Polystom

by Adam Roberts

  And there was the bear, directly in front of him.

  It hallooed, rather sorrowfully, at the suddenness of the light, more groan than roar. Polystom froze. The bear was twice his height (probably less in fact, but surprise and fear exaggerated the proportions). It looked, in fact, surprisingly unlike a bear, or unlike Polystom’s memories of bears – more like an enormous shaggy brown lion standing on its rear legs. Its fur was seaweedy and matted, hanging in strands from its huge body. Perhaps the creature was not in perfect health. But its teeth, stained yellow by the lamplight but presumably white, jutted proudly out; and its eyes, so glossy they looked like globes of black oil, caught starbursts from the torch and glistened. Its front paws dangled in the air before its chest, like a man leaning on an invisible rail. Each paw sprouted long thorn-shaped claws.

  The bear moaned again.

  Polystom’s first reaction, when he had unfrozen enough to act, was to pull his thumb back over the switch of the torch. The yellow light vanished, his retinas’ recoil leaving everything utterly black for a moment until the softer silver-green moonlight faded up the world into half-vision. The outline of the bear was still there, one kind of dark massed against the variegated darkness of the background. For a time the scene stayed as it was, until Polystom saw, or thought he saw, the shape melt, droop, dissolve, and vanish. When he finally summoned the courage to move he backed slowly until his hand, reaching behind him, touched a tree trunk. This he slowly slid behind. Could bears see in the dark? He couldn’t remember, wasn’t sure if he’d ever known. His own breathing seemed appallingly loud.

  When, after an age, he decided to risk the torchlight again, the sudden brightness showed only trees. The bear had gone. Pricking his courage, he forced himself towards the water. He had the superstitious sense that the lamp had somehow summoned the bear to him, or even called it into being, so he moved through the dark with the light off, tripping often over bumps and roots and twice falling completely. But he made it down to the glittering expanse of moonlit water, and then after a short trot into one of his boat huts. Inside, with the door bolted, he was trembling so hard he couldn’t stand up.

  Later, with a boat on the way, and most of a bottle of wine inside him, he felt more self-congratulatory – his encounter took on resonances which fear had, at the time, blocked out. He had stood his ground. It had been the bear that departed. And, the more he thought about it (jotting with drunken-messy handwriting in his little notebook) the more the encounter took on a magical or mythic quality. The bear, rearing up from nowhere in the middle of the moonlit forest; Polystom standing so close (not true, this part, but in his lubricated imagination it became true) that he could smell the odour of bear-pelt, the hot exhalations of old, eaten meat on the beast’s breath. It had appeared to him in a burst of light. Then it had vanished into darkness again. It came to seem to Polystom almost a blessing from the land, from his estate. It came to seem to him, obscurely, almost a materialisation of truth itself.

  The moon like a perfect circle of green-and-silver stained glass, brimful of light. [this last sentence is of dubious provenance, and may not belong at this point in the narrative.]

  TWO

  CLEONICLES

  A Murder Story

  [first leaf]

  Cleonicles’ last day alive began exactly like any other day, with the routine he had inhabited now for fifty years. He woke early, sunlight filtering beautifully through his bedroom curtains, and got himself out of bed. His morning servant, who slept on a pallet-bed outside the bedroom door, came in as soon as he heard his master stirring, and took him through to the annex. In this little cubicle Cleonicles sat on the lavatoire and moved his bowels whilst his servant lathered his face and shaved him. Decades of the procedure had made the old servant adept at guiding the razor smoothly over the knuckles and ridges of Cleonicles’ face. By the time the residuum of foam was being wiped away with a large damp cloth, Cleonicles had emptied his bowels. He came back through to the bedroom, with his servant behind him, and servant helped master into his underjohns, into his Daverné trousers, his undershirt and overshirt. Dressed, his feet slipped into his favourite house-shoes, with the lambswool linings, Cleonicles made his own way downstairs leaving his servant behind to make the bed, tidy the room and clean up the lavatoire. Breakfast was cooking; Cleonicles could smell it.

  Naturally, he did not realise that this was his last day alive. He had every reason to expect, throughout this day and for many others, to continue his science. In fact, so established was his comfortable daily routine that he didn’t even look forward with any conscious shaping of his thoughts. If he had done so, he would have imagined working this day and the next on stellar observation and theory, with other work – covert work, for which he was still employed by the Prince – taking up a proportion of his time. Had he bothered to articulate this to himself he would have thought of spending the next month in this. But he did not need to look forward: habit and contentment had positioned him in an eternal present where nothing in the future, and nothing in the past, could disturb his happiness.

  His nephew Polystom had stayed three nights, but had left the previous day for his estate on the world above – the green-blue sphere of Enting, huge in the sky. He loved his nephew, of course, and enjoyed his visits, but there was also a certain relief in having the house to himself again. A troubled soul, his nephew. Something not quite in harmony within him. And on the occasions that he stayed some of his unsettled spirit percolated through into the general atmosphere.

  After his breakfast, Cleonicles strolled on his front lawn and smoked a cheroot. The air was clear today, the booming chuckling of the stork-boars clearly audible over the sounding-board of the waters. They were gathering in a flock at the near shore, and Cleonicles wandered down to look at them. They were peculiar beasts. He had published a paper on them soon after moving to this house – decades ago, now. The shallowness of the Lacus Somniorum (which was generally two feet deep, sometimes three, across almost all of its enormous breadth and length) meant that there was virtually no tidal action, despite the colossal gravitational pull of Enting in the sky. But the birds seemed to flock in a tidal fashion, as if they were being pulled west and east by the gravitational tug. Cleonicles had dissected many of the creatures and was certain that he had found a small metallic node deep in their brains. It was nothing more than a piece of metal grit, but Cleonicles’ theory was that it in some way enabled them to orient themselves in the gravitational and magnetic fluxes. It was a difficult theory to prove.

  Looking up, Cleonicles saw a rice grain-sized speck in the sky.

  A plane?

  No, the wrong shape.

  It could have been a balloon-boat, a long way off, or then again a skywhal close by.

  He trotted an old-man-trot up the lawn to the patio where his smaller telescope was set up. Angling it and settling his eyes against the eye-pieces took only a moment. It was a skywhal! Another one, flying close to the world. Once again it was a young one, its fronds underdeveloped. Extraordinary! This was the third he had seen in as many months. In his previous three decades on the moon he had never seen one of the shy beasts come so close up. They were sensitive to the gravity dip of any large body and preferred to stay away from them. Young ones could be curious, and had been known to stray close to worlds – although never this close, and never thrice in three months! More mature beasts kept themselves on languorous cometary orbits around the sun, sweeping endlessly through the interplanetary sky, feeding, growing, mating, eventually dying. Very rarely an elderly and perhaps sick skywhal would beach itself on a world, crashing to the ground to be dashed to pieces. This had not happened in Cleonicles’ lifetime, but it was well documented – happening once a century, perhaps, it could be expected. But why would this young creature return three times to the dangerous gravity of the moon? Assuming it was the same beast.

  Cleonicles hurried indoors and returned with one of his sketch pads. Most scientists had cameras fitted to thei
r telescopes, of course; and Cleonicles himself used a camera, attached to his major telescope, for his stellar work. But he still loved the older discipline of making sketches. He shifted the telescope minutely, tracking the great sky creature as it swam, and sketching its lenticular body, its mouth like an enormous leather catch-all bag left wide open, its stubby fronds. There was no doubt, as he compared his sketches, that this was the same beast he had seen before.

  Why was it visiting him?

  It wasn’t visiting him, of course, it was merely drawn for some reason to the moon, or perhaps only tracing out a peculiar trajectory through the sky for its own reasons. But Cleonicles had always found it hard to separate himself from his science. Part of the thrill he had tended to experience as a scientist came from his own soul, his own sense of engagement in the cosmos. He couldn’t quite shake the sense, somehow, that the beast was seeking him out, nosing through space to come to him. Foolish. The fondness of an old man.

  Cleonicles stretched himself at the telescope. He was an old man, after all. And, yet, wasn’t there some special connection between the skywhals and himself? Between those great dumb sky-cows floating between worlds, and Cleonicles, most famous scientist in the cosmos? It was Cleonicles who had first thought of charting skywhal movement to index the concentrations of scilia in the sky. The beasts flew in arcs where they could be sure of scooping up the maximum amount of the microscopic creatures. Scilia were present all throughout the interplanetary sky, of course, and received wisdom had been that this distribution was uniform. It had been Cleonicles who had been able to show that in reality the scilia grew much more prolifically in certain areas than others; and that the skywhals organised their trajectories to sweep through these places. His early research had been mostly on scilia; this was how he had made his reputation in the scientific community as a young man. The miniature unicellular creatures that lived throughout the interplanetary atmosphere, billions upon billions of them, he had often observed through microscopes.

  He had known from an early age that the excitement to be felt at observing such things outweighed any excitements generated by human contact. It wasn’t that he was a misanthrope, exactly. He liked people well enough. He valued the time he spent with his family. In his younger days he had taken lovers. But the tang of that pleasure had always come abruptly upon him in the act, and had faded rapidly afterwards. The pleasure science gave him, however, was of an altogether deeper sort. It grew within him, a warmth in his viscera, at the prospect of study. It swelled to a sort of subdued thrill that permeated his whole body as his scientific endeavour – whatever it might be – occupied him. It lasted longer and gave more satisfying excitement.

  He had come to understand this early in his life, probably, in fact, from his very first microscopic observations of scilia. That very first microscope, pronged and angular like a petrified branch. He had settled himself over the device, rested his eyes on the brim of the eye-piece, fiddled with the nipple that adjusted focus until the two bleary circles of light coalesced into a single bright disk. And there they were! Sluggish under gravity (for their normal environment was weightless), but vivid and beautiful, each one as though carved with infinite attention to detail out of a microscopic speck of glass. Each scilion was a sausage-shaped nodule, with a transparent cell wall and strands, almost eyelash-like, in a ridge along its ‘back’. At the centre-line of this tiny transparent lozenge were the tiny particles of cyanophyl with which the things converted sunlight into energy. The specks looked almost colourless under the microscope, with only the very faintest suggestion of mauve about them. It was these that provided a reaction surface where the carboniferous gases of interplanetary space were oxygenated, locking the carbon into their bodies. Cleonicles hypothesised it was the countless billions of these creatures, and their tiny specks of cyanophyl, that gave the interplanetary sky its colour. This theory, published in Proceedings of the Chemical and Royal as one of Cleonicles’ earliest papers was not uncontested – the prevailing view was that atmospheric colour was a gaseous phenomenon. Cleonicles argued that the gradations in the intensity of colour were the result of greater or lesser concentrations of scilia. Others denied this, explaining these nebulous patches with reference to various, purely chemical, reactions. But that dispute, conducted with a gentlemanly and gentlewomanly restraint, had never especially engaged Cleonicles’ heart. His heart belonged not to the society of scientists, and their antique rituals, but to science itself – to his true bride, science itself. He had lost his heart to her as soon as the two blurry circles revealed by his microscope had swum together into the sharp one, and the secrets of the miniature world had been opened to him. It was seeing. It was being privy to details fundamental to the cosmos that were nonetheless overlooked by almost the whole population of the System. It was the awful beauty of these glass-coloured specks, the incredible precision with which they were fashioned.

  Some of the scientists with whom the young Cleonicles mixed – some of these venerable men and women saw Divinity in the precision. They saw God in the staggering profusion of miniature perfection. But not Cleonicles. For him, science had been a liberation from the foggy doctrines of ‘God’, not an endorsement of them. It had struck him sometimes, as he worked carefully at his early scientific projects, that this elimination of faith in his heart had not been accompanied by any depression of spirits, any pangs of angst. Probably there was a deeper faith than religion in Cleonicles’ heart: one planted by his childhood sense of the closeness and permanence of his family – the careful attention and more carefully delineated boundaries of proper behaviour laid down by his parents; leavened into something less military, something more human, by the love he shared as a small boy with his brother. His parents had been distant figures, perhaps, but he had never doubted the bond between himself and his brother. It was love, a deep love.

  Growing older, he realised that this elegant structure, rigid yet yielding, was more than family. It was society as a whole, the whole marvellous intricacy of humanity itself. And science first drew Cleonicles for the same reason. It gave him an insight into the deep structures that underlay everything, and the sense that the apparent randomness and diversity of the visible System was governed, underneath, by certain simple, immutable laws. The fact that the principles of order and structure were fundamental chimed with his own sense of things. The beauty of science lay precisely in this feeling of rightness. It was not ‘God’ – any more than a crystal, a painting, a population of mice, a nest of orbits around the sun, any more than any pattern was ‘God’. But it was ordered, and that was enough.

  Order was important to him.

  At this early stage in his life (he lost all pretensions to religion in his late teens) science was a pastime; he was just one more gentleman amateur, dabbling in the prettier disciplines. His life ran, still, in conventional channels. He drank. He intrigued. He enjoyed love affairs. He even played sport, although his lanky, unmuscular frame was ill suited to it. And his whole life might easily have worked it way along those lines, with science as no more than a hobby, except for one thing: a flaw in the symmetry of structure he observed that snagged his attention.

  It grew out of his observation of scilia, the very same microscopic free-floating creatures that played so important a role in interplanetary space. Cleonicles watched them through his microscope. He sketched them, marvelled at their jewel-like beauty. Then he read a study of the skywhals – the enormous, floating beasts that basked through interplanetary sky with mouths agape, gill-grilles filtering out hundreds of pounds of scilia a day. The scilia fed, in a manner of speaking, on the sun; the skywhals fed on the scilia. Like a planet-bound natural chain of being, Cleonicles saw structure and harmony here just as it existed in human life. But there was an absence in the pattern, and it was this absence that attracted Cleonicles’ attention.

  He knew the generally accepted theory, called by some ‘evolution’ and by others ‘progressive alteration’. He had read the classic studies
by Anhydrocles, Pelias and others, of the slow accretion of biosphere on each of the System’s worlds. First, microscopic life, then progressive alteration and growth to multi-cellular creatures; then larger and more complex patterns feeding on the simpler, until complex life evolved, honed either to defeat predation by numbers or agility, or else to predate more effectively. Cleonicles saw in the microbes, plants, insects, birds and ornithophages of, say, his home world Enting a beautifully balanced structure, as glittering and precise as crystal. But comparing the situation, he couldn’t see why a similarly complex chain-of-being had not progressively grown into interplanetary space. Out there were microbes (the scilia) and large-scale grazers (the skywhals), but there was nothing else.

  This perceived imbalance led him to look more closely at the habitat provided by interplanetary atmosphere, and these enquiries, casual at first, then more committed, pulled him with inexorable and delicious force into science as a whole. By twenty-three he was history’s youngest-ever member of the Prince’s Scientific Society, with seven published papers to his credit, including groundbreaking research on skywhals and on interplanetary sky. By twenty-five he had published a book-length study, part observation and part hypothesis, on the interplanetary habitat – arguing that freak mutation had given certain high-gliding birds float-bladders that had lifted them higher still, and the pure emptiness of interplanetary sky had meant that no rivals prevented these birds from colonising the new realm. It was still the most widely accepted theory for skywhal ‘evolution’. And from there he had worked on the very first Computation Device; and then, opening up whole new worlds of science, into other arenas. He had pioneered stellar research as a scientific discipline. He had financed the first experiments out of his own pocket. And, now, an old man, he could look back on his life with satisfaction. He could have done so, except that such a degree of introspection was alien to his nature. As he had always done, he absorbed himself wholly in what he was doing, in the now. His memories were hazy and rarely consulted (except for strictly scientific recollections), and his sense of the future as unformed as a baby’s. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, he was as contented a man as lived in the whole System. Of course he did not know, as he continued to track the skywhal with his telescope, that this was to be his last day alive.