The Miocene Arrow

by Sean McMullen

  My affair with Rosie lasted two years, until she went to a school overseas on some teacher exchange scheme. Even now—well, until the sea-call at any rate—we remained friends. Jillian’s prudery grew steadily into more of a contrast with my own new attitudes. I began to insist on more intimate fondlings, then consummation. She resisted, she said the idea was disgusting. We began to drift apart. She finally struck up a strange relationship with the class nerd in Biochemistry 2, and they were still happily together when I lost touch with them in the early 1990s.

  There now, my unknown reader, you have it all. As I see it, the cetezoid that we reconstructed had telepathic powers, and he was probing about in my memory to find a weakness common to all humans. The basic sea-call seems to depend on body mass alone, but humans could probably resist it. The cetezoid needed a second weakness. He found it, too, but it is not what you probably think. It was not fear of ridicule, or even sheer lust, but the willingness to change one’s mind and try a new idea. All of us have that ability, all of us would rather let our hand drop to Rosie’s thigh than wave farewell. Figuratively, at any rate.

  A few days after my brain replayed the start of my affair with Rosie, the cetezoids escaped. Every so often they were transported in a truck to a university lab where they would be examined in certain benchmark tests. On this trip, our truck failed to take a bend, crashed through a safety rail and landed in a deep tidal gorge. All humans on the truck were drowned, but no trace was ever found of the two cetezoids.

  As well as being a tragedy it was also a great setback to the project. Another clone was prepared for the memory transfer and the experiment started all over again. Eight months went by.

  One morning I arrived at work and let myself into a high-security room in the computer centre. I felt an odd, almost sensual twinge of pleasure and surrender, then I awoke, battered and famished. My digital watch showed that five days had passed: five days in the secure room, five days while I did … what? My fingernails were torn, and the east wall was smeared with blood, as if I had been trying to claw and batter my way through it. I hobbled stiffly across the room and tapped the exit code into the door’s touchpad. It opened at once. Outside, the corridors were empty and the phones were dead.

  Glass in some windows was broken and bloodied, always those facing east. The sea was to the east. The drop from many of the broken windows was considerable. Crumpled heaps that had been my colleagues lay at the bases of several east walls.

  I went to the Director’s office suite. It was empty, and the glass door to the observation patio overlooking the beach was open. Taking a pair of field glasses from a rack I walked out to the rail and looked down. There was a sheer drop to the sand, and sand was blowing over a body wearing a familiar suit, directly below. A sea breeze wafted a sickly scent to me, something far more ominous than rotting seaweed. There was a scum on the water, and it extended a long way offshore. The field glasses resolved human corpses, the tide was thick with bodies. I had been lucky. Not many people had been in a place where they had to think to get out, and they had mindlessly obeyed a call to walk east into the sea.

  I lowered the field glasses and shambled inside, flopping heavily into the Director’s chair and shutting the world out with my hands while I first absorbed the shock, then tried to think it through. There was the memory of a memory … I tried to think calmly. It was impossible. I gave up, surrendered, accepted that I was doomed … and piece by piece ideas and memories began to fall into place.

  A hand wavering, then descending to a thigh: it was an act of deliberate surrender, something that I would do again if given the option. For someone else it might be reversed: the abandoning of lechery for religion, for example. Eight years ago I had thought a lot about that incident, and it was not long before the inexplicable accident when two cetezoids had escaped. The cetezoids! Thousands, perhaps millions of people had been called to the sea. My lapses eight years earlier had stopped not long before the cetezoids had escaped.

  Subsequent research with the remaining pair and new clones suggested that the species once had a very advanced society. There were indications of complex rituals and behavior, and an advanced language full of unintelligible concepts. If they had reached such a level of sophistication, and if individuals bore scars from fighting … did they have wars? If so, what were their weapons? Could I recognize them as such? An ancient Greek might know a spear-wound when he saw one, but what would he make of radiation burns, or a human shadow burned into the wall of a building? If cetezoid tusks were only for formal duels, their weapons of war might be unrecognizable. They could not have bred great numbers in eight years, but they probably rallied the existing populations of whales and dolphins and taught them to fight us.

  Concentrating very hard, I tried to recall what I had been thinking of in the secure room before the oblivion. There it was, as faint as the distant gleam of an OBU in the evening sky: the memory of a hand descending to a thigh. Surrender.

  Surrender to new ideas is the glory of the human race, it is the powerhouse of creativity. Einstein had once surrendered his belief in Newtonian mechanics, in fact all progress is due to abandoning old ideas for something better. I refused to feel guilt about my surrender in Poynton’s Bar and Grill on that hot afternoon in the mid-seventies—yet right or wrong, it is a weak point in the human mind. Everyone has their own private watersheds, moments when they have abandoned something. The cetezoids somehow used that moment of surrender.

  Human dominance of the material world had dipped us in the waters of the Styx and made us as invulnerable as Achilles with heel armor … yet Achilles’ brain, too, had not been in contact with the enchanted waters. A single, well-aimed arrow from an unrecognizable Miocene weapon would sink straight in. I could have waved goodbye to Rosie instead of touching her thigh, but my hand descended. When I woke up from the sea-call it had been descending for five days.

  Ideas flicked through my mind, like abstracts in a scanner. This was like a neutron bomb, it destroyed-people but left buildings intact. Intact for what? Cetezoids could not leave the water and take over our cities. Still, it was an answer, even if it was incomplete. I took out my pocket diary and scribbled a few lines of explanation. Where to leave the message? In the Director’s office? Yes, in the middle of the desk, held down by his meteorite paperweight. When they came they would check his office first … when who came? I left it there anyway.

  I found two lengths of chain touchlocks, and as I moved about the Institute I kept myself chained to at least one fixture at all times. If a second strike came I would be rendered mindless again by the cetezoids’ weapon, but I could not unchain myself without thinking.

  I decided that my next warning would be broadcast to the world. I tried several hand-held cell-comms, but although the batteries were charged, I got no replies. Still, I broadcast my message, hoping that someone would hear even if I could not receive them. Each truck owned by the Institute had a radio, so I decided to chain myself to the steering column, then drive slowly inland, broadcasting my message as I went. I had to think to steer, so I would be safe. I would rig up a dead hand switch for the brakes in case a sea-call came while I was driving.

  If people were walking they could cover no more than 300 miles in five days, so there were bound to be many people still left. I could tell them what was really happening, show them how to tether themselves against the oblivion of a sea-call. I went to the cafeteria, found some sealed health bars and ate them quickly, then packed food for a week. Next I went looking for a truck. The parking lot was empty.

  The nearest suburb was a mile away, and along an unfenced road through a flat, open stretch of parkland. There was nothing to chain myself to, not a tree, not a fencepost. The only other road followed the coastline to the university, and walking that one was out of the question. My next thought was to join together a mile of chain, but that would also allow me to reach the sea if the cetezoids used their weapon again.

  I stared down the road from the perimete
r of the Miocene Institute with tears on my cheeks. I would have to walk it without being tethered, and if another sea-call came, my mind would be seized by the Miocene Arrow through that window of surrender … unless I could close it.

  Could I bring myself not to let my hand drop to Rosie’s leg? Could I deny my watershed, the turning point in my whole outlook? In a facile sense it was easy to say yes, yet I had to really believe it if I wanted immunity from the cetezoids’ sea-call. I needed that immunity if I wanted to walk untethered down the road from the Miocene Institute to relative safety. “It wasn’t wrong!” I shouted down the road, yet I knew that it was not a case of right or wrong. I was vulnerable because I was willing to question my own beliefs in some circumstances. My own pride and self-respect would never let me give up the right to do that, and an incorporeal hand would always be poised to seize me. I clung to the bars of the Institute’s gate, shouting obscenities at the sea and at myself.

  Well, now I have come full circle with my story. A grubby little episode of student infidelity has brought down civilisation as we know it. The sea-call now works on all large mammals, but I suspect that humans had not been susceptible until I provided a window. Dear reader, if it is any comfort to you, my days and nights in Rosie’s bed were truly wonderful.

  Ah, the sky is getting light outside, and it is time that I was getting into my truck and releasing the safety catch on my fully automatic, gas-operated, magazine-fed assault rifle. I shall exchange this diary with my earlier rough notes beneath the late Director’s meteorite paperweight, and most likely I shall vanish from the pages of history forever. Maybe I’ll live though, in DNA with avian genes spliced in to make my descendants immune to the sea-call.

  Goodbye, reader, and wish me luck. They say the only truly brave people are the frightened ones who overcome their fears. Just now I am very, very frightened.

  Dr. James Brennan: BSc, MSc, PhD.

  “Good fortune go with you, James Brennan,” said Vander Hannan as he closed the folder on the sheaf of pages.

  Darien had given the gun to Theresla and was massaging her stiff fingers, but she stared at him and arched her eyebrows as if to say, Well, what did you think? Vander sat back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “There are many legends of how the Call came into being, Semme Darien. Why should I believe this one in particular?”

  “Because it is true,” Theresla answered for her.

  “Truth needs proof, or it might as well be a lie.”

  Theresla considered for some moments.

  “Ask me some mysteries.”

  “Does my mother live?”

  “Yes, she is south of Forian and seems to be traveling to the Colandoro border.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “Uh-uh. Proof may be obtained by sending a dispatch to the Bartolican envoy in Denver. Tell her to write when she arrives. Next question?”

  “What about an explanation of why inexperienced teenage Yarronese flyers can match Bartolican wardens victory for victory, while our carbineers triumph in every battle?”

  “The Yarronese youths supposedly have six victories for every loss. One of them has twenty-five.”

  Vander went white, but did not react otherwise. The true osses were known to only a dozen men west of the Yaronese border. How could she have known? That was a question she would not answer, of course.

  “Then tell me why,” said Vander.

  “The Yarronese are good, but not as good as that. There is an aviad wingfield in the eastern Callscour lands. Your wings are being stolen and flown there while being written off as battle losses. I think they are to be used in Austral-can wars, but even I don’t know everything. I keep hearing the term Miocene Arrow in connection with your wings. Have you heard it as well?”

  “No,” Vander admitted. “Were you serious about my mother being alive?”

  “She must be at least forty pounds lighter, but she is alive and uninjured. Write to Denver, check for yourself.”

  “And if you convince me, then what? What do you want?”

  Theresla sauntered across and leaned on the back of Vander’s chair.

  “You are regarded as too patriotic for some of the se- crets that are currently being whispered in the Condelor palace, Sair Hannan. This war is not in Bartolica’s interests, you see. We can provide you with those secrets, and a few more besides.”

  “What do you want in return?”

  “Acting Inspector General, we want you to do what any royal Bartolican warden and patriot would do.”

  5

  BROTHER GLASKEN

  4 October 3960: Forian

  Rollins’ first view of Forian filled him with a mixture of awe and dismay. It was a bigger and older city than Median, and while it also had the advantage of ancient city walls, the walls of Forian were many times thicker and twice as high. Built in an age when the cart cannon ruled, they had long been swamped by outer suburbs of the Yarronese capital. Houses, towers, churches, and picturesque footbridges had encrusted the massive and ancient walls since the wardenate system had begun, but now there were only the stumps of all that left, and the walls again stood clear above the outer city in defense of the Airlord’s palace and inner suburbs. A hundred and twenty trams were in the marshaling yards, with their carriage guns concentrated on the western walls, while cart cannons were dispersed through the outer city, adding their heavier shells to the bombardment.

  Since the war began the Bartolicans had become renowned for taking advantage of a Call’s passage. Although Calls disrupted both sides equally on the Mexhaven battlefields, in this war the Bartolican carbineers always recovered faster. This was the way that they had taken Middle Junction, Green River, Median, Kennyville, and the whole of Montras. Forian proved a lot harder. The city had been given time by the brief death struggles of the western and middle cities, and the Bartolicans were greeted with mines, booby traps, and ancient stone walls defended by thousands of well-supplied reaction guns and more cart cannons than the Bartolicans could bring to bear.

  A Call blanketed the city battlefield a week after Rollins arrived with his black tram. It was a sign of desperation that the Bartolicans were willing to risk their precious and enigmatic black trams merely for the sake of their additional roof guns. Now that it was early October the high command wanted a result from the fighting. Rollins heard Call handbells being rung in the distance and strapped himself into the driver’s seat of the tram.

  The world stopped.

  He awoke, as usual, to find the day more advanced and his body fatigued with three hours of trying to mindlessly escape his straps and walk west. As Rollins watched the Bartolican guns began firing again. The tram’s four-inch carriage gun added its voice to the barrage; then all was drowned by a massive explosion that seemed to lift a section of the city’s walls and dump it to shatter like a clod of earth. When the pall of dust and smoke had cleared a smoothly sloping pile of rubble beckoned to the besieging Bartolicans. Rollins quickly climbed to the roof of his tram for a better view.

  “There they go, as usual our carbineers were in the right place at the right time again,” said one of the men working the carriage gun.

  “What was that huge explosion?” asked Rollins.

  “Hah, same as at Median. Those dead-hump Yarronese store their shells in the walls to save on the real estate for a proper bunker. We only had to land one shell on it, and it’s come on in folks.”

  In some ways it made sense. Centuries of having wardens and squires fight limited, chivalric wars in the air had replaced the military common sense of the ancients with practical economic expediency. Why prepare for a besieging army that would not ever arrive?

  The bull-ant swarm of Bartolican carbineers ran unimpeded over the rubble of the wall, went over the top, and vanished from view. Of course there would be days of fighting to tame the rest of the inner city.

  The massed chattering of reaction guns rolled out over the city like hail on a slate roof. Heavy react
ion guns, the type that carbineers did not carry. The swarm on the rubble of the wall slowed and stopped as the carbineers sought cover. The chatter of reaction guns continued as the carbineers already inside either hid or fought for their lives against overwhelming firepower. At a mirrorflash signal from the Bartolican command center the two gunners loaded another four-inch shell and aimed just behind the walls of Forian. The bombardment from the tram sidings began again.

  “Someone must’ve learned their lesson in Median,” said the gunner’s jack as he cranked another shell up from below.

  “How’s the supply holding?” asked the gunner.

  “Crayon code says we got nineteen after this one.”

  “Nineteen! What happened to the hundred we started with?”

  “Fifteen at Median, the rest hereabouts. They don’t grow on bushes, Lek. We should ease off.”

  “We can’t ease off. You know what shit we get for doing our own act, even if we’re right sometimes. If they want to fight on empty, that’s orders. Hey, we’re like wheels in a machine. One wheel might think it’s a good idea to go faster or slower, but then your whole machine’s got a problem.”

  By late afternoon the Bartolican attack had been repulsed after the carriage guns had exhausted their shells in close synchronization. The cart cannons boomed on for a short time, then were silent as well. Rumors circulated that two thousand carbineers had died. Official word was that the attack had achieved its aims: There was, still an hour of light left when the cart cannons of the Yarronese opened fire from behind the walls. The range was extreme, but the rain of shells was intense while it lasted. The Yarronese were letting the Bartolicans know that they were in full control behind the walls. To an untutored eye the damage was minimal, but one black tram received a direct hit and was blown apart.