The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  And, though he’s paying no particular attention to anyone, something about this moment must be brushing the consciousness of the Indian businessman, whose closed eyes and flaring nostrils suggest that he is experiencing the onset of a spell of profound concentration. A beatific smile spreads slowly across his face, first as a pout, then a wave of relaxation that transforms his whole appearance, softening every wrinkle, every frown-line, before spreading to his shoulders, his back, even to the girdle of his hips, so that he seems without moving to grow, to unwind, his stoop and rounded posture gone, his belly not a burden but a part of him now, integral to this new shape as it emerges from its unathletic original.

  Now the girl is watching the businessman very closely. Without even moving his head, the man opens his eyes, gazing deeply into the girl’s eyes, so intensely that she blushes, the colour bringing life to her sallow cheeks before spreading prettily to her neck and even so far as her breastbone, and perhaps she feels the heat there, the power of that strong, involuntary flush, because she reaches a hand to her throat and her fingers linger there, and it seems in that instant as if she is caught between contrary impulses: to shield herself modestly from the businessman’s smile, and at the same time to asphyxiate herself, stopping her breath so that her eyes might roll in ecstasy back into her head.

  Sensing a crisis, the young builder shifts his weight onto one leg, his arms forming an encircling arc, as though to embrace the girl. This motion catches the eye of the businessman, whose admiring gaze explores the young man’s face, and the three move towards each other in a single, sweeping embrace. You drop your newspaper between your feet. You have to join them. You have to. But you can’t, the woman next to you has her hand on your thigh, her grip is like a vice, and her other hand is between her legs, lifting her skirts, revealing the smooth, full black flesh of her thighs, and even as you lean into her, toppling into her lap, the whole carriage gives a sickening lurch, and the blind black windows, caught in mid-tunnel, erupt suddenly with colour and motion.

  Behind the mother and son sitting opposite you, entwined and kissing, something appears.

  It is a mouth, pressed against the window, suckered there, its needle teeth tip-tapping on the glass.

  A second later, it is torn away and a rain begins of limbs and eyes, the soles of feet, of scrabbling hands and spoon-shaped privates and grazed, bluish knees. Excuse us! Coming through!

  All the chickies of the city are flooding past the carriage. There are thousands of them, piling one atop the other in the urgency of their passage. The horizontal rain hammers at the glass and keeps on hammering and hammering; there is no end of them. They’re no threat, trust me, they’re not trying to penetrate the carriage. They just need to get past.

  But why?

  The answer’s there before you, quite literally in black and white. ATTACK.

  The chickies know. They know what’s coming. And they’re afraid. Hell, they’re terrified.

  And it comes to you (though on a great calm wave of acceptance, so that it does not feel like a thought at all, but rather a change of perspective, a slight but significant shift in the meanings of things), that your own relaxed acceptance of this sight is of a piece with that peculiar, subaqueous episode just now with the student and the businessman and the builder.

  And you wonder – without drawing any particular hard and fast conclusions – about the strange sexuality of these chickies, so abject in their self-abnegation, so strong in body, yet in mind, so weak!

  And it comes to you – again, without the slightest trace of shock or fear – that this is bullshit. That we know exactly what we’re doing, and that it’s you, you who are being manipulated. And that it’s not just you. It’s everyone. And that this manipulation has been going on for some while – perhaps ever since that day, half a century ago, when chickies rose out from the dead and crawled their way up through the Somme’s thick, stinking, bloodied mud, and saw the world, and saw inside the world, and saw inside the heads of everyone on Earth, and laughed their bright, needle-mouthed laughs, and said, as one,

  LET’S HAVE SOME FUN!

  , you have lost your sense of time. Aware that the train is not moving, you experience a lurching moment of panic. After all this while, have you somehow missed your stop? But no: the train is even now pulling into Holborn. You work your way as politely as you can out of the crowded carriage onto the platform, where colour-coded signage leads you to the far end of the platform, a flight of steps and a subterranean concourse ventilated by a large blue fan behind a grille.

  Another corridor – the same white-painted tin, the same movie posters, Stanley Baxter, James Robertson Justice – and a spiral stair lead you to the Central Line and, after barely a minute’s wait, an eastbound train arrives to carry you to Saint Paul’s.

  From here it’s just a short walk to the Barbican.

  At Moorgate Station, you find crowds gathering in silence. Moorgate itself, a road which meanders in and out of Bundist territory its whole length, has been closed to traffic. Today, though, it is anything but a no-man’s-land. Quite the reverse: you see the ageless, bony-faced men and women of the Bund mixed in amid this crowd, who look as though they might have toppled out of the taproom of the Foresters. There’s no argument. No jostling. No confrontation or muttering. There’s nothing. People are moving en masse across the road towards Finsbury Circus, where the crush is less and the engineered baobab trees afford some screen against the sun. People are trying to see. People are trying to work out what is going on. They are looking up, all of them, in the same direction. They are looking at the Moon, pale in the bright and cloudless day, and circled – this is by now unmistakable – by a white sclerotic ring of stuff, like a wild and ancient eye.

  You feel a weight shift in your coat, a tug at its lapel as Jim climbs onto your shoulder and perches there, unremarked.

  He whispers in your ear: ‘They’re rocks. Big ones. Great hunks of regolith. Rail-gunned out of lunar orbit, set on course to hit the Earth. We knew of this in Woomera. Defences, the Bund told us. A last resort. A weapon to end war! The old story. I’m sorry, Stu. We weren’t quick enough to stop it. We weren’t strong enough. Hell, who am I kidding? We weren’t clever enough.’

  Gently, you pluck Jim off your shoulder and tuck him into your trouser pocket where he won’t get away again and cause any more trouble. You blink to clear your eyes. You ease slowly through the crowd towards the Barbican.

  * * *

  This was the flat Fel used when she wanted to be alone. This was the place she came when she wanted to think about her time with you. This was where she stayed when she wanted to remember.

  She came here when she was trying to get pregnant. You know that from the testing wand you found in the bin. What you didn’t know, what you didn’t guess, until Jim spotted the date on that appointment slip, was what her pregnancy was for.

  You open the door. There’s someone moving about in the bedroom and you think it might be her. There are heavy footsteps. Is she still pregnant? Are you in time? If you are, if she’s still pregnant, if she’s yet to go through with it, then maybe there’s still hope. Maybe the Chernoy Process can be reversed. There may still be a way to save her.

  The door comes open and you start to speak and into the hall steps Georgy Chernoy, stark naked, his eyes gummed with sleep, one hand in his chest hair, the other scratching his balls. He stares at you.

  You want to be sick.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he says.

  You can’t speak.

  ‘This is my flat,’ he says.

  This, in all fairness, is true.

  ‘Wait there,’ he says. He goes back into the bedroom.

  You lean against the wall, your hands over your face, and let gravity carry you down the wall to a sitting position. Something sharp stabs you in the thigh. Have you been stung? You stagger up, flicking at your trousers, and there is a dot of blood soaking through the khaki. Good God, you have been stung! Above th
e dot of blood there’s a great bulge of stuff, jammed in your trouser pocket. The lining’s got all twisted around. You dig your hand in to sort out your pocket and you prick your finger. You suck a bead of blood away and, shambling about the hall, you use both hands, tugging this way and that, to untangle the unholy mess stuffing your pocket.

  Construction-kit Jim has vanished. Rule-bending sprite that he was. And it’s a job of work, I can tell you, to bend your mind away from him. Jim, I don’t mind saying, has been one of my finer creations. But what’s happening here and now is more important. You need to concentrate. So, bit by bit, I scrub your plastic brother out of your head. He was only a bit of fun, after all. A bit of comfort, and you don’t need him any more. In his place I’ve slipped the usual fetishes: an old straw doll and a picture of Jim in a pocket frame – only the glass has finally cracked and broken, and your pocket is full of shards.

  Carefully you turn the mess out into your hand: shreds of stalk, ribbon and glass. Jim’s picture looks okay. You palpate your thigh through the material of your chinos and wince: a splinter has lodged in the cut. You’re taking your trousers down when Georgy reappears at the bedroom door, in slippers and dressing gown. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he says.

  * * *

  You are sitting on the balcony, watching a daytime Moon set behind the blocks of the Barbican. The Moon’s corona has evaporated, at least for daytime viewers. The rocks are separating, spreading out, each one individually targeted. And yet, with the corona evaporating, it is still possible to believe, in those few seconds of its setting, that the Moon now is as it always was, and that the shape of an ordinary, unaccommodated man is still imprinted on its surface.

  Georgy brings out a tray with coffee and cups and a big plate of pastries and sets it on the green metal garden table you and Fel picked out one day, furnishing your first and only home. You hold the table steady for him as he presses the plunger of the cafetière. He sets out the cups and pours. You drink. You eat.

  Georgy is a blowhard but he’s not stupid. He knows why you are here. He knows the sort of explanation he owes you. He says: ‘I come here often now. To this flat. To be among her things, you see. To remember her.’

  ‘You put her through the Process.’

  He does not look at you. He nods. ‘Yes.’

  ‘She wasn’t ill. She wasn’t old. Why?’

  Georgy wipes the grease off his hands against the fabric of his dressing gown. ‘I know what you think of me, Stuart.’

  ‘Do you.’

  ‘It’s written all over your face. You think I’m prideful. A crackpot inventor only too happy to grandstand, and use my own daughter to do so.’

  So now you know. ‘She’s on the Moon.’

  Georgy smiles. ‘Very good.’

  ‘Is she alone?’

  ‘No.’ Georgy pours more coffee for you both. ‘But she was the first.’

  A sound comes out of your mouth. You’re not sure whether it’s a laugh or what. ‘She beat my brother to the Moon.’

  Georgy waits for you to calm a little. He says, ‘You may think I have some sort of inside track on everything that’s happening. Stuart, I don’t. Most of what I know I get from the TV, same as you. But for what it’s worth – and I can’t promise – but for what it’s worth, I think Jim is alive.’

  A tricky moment for me, I can tell you, as suddenly your memory fills with the heavy solvent tang of modelling cement and enamel paint. You’re on the very brink of remembering the toy I gave you, and that would not do at all. Scrub! Wipe! Delete! Erase! Fuck, but I’m cutting this fine . . .

  ‘Alive.’

  ‘Saved. Stored.’ Georgy is in earnest: ‘There was a genuine effort to save the Victory’s crew, Stuart. Give us a chance. This is a new world for us, too.’

  A new world. Now there’s a thought to conjure with. ‘A second jar.’

  ‘What?’

  You push the plate away from you. ‘At what time is the jar half-full? You told this story at Windsor Castle. The exponential function.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘I was there. Stella was there. That was the evening I met Fel. You told us how long it takes a steadily growing thing to double in volume. At one minute to midnight, the jar is just half-full. The future looks rosy. At midnight, you realise you’re going to need another jar.’

  ‘Nicely put.’

  ‘The Moon’s your other jar.’

  ‘A rather small jar.’

  ‘And at one minute past midnight – what then? You’re going to need two more jars. Then four. Then eight.’

  Georgy watches you. He’s trying to decide how much you’ve understood.

  ‘But that first jar. It’s consumed. It’s done.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, necessarily. It’s used up. It’s done. And that’s why you’re cleaning it.’

  ‘Cleaning it?’

  ‘Bombing it.’

  Georgy makes little brushing motions with his hands. ‘No, Stuart. No, that’s too much. The Bund is simply trying to defend itself—’

  ‘I saw the corona around the Moon, George. I saw it even in daylight. You’re trying to wipe us all out.’

  Georgy’s smile is, for once, not a mask. It is also, quite possibly, the saddest smile you have ever seen. ‘And yet.’ He fools with his empty cup. ‘I’m still here. Aren’t I? No room for an old man on the Moon. And what about all the others living here? These Bundists you’re so afraid of, all of a sudden: do you see them leaving on spaceships?’

  It comes to you that events have spiralled far out of everyone’s control; that Georgy Chernoy, and many others, are even now being betrayed.

  ‘I begged them to take her, Stuart. And I begged her to go. I told her more than I should have done, scared her as much as I could with what’s about to happen here. The coming war. She absolutely ignored me, of course. Refused me. Of course. Any sane person would. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t sick. She was beautiful and happy and in love.’

  He meets your eye. ‘In love, Stuart.’

  You see what he is doing. You see what this is. What he is trying to pull. ‘No.’

  ‘I couldn’t have done it without you, Stuart.’

  ‘No.’

  Georgy’s smile is still there, it is still real, and it is absolutely not a smile of victory. ‘Don’t feel bad, Stuart. What’s coming is terrible. I thank God every minute that you turned her away. Don’t feel bad. If you’d offered her a child, she’d have stayed here with you.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Don’t you see? Stuart. My friend. I’m trying to thank you. You saved her life.’

  * * *

  The rest of the day you spend with Stella, trying to persuade her to come back to the West Riding with you.

  Ridiculous, that Georgy and Stella should live such proximate lives and not be talking; that two people so in need of mutual comfort should be at hammer and tongs like this; Georgy sitting in an apartment on the eleventh floor of a tower block, missing his daughter, while deep in the basement of the same complex, Stella is slowly losing her mind among the props of her silly TV series, trying to rewind time to the day she was at home, working upstairs while Betty played in the living room and she thought she heard the front door clicking shut, and she paid the sound no mind.

  ‘I didn’t even hear the car!’ she sobs.

  You’ve found her deep in the basement workshops of the Barbican’s theatre, at the heart of the world she has made. She’s even sitting – see? – at the DARE commander’s desk. Beside her, a small TV monitor is tuned to the BBC. Tears are rolling down her face. She has a look of such helplessness, you go down on your knees to hug her. She bends towards you, arms around your shoulders. You feel the tremor under her skin. Of course she is frightened.

  Georgy has been no help. ‘He told me it’s a fight we should never have started!’ Stella sobs. ‘Orbital David and Goliath, he calls it. How can he be so callous!’

  You don’t want to ge
t caught up in their war of words. Still, it occurs to you that Georgy probably feels entitled to be callous. The Bund has made its next and most dramatic play without him. There’s been some split, some speciation. The confusion’s not just on the TV. It’s real. It’s deep. Georgy told you the Bund means peace, that it acted in self-defence, and saved the crew of the Victory. He probably means it. He probably believes it. At any rate, he wishes it were so. But who does Georgy speak for now? For the Bundists who will be killed along with him in the coming bombardment?

  ‘The Gurwitsch. Medicine City. All that work. It was supposed to be for everyone.’

  ‘So what are you saying? That his own people have betrayed him?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, Stella, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Him and who knows how many thousand others. The people doing this probably don’t even consider it a betrayal. Have you seen them on TV? The Bund’s news anchors now? They’re new. They’re a new thing.’

  Stella thinks about it. She sniffs. ‘Typical,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Typical. The impatience. The Bund couldn’t wait. Not even for itself. Who do we suppose is on the Moon now? A bunch of those fishbowl-headed types, I suppose.’

  You tell her about Fel. She does not look surprised. ‘She’s Georgy Chernoy’s daughter, Stuart. Think about that. It was a lovely dream you shared together. But she was always going to be among the first if the time came to advance.’

  ‘She wanted a normal life.’

  ‘She was barely into her twenties. She wanted out from under her dad. Don’t be disheartened. She’s up there. She’s safe.’ Then, in a much smaller voice, she asks you: ‘Did Georgy say how long we’ve got?’

  ‘A couple of days, he reckoned, before the rocks rain down. Thirty-six hours.’

  ‘Can they be called off?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So.’ She stares at her hands. ‘What are we now to the Bund, do you think? People like us. The unaccommodated. Work animals? An invasive species?’