The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Not at all,’ said the doctor. ‘A few more questions. Did you used to smoke?’

  I wasn’t expecting that question. ‘Did I smoke?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Yeah, I used to. You can’t get the fags nowadays.’

  ‘The—?’

  ‘Cigarettes. I haven’t smoked one in years. But I used to, yes.’

  ‘We can see it in your lungs. Your lungs should,’ he said, simpering a little as he said this, ‘be a healthy pink colour, but yours are black. Black!’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ I said, feeling annoyed. ‘There’s no need to lecture me. I’ve quit, yeah?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s almost funny. These black lungs have almost certainly saved your life.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean, it’s almost funny?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, I trained as a doctor,’ said the doctor, folding his arms and becoming quite chatty. ‘I don’t mind telling you – the army paid me through medical school, and I worked as an army surgeon. But most of my work was prevention, touring barracks, talking to the men about sexual health, about keeping strong. I used to lecture them on not smoking. They all smoked, of course, soldiers, mostly, they all smoke. But I’d stand there and say,’ and he furrowed his brow in parody of his old lecturing style, ‘hey guys, don’t smoke, it gives you cancer, it impairs your physical fitness, and so on. I’d have been the first to lecture you on the health hazards. But now the boot is on the other foot, if you see what I mean. Your smoking altered your lungs, and they don’t like that. They like an unpolluted lung. That’s the irony, you see. If you’d have followed my advice years ago and quit smoking, then you’d probably be—’ He stopped.

  ‘Be what?’ I pressed. ‘Dead?’

  ‘In a much worse state,’ he concluded, looking serious.

  ‘What about [Name deleted]? I was out on the snow with him. Where is he now?’

  ‘He has been significantly impaired,’ said the doctor.

  This unpleasant phrase chimed inside my head. I imagined monstrosities, deformities.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘He used to smoke too – as if that makes any difference to anything.’

  ‘We know,’ said the doctor. ‘Which is why he’s lasted as long as he has. But he also used cocaine, and wore away much of the mucus membrane inside his nose. That gave them an access to the base of the brain pan – we’re not exactly sure how it worked.’

  ‘Explain to me,’ I said. ‘I’m confused.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘I don’t have clearance to talk to you about this.’

  ‘You’ve just been talking to me about it!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll check in on you tomorrow.’

  I spent the night in that room. A soldier in a mask brought in a truckle bed. There were no blankets or pillows, but I was very tired and I slept easily. It was never cold inside that room. I woke in the dark, with no idea what time it was. I woke in the middle of a dream in which Minnie and I were boating together in the middle of a blue lake (although we had never been boating together, she and I, in real life), and she said to me, ‘You know what this blue stuff is in the lake, Mum?’ and I said, ‘Sure, sweetie, it’s water,’ and she said, ‘No, it’s a very different chemical. We’re crossing the lake of acid.’ And in my dream I knew she was right, even though the blue fluid looked so peaceful and limpid. It wasn’t hissing or steaming the way you might think acid would. So I pulled the oars out of the water and they were two corroded lumps on poles, like two boiled sweets that had been sucked for too long.

  On the far side of the lake was an enormous mountain.

  Minnie was standing up and pointing, indicating across the lake at the mountain, spectacularly broad and high with a road running around it at an angle that was virtually horizontal, coiling around the flanks of the mountain like the thread of a screw, and myriad tiny little figures were on the road, walking upwards. And I said, ‘Isn’t the air clear, we can see every tiny little detail on that mountain road,’ (and I was very struck in the dream that I could indeed see these tiny details, even down to the fact that the men marching up were wearing collarless shirts and workman’s pants). But when I looked again I could see that Minnie was not pointing at the mountain, but in a different direction. She said, ‘There’s the criminal.’ I didn’t want to follow the line of her pointing arm, I didn’t want to see the criminal. I had the feeling that he was lying in the middle of the blue lake of acid, a basker, and I didn’t want to see it. Perhaps his body was half-eaten away. ‘I want to go back,’ I said. And Minnie had become [Name deleted], and I knew that he was the criminal, and he was right in the boat with me. I was afraid. I said, again, ‘I want to go home.’ And [Name deleted] replied, ‘Back to that place of sawdust and chopped ice?’, speaking with immense disdain, as if I were the most foolish and despicable person in the world to want to return to such a place.

  I woke.

  They wouldn’t let me out of that room. A soldier in a mask brought me food, and when I needed the toilet I used a chamber pot (real old style), which he took away and brought back clean. Not a pleasant job for him, I suppose. It only occurred to me on the second day that they might be conducting tests upon my stool, upon my water.

  I spoke to the doctor when he next came to visit me. ‘I understand that I’m considered to be a contamination risk of some kind,’ I said. ‘I only wish I knew what the contamination was supposed to be.’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say,’ he said, smiling, as if this were in itself amusing.

  ‘Where’s [Name deleted]?’ I asked. ‘Did you leave him out on the snow?’

  ‘He’s in a room not far from here.’

  ‘Is he also in isolation?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘I want to see somebody.’

  ‘You want?’

  ‘I want to see [Name deleted].’

  ‘I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘She’s a woman, in this camp. She’s one of the internees brought here. I want to speak to her. I want you to bring her here.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say,’ he said, shaking his head a little, ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  I got up and walked towards the doctor. I had the half-formed idea to rip off his mask, to infect him with whatever was in me (whatever the breath of the snow-worm-alien-thing had given me), so that he would understand the frustration of quarantine. So he would have to endure it too.

  As if he read my mind he was up and out of the room in a moment.

  I reached the door just in time to hear the bolt sliding through to lock it. ‘Hey!’ I yelled, banging on it. ‘Can I at least have something to read? Can I at least have some reading matter?’

  I banged for five minutes, or ten, I can’t be sure. Eventually I gave up. I made myself comfortable and lay on my bed for a long time, running things through my mind. Eventually I fell asleep. It felt as if I had reached the end of something, but I hadn’t reached the end. There was one more act to play out.

  My room had no windows, so it was impossible for me to know what time it was. But I was asleep, and the room-light was off, so it felt like the middle of the night, when the door started shouting, bang-bang-bang. ‘Hold on,’ I called, druggily, still half asleep, thinking I was back in my house in Liberty and somebody was at the door. Somebody was smashing at the door, making it bounce in its frame. ‘Hey!’ I called, coming more awake. ‘Hey!’

  I sat up, and heard the bolt being withdrawn. The door swung open, and a shadowed figure stepped in, and said, ‘So where are the lights?’ and I recognised the voice of my former lover, of my companion on the snow on the occasion of my meeting with the aliens: [Name deleted].

  He said, ‘So where are the lights?’

  ‘On the wall, by the door,’ I said, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.

  And the lights came on. And my eyes winced with the brightness. There he was, [Name deleted], his
creased, intense face looking nervously all about the room. He was the first person I had seen in days not wearing a mask.

  ‘What’s the password?’ he asked. He sounded insistent. ‘What’s the password?’

  ‘Password shit,’ I said, rubbing my face.

  He had shut the door behind him and was crossing the room to me. ‘C’mon, Tira, password, password.’ He sat down next to me. He was grinning.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘[Name deleted], I was asleep, you know?’

  ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ he was saying, ‘but I can only tell you once. You gotta remember it, OK?’

  ‘You know, I’m not in the mood—’

  ‘Remember I told you I was abducted, when I was a kid? That I was an abductee? Remember that? Well, hold that thought, keep it to yourself but hold that thought. The password is “live free or die”.’

  ‘Four words,’ I said.

  ‘Sure. Live free or die. Enemies of freedom: surveillance, army, government. Face them, even at the risk of death.’

  ‘What are you doing here, [Name deleted]?’

  ‘What am I doing here? Let’s get out, hey, Tira? They’re holding us as prisoners. I’m come to rescue you. Like Luke Skywalker in the movie, and you’re the princess.’

  ‘I’m no princess,’ I said, distractedly, because I had just then noticed what he was carrying in his right hand. ‘What’s that? No, I know what it is, where did you get it?’

  He looked down at the gun, held it up to display it. ‘This? I found it.’

  ‘Should you – hey, should you be carrying that around?’

  ‘It was a guard’s. He was supposed to supervise my inhalations. They got you inhaling?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, nervously.

  ‘You know what we’re inhaling?’

  ‘No.’

  He grinned. ‘That bother you? Don’t you think you should know? Isn’t that the point of freedom, to be in charge of your own body?’

  ‘How,’ I said, trying to stay calm and keep my voice low, ‘how did you get the guard’s gun?’

  ‘He didn’t believe I was abducted.’

  ‘Didn’t?’

  ‘No,’ [Name deleted] said, sombrely, shaking his head as carefully as a child. ‘He mocked it. I couldn’t persuade him, of the truth of it. I guess I won’t even try any more.’

  Everything was very quiet. The door was not quite shut.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘They think the visitors, the aliens, have infected us. Think of that! How likely do you reckon it is? They evolved on a completely different world, their cellular structure, their everything is completely different to ours. There’s just no way our two metabolisms could interact. They won’t listen! I can speak to them, they speak to me, I know. They don’t even see them as worms – Christ, they’ve no idea. Some form of fluid aggregation – fuck that. They think they’re like an ants’ nest. An ant!’ he said.

  ‘[Name deleted]—’

  ‘Can you believe it? A cloud of dust. Intelligent dust! Does that sound likely to you? They let billions suffocate under the snow, but some, some conscious decision on their part kept us two alive. Why? Because they have a plan. A plan, and I’m at the centre of it. I tried to explain that to the guard, but he didn’t want to listen. Didn’t want to hear. It was in his interest to hear, I’d say: to hear that I’m the one.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Wait a minute. What about the guard?’

  ‘Came in with this breathing thing, with the long rubber hose. God knows where they dug that up from. Fifty years old. The rubber hose broke.’

  ‘Broke?’

  ‘He’s dead, the guard. The hose broke.’

  I could feel my heart hurry alarmingly. ‘Dead?’ I repeated, huskily.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the difficulty I had,’ he said. ‘I took the hose and managed to get it around his neck, but rubber stretches, you know? I pulled and pulled, and I’m not as strong as I used to be. So I hung on it with all my strength, and my heart started complaining – I don’t have a very healthy heart. I had a heart attack you know, before the Snow. I had surgery.’

  I said nothing.

  He was quiet. After a while, he concluded: ‘Anyway, the hose broke, and he fell to the floor. He was pretty grey by then. A kind of dark grey, not blue. I was expecting him to go blue. But his eyes were red – not just red-rimmed, but the whites of his eyes completely red on both sides. It was pretty gross.’

  ‘Are you sure,’ I asked, ‘that he’s dead?’

  [Name deleted] shrugged. He looked at the gun in his hand. ‘Not breathing,’ he said. ‘I sat and watched him for a while. Then I took his sidearm. His holster was still buttoned up. He didn’t think to unbutton it, take out the weapon and ward me off. He kept scrabbling at his throat, but the hose had stretched and stretched till it was thin as wire, and it had dug right into the flesh of his throat, you couldn’t reach it to pull it out. I mean,’ he added, more slowly, ‘if he’d thought clearer he could have got his gun out, and then he’d still be alive. But he didn’t think clearly, so he’s dead – it’s kind of his fault really. You got to always,’ he tapped his forehead with his left forefinger, ‘keep one step ahead, mentally.’

  I felt nauseous. ‘Jesus,’ I said.

  ‘He was only a guard,’ said [Name deleted].

  ‘You’re a psycho,’ I said, without heat.

  ‘I couldn’t define that word if you asked me,’ he said quickly. ‘Psycho, what does that even mean? That’s just – that’s just—’ He stopped. He was looking at the gun in his hand. ‘That’s just a meaningless word,’ he concluded, before continuing without pause, ‘and I never, I never saw the supposed comparison between a gun and a dick, you know? They’re not at all alike, really, when you think of it. For one thing, a gun has no balls, and it doesn’t spray, no fluid comes out of it. And you can only use it for one thing. You can only use a gun for one thing, you know, whereas with a dick – you can fuck with it, piss with it, pull on it when you’re feeling lonely.’ He chuckled.

  After a pause he said in a lower tone, ‘Six billion dead under our feet and you’re going to blame me for one more?’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said.

  ‘Alright,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry, I apologise. Alright? Shall we go?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ I said.

  ‘C’mon!’ he cried, smiling. ‘Don’t be pissy.’

  ‘You,’ I said, meaning to say, you revolt me, but my eye fell on the gun in his hand again, so I repeated, ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’

  ‘You’re coming,’ he said, not smiling.

  ‘Or what?’ I said, firing up a little. ‘You going to kill me too?’

  ‘I guess,’ he said, deadpan, and stood up. The pistol was aimed at my face. A gut-level fear thrummed in my belly, a death-fear, and my heart just galloped. My hands were trembling. I stood up too. ‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll come, but I’m—’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I’m coming, OK. Don’t be crazy, alright?’

  ‘We need to speak to them again,’ he said, still pointing the gun at my face. ‘That means going out on the snow. You got anything warmer to wear? Where’s your coat?’

  I needed, desperately, to urinate. Everything in the room seemed sharper, more vivid, and every object and space had oriented itself around the gun, its human c-shaped scaffold, its single clear eye looking straight at me. It was the still point. The need to pee passed away, but my hands were still trembling. ‘They took my coat,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a coat.’ I thought, ridiculously, maybe he’ll leave me here when he realises I don’t have a coat. It’s stupid, I know, but although I believed he was capable of shooting me dead I didn’t believe he was capable of herding me out onto the snow in my night-wear.

  I was wrong. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘They’ll keep us warm.’

  I had on bedsocks, leggings, a long-sleeved top. At home I sometimes slept in a nightcap, but the army doctors
hadn’t provided me with one of those. It was in this costume that I stepped out into the corridor, prodded by [Name deleted]’s free hand into an ungainly trot. At the end of the corridor we passed through a door into a sort of hall. Electric lights dangled on cords like shining hanged men. The windows set in the left-hand wall were black, so it was indeed the middle of the night.

  A dozen beds were arranged along each wall, so the hallway was a sort of hospital ward. But all the beds were empty, their sheets folded neat as cardboard, their pillows undented. ‘Go through,’ urged [Name deleted] behind me. ‘Go through.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Outside,’ he said.

  And we hurried through into a corridor, and into another room, this one apparently the lobby. A private was sitting with his boots on the table in front of him, reading a library book. His gun was leant against the wall behind him, like a broomstick. There was a desk light by his propped-up left boot, and another light over the outside door. [Name deleted] actually squealed, with delight or panic, when he saw the private. ‘Don’t move, don’t move!’ he yelled, hurrying over to him, the gun in his right arm, and his right arm locked straight out, pointing straight ahead.

  ‘[Name deleted],’ I said. ‘You’re scaring me.’

  The man said nothing. He looked like he thought maybe he was dreaming. Then he whipped his feet off the table, covered his mouth with his hand and half-fell backwards off his chair onto the floor. ‘You stay there!’ [Name deleted] sang. ‘You stay down there! Come on, Tira.’ And he grabbed my arm and pulled me through the main entrance and outside.

  It was dark outside. The ground glimmered underneath a frost-coloured moon. I immediately began to feel the pain of the chill through my bedsocks, and the air nipped at my neck and face. But I felt an outrush of warmth from my chest which I knew was sheer relief. ‘Jesus, [Name deleted],’ I exhaled. ‘I really thought you were going to kill that guy.’

  ‘Take a few down,’ he said, but he was facing away from me as he spoke and his words weren’t distinct. Maybe he said, ‘Take a few of them down.’ He pulled me across the frozen yard, where moonlight underwrote every sparkling lump of snow with a crescent of shadow. Boots and tyres had churned the snow up in the day, and the night had settled it in its weird choppy little shapes. I looked up and for a moment [Name deleted] had vanished. ‘[Name deleted],’ I warbled into the night. ‘[Name deleted]?’ A prisoner, now abandoned, I felt not freedom but terror. I peered amongst the chill block shadows of trucks parked close to one another twenty yards from me.