearly unbearable to me: to think that death would provide no escape from this monotony.
‘No,’ I yelled, and the word hurt my ears, and made my head throb, it was so loud. And yet, once again, there was no echo; the word vanished as soon as it was spoken.
Then I had the sensation of insects crawling inside my head, a gritty, itchy sensation right in the middle of my head. Pulling off my mittens I tried to screw my little fingers into both my ears to reach the itch. ‘Ah!’ I hummed. ‘Ah!’ I was humming to try and reach the itch with sound waves, to take the edge off it. My own humming sounded vast, headachey, but the sound stopped as soon as I stopped.
The bright snow was parting in front of me. A gap opened up in the crust, and snow tumbled inwards from its lips. The gap widened, and the snow shifted around it. Something bone-white moved in the space. It reared slowly up.
It occurred to me then that perhaps the reason I couldn’t see [Name deleted] was that he had been buried. Perhaps the snow had collapsed upon him and carried him down into the hole that had been created earlier. I thought to myself, distantly, that I should be trying to dig him out. But at the same time I was hypnotised by the giant worm that was rising up in front of me. I was face to face with the alien.
Then, with a rushing insight, I understood who this being was. Not an alien, of course, but rather my daughter. She had taken a strange form, that can’t be denied. She was wormy, dragon-sized, with a grey-white forward portion, and then feathers, or not feathers because each frond twitched and wriggled with life; cream-coloured scales, or fins, or something; but a mouth with a purple-brown pulsing action somewhere behind the fourfold crinkle of its lips; and behind the complicated business of the midsection was a great swelling, elephantine and indistinct, mostly still buried in the snow. In the snow. But she – it – would shift, and pull herself-itself round, and I would get the sense of something more complicated, segment upon segment and each different from the other.
‘You’re big,’ I said. ‘You’ve grown so big.’
The words were normal-sized. They didn’t boom or hurt my ears. They were conversation words, not solitude words, and much more comfortable to my ears.
Minnie swirled slowly, and the snowtop ice growled and cracked, and her sheer size broke atoms of snow from the surface and sent them scurrying into the wind. This season I am big, she conceded. Her skin pulsed and vibrated, turning purple-black as it did so. Perhaps that was how the sound was produced. I could have laughed, or cried, or repeated her manner of speech. This season? As if it were a fashion show.
‘I missed you,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry you went away.’
This season I am big, said the creature again, and then I couldn’t see it as Minnie any more, but as a great ugly worm, long as a skyscraper laid flat. It was almost as if this monster had devoured Minnie’s body,
had nosed under the snow, through the buried streets, into the crushed rooms until it had found Minnie’s body, and swallowed it python-like.
I shouted. ‘I’ll kill you,’ I said. ‘You are so ugly,’ I said.
To kill strike below the shoulder, said the creature, arcing the second, icicle-feathered-segment of its monstrous body out of the snow to present itself to my aim. The calmness, the blandness even, with which it faced its own death struck me forcefully. I sat on the ground. The stiff ice crackled under my snow-clothes. I wanted to cry, to weep and howl, but tears didn’t come. Sometimes they don’t. There are times when you want to cry, as a demonstration of the turmoil inside you, and the tears simply don’t come through. The monster withdrew itself into the snow before me, until only its grey forward segment, with its sore-looking multi-lip mouth, was visible. To kill strike below the shoulder, said the creature.
‘Dragon,’ I said. I drew a deep breath. ‘Where did you learn English?’
This season I am big, said the dragon.
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
The dragon seemed to murmur to itself, to twist in the ice a little, as if it were considering my questions.
‘What I mean to say,’ I said, with a new lucidity, ‘is that – maybe you don’t grow the way organisms from this world grow – to start small and to grow larger and larger. Maybe it’s not like that for you. Maybe you fluctuate in size.’
The study has been longfold, said the dragon.
I pondered this. ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand the word.’
The period of study has taken long, said the dragon.
‘Study? What?’
The period of study has taken long, said the dragon. At the beginning we spoke fax.
And I had the understanding that the creatures had studied us through electronic communication, and that for some reason fax-messages had sounded to them more like intelligent interaction than human speech. I don’t know how I knew this. I could present you with some theories as to how; maybe I imagined the whole thing. Maybe the creature said facts, not fax, and the vivid mental picture distracted me from the truth of it. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Taken long-ish talking has has at and, said the dragon.
I got to my feet again. ‘What drew you to me? Can you read my mind? Is that it?’ I was quite excited. ‘Are you only speaking in my mind? Maybe the words I hear are just sounding inside my brain. You can sense my pain, my loss, and that’s what’s drawn you to me – my daughter, my beautiful, dead daughter. You know about that, don’t you. You know about that.’
This season I am big, said the dragon.
‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I’m going too fast for you. It’s OK. I can slow it down. We can slow it down. Let’s talk, slow as you like.’ I was consumed by intellectual curiosity. I was talking with a creature from another star.
It was necessary tenfold to break through the crust that forms on the surface of any object superheated supercooled, said the dragon, with a weird emphasis. This season I am big, it added.
Again I experienced a clear mental picture. I can’t be certain, to be honest with you, that this was the result of some alien telepathic suggestion. Maybe my brain was merely playing tricks with me. I have a vivid imagination. Perhaps I imagined the whole thing, influenced by [Name deleted]’s gabbling about science fiction and Dune and so on. Maybe that was all. But I saw a meteor landing in soft snow, and then I saw the hard surface forming on the snow, and then meteors crashing down with tremendous acceleration to punch through the crust and reach the soft snow underneath. I saw all that, and with a salmon-like leap my heart reached a new level of understanding. That these creatures not only lived in the snow, they were the authors of the snow.
As if following my thoughts, the beast curled its horse-head-sized snout, with its strange maw, sweeping it left and right past my face. There was a grassy, alcoholic smell.
‘It’s your element, isn’t it?’ I said.
It was necessary sixfold to break through the crust that forms on the surface of any object superheated supercooled, said the dragon. It was necessary twofold to break through the crust that forms on the surface of said the dragon.
It withdrew abruptly into the snow, drawing back like a tortoise pulling its head back into his shell. There was an earthquake-like rumble, and the crust bulged away to my right. The grey snout of the creature emerged, and fragments of ice adhered to it like the skin of sugar on a crème brulée. Taken longfold talking has has at and, said the dragon.
I saw everything. I saw the alien world, snow-covered, creatures swimming through the snow like fish swim in our oceans, but superintelligent creatures, creatures with inquisitive minds, mapping the cosmos, planning their next move. I saw the terraforming of Earth from their point of view, co-ordinating a thousand sub-cometary lumps in oblique trajectories to graze our atmosphere. I saw them falling to Earth themselves inside boulder-sized ice blocks, nascent forms, no larger than a thumb – or – no – larger than a pollen grain. I don’t know. I can’t say whether this was telepathic suggestion by the creatures, or something else. Maybe it was just my imagination.
And I blinked,
blinked, and I was alone, and
blinked, and I was in the chopper, and a man in uniform was leaning across me, in front of me, yelling right in my face. He was hanging on a strap with his left hand, and waving in my face with his right. I was sitting there, seeing this man, and behind him the inner wall of the chopper. Everything seemed to have changed very abruptly from bright whiteness to close, dark, noisy. I could see a small window in the wall, through which everything was blank and white. The engine was very loud.
The man was shouting, ‘Count for me, backwards,’ and I took my gaze from the white window, and the metal fittings of the ’copter’s hold, and tried to focus on him, upon this man. It was enormously hard to concentrate. His face seemed to decompose and recompose in front of me – there was his nose, his chin, his left eye, his forehead, his ears, his right eye, but they didn’t seem to cohere in a single image. ‘Can you do that for me?’ he yelled.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Good!’ he said, looking pleased, his eyebrows shooting up. ‘OK, good, stay with me now, stay with me. Can you count, can you count backwards from ten, for me please?’
‘Count?’
I could see, then, what was wrong with his face. He had no mouth. But I thought to myself, if he has no mouth, how is he asking me to count?
‘Backwards,’ he said again.
And then, with a conceptual coming-together in my head, I understood what the problem was. I could see that he was wearing a plastic mask over his mouth. That what I had taken for his chin was actually this mask.
‘Why are—?’ I asked.
He nodded, vigorously, and raised his voice again, as if the noise of the chopper were making it impossible for us to communicate.
‘Can you please count backwards …?’
‘Ten,’ I said, looking around the space. Two soldiers, also in masks, were sitting on a low metal bar on the far side of the compartment. Some boxes and cases were on the floor to the right of me. ‘Nine,’ I said. ‘Nine ten, eight nine ten.’
‘Backwards,’ the man yelled again.
‘Ten eight nine,’ I said. ‘Ten nine eight. Why are you wearing a mask?’
‘What?’
‘Why are you guys all wearing masks?’
He nodded, ‘Very good, very good,’ he said. ‘This is very good. Can you go back all the way from ten to one for me?’
We landed back at the internment camp, and I was hurried from the ’copter into a metal prefab, where another group of masked men, this time in doctors’ clothes, were waiting for me. They had a heater going in a booth, and asked me to strip, which I did without shame or embarrassment. They examined my skin, but paid particular attention to my nose and my mouth. They peered in my mouth with black plastic-snouted instruments.
They gave me a mask of my o
wn, linked via a black rubber tube to an atomiser of some kind. When I breathed in this device scattered a warm mist of, it felt like, water into my lungs. I coughed, but they insisted I keep going. ‘What is it?’ I asked, coughing and coughing. ‘Is it water?’
‘No,’ they said. ‘A very different chemical.’
I dressed in new clothes: thermal undergarments, woollen top, hiker’s trousers, socks, gloves, hat. I sat on a chair in a room by myself for a length of time: minutes, perhaps, half an hour perhaps.
Doctors came and went.
Two men came in, one of them a doctor the other with a camcorder. It was rare to see such technology in our post-Snow world. They pulled up chairs and sat opposite me. They were both wearing surgical masks.
‘What did you see?’ they asked me.
‘Where?’
‘Out on the snow. With [Name deleted].’
‘How about him?’ I inquired, my memory prompted. I had fled the compound with him. We had walked through the pre-dawn, and into the rising sun. We had seen the snow transformed into a landscape of jewels and lights, we had seen the white become multicoloured. But in all my journey back in the helicopter I had forgotten entirely about him. ‘Is he OK? Is he alright?’
But they didn’t want to talk about him. ‘What did you see?’ they asked.
‘I saw my daughter.’
They didn’t seem to think this was outlandish. ‘Your daughter?’
‘She’s dead,’ I said, with the gritty prickle of tears behind my eyes. ‘She’s dead and under the snow, and she’s been dead for years. But she was there. I don’t know how, I don’t know how exactly. I saw a monster. I saw this giant worm, this dragon, but it was also Minnie, somehow.’
‘I see,’ said the doctor.
The man taping it on the camcorder didn’t say anything.
‘Minnie,’ I said, because I felt I needed to explain it to them, ‘was my daughter.’
‘I see,’ said the doctor.
I heard myself. ‘It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It sounds mad.’
