The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  He suddenly felt disgusted. Scientists had established that the alien bacteria were harmless. That was the story, but it might be wrong. It might be a big lie, maintained to prevent panic in the streets. He wished he hadn’t touched the car. The alien had been using it for months. It must be coated all over with invisible crawling slime.

  What was it like, to be part of a living world? He stared at the spanner in his hand until the rod of metal lost its shine. Skin crept over it; the adjustable socket became a cup of muscle, pursed like an anus, wet lips drawn back by a twist on the tumescent rod. The mechanic was nauseated, but he could not put the tool down. He could not go away from it. This oozed drop of self, attached to his hand, would not be parted from him if he dropped it. Tiny strings, strands of living slime, would cling and join them still. The air he breathed was full of self, of human substance.

  He stood up. He backed off. A robot casing yielded like flesh. The mechanic yelped and sprang away. His hand, with the rod-flesh spanner growing out of it, hit the keypad; and all the tools began to leap into action. He stood in his own surging, hurrying, pulsating gut — for an instant saved by the notional space of an anatomical drawing, and then the walls closed in. There was no light, only a reddened darkness. The mechanic wailed. He fought a horrible need to vomit; he scrabbled desperately at the keys.

  When everything was quiet again, he sat for while. It might have been minutes; it felt like a long time. Eventually he stopped wanting to be sick and managed to put down the spanner. He sat with his head hunched in his arms; became aware of this abject fetal crouch, and came out of it slowly. He took a deep breath.

  The garage was the same as it had always been: dead and safe. He realized that he had been highly privileged. Somehow, just briefly, he had succeeded in entering the alien mind, seen the world through alien eyes. How could you expect such an experience to be pleasant? Now that it was over he could accept that, and he was truly grateful.

  At last he heaved a sigh and set about putting the bay to work again. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the red car with hand tools now. Besides, he was too shaky. But he would deliver the alien’s vehicle in the morning as promised, as near to perfectly reborn as was humanly possible. He owed it that much.

  He had tried to take something from the alien by a kind of force. And he’d got what he wanted. It wasn’t the alien’s fault that he’d bitten off more than he could chew and gagged on the mouthful. Gritting his teeth against the ghostly feel of flesh in the machines, he set up the necessary routines.

  In a short time, it was all done. But it was very late. His wife would have to ask questions now, and he’d have to tell her something of what had happened. He stood looking at the plastic shell and the clever, deviously economical innards under the open bonnet. The machines, they said, couldn’t live with the ecosphere. In the end the human race would have to abandon one or the other: motor cars or “the environment.” But “in the end” was still being held at bay. In the meantime this was a good, well-made little compromise with damnation.

  He felt lonely and sad. He had seen another world walk into his life, reached out to grasp the wonder, and found something worse than empty air. He’d wanted the alien to give him dreamland, somewhere over the rainbow. He had found, instead, an inimical Eden: a treasure that he could no more enjoy than he could crawl back into the womb.

  The mechanic sighed again and gently closed the bonnet.

  The red car settled itself a little.

  “Thank you,” it said.

  In the morning at nine o’clock the alien was there. The car was ready, gleaming on the forecourt. The alien put down its bag, which it carried not on its back or at arm’s length but tucked under one armpit in that very peculiar, lopsided way of theirs. He thought it looked tired and anxious. It barely glanced at the car. Perhaps, like a human, it didn’t even want to know how badly it had been cheated.

  “What’s the damage?” it asked.

  The mechanic was hurt. He’d have liked to go over the whole worksheet with it: to extract the sweet honey of its approval, or at least to extend this dwindling transaction just a little further. He had to remind himself that the alien owed him nothing. To itself, its feelings were not romantic or bizarre in the least. The world it lived in was commonplace. The mechanic’s experience was his own concern, had been an internal matter from the start. The alien was not responsible for kinks of human psychology, nor for imaginary paranormal incidents.

  “Look,” he said. “I’ve got a proposition for you. My eldest, my son, he’s just passed his driving test. He won’t be allowed out on his own for a while, of course. But I’ve been thinking about getting him a little runabout. I don’t keep a car myself, you see, I’ve never felt the need. But kids, they like the freedom… I’d like to buy your car.”

  In the cold light of day, he couldn’t bear to tell it the truth. He knew the car would never speak to him again. But he had been touched by the world of the other, and he simply had to bring away something: some kind of proof.

  The alien looked even more depressed.

  The mechanic realized suddenly that he didn’t have to worry about the money. He would tell the firm everything. They were human at head office: and as fascinated as he. The car would stay on the forecourt. He would call in and get it featured on the local news, maybe even national news. It would be extremely good for business.

  For the alien’s benefit, however, he would stick to the story about his son. They really shouldn’t be encouraged to believe that human beings thought they were magic.

  “List price,” he added, hurriedly. “And a little more. Because anyone would pay a little more, a car that’s been driven by one of our famous visitors. What do you say?”

  So the alien walked away with its credit card handsomely e-charged. It turned at the corner of the street, by the yard where the banana fronds hung over the gate, and bared its pointed teeth in that seeming smile. The farewell could have been for the red car on the forecourt as much as for the human beside it, but it made the man feel better anyway.

  September 1992

  Blue Clay Blues

  Somewhere on the outskirts of town, the air suddenly smelled of rain. The change was so concrete and so ravishing that Johnny stopped the car. He got out, leaving Bella strapped in the back seat. She was asleep, thank God. The road punched straight on, rigid to the flat horizon. The metaled surface was in poor repair. It seemed to have been spread from the crown with a grudging hand, smearing out into brown dirt and gravel long before it reached the original borderline. There were trees at the fences of dusty and weed-grown yards; clapboard houses stood haphazard amid broken furniture and rusted consumer durables. The town went on like this, never thickening into a center, as far as the eye could see. The rain was coming up from the south, a purple wall joining sky and earth. It smelled wonderful, truly magical. There were a few rumbles of thunder knocking around the cloudy sky. He hoped for lightning.

  It took longer than he’d thought. He reached in and picked up his phone from the seat, called Izzy again. He’d been calling her all day, leaving messages on the board. These repeated phone calls from an irate spouse would be the talk of the floor; Izzy’s workplace was that kind of petty. He knew she’d hate it; she would be made miserable by the piddling notoriety. He was partly disgusted at himself, but not disgusted enough to stop.

  The arrangement was that Johnny looked after Bella, and when he was on a trip she went into daycare. It was a good arrangement, except when all the emergency routines failed at once. It had broken down seriously yesterday. He had had to leave town with the baby. He had been trying to contact Izzy ever since, but they kept missing each other, with almost mythological symmetry. Every time he ran his messages, his wife jabbered at him in gradations of bewildered panic. Every time he called her, her number was busy.

  Now she was at work, where they didn’t allow personal phones on the floor, and he was twenty-four hours out in the boondocks with a two-year-old in tow. Sh
e couldn’t be too badly worried though: he was keeping her well informed.

  He stood and watched the advancing wall, brooding sourly on the amount of work he put into their relationship. He had practically invented everything, all the little rituals of bonding. He wondered, did Izzy feel that she was doing the same: building their life together, brick by sodding brick? Maybe she did. It’s called marriage. It works, more or less.

  The tow truck careened to a halt, followed by three motorbikes. Three men got out of the cab. The bikers remained mounted. Johnny still had the phone in his hand. He took a step, casually, and let it drop onto the driver’s seat.

  “What’s the problem, kid?”

  The speaker was tall and basically skinny, but with bull shoulders and heavy arms from some kind of specific training or maybe manual labor. He was inappropriately dressed: a suit jacket over bib overalls, no shirt. The rest were the same — not exactly ragged, but it was clear they’d left certain standards far behind. They were all of them technically white, a couple dusky; a shade further off the WASP ideal than himself. Every one of them was armed.

  Johnny immediately realized that these people would find an aesthetic impulse hard to understand. It would be as well not to brand himself a city slicker, to whom rainfall is a spectacle.

  “Some kind of breakdown?”

  “I guess so,” said Johnny. “Engine died, no reason why. I was about to look under the hood.”

  “Whaddya use for fuel?” A biker, nursing his mighty steed between his knees, seemed amiably curious.

  “Uh — just about anything.”

  “Well, all we got is just about plain gas.” The bikers laughed, contemptuous of city slicker modernity.

  Ouch. That was a warning. Don’t pretend to be too like them. They’ll always smell you out.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  The man in the suit jacket bent over Johnny’s engine. He took his time, considering there was absolutely nothing wrong. Johnny’s assistance didn’t seem to be required, which was good because he didn’t feel like turning his back, and particularly not like bending over in a peculiarly vulnerable invitation… The other two men from the truck came close. They looked into the back of the car and saw Bella — whose existence had, for the past few minutes, vanished from Johnny’s consciousness. Something, some lax, living system inside him — blood or lymph or nerves — went bone-tight from the crown of his head to his heels.

  “That your kid?”

  “Yes, she’s my kid.”

  “Can you prove you’re the father?”

  This bloodcurdling question did not require an answer. As Johnny mumbled “Why yes, certainly…” the speaker, a squat youth in baggy cutoffs worn over a stained but gaudy one-piece that surely belonged in another tribal culture altogether, turned away. The guy in the suit jacket slammed the hood down saying, “Yep. That certainly is a catastrophic breakdown.”

  At the same moment Johnny understood that the truck, which he’d taken to be a mere accidental prop, was here on purpose. A chill and horror of excitement ran through him. He was afraid he was shivering visibly — but in fact he’d have had some excuse because just then the rain arrived. It fell over the whole scene like a roll of silk tossed down, as purple as it had looked on the horizon: scented and cold and shocking.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Johnny.”

  “What d’you do?”

  “Uh — I’m an engineer.”

  “Looking for work? We could find you some. You need a wife to go with that kid. We got women too.”

  This banter didn’t mean anything. Johnny had discovered that everywhere you go in the boondocks, people will invite you to stay. It seemed a point of etiquette to regard any chance comer as a potential addition to the community. It wasn’t something to worry about, no more than the equal number of brief acquaintances who invited you to take them home, see their kids through college, advance the capital for them to set up in business. Banter covered the positioning of the truck, the chaining up of Johnny’s car, all under the hammering of the purple rain. Johnny, expressing decent but not effusive gratitude, got into the back with Bella, who woke as the car was being winched onto the flatbed. She didn’t speak or wail but stared all around her mightily. He could tell she’d been dreaming.

  “It’s okay, Bel. The car broke down. These people are giving us a ride into town.” “Daddy, why are you wet?”

  “It’s raining.”

  Bella stared with eyes like saucers, and dawning appreciation of this new means of transport, this audience, this adventure. The bikers peered in at her. “Who’s that?” she demanded. “What’s his name?” It was the stocky young one. She could never be brought to believe that there were people in the world whose names her parents did not know. “Archibald,” said Johnny at random. He spent the rest of the trip naming the other men in the same mode, and explaining over and over that the car was suddenly sick and needed a car-doctor: over and over again, while he made desperate mental tape of their route and reviewed worst case scenarios, and still found a little space in which to want to kill Izzy, just beat her to shit. He knew she wasn’t to blame, but she was the other half of his mind, and the fight-or-flight rush had to have some outlet.

  The drive ended at a wired compound, shrouded by tall dark hedges. Inside, there was a wide yard and flat-topped buildings that looked somehow like a school. The rain made the wall of leaves glow blue-black and glistened on piles of automotive rubbish. Dogs rushed to the gates as the bikers dragged them open, snarling and yelping away from kicks. Bella was scared. Johnny got down with the toddler fastened on his chest like a baby monkey, his pack on his back and jacket bulging. He surrendered his keys with a good grace.

  “Papers?”

  Out here, you had to carry physical documentation. It was a bitch because most of them couldn’t read, and just got mad at you while they were trying to decipher your life’s history. He handed over his folder, hoping the boss, at least, was literate.

  He wished he had the nerve to leave some of his stuff in the car. It would have looked better, he knew. He staggered under his untrusting assumptions, and they led him off to a hall with a scuffed floor of light timber and rows of plastic chairs. The room smelt of kids. He decided that this was the school, in so far as such things still existed. A school, and a junk yard: original combination for some gifted entrepreneur.

  “We’ll take a look, Johnny, just you wait here.”

  One of the bikers — Samuel — watched them through the fireproof glass of the hall doors. Bella was unusually silent — most unusually, because he knew she was riveted with excitement. He looked around and found that she was sitting, legs jutting over the edge of the scummy plastic seat, with one hand ruminatively delving under her skirt. Her expression was of dignified, speculative pleasure.

  Johnny managed to smother hysterical giggles. “Get your hand out of your pants, Bel. People don’t like to see that. It doesn’t look good.”

  This condemnation — always in a tone of mild and absolute certainty — was the worst her Daddy ever issued. Bella understood that concern for the comfort of others and respect for their beliefs was to be her ultimate morality. She removed her hand with a sigh.

  “My nobble went fat. It went by itself.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s the adrenalin rush. Ignore it, kid.”

  Samuel — stringy and pale, with ropy muscled arms and a ponytail — came to fetch them. They were led into a cavern of a mechanic’s workshop. The foreign and menacing smell of heavy oil filled the air. Johnny’s car stood openmouthed on black greasy concrete, surrounded by a slew of tools and power leads. It looked as if the poor beast had been through a rough grilling. Johnny hoped it had managed to hold out.

  The mechanic inspected them. Johnny had rarely met a black man outside the city. Tribal divisions were so stern it would have been pointless to send a white boy off the white squares, under no matter what inalienable flag of truce. But this man’s color was
only the least of the signals he sent out. Johnny gathered that he was looking at the local God, the big chief.

  God was very dark, perhaps fortyish (but Johnny was always making mistakes about age out here), with sleepy narrow eyes and a whisper of moustache above his humorous mouth. Johnny liked him on sight, and was no less very scared indeed. He slid Bel to the ground but kept a tight grip. The wrist, not the hand. One learns these tricks of technique.

  The mechanic wiped his hands on dirty rag.

  “You ain’t armed, boy.”

  A man without a gun on his hip was so peculiar he was downright threatening. Johnny didn’t mean to threaten anybody.

  “I’m a journalist.”

  “Ah — ha. Thought you said you were an engineer.”

  God speaks grammatical English, when he chooses.

  “Engineer — journalist. I’m an eejay.”

  God’s courtiers displayed a hearteningly normal reaction. Samuel giggled, nudged Ernesto in the ribs; Gustave hooted.

  “Hey, eejay. You wanna mend my tv?” Archibald grinned.

  Florimond in the suit jacket cuffed him and shrugged at the visitor, assuming an air of grave man-to-man sophistication.

  “Okay. So what story are you hunting, newshound?”

  Unlike the others, God was not impressed by the eejay tag.

  But Johnny was still recovering from Bella’s masterstroke: from finding himself sitting in a gangster’s waiting room with a two-year-old who was calmly taking the opportunity to get in touch with her emotions… Smothered hilarity maybe gave him an aura so inappropriate as to shift the balance. As the man spoke, the casual promise of death that hung around him became less palpable. Johnny’s territorial blunder might be excused.

  The courtiers grew quiet. Bella squirmed and tugged, displaying her usual pathological failure to read adult atmosphere — which at this moment made Johnny long to break her arm.