Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  Something bumped into her, and apologized with two voices. It had wrinkled skin like an elephant, only it was blue: crumpled pajamas. Two men missing legs were hopping together for support.

  Third dimly made out the shape of the hospital building. The rebels were making the patients march as well. Third found herself suddenly in a line of marching things, all down around her knees, hunchbacked, bobbing, and all talking at once, very softly and clearly. “I am a delicate piece of lifesaving equipment,” said a little beige box on muscular, human legs. Another, armored like a beehive, black, waddled ahead of it. “I can take over cerebral functions for all blood groups,” it announced in a hushed voice. “Please treat me with care.”

  Suddenly a rebel stepped in front of Third. “You are going the wrong way, Old Woman,” he said.

  “I can’t see!” exclaimed Third. She could see well enough that the line of machines led to another mound of flesh. There was a shadow on top of it, black. It had a sharp green grin. “Please treat me with care,” said the little beige box as the shadow brought something, a garden hoe perhaps, down on its head.

  “You go that way, to the Bridge,” said the Rebel, trying to block her view. “Across the River, that way there.” Third leaned around him, curious. She wanted to see. There was a white coat talking, a doctor.

  “But these things save lives, they can save the lives of your friends, why are you doing this?” wailed the doctor. Without breaking the rhythm of his swing, the shadow brought the hoe down with a crack, on the doctor’s head as well.

  The rebel grabbed Third’s arm and pulled her away. “She can’t see!” he called out to his comrades. Then he murmured, thin-lipped, “You didn’t see anything. Did you?”

  He led her to a wide avenue that went down the hill to the Bridge, and there they were, the People, a dappled mass of them, black-haired heads and many-colored shirts. Some of them wore coolsuits and hiking boots and knapsacks; some of them carried parasols and twirled them. Some of them sat on the balconies of buildings, as if at a festival, drinking from tins and eating sandwiches. The People, always polite, always patient, talked in lowered voices about practicalities, without complaint.

  “Once we are across the Bridge, we will be all right.”

  “Ssssh, ssssh, darling, later. We need to save the food for later, all right?”

  “Oooof! It’s hot. Why couldn’t they wait until spring?”

  Third felt her sandal come off her foot. She spun around, but it was lost under a forest of legs. “My shoe! I can’t see it. Can someone get it for me?” Third asked. People looked down around their feet, and shook their heads.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I can’t see it,” said a City Woman, very prettily. Third could see the blurred back-and-forth motion of her hand, and the wide white fan with red patterns. Her little daughter looked up at Third in silent dislike. Third could see her black eyes.

  “Where are we going, Mummy?” the child asked in a discontented voice.

  “You are going, Child,” said Third, unbidden, leaning down, “to the Unconquered Country.” The little girl buried her face in her mother’s side. “Oh no, you must not be frightened! It is very peaceful there. Everything is as it should be, there.”

  “What do you mean?” the mother asked, sheltering her daughter.

  Third bowed and made a gesture that enough had been said, and, smiling rather smugly, turned away. It was not for everyone to know. The sun seemed to swell, directly over the middle of the street. The People shuffled forward, a step at a time.

  Suddenly the crowd heaved itself up in front of Third. They were on the stone steps of the Bridge. Third climbed them, as if they led to the altar of a temple, feeling a sudden gathering grandness, as if she were being married. Overhead, the great gray workings of the Bridge loomed like a gate. Third could see them clearly. She fixed her eyes on them, as she was carried forward in slow procession by the crowd. Then, at the very hottest moment of the day, under a merciless sun, in the middle of the Bridge, it came to a stop, and did not move again.

  The asphalt underfoot was just on the point of melting, a sort of black putty, and Third had to move from one foot to the other, to save the bare one burning. There was nowhere to sit down. The People, pressed together, could smell each other’s bodies. Balancing on the railing of the Bridge, holding on to a suspension cable, was a rebel girl, scowling with the heat, blinking. Just below her was the body of a dead soldier. The People backed away from it as much as they could, wrinkling their noses. Third squeezed her way through them, smiling, and sat down next to the corpse. Her knees touched it.

  “Hello, Third,” said the corpse. Third looked down and saw that it was Nourisher of the East.

  “Hello,” she whispered to him.

  “Listen,” he told her. “You will be on this Bridge for two days. People will die. It is most necessary that you get water. You can survive two days without food, but no water in this heat for two days and you will not be able to stand up, and the rebels will kill you.” He told her how to get water. Third could not accept it at first, would not have accepted it from anyone else. “Wait,” he said, “until it is dark.” The rebel girl leaned back and drank deeply from a canteen.

  Water was a joke at first, to the People on the Bridge. They were so thirsty, and down below, a hundred feet away, was the river. They could hear its roar; they could smell the spray. They drank the last of their warm sticky lemonade. People lost control of their bladders and bowels and could not wash. Infants began to shriek for water. It was only two hours later that Third saw someone jump off the Bridge. He was a young boy. He clung, hunched, to the railing for a long time, before finally letting himself slip off the side. His friends crowded round the edge to look, and then silently turned away.

  People began to crawl along the railings to get out. Third nodded at them, benignly. She was not agile enough to climb, and they shaded her from the sun. For most of the distance, there were no cables to hold on to, and the people seesawed their arms, until they fell off, landing on the people beneath them: much angry shouting. A man in a brightly colored short-sleeved shirt fought his way through the crowd. “Anything to drink?” he kept asking, smiling, perplexed. He had a fistful of paper money. “All of this, for a bottle of Coca-Cola. Here, look. All of this for you.” A young woman, smiling, shook her head. The man could not believe it. “Look, what is a bottle of Coca-Cola worth?” The woman still shook her head. “It could buy you a nice house, a car!” he said, with a yelping, nervous laugh. He looked at Third. “All my life,” he said, “I spent making money.” He moved on. Some time later, Third saw the money blow past the railings, like leaves.

  Surreptitiously, she took the corpse’s hand. She wanted to ask Crow if the fire had hurt. She wanted to ask him if he knew that she had made a house for him, and lived the life she would have had if he had lived; that she had been happy. But it was difficult to ask such things, and besides, she already knew the answers.

  “I came back,” Crow said. “I could have kept on flying; the flesh had been burned away. But I chose to come back.”

  “Bodhisattva,” said Third, realizing. Gratefully, she closed her aching eyes and slept.

  Suddenly it was cooler, dark. “Now,” said Crow. Through the girders of the Bridge was a tangle of stars. Amid them, the rebel girl squatted out over the railings, her trousers down around her knees. Third crawled forward with her tin cup. She held it out under her.

  The girl squawked, and clenched, and stopped herself.

  “Please,” said Third. “It’s only water. It’s the only way. There is nothing wrong.”

  The girl looked helpless and harassed; finally she had to let go. The water spilled gently out of her; it rang in the tin cup, filled it generously. It seemed such a natural, friendly thing to do, sharing water. Third very elegantly raised the tin cup and sipped it. It was surprisingly cool and mild, only slightly salty. She nibbled her rice ball for a moment, then held it out toward the girl. The rebel hesitated, but
was very hungry. Finally, she broke off a piece of it, and gave Third a wisp of a smile.

  The girl was from Durnang province, to the north. Most of her family were still alive, but scattered. She had never been to school; she had fought with the Ghost Wolf regiment instead. She asked Third why she held the hand of a dead traitor.

  “Because he was of the People, once,” said Third. “There is no difference. The Dead are the living.” The girl did not believe in the Buddha. That was Shinga Iary, she said, Consoling Nonsense. Third repeated the words.

  “We must get off this Bridge,” said the girl.

  “How?”

  “We could just walk out, over them,” said the rebel. “If there’s trouble—pow. Come on.”

  Third looked at the People, all lying in orderly rows. “No,” she said. “You go. I’ll stay.” She watched the girl stumbling out over the backs of the People. Where she passed, there was the wailing of a baby.

  Why did I do that, Third wondered. She knelt down again beside the body. She picked up the cold hand. Whose are you? she asked the hand. It looked so small. Did anyone mourn for you? Did anyone love you, like I loved Crow? She looked at the expanse of fallen faces, blue in the moonlight.

  There is a part of me that loves them, she realized. That is why I stayed, because they are my People. That is not Shinga Iary. She sat through the night, holding the dead hand.

  The next day ground on, hotter and hotter; like a mill. The faces of the People were the faces of the Dead—bloated and unmoving and lopsided, with open mouths. An infant was lapping the asphalt, ceaselessly, with its tongue. Third stroked its head to make it stop.

  You are all Dead, she thought, we are all crossing over. The thought made her feel peaceful and at home; all of her friends were Dead. In the city behind, brown clouds of smoke were rising up. In the sky overhead, birds still wheeled on currents of air, and clouds still subtly changed shape, breaking up the light, casting huge shadows through it. Third lay back. I could be a child again, she thought.

  “My name is Third,” she murmured to the clouds, “and I was born in a village called No Harm Can Come…”

  Her voice trailed off. Why did it seem that there was no point going on? She felt warm, cushioned. She rolled her head and found that her special teacher was sitting next to her.

  The teacher was younger than Third now, but she was still smiling. “Give me numbers,” the teacher said.

  Third found that she did not hate her. All of that was so long ago. The woman’s face was thinner than Third remembered, and the smile more uncertain. You were trying, Third thought, poor thing, you were trying to help.

  “I don’t have any numbers,” said Third, shaking her head.

  “Oh, but you do,” said the teacher, rocking forward on her knees, holding out her hands on either side of her. “You have faces instead of numbers.”

  So I do, thought Third, and smiled back at her. That is what I have. Thank you.

  In the sky overhead there was a daystar, moving. The Big People put machines in heaven. High up, there was cold metal and safety. The Big People slid between the stars, it was said, in a network, like a spider’s web. That was as close as they would ever get to Heaven. Slide, Third told the Big People, slide and leave, leave the world to us again.

  She closed her eyes and dreamed, dreamed of great arches made of white stone in the sky, and the arches made her happy, like being in a temple. They held up the sky and the stars, and there was a road, a bridge across a gulf. The bodhisattvas came back along it, out of love, to lead the People. She saw them, wearing gold hats like the spires of temples.

  Night. Death. Dawn. Cool breeze, smelling acrid, the odor of burned tires, and an ocher sky with a heavy orange sun.

  “Now,” said Crow. “Get up.” The corpse’s head had disappeared under a sheen of jelly; and translucent, wire-thin worms twisted in its mouth. “The worms are the truth,” Crow said. “They are words.”

  “We are numbers,” said Third. Her sister was beside her, and helped her stand up. Third felt very weak; she couldn’t lift her feet, so she pumped her knees back and forth to get the blood flowing, as her sister held her arm.

  “You have had great fortune, Little Princess,” her sister said. “You did not starve, or wither. You were loved, but you never became a soldier’s wife or a City Person, so you can lose no one else. You have lived the best life possible in the Land of the Faithful.”

  There was a jabbering of orders from far ahead. The People sat up, blinking, prodding relatives, helping them, groaning, to stand up. A mother tried to wake her baby; there was something wrong with the way its mouth hung. The mother shook it, and began calling its name. “Stand up,” said Third, a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Take him with you. It is time.”

  The ghost numbers rose up, thousands of them, as if ruptured from balloons, reaching up for some reason, some answer. The number of the People. The size of the world.

  They found it. Third could see the high white clouds, and there was a bridge across a gulf, and the People were crossing it, Third’s first sister who had been withered, her second sister who had finally died in her airport window, an old man Third suddenly recognized from her village. She gave him a friendly wave. There was a man, too, whose face she could not quite see, riding on the back of a tiger.

  There came a sudden booming, a crackling. Fireworks? Why should there be fireworks? Third turned in time to see the spires of all the temples on the hill rise up on clouds of dust, like rockets. They were lifted up, and listed to one side, straining toward Heaven, hanging in the air for a moment, and then fell, uninhabited stone. Ah yes, even that made sense. The temples were being killed too, to join them. The temples would be there waiting too, and the villages, and the houses. The houses would greet their families with their cry for the dead.

  Third felt something feather-light descend on her back, and something dry and bony wrap itself around her neck, and she felt her mother’s face press close to hers. The skull was only lightly covered by a dry crackling of skin. “I carried you once, daughter,” she said. “Now it is your turn to carry me.”

  And in the sky was a bird made of fire. It burned, leading them, and it sang, a strange sad song that rose up at the end like a question, for everything that had been lost, an orphaned song, for an orphaned people. The bird was not struck down.

  “We are going home, child,” whispered Third’s mother. “Third Child, we are going home!”

  for John Lennon,

  for Philip K. Dick, for Walter

  AFTERWORD

  A Fall of Angels was written about 1976 as a show of strength. Fan was written in 1988 or ’89. Both O Happy Day! and The Unconquered Country were finished in 1984, a year in which I could do no wrong.

  It has been very strange rereading them, as if I had run across my younger self. There is the embarrassment of reliving youthful inadequacy; grief for departed energy; a kind of sympathy for the awkwardness and sincerity and pomposity of youth.

  There is also the embarrassment of old friends. Here they come, like certain kinds of fan. Here comes Teenage Megadeath, envisaging the slaughter of millions and imagining that this is an effective protest. Here comes the Expository Lump, covered in spots and determined to back you into a comer to detail at length his brilliant ideas. Here is Unperceived Sources, all agog with Star Trek and unaware of it. Here comes Style, all done up in German Expressionism, or Brechtianism, or whatever mainly visual or musical trend has caught his attention, his hypersensitivity to fashion. These are among the usual embarrassments of writing Science Fiction, a genre that is at its most flaming, its most colorful, the less you know, the ruder your taste.

  A Fall of Angels was going to be published at the time. Hilary Bailey, editor of New Worlds, liked it, but that incarnation of the series folded before it could appear. I had been terribly spoiled—the very first story I had written had been published by her as well. I thought all my stories would be published. I gave Fall of Angels everything
I had.

  Never give a hundred percent. Bob Dylan said it, and I thought it was a terrible credo for an artist. Picasso said the same thing, but explained why. A full expenditure of artistic strength is actually ugly, like someone at a party trying too hard. People like feeling that there is plenty left over. Retyping, tweaking Fall for this edition, I had to relive just how much of myself went into it, the research, the endless rewriting, the boiling down. I remembered sitting on the grass in Regent’s Park and writing the moment when Z mourns B and for just a paragraph or two something new happened; I was able to lament on behalf of someone else in their voice, not my own. I remember the discovery that every line of dialogue has an unspoken thought behind it, and ties in with the preceding line—either intimately as a reaction, or as denial, talking across it, ignoring it. It even taught me how to write simply about complex facts, which stood me in good stead when I found myself a public information officer. Writing Fall hurt, but in the way that training for a sport hurts; it also felt good.

  A Fall of Angels did not sell, but it did give me months of something to look forward to. At least once a week I had the feeling I might hear something about it. I sent it to Brian Aldiss, like whom I imagined I would write. He was kind and helpful, but…he warned me of its length.

  I knew of course it might not sell. I was still not prepared for the reality. The disappointment when I realized that it simply would not see print stopped me giving as much for a very long time.

  However, the manuscript became a kind of calling card. I would leave it with other fans, or people who had achieved something in the arts, and it was enough to raise eyebrows if not investment. It meant I continued to think of myself as a writer.

  Right now, A Fall of Angels is still the favorite among my own stories, not for its efforts at hard SF but for its intercutting of high SF with the down to earth, and its determination to tell a story without violence or anger. It really should not come as a surprise that you were sweeter, kinder when young. Somehow it still does, rather as though you had grown more rebellious and adolescent as you grew.