The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  Kissing me, putting her arms around me, sliding her tongue into my mouth, she stopped me from formulating the obvious question: whether her father had asked her for anything in return.

  My Tooting housemates helped us pack and made us promise to come back and visit, but we never did. I was sorry to lose that easy, effortlessly decent community in Tooting. Looking back, I can see that I was at my happiest there, and at my best.

  But love will have its day. I imagined I was surfing with Fel through new territories. (‘Surfing.’ This is what she called the business of acquiring information.) Books. Music. She played me Wagner, Mozart, Schumann. We read poetry aloud to each other in bed. Cavafy. Keats. Eventually it would come to me that I was not ‘surfing’ anything; that I was simply wallowing along in her wake. In the meantime I was drunk on her difference. The weird flexibility of her limbs. Her scrawny strength.

  ‘We frontload our health,’ she told me once, in bed. I sucked on her tit as she spoke for the Bund. ‘Many of us go blind before we die.’

  * * *

  Fel had time for Stella’s TV show. I didn’t. The spring term of my second year ended with important exams. In the end, in a desperate bid to balance favours for Stella with my course requirements, I persuaded my tutors to grant me a placement at her studio, so that I could design the interiors she needed and have that count towards my qualification. Submarine. Moonbase. Moon interceptor. Tank-like ‘mobiles’. The subterranean offices of DARE’s Shepperton HQ. I sold it to the Bartlett as an opportunity to design for the new fabrication machines spilling out of Medicine City. I showed them Fel’s open-weave exoskeleton-cum-jumpsuit, in both its fabric and wire versions, and I explained I wanted to accomplish equivalent innovations in the built environment. I used expressions like ‘built environment’. They gave me six weeks and expected me to write them a 30,000-word dissertation about the experience.

  Because Georgy Chernoy’s personal worth was astronomical, it was easy to forget that Stella was a commercial success in her own right. She owned a house in Islington and a holiday cottage in Shropshire, to which she used to repair whenever she had a script to work on. When she heard about my dissertation deadline, Stella gave me the key and told me to top up the oil tank, keep the dehumidifier running in the master bedroom, and otherwise do with the place as I liked.

  As if holing herself away in an old crofter’s cottage at the edge of a village just shy of four hundred souls was not isolation enough, Stella had had a hut built at the top of her garden. The garden ran all the way up the hill behind the house. Though the property deeds presumably marked a border, in truth it was possible to walk all the way up through the garden, past two handkerchief-sized lawns, past gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes, and a terrace barely big enough for a set of rusting garden furniture, up more steps to the hut, and beyond, into trees, and out again to a view all the way to Wales, and there imagine that the entire Clun Valley was one’s own.

  I took an extended Easter break there. On my first night, I woke up at about 4 a.m. to an unfamiliar chill and could not get back to sleep. I went downstairs, made coffee in one of Stella’s several coffee makers, fetched the key from beside the back door and carried my drawing equipment up to the hut along bark trails and flagstone paths treacherous with moss and lichen and dew. The hut was small, watertight, and the bottled gas heater warmed it up in minutes. There was a chair and a tilting table large enough for me to draw on. It became a routine. I started work before dawn, finished around eleven and spent the rest of the day either walking in the surrounding countryside or tending the garden.

  It took me about a week to shake off the persistent feeling that I was working on DARE out of weakness – an inability to say no to my aunt when she needed a cheap favour. By the end of the second week I was obsessed. I spent evenings on the phone to Stella and to Fel, arguing for more budget, better materials, more ambitious sets. I drew ceaselessly, inspired by the scripts I had read the night before. These arrived almost daily. The series, originally planned at six episodes, was now budgeted to run for twenty. Our available funds were increased, but I still had to design sets that were more convincing, more sturdy and more easily mended for less money per unit of screen time.

  Strong colours and extensive lighting notes replaced expensive materials. The moonbase grew airier, lighter and less cluttered, the submarine even more of a human sardine can. Only a skeleton staff remained to operate DARE’s subterranean HQ.

  Though she brought in friends to help with the dialogue, Stella wrote the additional storylines herself. Under the pressure of extra work, the scripts, though crude, were acquiring a distinctive flavour – an urgency and coherence the original episodes had lacked. Whether by accident or design, Stella’s notion – that the world has room for more than one future – began to be realised. The show’s inconsistencies, its departures from reality, no longer bothered me. I began to inhabit the world of the show. In my mind, it ceased to be a drama about underdressed people in space. It ceased to be a show that deliberately, wilfully ignored the Bund, the chickies, or the half-dozen other human variants that rub more or less uncomfortably against each other upon this crowded and irradiated Earth.

  DARE became for me another world entirely: imperilled, certainly, but in many ways happier than our own. It was a world without civil war, without nationalism, without tribes. It was a world that had never been exposed to Gurwitsch’s ray, a world in which the ray had not yet been discovered or, better yet, did not exist. It was a world whose dominant species was still one and entire: a single, healthy, well-bred human family.

  A scream startled me out of my reverie. It came from the bottom of the garden. I leapt up, looked out, but it was still an hour before dawn and all I could see was my own face, reflected in the glass of the door. I ran outside. ‘Hullo?’

  There was no reply. I hurried as fast as I dared down the garden. I’d taken my shoes off outside the hut and the dew soaked through my socks as I ran.

  I found Fel catching her breath by the back door.

  ‘Fel? What are you doing here? Are you all right?’

  She pointed at the path. ‘What is it?’

  We were in pitch darkness. I stepped forward to trigger the outside light and there, in the centre of the path, frozen stiff as a garden ornament, was the toad that lived in the rockery wall. I bent down and made to take hold of it. It jumped between my feet. I chivvied it away.

  I took Fel in my arms and kissed her. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought I’d surprise you.’

  ‘Darling. Come see the hut.’

  She pulled back against my hand. ‘Not up there.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said, pouting, only half in jest.

  I laughed, put my arm around her and led her into the cottage. ‘I’ll make you a coffee. How come you’re so early?’

  We spent the next four days together. I would wake at four and work in the hut until daybreak. We would breakfast in the garden around nine, and then I would go back and work into the early afternoon, when we would visit some town or other, some castle or stately home, that Fel had spotted in the guide she had bought. I tried to take her walking with me but the countryside bothered her. Things kept moving about in her peripheral vision: sheep, cows, crows, tree branches bending in the wind. She was always tripping over roots, stones, her own laces. She was not equipped for the natural world and lacked the lore necessary to survive it. If a cow’s in your way, wave at it and keep walking. Stand still for a wasp, and check the rim of an open can before raising it to your lips. ‘It stung me! It stung!’ I kissed away her tears but Fel was not to be comforted. ‘Let’s go back. Urgh! There’s another one!’

  ‘That’s a bee.’

  ‘I don’t like the outside. The outside is mean.’

  The paper guide she had bought in Ludlow was exhaustive, but Fel missed the Bund’s information glut. The day we went to Stokesay Castle, she asked me: ‘How do we know if it’s
going to be busy?’

  ‘It’s Saturday. It’s a castle. It’s going to be busy.’

  ‘But what if it’s too busy?’

  ‘Then we’ll queue or we’ll go somewhere else. Come on, Fel.’

  She carried her absurd do-everything, know-everything phone around wherever we went, though a lack of signal rendered it virtually useless. The phone had a camera in it so her carrying it around made some sense. She worried about losing it, though. ‘Nothing’s backing up,’ she explained.

  ‘It’s your phone. It’s in your hand. Why would you lose it?’

  ‘I just don’t want to lose our pictures.’

  ‘You’re not going to lose them.’

  ‘Don’t be angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  When we got home, she made me sit with her and look through her camera roll, for all the world as though the day recorded there had not already happened.

  ‘Nice. Good one. Yes.’ I had no idea what I was supposed to say.

  When it was time to return to London, Fel dialled a number on the house phone, listened, dialled some extra numbers and put down the receiver: ‘All done.’

  In the evening, a car drew up outside the door. It was large, white, brand new and unlike anything I had seen before. There was no driver. We put the luggage in the boot and climbed in. The interior smelled of leather polish and new plastic. This is how Fel had managed to arrive so early, the morning she came to the cottage: she had booked one of these vehicles for herself and slept the whole way. She snuggled against me as our vehicle wound steadily through narrow country lanes to the M54. I clutched at her, petrified. The motorway was worse. I was convinced we were going to crash. How can a car have no driver? I cricked my neck craning to see out of windows dialled dark against the street-lamp glare.

  When we got back to the Barbican, I was so tired I had to go straight to bed. The mattress felt as if it was moving in waves under me.

  6

  ‘No one need be too surprised by the pace at which we build,’ Georgy Chernoy had said, over dinner in Windsor Castle. ‘The rules by which we operate are no different from the rules that have pertained to progress, fecundity and expansion on this planet since life began. They are no different, if I might for a second speak as a Bundist –’ (a strange thing to say, since to my knowledge he never did anything else) ‘– no different from those which led our unaccommodated forebears to their own achievements.’

  Even Stella, who had sat shiny-eyed through his whole performance – wrapped up in his vision, or at any rate spellbound by his delivery – admitted to me later that Georgy Chernoy’s noblesse oblige at this point had made half the room suck its teeth.

  Oblivious, Chernoy had continued: ‘I say “rules”, but there is only one rule, and everything follows from it. Not a rule, even, but a simple mathematical truth. I mean the ‘ exponential function.

  If the Bund has deviated from the general course of human progress, it is through their knack of comprehending, embracing and exploiting the consequences of the exponential function.

  ‘And how strange that humankind, the tool-builder, the city-maker, the census-taker, should be always tripping over such simple mathematics!’

  Here Stella’s report broke off in typical style: ‘Oh, I’ve no head for numbers!’

  I had just got back from Shropshire and Stella was treating me to one of those expensive hotel teas she so enjoyed. It was May, the first anniversary of my meeting Fel, which meant it was also a year to the day since the dinner at Windsor Castle. This was how we got talking about Georgy Chernoy and how I came to hear, slightly garbled and second hand, a speech Fel and I had missed. ‘Something about how things double every few years. You must know all this from your college work.’

  I poured milk from a silver jug into Stella’s cup. ‘I just spent a whole month in Shropshire drawing curves. That doesn’t mean I understand them.’

  ‘Curves! Yes! He talked a lot about curves. About how the Bund thinks in curves. It all sounded rather pretentious, if you ask me.’

  Had Georgy Chernoy sought a living example of general mathematical myopia, he could not have found a better subject than Stella. I remember thinking darkly: perhaps this is exactly what he has done – picked her as a sort of glamorous mascot of human limitations. A human pet he can watch as she paces stereotypically back and forth, back and forth, against the plate glass of her own incomprehension.

  Chernoy’s point – and it was a valid one, however galling – was that some vital truths about the world, though well known and widely broadcast, absolutely refuse to stick in the unaccommodated mind. They are well understood, and yet they invariably fail to inform action.

  Multiply the natural logarithm of two by a hundred and you get seventy, or as near to seventy as makes no odds. Divide that number by growth expressed as, say, so many per cent per year, and you get the number of years it takes for a steadily growing thing to double in size. A tree growing at five per cent a year will double in size every fourteen years.

  From that, everything follows. Since the first protozoa assembled themselves, species have been expanding to fill the niches available to them; have reached carrying capacity; exceeded it; and died. ‘The greatest human achievement was its magical ability to cheat the limits of carrying capacity by altering its environment. The Bund’s more recent achievement is to accept, and act upon the knowledge, that this human magic also has its limits.’

  I think this is what, above all, puzzles non-Bundists and fuels our occasional hatreds: our sense that the Bund is hypocritically preaching restraint on the one hand while throwing off all shackles to expansion with the other. For heaven’s sake, it has begun to mine the Moon! The Bund, to the contrary, would have it that its own dizzying, so-fast-as-to-be-unfollowable growth is possible because it understands the limits to growth better than anyone else. ‘If bugs in a jar reproduce once every minute, and by midnight the jar is full, at what time is the jar half-full?’

  This Stella had remembered. Familiar enough as I was with the riddle, it still took me an incredulous moment, a split-second of scepticism, before I confirmed the answer in all its enormity: ‘At one minute to midnight the jar is still only half-full.’

  ‘You see?’ Stella clapped her hands, delighted.

  One minute to midnight, and the future looks bright, the possibilities endless, or almost endless. A whole half-jar remains unexploited!

  A minute later, everything starves. Everything dies. Everything ends. This was the Bund’s point of pride: that it understood the exponential function in its bones; was trained up to it; was born to it. It thought in curves and, in so doing, knew how to evade environmental limits long before impacting with them.

  ‘Do have another little cake.’

  ‘I’m done.’

  ‘Not at these prices, you’re not,’ Stella snapped. ‘At these prices we’re licking the bloody plates.’

  I picked one with a strawberry on top as the healthiest-looking option. Underneath the fruit was a crème pâtissière so thick I needed an extra cup of tea to wash it down.

  Stella took the opportunity to check her phone. Georgy had got it for her to help her organise the shooting schedule for DARE. The first live-action filming was just a fortnight away, and a second-unit crew made up of final-year film students was already at work making stock footage of the models I had built for the show: submarine, mobiles, interceptors, satellites, assorted Earth- and Moon-based launch platforms; also some simple pyrotechnic work.

  She pecked hazily at the screen, saw me looking, sighed and dropped the phone on the table.

  ‘I’m never going to get the hang of this thing.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ I said, but only out of form’s sake. I knew how impossible it was. Just the night before, Fel had cuddled up beside me in bed and tried showing me how she planned our evenings on the tablet she was always hauling around with her. Images sprang from the screen in 3D and she started knitting patterns together as thoug
h plucking a harp. All I could do was laugh.

  ‘What? It only takes practice,’ she said. Perhaps she was trying to be kind. We both knew it wasn’t true.

  Stella had tried moving her scripts onto glass; the logic of text manipulation had held reasonably fast in the transition between media and she spoke enthusiastically about the speed at which she was able to turn cast scripts into shooting schedules. Suddenly the (Bundist) lighting cameraman and the cinematographer were accessing her work even while she was tapping away at it, her whole screen blizzarding in green and purple. She’d had to abandon the work to them. She was enough of a professional to know that film-making is a collaborative business and that her film crew knew a lot more about the mechanics of a shooting schedule than she did. You could see that it hurt, though: how work she had assumed would take a week came back to her, without her input, late in the evening of the same day.

  Episode seventeen upped the ante by launching a story arc to carry the first series to its cliffhanger conclusion. (Stella had it in mind that a second series of DARE, if green-lit, would eschew standalone episodes altogether. She would run the show, developing its narrative ‘spine’, while professional writers drawn from theatre would collaborate on individual episodes.)

  In episode seventeen, the aliens launch a concerted attack on the moonbase – DARE’s first line of defence. At first, the attack appears tactical, but by episode nineteen it is clear that the UFOs are arriving for the long haul. Despite swingeing losses, they begin to construct a nigh-on impregnable bridgehead on the Moon’s far side, using material time-shifted one second into the future. Cut off from their lines of communication, the crew of DARE’s moonbase lack vital intelligence on the nature of the aliens’ ‘chronoconcrete’. Unaware that their attacks are simply strengthening the enemy’s hand by providing them with a vital extra source of ‘chronic energy’, they succumb, one by one, to mysterious, invisible ground-assaults.