by Adam Roberts
‘Space and time are the way the universe is. Just is.’
‘That’s not what Kant says. He says we don’t really know the way the universe just is. All we know is how our perceptions and thoughts structure our understanding.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Kant says that cause and effect are just in our heads?’
‘That’s right.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘If space and time and causality are just inside my head, then what’s my head in? It takes up space, my brain. It takes time to think these thoughts.’
‘There’s something out there,’ Roy agreed. ‘But we don’t know what it is. Here’s a thought-experiment, Kant’s thought-experiment. You can imagine an object in space, can’t you?’
I grunted.
‘OK,’ said Roy. ‘And you can imagine the object being taken away. Yes? Then you have empty space. But you can’t imagine space and time being taken away. You can’t imagine no space, no time.’
I grunted again.
‘That shows that space, time, causality and some other things – they’re part of the way the mind perceives. There’s no getting behind them. Is the Ding an sich itself structured according to that logic? The eyeball cannot see itself. We cannot know. Maybe, maybe not.’
‘Ding,’ I said, my eyelids slipping down my eyeballs, ‘like a microwave oven?’
‘We’re looking for aliens with visual telescopes and radio telescopes,’ said Roy, standing up and putting his beer bottle down. ‘But whatever tools we use, we’re looking for aliens in space and time, aliens that understand causality and number. But maybe those things are not alien. Those things are the way our minds are built. And that means we’re looking in the wrong place. We should not be looking in space, or time. We should be looking in the Ding an sich.’
‘Sick,’ I said, My eyes were shut now. I didn’t seem to be able to open them. Such muscular operation was beyond my volitional control. ‘I feel a bit sick, actually.’
‘Ding,’ I heard him say, at the far end of a very long corridor. ‘You’re done. Let’s open the microwave door, now, shall we?’
I suppose I was asleep. I tried to shift position in bed, but my arms were numb. Sometimes you lie on an arm and it goes dead. But this was both my arms. They were up over my head. A scraping sound. Distantly. I tried to pull my arms down but they were already down. I tried to process this, failed. This is the chance, somebody was saying, or muttering, I don’t know. Perhaps I was imagining it. We’ve never had this chance before. Because although human consciousness is structured by the Kantian categories of apperception, there’s nothing to say that computer perception needs to suffer from the same limitations. It’s all a question of programming! A programme to sift the Centauri data so as to get behind the limitations of consciousness.
I was moving. Everything was dark, dark, dark. My arms were trailing behind me, I thought; and something was pulling my legs, I thought; and I was sliding along on my back. Was that right? Could that be right?
We look out from our planet and see a universe of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability – and we forget that what we’re actually seeing are the ways our minds structure the Ding an sich according to the categories of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability. We look out and we see no aliens, and are surprised. But the real surprise would be to see aliens in such a vista, because that would mean the aliens are in our structures of thought. Surely there are aliens. Of course there are! But they don’t live in our minds. They live in the Ding an sich.
The motion stopped, but I was still too sluggish to move, or speak, or even open my eyes. The next thing I knew, somebody was kissing me on the lips. Goodbye, was a word, and it floated around. Then nothing.
O dark, dark, dark, they all go into the—
Or.
Or something. It came upon me slowly. It, as it were, crept up on me. I couldn’t as yet put a name to it. Let me think through the necessary and contingent possibilities, I thought to myself. It could have been a letter from my mum, in which case it was full of family trivia and Roy’s just yanking my chain for the hell of it. He’s certainly capable of that. The thing, whatever it was, was closer now, or larger somehow, or in some sense more present, although I still couldn’t put a name to it. It could have been a letter from a friend, or from Leicester Lenny, but if so it would only say Q-B4 ch! or Kn-R7 or something, and that could mean nothing at all to Roy. Or it could have been a letter from Professor Addlestone of Reading University, blathering on about something. Or it could have been, the thing was all around me now, or all within me, or otherwise pressing very imminently upon my consciousness. Or it could have been from Lezlie. But then, what? It was full of the usual blandishments? In which case Roy’s hoarding of it is creepy but, in the larger scheme of things, unimportant. That’s not what I’m afraid of though, is it? I felt sick and I was sick and it froze on my chin. I’m afraid the letter says: I’m leaving you, I’ve found someone else. But but but, if it is, then I’ll find out eventually – won’t I. I just need to be patient. I’ll find out in time. Assuming I have time—
Cold.
That was the thing.
That was what had crept up on me. That’s what’s behind the veil. Endless, implacable, killing cold. Even the most cursory examination of the cosmos confirms this.
I sat up.
I was outside, in the darkness, in my indoor clothes. Scalded with the cold. My whole body shook with a Parkinsonian tremor. I angled my head back and the stars were all there, the Southern Fish, the Centaur and the Dove; the Southern Cross itself; Orion and Hydra low in the sky; Scorpion and Sagittarius high up. Hydra and Pegasus. I breathed in fire and burned my throat and lungs. It was cold enough to shear metal. It was cold enough to freeze petrol.
I got to my feet. It wasn’t easy, but I did it. My hands felt as though they had been dipped in acid, and then that sensation stopped and I was more scared than before. There was nothing at the end of my arms at all. I tried rubbing my hands together, but the leprous lack of sensation and the darkness and my general sluggishness meant I could not coordinate the action. My hands bounced numbly off one another. I became terrified of the idea that I would perhaps knock one or more fingers clean off. It looks ridiculous as I write it down, but there, in the dark, in the cold, the thought of it gripped my soul horribly.
I had to get inside, to get warm. I had to get back to the base. I was shuddering so hard I was scared I might actually lose balance with the shivering and fall down – in which case I might not be able to get back up again. Ghastly darkness all about. Cold beyond the power of words to express.
I turned about, and about again. Starlight is the faintest of lights. I could see my breath coming out only because of the vast ostrich-feature-shaped blot that twisted in my field of vision, blocking out the stars. I needed to pick a direction and go. But I couldn’t see any lights to orient me. What if I stumbled off in the wrong direction? I could easily stagger off into the wilderness, miss the base altogether. I’d be dead in minutes.
I addressed myself: take hold of yourself. You were dragged here. Roy dragged you here. Runty Roy; he couldn’t have removed me very far from the base. Presumably he figured I wouldn’t wake up. That I’d just die there in the dark.
‘OK,’ I said, and took another breath – knives going down my throat. I had to move. I started off, and stumbled over the black ground through the black air. I began to fall forward – my thigh muscles were cramping – and picked up my pace to stop myself pitching on to my face. My inner ear still told me I was falling, so I ran faster. Soon I was sprinting. It’s possible the fluids in my inner ear had frozen, or glued up with the cold, I don’t know. It felt as if I were falling, but my feet were still pounding over the ice, invisible below me. I felt like a diver, tumbling from the top board.
And then I saw the sea—
—I was at the c
oast. Obviously I wasn’t at the coast because that was hundreds of miles from the base. But there it was, visible. There was a settlement on the shore, a mile below me, with yellow lights throwing shimmery ovals over the water. There was a ship, lit up like a Christmas decoration, balanced very precisely on top of its own lit reflection. I must have been ten degrees of latitude, or more, further away from the pole, enough to lift the moon up over the horizon. The texture of the sea was a million burrin-marks of white light on a million wavelets, like pewter. There was no doubting what I was seeing. My whole body trembled with pain, with the cold, and I said to myself I’m dying, and I’m hallucinating because I’m dying. I must have run in the wrong direction. I felt as if I’d been running all my life, all my ancestors’ lives combined.
There was a weird inward fillip, or lurch, or clonic jerk, or something folding over something else. I was conscious of thinking: I’ve run the wrong way. I’ve missed the base.
And there was the base. Now that I was there, I could see that Roy had covered the common room window on the inside with something – cloth, cardboard – to make a blackout screen. He had not wanted me to see the light and follow it as a beacon. Now that I was there, I could just make out the faint line of illumination around the edges. I couldn’t feel my hands, or my feet, and my face was covered with a pinching, scratchy mask – snot, sick, tears, frost, whatever, frozen by the impossible cold to a hard crust.
I slumped against the wall, and the fabric of my shirt stuck. It was so stiffened it snapped. It ripped clean away when I got up.
The door. I had to get to the door – that was when I saw … I was going to say when I saw them but the plural doesn’t really describe the circumstance. Not that there was only one, either. It is very hard to put into words. There was the door, in front of me, and just enough starlight to shine a faint glint off the metal handle. I could not use my hands, so I leant on the handle with my elbow, but of course it did not give way. Locked, of course locked. And of course Roy would not be opening it for me this time. Then I saw – what I saw. Data experiences of a radically new kind. Raw tissues of flesh, darkness visible, a kind of fog (no: fog is the wrong word). A pillar of fire by night, except that ‘it’ did not burn, or gleam, or shine. ‘It’ is the wrong word for it. ‘It’ felt, or looked, like a great tumbling of scree down an endless slope. Or rubble gathering at the bottom and falling up the mountain. Forwards, backwards.
It was the most terrifying thing I ever saw.
Flames about me, and black coals the size of mountains.
There was a hint of – I’m going to say, claws, jaws, a clamping something. A maw. Not a tentacle, nothing so defined. Nor was it a darkness. It made a low, thrumming chiming noise, like a muffled bell sounding underground, ding-ding, ding-ding. But this was not a sound-wave sort of sound. This was not a propagating expanding sphere of agitated air articles. It was a pulse in the mind. It was a shudder of the soul.
Flames all about me, and the blackness of night rolled into giant coals. I was in some titanic fireplace being burned, and the burning consumed me. Sylphs of light, like the aurora australis in the sky, flickered about my head. It wasn’t my head. My head was wholly and acephalically gone. Top of the world, Ma. Top of the world.
The world-serpent slid monstrous from its den and I knew it was going to devour me.
I could not get inside the base, and I was going to die. I felt the horrid cold in the very core of my being. Then ‘it’, or ‘they’, or the boojummy whatever the hell (I choose my words carefully, here) it was, expanded. Or undid whatever process of congealing that brought it – I don’t know.
Where I stood experienced a second as-it-were convulsive, almost muscular contraction. Everything folded over, and flipped back again. ‘It’, or ‘they’ were not here any longer. In fact they had been here aeons ago, or were not yet here at all.
I was standing inside the common room.
Do not demand to know how I passed beyond the locked door. I could not tell you.
The warmth of the air burned my throat. I could no longer stay standing. I half slumped, half fell sideways, and my arm banged against one of the heaters – it felt like molten metal, and I yelled. I rolled off it and lay on the floor, and breathed and breathed.
I may have passed out. I have no idea how I got inside. I was probably only out for a few moments, because the next thing I knew was that my hands were in agony. Absolute agony! It felt like the gom jabbar, like they had both been stuffed into a tub of boiling water. Looking back I can now say what it was: it was sensation returning to my frostbitten flesh. But by God I’ve never felt such pain. I screamed and screamed like the Spanish Inquisition had gone to work on me. I writhed, and wept like a baby.
Somehow I dragged myself into a sitting posture, with my back against the wall and my legs straight out on the floor. Roy was standing in the common room doorway. In his right hand he was holding what I assumed was a gun, although I later realised it was a flare pistol.
‘You murdering bastard,’ I said. ‘Have you come to finish the job? You going to shoot me down like a dog?’ Or that’s what I tried to say. What came out was: ‘yrch yrch orch orch orch’. God, my throat was shredded.
‘The thing-in-itself,’ he said. There was a weird bend in his voice. I blinked away the melting icicles from my eyelashes and saw he was crying. ‘The thing-as-such. The thing per se. I have experienced it unmediated.’ His face was wet. Tears slippy-sliding down, and dripping like snot from his jowls. I’d never seen him like that before.
‘What,’ I croaked, ‘did you put in my whisky?’ Oh God, the pain in my hands! And now my feet were starting to rage and burn too. Oh, it was ghastly.
He stopped crying, and wiped his face in the crook of his left arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Even at this juncture he was not able to look me in the eye. He lifted his right hand, holding the flare pistol, slowly, until he was holding it across his chest, like James Bond in the posters.
I was weeping. Not because I was scared of dying, but just because my hands and feet hurt with such sharp and focused intensity.
Roy took a breath, lifted the flare pistol to his own head, and pulled the trigger. There was a crunching bang, and Roy flopped to the ground. The common room was filled with fluorescent red-orange light and an extraordinarily loud hissing sound. For a moment we were in a luridly lit stage set of Hades.
What had happened was this: the tip and fuse of the flare projectile had lodged itself in Roy’s skull, and had ejected the illumination section and its little asbestos parachute at the ceiling, where it snagged against the polystyrene tiles and burned until it was all burned out.
I sat in that ferociously red-lit room, with molten chunks of polystyrene dripping on to the carpet. I was agonised by my hands, feet, face. Then the shell itself burned free and fell to the ground, where it fizzled out.
Roy was not dead. Nor was I, amazingly. It took me a while, and an effort, and the whole way along I was sobbing and begging the cosmos to take the pain away; but I got to the radio, and called for help. They sent an air ambulance that laid a pattern of flares on the unlit runway during their first fly by and landed alongside them on their second. It took four hours, but they got to us, and we did not die in the interval.
I crawled back to Roy, unconscious on the floor, and pulled the shell-tip from the side of his head. There was no blood, although the dent was very noticeable – the skin and hair lining the new thumb-sized cavity all the way in. There was little I could do, beyond put him in the recovery position.
Then I clambered painfully on the sofa, my hands and feet hurting a little less. Then, surprisingly enough, I fell asleep. Roy had dissolved a sleeping tablet in the whisky, of course, to knock me out; and when the pain retreated just enough I couldn’t fight off the chemical effect any longer. I was woken by the sound of crashing, and crashing, and crashing, and then one of the ambulance men came through the main door with an axe in his hand.
We were flown to Halley
, on the coast – the subject of my vision, or whatever that had been. We were hospitalised, and questioned, and my hands were treated. I lost two fingers on my left hand and one on my right, and my nose was rescued with a skin graft that gives it, to this day, a weird patchwork-doll look. I lost toes too, but I care less about those. Roy was fine: they opened his skull, extracted a few fragments of bone, and sewed him up. Good as new.
I don’t think they believed his version of events, although for myself I daresay he was truthful, or as truthful as circumstances permitted. The official record is that he had a nervous breakdown, drugged me, left me outside to die and then shot himself. He himself said otherwise. I’ve read the transcript of his account. I’ve even been in the same room with him as he was questioned. ‘I saw things as they really are, things per se, I had a moment – that’s the wrong word, it is not measured in moments, it has always been with me, it will always be with me – a moment of clarity.’
‘And your clarity,’ asked the investigating officer sternly, ‘was: kill your colleague?’
He wanted the credit all to himself, I think. He believed he was the individual destined to make first contact with alien life. He wanted me out of the way. He didn’t say that, of course, but that’s what I think. His explanation was: my perceptions, my mental processes and imagination, would collapse the fragile disintermediating system he was running to break through to the Thing-as-Such. I confess I don’t see how that would work. Nonetheless: he insists that this was his motive for killing me. Indeed, he insists that my reappearance proved the correctness of his decision, the necessity for my death – because by coming back at the time I did, I broke down the vision of the Ding an sich, or reasserted the prison of categorical perception, or something, and the aliens fled – or not fled, because their being is not mappable with a succession of spatial coordinates the way ours are. But: I don’t know. Evaporate. Collapse away to nothing. Become again veiled. He wrote me several long, not terribly coherent letters about it from Broadmoor. I still prefer the earlier explanation. He was a nerd, not right in the head, and a little jealous of me.
