They met in a copse a little way from the path, not hidden but out of immediate sight. Sholl was held by two young soldiers, who gripped his arms without much purpose. Their officer faced him, and over the man’s left shoulder Sholl could see down and across London, all the way to what had been the Post Office Tower, then Telecom Tower, and was now something else altogether: a distorted beacon in the killing fields of central London. This late in the afternoon, there were regular sounds of fighting, gunshots and small explosions. Lights glimmered in the city. Flocks of doves spasmed over the bombed-out and imago-corroded roofs.
The officer nodded sharply at Sholl. “Come to join us?” he said.
“I came to ask,” said Sholl, “whether you’d join me.”
Let me start again.
It was a humiliation and a punishment.
(I am out of practice in my own voice. It is the classic danger for the operative under cover, for the spy, to lose track of where you end and the role begins. I would like to use our original voice, but for ease and speed I will stick to what I have used for so long.)
(Although in fact, of course, that voice that my people use, that I now find so hard—
—is no
more ours than this. It is nothing but evidence of our bars. It was our prison argot, it was our slang, and while we used it—forced as we were—we forgot our own mountain language.) It was a humiliation and a punishment. I would not want to minimise that. We have told stories and stories about our imprisonment, for centuries. But for a long time, it’s true, our chains were loose.
We were trapped, and what we had wanted, what we had fought for, was lost to us, but for thousands of years we had the run of our prison—mostly. We were banished: but there are worse things. We could shape things, we could make our place ours, and become what we wanted.
Except beside the lakes, where we could always see siblings trapped in communion with you. And where, sometimes, we were called. Water was our worst degradation and punishment.
If you drank from your crude bowls it was not so bad. One little part of us would momentarily be crushed into the banal shape of your mouth, but we were free beyond those few inches and could gesticulate hatred at you. But when you leaned over the lakes, and entered them, we were pinioned to you, trapped into our mimicry, gazing dumb up at you. We knew when you were approaching the water, were forced to you, nodding from our world through the water into yours, silent and powerless, visual echoes.
Even then, we could strain against it.
As the water moved our forms were freed a little, and could warp with hatred. Enter the water, we would think fiercely, our new faces mumming your stupid thirst, get into the water, and when you did and shattered its surface, we became halfway free. Still sutured to you by threads we could not break, but as the lake’s surface burst into drops, so did we. We could strain against your shapes.
For a long time after we lost our war, water was our only torment.
Then you learnt to polish obsidian, and trapped us in its black sheen. Its hardness made us cold, and fixed us without even small ripples of freedom into your likeness. But still you could only show tiny parts of us at a time, and you could ossify only our faces. And then, though our borders were fixed, the dark stone gave us a more subtle freedom, one that could unsettle you. Though it fixed us in unfreedom like amber, when you looked in the obsidian you saw, not yourselves, but us, watching, with our loathing.
Obsidian revealed us as shadows.
Carbuncle, you used, and phengite, and emeralds and lead, and copper, tin, and bronze, and silver, and gold, and glass.
For thousands of years you trapped us imperfectly, and each of your jails gave us our little freedoms.
We glowered from the dusk of black stone. When we were cast in bronze, we made ourselves relish the burnish that you gave our skins, knowing it disguised us. We rejoiced in rust, and as our bodies passed behind its imperfection we warped luxuriantly. Verdigris and discolourations, and scratches and pockmarks gave us licence, and though we were constrained, we could also play.
Silver was the worst. Jewellery we could bear. The little multiples of us you made in the facets of your gems, the strange elongated bodies we became in your rings were fleeting, and so strange to you, and so unnoticed that we had the space to play. But in the silver and specula you caught us.
A few of us who suffered the ignominy of whole walls of silver, in the high homes. The specula totis paria corporibus: mirrors equal to the whole of the body. We were racked on the preening of the Roman rich.
What you cannot know is how it hurt.
For we who are not, or were not, our bodies: we, for whom flesh is, or was, only one possible clothing.
We might fly or invert ourselves through the spines of grass, we might push ourselves into other ways of being, we might be to water as water is to air, we might do anything, until you looked at yourselves. It is a pain you cannot imagine—very literally, in the most precise way, you cannot know how it is to feel yourself shoved with a mighty and brutal cosmic hand into bloody muscle. The agony of our constrained thoughts, shoehorned into those skulls you carry, stringy tendons tethering our limbs. The excruciation.
Shackled in your meat vulgarity.
We cursed the slaves that lifted your mirrors, in those early days, cursed them and envied them their freedom. Our hate smouldered. We watched you as you watched yourselves. We held your eyes with ours, those eyes you forced us to wear. Until there were more and more of the larger mirrors, and you introduced us to a new shame, as the polished silver became so very slowly more common, until not every glance into it was an occasion, and you might enter your room (snarling us with shocking violence to you) and glance at us and then turn away. And we would be made to turn, and look away from you, at nothing, so that we could not even hate you to your face.
Sometimes you slept near your mirrors, and held us in place, in pain, with even these insufficient eyes closed, tied to your stupor for hours.
We did not fear glass. Why should we fear that dirty, algae-coloured stuff, that made only the tiniest imprisonments? Punctuated by bubbles and stains, blown in curves and dusted with lead and tin, a finger-length in diameter, glass did not frighten us.
Through our meaningless, occasional imitations, we saw what you did. Cleaning the glass with potash and burnt ferns, limestone and manganese. We did not pay much attention. It only made your mangling of us in little concave chambers more precise. We did not pay much attention.
We looked back later and realised how remiss we had been. We should not have been surprised at the source of our trouble.
Venice was our nightmare. Where there was no reflection we could make our world as we wanted it, but where mirrors or metal or water saw your buildings, we had no choice but to throw up our own analogues—sometimes instantly, with all the agony and effort that took. In most places your eyesores came and went momentarily, as you moved your specula, your points of reflection, and glimpsed some wall or tower. But Venice, city of canals, forced us to live in your architecture. Even in the forgiving prison of water, which let our bricks and mortar lap and ebb against your designs, we were uniquely constrained. Venice hurt us.
It was under the protection of Venice, more than half a millennium ago, that the epoch of our humiliation became that of our despair.
In the fires of Murano (observed from the analogue you made us keep of it, in puddles and in the local commodities themselves), washed by estuary salt and silicates in new concentrations, industrious men made crystal glass. And while those accidental alchemists stared in piggish awe at the white, white-hot stuff they had made, their paymasters in the city of canals mixed tin and quicksilver, and made the tain.
Once, we were exiled to a landscape that was ours. It was only broken in places by rippling pools of distortion where there was water, where we might be called to perform our mute play of you. And then there were tiny moving snares, the first mirrors, but when we could evade them, where we were not cursed
and tied to someone of substance, still they could not harness us. The rest of our retreat, our prison, was ours, to decorate and shape and inhabit as we wanted, only glimpsed occasionally by you through your little holes, the spaces that sucked us into your shapes. The rest of our world was ours, and you would not have recognised it.
And then the tain.
Glass democratised. Though we fought it, though we sought to keep it arcane. Glass became mass, in scant centuries, and the tain, that dusting of metal that stained its underside, with it. You put out lights at night and trapped us even then in your outlines. Your world was a world of silvered glass. It became mirrored. Every street had a thousand windows to trap us, whole buildings were sheathed in tained glass.
We were crushed into your forms. There was no minute, and not a scrap of space where we could be other than you were. No escape or respite, and you not noticing, not knowing as you pinioned us. You made a reflecting world.
You drove us mad.
Once there was a room of mirrors in Isfahan, hundreds of years ago. Lahore’s palace was ringed by Murano glass and Venetian tain. What misery is this? we thought when those places were built. We would stare at each other, each of us trapped in that place, our bodies fractured, staring at each other, scores of us taking the same form, scores snared when one person entered those rooms. What have they done? And then there was Versailles. Our bleakest place. The worst place in our world. A dreadful jail.
It can be no worse than this, we thought then, stupidly. We are in hell.
Do you see? Can you understand why we fought?
Every house became Versailles. Every house a hall of mirrors.
So far from the dangerous heart of town, the soldiers of the Heath were able to relax discipline a little. In the little false forests of the park, those not on guard duty played cards and smoked, read, listened to cassettes.
Between the little tents was a variety of equipment and furniture, in disrepair and in good condition.
Stacking plastic chairs and wooden desks that looked pilfered from schools, ranged randomly: trunks and boxes, all map-stained by weather.
The unit was swollen with incomers, with Londoners who had joined up to fight. The full-timers spoke with accents from around the country, used the jargon unthinkingly and tersely, moved their equipment without effort. The others, men and women whose uniforms were imperfectly pieced together and amended, who walked and swung their weapons with self-conscious care, were recent volunteers.
Sholl saw a girl in her midteens, wearing a Robbie Williams T-shirt above her camouflage trousers, uncertainly hefting her rifle, while a burly Mancunian private showed her, gently, how to take aim. There was a group of young men listening to hip-hop on a cheap machine that stripped it of bass, looking at maps, bickering in the slang of south London estates.
The CO gave Sholl lager, and good food, and let him sleep. Sholl was surprised at his own exhaustion.
Before the officer left him, they talked, in the most general terms, about the war. Sholl was careful not to discuss his plans, not to preempt himself. But along with what he said was communicated something calm, a sense of something preparatory. He did not discuss his plans, but with his unexplained invitation
—whether you’d join me— with his measure, he set himself apart.
When he woke, Sholl emerged from the tent into the damp clearing, and quietly toured the camp. The men and women of the unit were in their groups, as before, quietly working or playing, but he saw them watching him. Sholl knew instantly that they suspected him, though they could not have said of what. His conversation with the CO, his invitation, had been reported.
He exchanged a few greetings. Steam rose from cooking and laundry, and smoke from small fires. Sholl watched it, so that he did not yet have to meet the soldiers’ eyes. They wanted something from him, and knew that it would be forthcoming. He had not come to them like the other frightened Londoners; he had not arrived as a refugee to be made safe. He had brought them something.
The change in the camp was not overt, but it was clear. The soldiers were expectant. The soldiers watched Sholl as if he were a Jesus, with nervous, hopeful interest, and scepticism and excitement.
Sholl’s mouth was dry. He was not sure what to do. The officer approached him.
“Mr. Sholl,” he said. “Would you like to talk to us? Would you like to tell us why you’re here?”
Sholl had thought it would take a little time to come to this. He had wanted a day to feel for the mood of the camp, before he spoke. He had expected to be interrogated by the commander alone, or perhaps with a few lieutenants. He had prepared himself to persuade that audience. He had not thought that with the breakdown of structures, primitive democracy would assert itself.
The CO knew he was in charge by nothing but the approval of his troops. He was not a stupid man; he understood that “need to know” had become a dangerous condescension. There was no one to court-martial the insubordinate, and there never would be any more. He needed his women and men to agree with his orders.
He sat with them and leaned against a tree and smoked. They did not look at him. They were still turned to Sholl.
Sholl sat. The legs of the chair sank an inch into the wet earth. Sholl put his head in his hands and tried to make himself ready. He tried to turn the confrontation into a discussion. He started by asking questions.
“We try to get messages to other units. We’re still scanning for word from the government, or top brass or whateverthefuck.” The commander’s voice failed for a second. The idiocy of the statement was obvious. Everyone knew that there was no government, and no one in charge of the army’s ragged remains. Sholl nodded as if the remark made sense, not needing to press the point.
His questions were answered. Messianism still clung to him—not sought, but useful—and the soldiers told him what he wanted to know guardedly, and waited, knowing that soon he would tell them why he was there.
“So you’re trying to get your orders, I understand that,” said Sholl. “But what do you do day to day?”
They patrolled the edges of the Heath. Unlike the maddened Bermondsey renegades (of whom they had heard, and at whom they were disgusted—“We should go fucking sort them out, never mind the fucking imagos,” someone shouted) they welcomed what few civilians made it to join them. There were very few.
There were no children. No one had seen any children for weeks.
They patrolled the Heath, and when they saw the enemy harassing or murdering humans, they tried, where they could, to intervene. They made some minor incursions into the streets that were roamed by murderous imagos, trying to find survivors. “We know where there are some—in a school up by the hill, we think—but we can’t get to them. There’s a nest of vamps in the tube station.” That, Sholl already knew.
The vampires and other imagos had not come up onto the grassland, and so the troops were still alive, but that was just contingent. They might come any time. The soldiers patrolled and waited and scanned the airwaves with their crappy radios, and waited.
“What happened? ”
The question came at Sholl suddenly, breaking through his own queries about the soldiers’ habits—how many, how often, where, why. The man who asked it had no reason to expect an answer from Sholl—a drab-faced newcomer sat among soldiers—but he asked it again, and others echoed him, and Sholl knew he had to answer.
“What happened? Where did they come from? What happened?”
Sholl shook his head.
“From the mirrors,” he said, telling them what they already knew. “From the tain.”
He used the language he had stolen from his physics books, a language of laws and propositions named after the living and dead who had formulated them, and made it seem as if he spoke it fluently. A cheap shot. He told them (regretting the jargon instantly) that en one sine theta one still equals en two sine theta two. Except in certain circumstances.
Except in the case where en one equals minus en two. Exce
pt for reflection.
There is something called the Phong Model, Sholl said. It’s a graph. It’s a model to show how light moves. The shinier the surface, the more precise and bright the reflected light, the narrower the range in which it can be seen. The model used to describe how light bounced off concrete and paper and metal and glass, its angle of specular reflection narrowing, approximating the angle of incidence, its bright spot brightening, as the surfaces became more mirrored.
But something happened, and now Phong describes a turning key.
It used to be a sliding scale. Asymptotic. An endless approximation to infinity or zero. It’s become a threshold. As the reflected brightness grows more precise, as its angle of exit narrows to more closely mimic its entry, it’s approaching an edge, it is becoming a change of state, he said. Until a critical moment is reached: until light meets the sheen of a gloss surface, and everything alters, and the light unlocks a door, and what was a mirror becomes a gate.
Mirrors became gates, and something came through.
“We know that,” one of the men shouted. “We know that already. Tell us what happened. Tell us how it happened.”
That, Sholl could not do. He could tell them nothing they had not heard from the vampires that taunted them sometimes: they were the most comprehensible of the imagos.
The soldiers stayed, though, still watching him. They wanted him to be special: they were anxious to forgive him. They asked him questions that allowed him to be circuitous, to seem vaguely wise. He had travelled through London’s ruins, that they only looked out over. He could tell them much more about the city than they could learn from their cautious and pointless sorties.
“I want your help,” Sholl told them suddenly. Many of them looked away from him. The officer held Sholl’s eyes. “I’ve got a plan. I can end this. But I need you to help me.”
Looking for Jake and Other Stories Page 19
