Polystom

by Adam Roberts

  ‘This was before the place turned into the Mudworld?’ asked Sof.

  ‘Before the war?’ said the captain. ‘Yes, yes. Although the one followed closely on the other, I believe.’

  ‘The servants didn’t like having the machine there, I suppose.’

  ‘But what a machine!’ said the captain. ‘A Computational Device, large as a mountain – buried under the ground. Written by experts – including, sir, your esteemed uncle. By the most brilliant men in the System! Who knows what marvellous things it has achieved.’

  ‘Is it still there?’ asked Polystom.

  ‘There?’

  ‘Working, I mean? Not damaged by the war?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I mean, yes, it’s still there. It may be,’ said the captain, nodding slowly at his own surmise, ‘that the secrecy is part of the war effort. Perhaps the machine has a role in the war.’

  ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ snorted Stet.

  But the dessert had arrived; blackberries stuffed with sweet-olives, and drizzled over with wine-cream. The conversation moved elsewhere.

  Sof and Stet settled easily into the routines of the ship, making friends with the civilian passengers. Polystom did not have that knack. He spent long hours in the bar by himself, reading and gazing into space, whilst one or both of his lieutenants chortled and heehawed with wealthy wives and mousy husbands.

  ‘A skywhal!’ cooed somebody one afternoon, and the occupants of the bar all made their way to the windows, drinks in hand. All save Polystom, who stayed back, and poured himself more drink. He thought of the stinking carcass of the skywhal on his uncle’s estate. That thought, by an inevitable process of association, brought to mind the flayed man. The figure still haunted his dreams, monstrous ghost.

  A week of further travel, with Polystom feeling increasingly alienated from his fellow passengers, whilst his two lieutenants formed a widening circle of friends, and the boat slipped into orbit around Kaspian.

  ‘We stop here,’ the captain announced, ‘for two days. Please be sure to be back aboard within that time, if you require passage to Berthing.’

  They circled Kaspian for hours; beneath them lay its frayed continents and cloud-speckled seas. Finally the balloon-boat began its descent, the rotors tugging against its anti-weight, against its buoyant desire not to sink into the thicker air at the bottom of the gravity well. Cloud swirled around the observation window, veiling it completely for several minutes, and then clearing suddenly to reveal the landscape around Stahlstadt: a few scraps of green parkland, the squares and squares of suburban houses and their gardens, but directly below them the splendour of the city itself – the largest conurbation in the System. Silver threads, rail-lines, stretched taut south, east, north-east, north-west, and the city clustered along those lines in each direction, like a giant splashmark. As they came lower more detail was revealed. The passengers crowding round the observation rail clapped and cooed with happiness. There were the famous triple-towers, throwing long shadows over the complex of esplanades. It was even possible to make out the miniature bristles on these broad stone areas: people! There was the Prince’s Palace! There – there – the bisected dome of the Library, the tiered shell-shaped erection of the new opera house. The balloon-boat swung lower, and Polystom found himself lost in his own thoughts, distanced from the excitement of his fellow passengers. To him the city looked oddly naked. It looked like the insides of some electrical device, with valves and juts and spars in some complex arrangement, the roads linking them gleaming grey in the light like solder. Everything displayed, as if some machine had had its cover ripped away. It looked, somehow, vulnerable.

  They stopped two days and one night at Stahlstadt. For many of the passengers it was the highlight of the trip; the opportunity to sightsee in the System capital. Even the two lieutenants wandered out, and for the single evening of their stay Stom, on their advice, allowed the men a furlough. But he himself stayed on board ship the whole time. He had seen Stahlstadt before, several times, he said. In fact, the shock of having a full gravity’s weight again, after a week of microgravity, depressed him. He spent the first day in bed, where even turning over made him feel exhausted. By the second day he felt as if he had a little more strength, but he was relieved when the balloon-boat lifted off and he returned to microgravity.

  The journey to Berthing was five days more, and there the balloon-boat voyage ended. Stom was met at the broad stone-slab airport by a military subaltern. It was hot. The sun looked bloated with fire and light, larger than it should be. The hills around Berthing Main Airport were grass-covered, but on an enormous scale, the green enormity of them sweeping up and up. Polystom found that oppressive too. He was, in truth, hungover, and content to stay in the shade of one of the balloon-boat hangars whilst his lieutenants unloaded the men and signed-in the company. Berthing’s gravity was actually a little less than Enting’s, but after weeks of microgravity it felt abominably heavy to Polystom. He had his batman bring him a chair, and then he sat in the sunshine, underneath the unpleasantly huge architecture of the hangar, gazing up at the seemingly neverending green sweep of the hills.

  ‘We’ll put you on a military transport tomorrow, Captain,’ said the subaltern. ‘I’m not giving anything away when I say that there’s a push coming, and your men will be very useful.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Polystom, sourly.

  He slept badly, kept awake first by the weight of his own chest, and then – when exhaustion sank him into sleep in the small hours – he woke again with another nightmare of the flayed man. He was grateful when he was hurried onto a sleek-lined military transport that buzzed and lifted away from the world. Microgravity returned him to a good mood, like an addict getting a hit of his necessary substance.

  They flew sunwards, the observation portals of the military craft occupied by stronger and stronger light hourly, or so it seemed. Stet and Sof, sensing their captain’s grumpiness, had gotten into the habit of giving him a deal of space. But without civilian passengers to chat to and impress, they too became grumpy. They took out their bad tempers on the men, shouting at them and making them clean their kit over and over until it gleamed with a weary brilliance.

  The journey took three and a half days. Finally the Mudworld itself came into view: a dull-coloured blob, then a whole sphere. The landscape was divided between caps of blue-green at north and south (seas, said the pilot officer, the polar seas), and a broad band of brown at the equator. The whole was so covered with cloud that the surface only showed through in the torn-cloth gaps of the white cover. As they passed the nightside flickers of what Stom took to be lightning gleamed, like a torch flicked on-off under a bedsheet. They swung round, twenty minutes later, and the sunlight dazzled from the whiteness.

  ‘Hot down there,’ was what the pilot said.

  [third leaf]

  It was very hot. Polystom and his troop unloaded at a military balloon-boat facility, and spent three days acclimatising to the new gravity. The Mudworld was a only little larger than the moon of Enting, so its gravity was not so oppressive as either Kaspian or Berthing. After a day Polystom was walking around, feeling fairly comfortable.

  The embarkation camp was not architecturally very attractive. Pathways of stone slabs had been laid over the ground in a zigzag pattern, but the mud was visible beneath. If sunshine occupied the sky for any length of time this mud dried to a stony hardness, but rain fell frequently and hard upon the little world and this turned the mud into brown sludge very quickly. The buildings were stacked blocks of stone, bolted together: boxy hangars, inside which partitions were fixed into the floor. Men marched and drilled up and down the central esplanade, stomping along in time to the shouting of a sergeant or a lieutenant.

  His first evening on the new world, his shirt dark and smelly with his own sweat, Polystom had dinner with a fellow captain: a wide-faced man ten years older than Stom was himself. ‘Captain Parocles,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘My boys have been waiting for
your boys. I think Command have something special in mind for the two of us.’

  ‘Really?’ said Polystom. He had spent the day groaning under his new weight, and had given no thought to the thought of battle. But, he told himself hopefully, that’s why they had come all this way. That was why he was here, when all was said and done.

  ‘Oh yes. There’s a big assault underway. Colonel Thakos will be popping down here tomorrow morning to fill us in. But I think we’ll see some action soon enough.’

  ‘You’ve been here a while?’

  ‘Best part,’ said Parocles, beaming, ‘of a year.’

  ‘Hard fighting?’

  ‘Oh, very.’

  Polystom fell asleep that night drunk; when he bolted awake, sitting up sweat-washed, with the flayed man still vivid in his thoughts from the nightmare he had been having, it was almost dawn. He congratulated himself on getting most of a night of sleep.

  He washed in cold water, and went outside. The sun was only just up, but already it was warm. Polystom wandered to the outskirts of the embarkation camp, and climbed a low thin-grassed hill. From the top he could look east to the rising sun, north, west where the shadows were long. The landscape was bleak: brown, rising and swelling but pitted with meteoritic craters that Polystom realised, his heart hurrying with excitement, must have been caused by shellfire.

  At breakfast, which he took with Captain Parocles, they were joined by a colonel from Command. ‘Good to meet you, captain,’ he said, shaking Polystom’s hand. ‘Have your boys been here long?’

  ‘This is our second day.’

  ‘Acclimatised to the gravity?’

  ‘Pretty much, I think.’

  ‘And the heat? It’s hot, though, ain’t it?’

  The two captains agreed, smiling, that it was hot. The colonel leant in towards Polystom and said to him, in a low pleasant voice, ‘You ought to call me “sir’’ you know. Not that it bothers me overmuch.’ He stood up straight. ‘Breakfast!’

  As their food was served to them, the colonel gave them their orders. ‘Day after tomorrow,’ he said. ‘There’s a mountain fifty miles south of here: a very important strategic site. Now, a number of ridges run out from this mountain, and they’re pretty strategically important too. There’s been some fierce fighting down there, I can tell you. The enemy has pushed in a deal of its force, and we’re aiming to break them there.’

  Polystom, his mouth full of apricot bread, nodded. Break them there. It was exciting to have the force, the focus of military expedition, stated so nakedly.

  ‘You two, my dear captains: we’ll run you down there, and day after tomorrow we’d like you to get stuck in. Alright?’

  ‘Alright,’ the two men said, together.

  In fact it was three days before the transports arrived: enormous canalboat-shaped vans, running on vast swollen rubber wheels that were taller than the van itself. ‘To enable it,’ said Stet, informing Polystom, ‘to run over the mud, you see.’ Three of these great buses were required to ship all of Polystom’s men and all of Parocles’.

  The fifty-mile journey took over four hours. Polystom, his spirits unusually elevated, chatted with Stet and Sof. ‘It’s smooth enough, this mode of travel,’ he said.

  ‘Ought to be,’ said Sof. ‘The wheels are soggy enough.’

  Pressing his face to the window, he could see the mud churning into the air behind him. Clouds darkened the sky, and rain started spotting against the glass. In moments it was lashing down, covering the window in writhing strands of water. ‘Weather seems changeable here.’

  ‘It most certainly is that,’ said Stet.

  ‘So,’ Polystom said to his lieutenants. ‘The company’s first engagement. How do you think we’ll do?’

  ‘It’s a little harsh of Command,’ said Sof, pursing his lips. ‘To put us into combat alongside a battle-hardened troop. I think so, anyway. Parocles’ men have a head start on us, so to speak. But I daresay we’ll acquit ourselves acceptably. I daresay we will.’

  ‘I’m certain of it,’ said Stet. ‘Besides,’ he added, as the rainclouds cleared away and sunlight sparkled against the glass, ‘It’s a heavy-armament advance. We’ll pound them and pound them with big guns, until they’re smashed to strands and threads. Then we’ll just walk up and take the site.’

  That didn’t sound terribly glorious to Polystom. Privately, he hoped for something with a little more glory.

  They arrived at the base in the afternoon, and the men were easily and quickly billeted. Polystom himself had his baggage taken into a dugout, timber-pillared and with a rough plaster on the walls, but still evidently a hole under the clay. It wasn’t handsome; and when his batman hung a mirror on a hook on the wall he saw that his face was scowling. He rebuked himself for this. It was idiotic to expect hotel accommodation. He was at a battlefront!

  He spent an hour walking about. There was a network of trenches, from which doorways led to various dugouts. Men stood to attention as he strolled past. Standing on toes, to look over the lip of the trench, he could see the long ridge they were ordered to capture; the hogsback. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ he said, addressing an ordinary soldier, and gesturing at the salient, their military objective. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be up there!’

  ‘Yes sir,’ replied the soldier, a slightly wild look in his eyes.

  That night Polystom had the jolliest meal with his two lieutenants in all their time together. When enough drink had passed into them all, he became almost confessional. ‘You boys know,’ he said, ‘that I’ve never been in battle before.’

  ‘You’ll do fine sir,’ said Stet.

  ‘Absolutely fine.’

  Polystom waved their words away. ‘Just let me know what to expect.’

  ‘Ask us,’ said Stet, ‘when there’s a real battle in prospect. The bombs’ll fall over the ridge tomorrow, and pound the enemy into the mud. Anything alive will be . . . well, won’t be alive after that.’

  ‘Hurrah!’ chimed Sof.

  They clinked glasses.

  ‘It’ll be a walk,’ said Stet,

  ‘A walk through the mud,’ said Sof.

  That night Polystom slept soundly, with no nightmares about flayed men to wake him up. He was shaken into consciousness after dawn by his batman, and he got out of bed with the thrill in his belly of a child expecting to receive presents on the morning of his birthday.

  The attack took place late in the morning. For twenty minutes aircraft droned overhead, and the sounds of muffled explosions drifted on the air, one after another, on and on. ‘That looks like quite a severe pounding,’ Polystom muttered to his sergeant.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Crius, fervently.

  ‘Not just smoke and noise,’ said Polystom, wanting to convince himself as much as anything. ‘Real bombing.’

  Finally the bombing stopped, and everything fell quiet. Polystom took his revolver from its pouch, and timed off five minutes on his watch. His stomach was tense, burning a little on the inside with the excitement. But there was a faint sensation of sourness at the back of his mind. This would be too easy a first experience of battle. All the defenders on the hogsback would be dead, smashed to scrags of flesh, and all he would be doing would be leading his men on a jog-trot through the mud. Perhaps, he told himself, he would see a more glorious battle some other day.

  There was a shout, orders being issued, followed closely by another further down the line. To his right and left, men pulled themselves over the lip of their trenches, Stet and Sof taking their men up there.

  Everything was quiet. Polystom sent four men up, and then clambered up after them. The mud was soggy, clutching and sucking at his boots. All clear: he waved up the remaining men from his trench, and hefted the weight of his pistol.

  He stood for a moment, looking around. The plain was a dark expanse scored out with thousands of tiny craters, like a turbulent sea frozen in brown. His men, and, further off, the men of Captain Parocles, were drifting forward in a great line. The sky was an untouched pale purpl
e from horizon to horizon. The sun looked swollen, ripe with heat. It stung his eyes. His skin was prickling with sweat. Before him the ground was more or less flat for half a mile, rising sharply to the ridge, the hogsback itself. The indistinct promontory looked as shapeless as a mass of modelling clay pummelled and pummelled by children’s hands. Nothing was alive up there, clearly.

  It was going to be a hot walk.

  ‘Come along then,’ he said to his men. With a sharp sense of insight he realised that he was actually there – he was in the middle of a battle. He had arrived. In the future, he thought, I’ll be able to say I was at the battle of the hogsback, and fellow military men would nod, and non-military types would look on with awe. He had done it. Pride bubbled in his chest.

  It was not easy walking: each step had to be dragged out of the clingy mud, and carefully placed to provide a solid enough pivot for the next step. Polystom marched on for ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, struggling a little to keep pace with the main body of men.

  There was a whistling sound, away to the left. One of the men was warbling some song or other. Polystom looked in that direction, annoyed; Sof, or Stet, would, he decided, isolate the fellow after the attack and punish him. On his orders. Just because the march was going well, under a sunny sky, was no reason to ignore discipline. Whoever the whistling man was, he certainly wasn’t taking this assault seriously enough.

  The whistling stopped with a faint thud, as if the whistler had been punched in the stomach. Serve him right. Then somebody to the right started whistling, and there was another thud, and Polystom’s eye was distracted by the sight of somebody tumbling backwards out of the line. He had been punched too hard, perhaps. The whistling was reprehensible, but there was no need for excessive violence. The delinquents could be disciplined later, when the assault was over.

  Another man started whistling, but had barely started when the thud came and he tripped forward. Two whistles, one on either side, two thuds like knocking on a padded door, knock, knock, and two men fell. Sweat was dribbling from Polystom’s forehead, where the brim of his hat pressed against the skin. It was dripping a little into his eyes. This place was altogether too hot. Uncomfortable. The men were moving more rapidly now. The whistling seemed everywhere, and more men were falling down. The sun was too bright. Polystom couldn’t see properly. And then somebody was screaming, but screaming impossibly, up in the sky, a weird howling that changed in pitch, changed again and then broadened violently into a crashing drumroll.