The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  Crow, as I still think of him, is due for re-election soon. He is standing, but there are strong candidates standing against him. I have not seen him in four years, and not spoken to or heard from him personally in three.

  And I think back. It still baffles me, the order of events. I have put them down here as I remember them, and I do so in the hope that he will read them. I don’t presume to think that I can change his interim-presidential mind, and the more I think about it the less certain I become of the actual order of events. Perhaps it is as I remember it, perhaps Crow is right. I know he is a busy man now, an important man, the leader of this small remnant of humanity. But perhaps he has time to read the occasional document, this one of the many that detail sightings of or encounters with the Others. They’ve been quiet for fourteen months now. Away to the east the plain of snow is interrupted by the curious plumage of a crop-field. It makes very beautiful patterns in the morning light. Some people, superstitious, refuse to eat food grown for them by the Others, but I have tasted it, and it is good.

  In New NY, or nearby, a large under-snow lake was discovered. I have heard that it was formed by the uncontrolled nuclear reactor under the snow at Seven Mile Island: I don’t know if that’s correct. There are the worries about radioactivity, but food is better than no food. Seven breeds of fish live down there: fed by human waste. They do very well. Sometimes they’re loaded into open-topped pallets and shipped over the snow-Atlantic. The ambient chill keeps them fresh, although the breeze of their passage can dry them a little – still tasty, though. These barges are computer-guided, and powered by sails, and they glide over the snow without human pilotage. When we’ve unloaded them we can simply send them on their way, further down to the east, and over a matter of weeks they’ll be blown all around the world and back to the over-US. Liberty will, they say, start a lake of its own soon. The greenhouses are doing better, although I’m too cash-poor to taste their food.

  I can see the moon as I write. She is barren, of course. The moon landings were before my time, but I’ve seen the pictures: dry as cement-dust, a world of ashes and corroded breeze-blocks under a sky black as stormcloud and night and death. But that’s not how she appears as I look up at her now. She looks white as diamond, she looks pure as the song said, chaste and fair. It seems to me, as I look up, that everything that has happened to this world, this earth, these events to which I was witness – that these events belongs to the same sphere. It seems to me that the old dust-and-ashes moon belongs to the dead time; that now, in our new world, not barren but chaste, not heartless but cruelly fair – that in this new world, the moon is a snow-covered landscape as well. She is our Holy Spirit, presiding over the course of humanity now. I can almost believe that it was from her, shedding a portion of her cold down upon us, that the snow came in the first place. To take a notional vantage point out in vacuum, the earth and the moon look now like sister worlds, white-and-white, cold-and-cold, pure-and-pure. We’re living in a new phase now, because the page is blank. Paper is blank, slab-like, it’s an expensive resource, but at least it’s blank.

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  Also by Adam Roberts

  Alma

  The Real-Town Murders (2017)

  By the Pricking of her Thumb (2018)

  Other Novels

  Salt (2000)

  On (2001)

  Stone (2001)

  Polystorm (2003)

  The Snow (2004)

  Gradisil (2006)

  Splinter: A Voyages Extraordinaire (2007)

  Land of the Headless (2007)

  Swiftly: A Novel (2008)

  Yellow Blue Tibia (2009)

  New Model Army (2010)

  By Light Alone (2011)

  Jack Glass: A Golden Age Story (2012)

  Twenty Trillion Leagues under the Sea (2014)

  Bête (2014)

  The Thing Itself (2016)

  Haven (2018)

  Parodies

  The Soddit; or, Let’s Cash in Again; or, There, and Back Again, Dammit, Where Did I Put It, Where Is It, I Don’t Believe It, I Must Have Left It There, Over Again to There, Oh for Heaven’s Sake, It’s Not Here Either, Back Yet Again, Fuming, Oh There It Is, It Was by the Front Door All Along (2004)

  The Sellamillion: The Disappointing “Other” Book (2004)

  The McAtrix Derided (2004)

  The Va Dinchi Cod (2005)

  Star Warped: Once Upon a Time in a Galaxy Nowhere Near Far En

  ough Away (2005)

  Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves (2006)

  I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas (2009)

  The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo (2010)

  I, Soddit. The Autobiography (2013)

  Adam Roberts is commonly described as one of the UK’s most important writers of SF. He is the author of numerous novels and literary parodies. He is Professor of 19th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, London University and has written a number of critical works on both SF and 19th Century poetry. He is a contributor to the SF ENCYCLOPEDIA.

  Appendix

  DOCUMENTS ASSEMBLED

  The Senate and the People of NUSA have ruled not to make public the foregoing documents. Special advisers have determined that:

  (a) with regard to [Name available to clearing level 7]; as a former President, and considering his allotted status as Hero of the New World, this standing would be compromised, and the health of the NUSA body-politic damaged, by certain unsubstantiated allegations made in these documents, specifically that he was [i] racist, [ii] cuckolded, [iii] complicit with the alleged invasion force of Others to any degree. None of these claims have any basis in truth.

  (b) with regard to [Name available to clearing level 7], his own confession may or may not be a forgery. As a recorded Hero of the New World his standing would be compromised, and the health of the NUSA body-politic damaged, by certain details contained in these documents. Reported via public news manifests: ‘[Name available to clearing level 7] gave his life to save the Republic. His sacrifice brought about an end of the war between humanity and the Others. He deserves the title Hero of the New World.’

  (c) with regard to a number of other officers in the NUSA military, several of whom now hold senior office in the government: no benefit to the nation can be demonstrated from having those parts of these documents that relate to their earlier lives made public.

  By Interim Presidential Order.

  A STATEMENT FROM [NAME AVAILABLE TO CLEARING LEVEL 7]

  ‘The new category of Hero of the New World has an immensely positive impact upon public morale. In the rebuilding of the lives of the human race, it is vital to have heroes to whom everybody may look up. In future years schoolchildren will study their life stories as wholesome and socially cohesive myths. It would damage the precarious sense of commonality in the NUSA for derogatory and largely untrue allegations about any Hero of the New World to come to light. Documents containing such allegations must be censored in various senses. We move on to a new age!’

  This interdiction shall hold for a period of not exceeding 50 years, subject to reappraisal by the Senate.

  Theories of the origin and purpose of the Others: put to motion this day, 4–1–10 in Senate.

  [i] That they are alien forms of life from another solar system, having altered this world to make it more habitable to their physiologies. 18 ayes.

  [ii] That they are alien forms of life from within our own solar system. 1 aye (later struck).

  [iii] That they are manifestations of the same catastrophic circumstances that caused the snow, viz. upheaval in natural order, mutation of the space-time continuum, created according to so
me natural (not supernatural) law. 4 ayes.

  [iv] That they are secular apparitions of spiritual conflict, viz. divine or diabolic intervention, just as the snow is God’s plan for this globe, and the survivors the elect, one day soon to multiply to the number 144,000 and ushering in the last days. 17 ayes.

  [v] That they are humans, or post-humans, having travelled through time, this present global catastrophe similarly provoked by time disturbances of some undetermined nature. 2 ayes.

  [vi] That they do not, in objective terms, exist, being manifestations of certain telekinetic abilities latent in humanity now brought to the surface by extraordinary events, and that all achievements attributed to the Others can in fact be attributed to the individual telepathic and communal telepathic abilities of the new humans, homo superior. 1 aye.

  [vii] That they are merely mass hallucinations, and all the apparent circumstances explained as their action may be explained in other, non supernatural ways. 1 aye.

  Coda Tira Bojani Sahai

  [1] It’s strange to look over all this documentation after so many years. Some of the stuff here I’d forgotten, and some – as with Fred’s confession, which I read for the first time two days ago – I’d never known. But other parts of the story are vividly in my mind, and have been there all this time.

  It’s strange, quite apart from anything else, to see how heavily censored all these papers were – that’s so redolent of its era. That more than anything else. That paranoid governmental control. A brow furrowed like low-tide sand. But now it is full twenty years later, and each year has felt full. I feel like an old woman, although I’m still only in my fifties. But things have changed. Some things have stayed the same. Some things have changed.

  For example, it seems nowadays foolish and oversensitive to blank out all those names. Anybody in Nusa, for instance, would be able to deduce my former husband’s name, since he, evidently, was the IP who followed Robinson. It’s a matter of historical record. Even I appear in the footnotes of the official histories. Other names are also only lightly obscured by the censor’s pedantry.

  If, as seems likely, this new ‘publisher’ will print out copies of these collected documents (‘for their historical interest’ as he puts it) then it is surely stupid to retain these marks of censorship. They date from a less secure time. Here, then, are the names obliterated in the original documents:

  George Corvino

  Fred Gimble

  Edie Bisson

  Thomas Pound

  Teri Grenert

  Frank Robert Gillprazer

  Of course, it may be the case, perhaps, that these names are less illuminating. It may be that it is not the names that are important.

  [2] We know a great deal more about the Others than we once did, although there remains much we don’t know. It is full fifteen years since it was determined that the ordnance they fired down upon Liberty – all the shells and bullets they spat up at army personnel and helicopters and so on – was actually our own; all dredged from the ground-level under-snow. They put out their alien feelers (whatever shape they took) and wormed their way wherever the snow was laid down, into barracks and military storehouses, and retrieved our own ammunition. This they were able to pass up into the upper reaches of the snow and propel upwards.

  Liberty was the only city they bombarded: there were no attacks of any kind on the other cities. And it does seem to be the case that they fired at Liberty in a sort of homage. They saw us blowing up our own buildings, and they, sort of, joined in. They saw our troops running around on the ice firing off their weapons at every tremor in the snow and every unexpected thing, and they fired back. With hindsight it becomes almost touching, like a toddler copying the things they see an adult do. It would be banal to say ‘they did not understand’, but I sometimes think, in terms not wholly removed from that mode of thought, that it may have been their mode of understanding which was simply not the same as ours.

  So in Newla, where the city council built the seven towers (the largest architectural undertaking yet of the post-Snow world), the Others seemed to have copied human actions, pulling up minerals from a wide area of under-snow, seeping them upwards (or lifting them, or insinuating them, or however it is they transfer material through the medium) and constructing their own weird and rather beautiful constructions a few kilometres from the city. I have only seen pictures, but they look like great rust-brown sausages, blimp-sized termite nests, some thin and towering, some oval and squat. And most importantly, when Newden set aside acres of snow, with painfully dug up ground soil and a solar-powered heating system to stop the earth from freezing, to grow maize and wheat, the Others copied. Their peculiar snow-crops, constructed (according to the best scientific intelligence) of displaced minerals and snatches of salvaged organic material – salvaged we don’t know how – are now grown widely around every city. Some strains are inedible, but some are nutritious, and two decades of human tinkering with the plants, cross-breeding and so on, have produced several quite tasty versions.

  And when New NY farmed fish in their under-snow lagoons, the Others provided their own swimming creatures. The last document by me, 341–999, mentions the beginnings of human fish farming. Survivors had carried up live fish eggs with them, and there were several attempts to create ponds for them to swim in. The first successful ponds were under-snow, in heated pockets of water made by, to begin with, heat pollution from the surface of the Earth; and latterly, closer to the top of the snow, in solar-powered sinks. We have bred and harvested our fish successfully for many years now. The Others copied us, as they did in so many things; in Liberty by creating their own fish-stocked under-snow lagoons. But in New NY they created a huge under-snow body of liquid water and filled it with strange creatures, things bred out of the frozen DNA of dead animals they found underneath the snow, gill-lunged cows with udder-sized swim bladders but without eyes, kicking with flap-hoofed hind legs through the black water, devouring tiny shrimp-like insects that in turn fed on organic matter dredged from the ground and circulated through the ecosystem. Dog-headed octopus creatures with tuber-like growths upon drifting tail-analogue tentacles. Headless birds that flap their way through the underwater with diaphanous adapted wings, and who feed by winnowing water into their neck-maw. Humanity came upon this bizarre resource by chance; it existed for several years before we became aware of it. Some say they made it for us, some say they made it for their own purposes, it’s impossible to know. But the meat is edible, which is the most important thing. To begin with some people were squeamish about eating such monstrosity, but nowadays we are more practical. It is amazing the things to which people can become habituated.

  Now, whether the creature that I saw on the ice, that first time, was one of these experiments – or whether it was indeed a manifestation of the Others, an avatar – or whatever the hell it was – I can’t say. Nobody can say.

  [3] Publishing is the vogue this season. It reminds the older citizens of pre-Snow times, and it is, I suppose, a diverting novelty for the young. The young outnumber the old. Books are much cheaper than they used to be.

  Yesterday I read a new science fiction novel, a sure sign that things are increasingly returning to some sort of pre-Snow normality. It’s the seventh new title published this year. There’s much more paper now than before. Fancy that!

  Science fiction is the literature of choice, of course, for Nusans. It has become the new realism, with historical fiction (as all books about the pre-Snow years must necessarily be called) looked down upon as a lamentable escapism. We try to come to terms with what has happened to the world. There was enough food to eat last year. There has been enough food to eat this year. Next year, we’ll see.

  The novel, by Donna Avellanos, was a speculative fiction about the Others. It incorporated a great deal about what we now know about them. I mention it because Donna interviewed me before writing the book, and accordingly it’s a novel that incorporates my personal theories about the Others. People do seek
me out sometimes, to ask me about Fred, or about my own adventures. It’s those theories that I want to set down here, in this coda, so that should somebody in the future pick up and read this mess of documentation, they would also read my personal beliefs. I am not a scientist. I have lived almost all my life in Liberty. Edie and I are still friends, and see one another. With hindsight it suited neither of us very well to be lovers. We blew hot and cold with one another for many years, spending intense periods of time together, then arguing explosively over trivialities and breaking up. But always getting together again. After my husband officially divorced me – this, as perhaps you’ll remember, was after his term as IP – I found myself working in Liberty stores or bars once again, which was a strangely debasing echo of my pre-Snow life. But a person has to work somewhere.

  Donna, the writer I mentioned in the previous paragraph, spent three days with me, asking me questions about my encounter with the Others. For a while (after the period recorded in the official documents) there were many such encounters; but nobody has spoken to an avatar of the Others in nearly two decades. So people such as myself (and remember: I met them not once but twice) have acquired a new celebrity. Mostly I talk about the first encounter, with Fred on the snow, when for whatever reason, presumably because Fred’s imagination had overwritten the situation, I saw Them as giant snow-worms. People like to hear about that because it is the more dramatic and entertaining of my meetings. But it’s the second encounter, when I met a version of myself, that interested Donna.

  When I met Them this second time, they said to me: ‘I see a lot of water, and some trace elements everywhere’. They told me that my own body was mostly water, with some trace elements. I think they were deliberately drawing parallels. I think that, for two decades, we’ve been confused in our thinking. We think of the snow as the medium in which the Others live, whether they live there in cities or in the wild, whether they are multicellular beings in the shape of sharks or dragons or termites or whether they are unicellular hive-minds, or more like dust, or pollen, or nanotechnological creatures of some kind. There have been advocates of all these theories. But I believe (and I am not alone) that we cannot separate out medium from life form. I believe they are the snow. I think the body of snow, which is, as they said, mostly water with trace minerals, is their body. As that officer of my husband’s whose name I can’t remember now puts it in the document, they are bodies but without organs. They organise on a different level to us. Snow crystals are matrices of water. We have evolved elaborate carbon-based structures, hard skeletons and soft sacs, to contain our vital water; but these aliens, I believe, have evolved a different way. Their structure is provided by the forms water adopts when it freezes; they store their chemicals, their electrolytes, their long-chain molecules in their water, rather than (as with us) the other way around (storing their water inside their tissues). This means that they are not limited to specific corporeal forms, but can shift whatever it is they require across the larger scale, moving material in whatever shape is necessary for action, or thought, or reproduction. That’s what I think.