The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

“My name is Mary McQueen,” she said, lightly. “I fear that I’m a little lost. I’m staying at Raggandale Hall, and I do not know the county at all.”

  “Raggandale Hall! Why, that’s six miles away, even as the crow flies. You must have come over the crest of the moor, through the fog. Did no one warn you not to come this way? The ridge is rarely free from its shroud of low-lying cloud, and the damp ground on this side is treacherous even for sheep.”

  “No,” she said, “no one warned me. I’m quite used to taking six-mile walks at home, although I will admit that the ground is much flatter there, and I never lose my bearings to the extent of not knowing when and how to turn around. The mist on the heights of the moor is very deceptive, and I was surprised to find that I had come out on the opposite side”

  “I’ll take you home when the squall blows over,” I said, compelled to play the gallant in spite of my dark mood, “but it’s a long way, and far from easy. There’s very little chance of reaching Raggandale by nightfall.” I paused again, for reflection, and then said: “In fact, it would be foolish to attempt it. You must come the other way, at least as far as Haughtonlin. The innkeeper at the Black Bull has a fly, and might be willing to lend you his servant to take you home by road. It’s a long way round, but it’s safe. If the fly’s hired out or the servant can’t be spared, you can stay overnight at the inn—or come back lo Stonecroft with me, if you prefer. The scullion can be pressed into temporary service as a chambermaid. I can drive you home myself tomorrow.”

  “That’s very kind,” she said, “but quite unnecessary. I’m sure that I can find my own way home.”

  “I’m perfectly sure that you cannot,” I told her, insistently. “I know how different this moorland is from most of England. Whether you know it or not, Miss McQueen, you’re in an alien land here. This rain is not the first we’ve had this week, and the bog will be exceedingly treacherous for some time to come. There’s no question of your going back that way this evening. You must come with me, at least as far as Haughtonlin.”

  “Very well,” she said. “Since you insist, I must bow to your superior knowledge of this alien land, and accept your guidance. I shall stay the night in Haughtonlin, if there is room at the inn, and make my way home tomorrow. If the weather is fine, though, I shall go on foot. I may be resident in the vicinity for some time, if my cousins at Raggandale are willing to accommodate me, and I ought to get to know the country—especially its dangerous regions.”

  I had to be content with that, for the time being, but we continued chatting. I told her something of myself—my education, my father’s military adventures, my adventures in journalism—but I said nothing about Emily or my current state of mind. It seemed to me that she might be hiding something too, although she gave me abundant news of my acquaintances at Raggandale and described her impressions of the estate in some detail. When I eventually left her at the Black Bull, I told her that I would return in the morning, and that if she really was intent on going up to the head of the valley and over the clouded moor, I would go with her, to make sure that she got safely back to Raggandale Hall.

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Grayling,” she said. “I would doubtless benefit from the services of a guide, and I shall therefore accept your offer to see me safely home, if I will not be causing you any inconvenience.”

  “None at all,” I assured her. “I come to Haughtonlin every day, and walk further up the valley whenever the whim takes me. It might be to my advantage to pioneer a trail that might take me all the way to Raggandale in future.” I said it carelessly, and only realized afterwards that it must have sounded like an expression of my intention to visit her there—but she only thanked me courteously, and smiled.

  * * * *

  I was back in Haughtonlin bright and early, but I went to the graveyard before presenting myself at the Black Bull. I was kneeling by Emily’s grave, oblivious to all else, when I was interrupted by a voice from behind, which said: “I thought it was you, Mr. Grayling.”

  I turned to look at Mary McQueen. In her all-black outfit she seemed every inch the mourner. Her expression was equally somber.

  “I would have come to the Black Bull within the quarter-hour,” I said, a little stiffly. “There was no need to come to find me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she replied, “but I felt a little uncomfortable at the inn. Even though you were so kind as to explain my situation last evening, the landlord and his wife seemed a trifle put out by the presence of a female guest with neither chaperone nor luggage. I can’t imagine why—this is Victorian England, after all, when ladies may take the Grand Tour unescorted.”

  “This is Yorkshire,” I reminded her. “An alien land.”

  She nodded in vague agreement, and then looked pointedly at Emily’s grave.

  “She was my fiancée,” I felt bound to explain, although she had not voiced a question. “She died of a fever shortly before her nineteenth birthday. I wanted to bury her at Stonecroft, next to my mother, but her parents would not hear of it.”

  “I’m sorry to have disturbed you in your mourning,” she said, politely—although she made no move to leave. “I thought that you seemed unhappy yesterday, but I could not fathom the reason why.”

  “There is no reason for me to inflict my unhappiness on others,” I replied, as I got to my feet. I walked back with her to the Black Bull, where I had a brief word with the landlord to make sure that he understood the reason for my presence and why I was heading the wrong way along the valley in the young lady’s company. There was gossip enough about me in the region, without generating more of a less respectful sort.

  The day was bright enough when we started out, but the cloud-cap on the ridge was even lower than usual, and we were surrounded by mist even before we had reached the lip of the granite basin that held the bog. The light of the sun made the white mist sparkle slightly, but the vapor was so thick that we could hardly see the ground beneath our feet, and I knew that navigation would be direly difficult. I thought that I had been there often enough in recent weeks to find my way, at least until we cleared the moist ground and had to clamber up the remaining rocky slopes to the crest of the moor, but I was too optimistic. By the time that the hands of my watch indicated noon I was quite lost, and no longer knew in which direction the ridge lay.

  Had I been alone, I would have turned back a hour earlier, when I was still sure in which direction Haughtonlin lay, but I had represented myself to Mary McQueen as a guide, and had promised to get her home; pride delayed me until I had no idea where I might be. I was about to call a halt and take stock of whatever clues I could find, hoping to recover my bearings, when I found myself confronted by a wall of granite, so dark in hue as to be almost black. It loomed up at least ten feet, and then was lost in the mist. I was sure that I had never seen it before—nor had I ever seen the crevice that gave access to a cave not unlike the one in which I had found Mary McQueen sheltering the day before.

  “We had better rest for a little while,” I said. “The sun is at its zenith now, and there is a chance that the cloud will lift, or even dissipate altogether, giving us an opportunity to see where we are.”

  The woman in black laughed softly, but not unkindly. “It’s a poor explorer who forgets his compass,” she remarked. Without any hesitation, she stepped into the dark opening in the rock-face.

  I started to protest, on the grounds that it would be pitch dark inside the cave, and that I had no more brought a lantern than a compass, but her black form had already vanished into the interior. Instead of calling after her, I followed her into the darkness.

  I had expected it to be cold inside the cave, but no sooner was I within it than my face was bathed by a draught of warm air. If that were not surprising enough, the air was strangely scented, not with the animal reek of a fox’s den or a wildcat’s lair, but with a curiously sweet perfume, like the odor of warm honey. I stopped dead, but I did not turn back towards the silvery mist. Instead, I said: “I must confess, Miss
McQueen, that I am quite lost. I have let you down, and I’m sorry.”

  I heard her laugh again, but the sound seemed to come from a distance, and it was as much a trill as a laugh, more akin to birdsong than any familiar expression of human merriment.

  “I must confess, Mr. Grayling,” she said, then, the words flowing like a cradle-song, “that I have not been entirely honest with you. Although I really am in residence at Raggandale at present, I am no stranger to this cloud. I am not lost at all—but I hope that you will forgive me for my deception very soon.”

  I had not the least idea what to make of this speech, and my confusion was further augmented by a strange sensation that stole over me, which I attributed to the effects of the sickly air that I was breathing in. I felt unnaturally calm—inwardly more peaceful than I had felt in months, certainly since Emily had died and perhaps far longer than that. When a hand took mine and drew me further forward into the darkness, I went meekly, with not the slightest pang of anxiety.

  The floor of the cave sloped downwards, and felt somewhat slick underfoot, but I did not slip or stumble as the invisible hand drew me on. My calmness lapsed by degrees into a near-somnolence, and I lost track of time and direction, although I feel sure that the path we followed as by no means straight. The tunnel was broad, though, and I never had to stoop to save my head from being bumped or scraped. It was almost as if it had been deliberately hollowed out in order to accommodate the passage of human beings—or something of similar size. The air grew warmer, and sweeter still, until I had the feeling that I was no longer breathing air at all, or moorland mist, but something infinitely richer and more nourishing to body and soul alike.

  We walked for a long time in total darkness, although I cannot estimate whether it was for tens of minutes or several whole hours. Eventually, though, we came into a part of the cave where the tunnel broadened much further, into a series of chambers, which were illuminated by a soft bioluminescence produced by some kind of fungus that grew thickly upon the walls and roofs. The light was faint, but perfectly white; once my eyes had adjusted to its magnitude, it was like seeing by starlight on a cloudless but moonless night. The return of visual sensation dispelled my somnolence, without threatening my tranquility in the least.

  My guide was little more than a silhouette against the background radiance, and her pale face did not seem to reflect the light with any distinctness at all, being little more than a dull grey blur atop her thick-clad body. She was no longer alone, and I realized that we had probably had invisible company for some time. The further we progressed through the sequence of chambers, the more individuals of the same kind I saw, passing along the pathway we were following in the same or the opposite direction. Somehow, I formed the impression that I was in some kind of religious community, and that the creatures swarming around me were devotees: a company of nuns, apparently, who had retired from the civilized world to live in closer proximity with their deity.

  Eventually, Mary McQueen invited me to rest, and showed me a covert in which I might sit down.

  “If this really is a nunnery,” I said to her, “it is surpassingly strange. So far as I know, no one in the neighborhood even suspects its existence.”

  “It is not exactly a nunnery,” she replied, calmly. “You might obtain a slightly better understanding of its nature if you likened it to a formicary. Although my sisters and I are certainly more human than insect, in body and soul alike, I like to think that we combine the best features of both those kinds of Earthly creature.”

  As the implications of this speech sank into my consciousness I was slightly surprised to discover that I was not in the least astonished or afraid. I felt, in fact, that I was no longer capable of amazement or fear—or grief either. It seemed to me that a state of Platonic ataraxia had somehow been thrust upon me, making the empire of my reason fully secure for the first time in my brief existence, fully liberating my consciousness from the animal instincts that we call emotions. I was, however, reasonable enough to remind myself that the impression might well be an illusion, and that I must be very careful not take everything that I saw or heard on trust.

  “So this is a hive rather than a community of cenobites,” I said, lightly, “and your mother superior is a queen. I understand the significance of your pseudonym now. Why have you brought me here?”

  “I brought you here because you seemed lonely and desolate,” she said, “and because you have a status and abilities that might be useful to us.”

  I took no offence at the first part of this answer, nor was 1 moved to any keen curiosity by the second. “How might I be of service?” I asked.

  “I shall explain momentarily,” she said, “but I must emphasize first that you are quite free to refuse our offer. While you are here you will be able to exercise a purer kind of reason than the one to which human beings are normally heir, in order that you might be unswayed by instinctive animal revulsion, but it is not our intention to compel your cooperation.”

  “That’s very kind of you, I’m sure,” I said. “Am I right in assuming that your species is not part of the Earth’s Divine Plan, and no evidence of any aspect of the mind of our Creator?”

  “We are not native to this planet,” Mary McQueen confirmed, “nor even this solar system—but if you believe in a Creator, you may take my word for the fact that we are far more representative of the common state of his mind and the apparent ambition of his Divine Plan than your own species.”

  The notion that I was dealing with the intelligent indigenes of another world intrigued me; I was as incapable of reflexive incredulity as I was of instinctive terror. “How many other human beings have you and your sisters brought here before me?” I asked, interestedly. “How many have accepted the offer that you are about to make to me, and how many have refused it?”

  “Our form of governance is far from democracy,” she retorted, “although I think, on due reflection, that you might have been wise to think in terms of a Mother Superior rather than a queen. At any rate, we are uninterested in matters of majority. Since you ask, though, you are the nineteenth person to be welcomed into this particular nest. If all our Earthly nests are taken into consideration, the number of our human recruits is presently something over a thousand. We have only been on your planet for little more than seven centuries. Of all the humans to whom we have made the offer of recruitment, not one has yet refused.”

  There seemed nothing starling in any of these figures, in my newly-remade estimation.

  “Very well, then,” I said, with perfect equanimity. “Explain what you want from me.”

  * * * *

  My seducer explained, very patiently, that I might be useful to her species’ long-term plans by virtue of my education and my nascent vocation as a writer. It was, she told me, highly desirable that her sisters might infiltrate themselves by slow degrees into the upper echelons of human society, recruiting human males who might confer useful social status by means of the institution of marriage, and might serve as prudently-deployed instruments of political and ideological influence. There was, however, a much more intimate function that I might serve in the first instance, whose fulfillment would equip me far better to serve in other ways and would provide highly desirable existential rewards.

  I would, my guide informed me, be asked to serve as a foster-parent to one of the infants of her species, and to nourish it with the utmost care. The vermiform infant would live within me—not merely in my gut, like an ascarid worm or a tapeworm, but actually within my abdomen, sharing the circulation of my blood like any other organ and deriving its nutrition therefrom. While there, it would grow slowly, undergoing the first phase of a long and complex process of maturation.

  The infant would not merely integrate itself into my circulatory system, however; it would also integrate itself into my nervous system. It would gradually take on the form and functions of a massive ganglion: a second brain, equal in complexity and capability to my own, and capable of exchanging information w
ith my own. I would, in some measure, become responsible for the elementary education of the nascent mind within that brain, assisting its gradual transformation from a creature of pure appetite to a creature of considerable intelligence.

  In order that this metamorphosis might be achieved, Mary McQueen told me, it would be necessary for the original infant to be gradually transformed, molecule by molecule and cell by cell, into a kind of flesh more closely akin to mine. By the same token, though, it would assist me—and, in particular, my brain—in a similar metamorphosis, so that my flesh would become more akin to that of the extraterrestrial visitors. Although the continuity of my consciousness would be perfectly preserved, allowing for the normal and inevitable lapses of sleep, its containing vessel would be strengthened in various ways.

  The visitors could not offer me immortality, but they could offer me a much-extended lifespan, potentially measurable in tens of thousands of years. Although I would always remain vulnerable to the possibility of destruction by catastrophic injury, my body would acquire much greater powers of self-repair, and would become virtually invulnerable to the ravages of disease. In addition to these vulgar material benefits, the quality of my experience of the world would be altered in several ways.