Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  I looked at him, trying to decide whether to punch him or not.

  “You weren’t even human when Lenny Hammond found you out on the moors,” he went on. “Just an animal dressed in rags.”

  I stood up.

  “You want to try to work out which side of your bread the butter’s on,” Liam continued. “We’ve been good to you. Rex has been good to you. But you’re a good journalist, and you owe this place more than staying with the Globe as it goes down.”

  I turned to go.

  “I’m trying to turn this village into the center of news-gathering for the whole north of England,” he said. “It’ll put us on the map, give us a lot of clout. And you could help me do that. I’m offering you a chance to do that.”

  I took a single halting step. Then another one. The next one came easier, and the next, and by the time I was through the door and out on the pavement, it was no trouble at all to walk away from Liam’s offer. He was like a radio station: the farther away from him you were, the weaker his message became, until finally you couldn’t hear him at all.

  Liam and Rex were locked in a duel to the death. They pretended it was about who ran the better paper, but it was really about Alice, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much if it hadn’t been for the Crash.

  I missed the Crash. Those who saw it said it was like a swarm of tiny black flies on their monitor screens, or a driving hailstorm, or a slowly blossoming flower. Nobody knew where it came from, or who had written it, but the Crash blew through every firewall on Earth as if they weren’t there. It took down economies, destroyed telecommunications networks, and effectively ended the War, all in about twenty minutes.

  There was chaos, of course, and I missed all that, too. When I finally came round, that day in Rex’s office, the elves had already come out of their millennia-long exile and had simply taken over the country.

  Well, no. That’s not exactly true; they didn’t simply take over the country. They put the country to the sword. They killed hundreds of thousands of people; they laid waste to towns and cities. They forbade us to have internal combustion and mains electricity and telecommunications and a government and, for reasons that escaped everyone, a music industry. The Crash and the chaos that attended the end of the War brought us to our knees, and they were never going to let us get to our feet again.

  We waited for the rest of the world to notice our plight and come to our rescue, but the rest of the world had its own problems. The United States were no longer united; California was just the wealthiest nation in a continent of intermittently warring countries. It was going to be another decade at least before Continental Europe emerged from what, by all accounts, was a bizarre Dark Age. Australia and New Zealand had come through the Crash pretty well, but only a die-hard optimist would have held his breath waiting for help from that quarter. We were all alone, trapped on an island with countless twitchy sylvan psychopaths.

  Bizarrely, there were some compensations. For instance, it turned out that magic actually worked.

  Well, maybe not magic per se, but all that weird fringe stuff like crystal-ball gazing and tea-leaf reading and palmistry and astrology and cutting open animals and reading the future in their entrails.

  It turned out, in those days following the elvish Occupation, that these things always had worked. They just never worked as ways of foretelling the future. What no one had ever cottoned on to was that they all told you what was happening, or what had happened, somewhere in the world. This, of course, was useless, unless you were a journalist, where explaining what’s happening or what has already happened is part of the art.

  The elves thought it was really funny that we had got it so wrong for so many years. They thought it was so funny that it was the only form of communication they allowed us to use. You could find yourself flayed to death for trying to start a local postal service, but the elves smiled benignly on you if you started reading animal entrails.

  It was one of those fields of endeavor where size really does matter. The interior of a rabbit, read by an expert, might, at a pinch, tell you what was going on in London. A pig would give you access to some random gossip and hard news from across the Atlantic. Cut open a cow, however, and the world was your oyster. The guts of an oyster might, if you were lucky, give you a clue to where you left your favorite socks.

  That was how the Chronicle had scored over us, over and over again. After years and years as a national newspaperman, Liam had inherited a farm so enormous that it seemed obscene to describe it as a smallholding. He had access to hundreds of cattle, seemingly thousands of pigs, and uncountable numbers of chickens. Liam’s animals gave the Chronicle access to news the Globe could only dream about.

  Some people were better at it than others. Rex wasn’t bad, but only the best-intentioned critic would have described him as an expert at reading the entrails of recently deceased animals. Alice, on the other hand, was an absolute star. When Alice left Rex and moved in with Liam, the Chronicle became, in its way, as well informed as any national newspaper had been in the days before the Crash. Alice could slaughter a chicken and ask it any question you wanted, and the geometries of its guts would tell you the answer.

  And that, in the end, was what this stupid little war was about. Rex wanted Alice back, and he thought that if he just kept going she would, in time, realize she’d made a mistake and gone off with the wrong bloke. It wasn’t the most bizarre situation I had ever seen, but it was up there in the top five.

  “Liam just tried to sign me up,” I said.

  Rex looked up from his desk. He’d had a bath and changed his clothes and slapped on some aftershave to try to cover the residual smell of pig’s blood, but if I were a betting man, I would have been putting money on him scrubbing himself raw for the next week to get rid of the stink.

  “Liam’s always trying to sign up my staff,” he said, going back to the page of copy he’d been reading when I came in. “He tried to sign up Harry last month.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “Harry threatened to kill him if he ever did it again.”

  “I just thought you should know.”

  He looked up at me again, a little, fearsome, ugly gnome of a man with the sweetest nature of anyone I’d ever met. He sighed and pointed at the chair he kept for visitors. “Sit down.”

  I sat.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I was tempted.”

  He thought about this confession for a few moments. “I can’t offer you any more money.” He clasped his hands in front of him on top of Harry’s copy. I knew it was Harry’s, even reading it upside down, because it was full of commas. Harry put commas in everywhere; he just couldn’t help himself.

  “It’s not the money, Rex,” I said. “Why do you carry on? He’s got half the livestock in the county, he’s got thirty-odd journalists, he’s got that sodding steam-powered press, he’s got that witch—” I stopped. “Sorry.” “That witch” was Alice.

  He shrugged. “I’m not going to give up,” he told me. “Despite what I said earlier, we are going to keep on reporting the news until we absolutely cannot report the news anymore. Even if we have to exist solely on local stories.”

  “If we do that, we’ll last about a fortnight,” I told him. “The advertisers will just go over to the Chronicle.”

  He leaned forward. “If I have to pay for this paper out of my own pocket,” he said calmly, “this paper will continue to be published every Thursday.” He sat back. “We got some useful copy out of the pig; I think if we’re creative, we can spin it out for another three or four issues. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re crazy, if you want the honest truth,” I told him. “You and Liam.”

  He chuckled. “Go home. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “I’m doing Ernie Hazlewright’s funeral in the morning.”

  Rex looked sadly at me and propped his chin on his hand. “I’m going to miss old Ernie,” he said. “He was a proper old lad. Fo
ught in the Falklands. You make sure you do a good job on Ernie.”

  I sat and looked at him, and I felt my shoulders start to slump, the way they always did when we had conversations like this. The Globe was like a black hole; I could get out far enough to peek over the event horizon, but I couldn’t escape the gravity of its impending doom. Rex was going to ride the paper as it went down the tubes, and I was going to be sitting alongside him in the front seat.

  It was a lovely spring morning, fresh and cool. I could smell the dew-damp earth of the fields on either side of the road.

  There were fifteen of us in the journalists’ pool, riding through the French countryside with a column of Alliance armor. The War was in its third year, and it hadn’t gone nuclear yet, apart from places like Kiev and Istanbul. The Alliance was finally making some headway against the Union forces. Everyone felt pretty good.

  A black-and-white road sign went past our Humvee. On it was the name STE. URSULE DU LAC.

  Only an optimist would have called it a village. It was just half a dozen houses and a school grouped around the Norman church of Saint Ursula. It was deserted.

  The Union had something they called “police battalions.” They came in behind the fighting units, and when an area had been pacified, they were supposed to stay behind and make sure that law and order were restored.

  That happened, sometimes. More often, the police battalions were just a euphemistic way of solving the knotty problem of what to do with an Occupied and presumably annoyed civilian population. As the Union advance pressed westward to the Atlantic, they had left hundreds of empty villages in their wake. We’d been on the trail of this one particular battalion for a couple of days now.

  Nobody was under any illusion that the Alliance forces were any better than the Union; there had been atrocity on both sides. But as journalists, we knew which side our bread was buttered on. We were traveling with the Alliance; we were hardly going to file stories accusing them of human rights violations.

  We pulled up in Saint Ursula’s little village square and dismounted from our various vehicles, stretching our legs. The Alliance had already come through here a few hours earlier and pronounced the coast clear, but soldiers fanned out to search the buildings while we journalists stood around smoking and chatting and doing pieces to camera. Someone unpacked a portable catalytic stove and brewed coffee. The smell drifted on the breeze.

  I wandered away from the main group. None of the buildings in the village seemed to be damaged. There was no sign that the War had come this way at all. But there were no villagers. There wasn’t even a stray dog.

  The school was a little way up the single street from the square. I lit a cigarette and put my hands in my pockets and walked up to it. It was white, and there was a little black bell mounted on a swivel over the front door. I walked up the steps. Someone behind me was shouting.

  I looked over my shoulder. One of the Alliance officers was running toward the school, shouting something and waving his arms. It was the little ginger-haired major from New Brunswick, the one who claimed he’d worked on the Chicago Tribune before the War. We all thought he was a dickhead and did our best to ignore him.

  I turned back to the door, turned the handle, and pushed.

  “Anyway,” said the ugly little man on the other side of the desk, “it’s not very much, but it’s something.” He smiled awkwardly. “It’ll keep you off the streets.”

  I looked around me and blinked hard. I said, “Did you just offer me a job?”

  Somewhere, between pushing open the door of Saint Ursula’s school and waking up in Rex’s office, three years had passed. I didn’t know how I had returned from France. I didn’t know the War was over. I didn’t know the elves had taken control of Britain.

  I had turned up in the village a week or so earlier, “an animal dressed in rags,” as Liam put it. The Village Council didn’t know quite what to do with this raving madman. They’d cleaned me up and fed me and, when I didn’t seem too dangerous, Rex offered to give me a job at the Globe’s offices, sweeping up and moving rubbish and stuff.

  I didn’t know why I came out of it when I did. Maybe Rex said something that brought me back from wherever I had gone to hide.

  I didn’t know what I saw when that school door swung open, but late at night, when I was lying in bed, terrible things beat on the thin walls of sleep, looking for me.

  I opened my eyes.

  There was a smell of burning in my bedroom.

  I sat up. The light of a full moon was flooding in through the windows and falling on an elf, which was sitting on the end of my bed, smoking a spliff.

  I shouted something and flopped back onto my pillows.

  “You’re looking well,” said the elf. “Newspaper work obviously agrees with you.”

  I said, “Did anyone see you come in?” Elves were not the most popular people in Britain. If anyone had seen this one enter my house, the most optimistic thing I could look forward to would be a vigorous lynching.

  It took a huge toke on the joint and blew out a stream of smoke that was silver in the moonlight. “It’s half past three in the morning,” it said. “Anyone out at this time of the morning isn’t going to believe they saw me, even if they did. Which they didn’t.”

  I sat up again and mashed the pillows down behind my back. The elf called itself 56K Modem. That wasn’t its real name, of course. The elves took whatever pleased them, including their names. Modem once told me its real name. It sounded like snow settling on a frosty road.

  “What do you want?”

  Modem tapped ash onto the floor. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

  “Do you want one?”

  “No. But I’m rather hurt you didn’t offer.”

  Modem was wearing a collarless white shirt and jeans. Its feet were bare, and its fine gray hair was bound into a meter-long rope. I rubbed my face to try to wake myself up. “What do you want?”

  “I heard that Rex killed the pig.”

  “Everyone else knows about it. Why shouldn’t you?”

  “It’s an interesting situation, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a fascinating situation, but I really need to get some sleep, so I’d appreciate it if you’d come to the point.” Modem had been visiting me, on and off, for a couple of years now. The first time, I had tried to run away screaming, but these days I was almost blasé about it, as if I weren’t sitting in the same room with one of the most dangerous predators on the planet. I could even do small talk with it.

  On the other hand, I had never found out why Modem visited. It usually spent its time taking the piss out of us, telling me how pathetic we were and how brilliant the elves were. I had a feeling—and it was nothing more than a feeling—that, somewhere in the black hole of memory between Saint Ursula and Belton, I had done something for the elves, or been forced to do something for them. It was a prospect that brought me out in a cold sweat.

  Modem looked at me and tipped its head to one side. The moonlight made it look ethereally beautiful. “We were wondering if you’d like us to intervene.”

  “No. Can I get some sleep now?”

  Modem looked hurt. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The elves hated Mankind, of course. They had been masters of the world for uncountable centuries. And then we had come along with our technologies, and we had cut down the forests that were their natural habitats, driving them back and back until all they could do was watch as our cities were built and wait until we were vulnerable.

  “We’re quite interested in Rex Preston,” Modem said.

  I felt ice touch my heart. “Oh?”

  The elf uncrossed its legs, recrossed them, brushed a piece of lint off the thigh of its jeans. “Actually, I’m interested in what you think of Rex Preston.”

  I looked at it. “Why?”

  Modem thought about it for a moment. “Professional curiosity?”

  “He’s a newspaper editor. How on earth can you be p
rofessionally curious about a newspaper editor?” The first rule about the elves was this: You didn’t annoy the elves. That was the only rule, really, but I’d learned that there was some latitude. You could annoy some of them more than others; it was just impossible to tell which ones. You had to wing it.

  “His paper is on its knees. His wife works for his competitor. He just killed his last animal. But he won’t give up.” Modem tipped its head to one side. “Personally, I find that kind of … devotion interesting. I’ve noticed something similar in the Resistance.”

  I burst out laughing. The Resistance was a largely theoretical thing, armed with whatever weapons they could scrounge from the days when the Alliance was based in southern England. They killed elves here and there—on the orders, legend said, of an ex–New Zealand Special Forces Colonel who had found himself stuck here just after the War. For every Resistance success, the elves destroyed a village or a town. Popular opinion had it that the Resistance had caused more loss of life than the elves themselves.

  “Rex isn’t with the Resistance,” I said. “It would get in the way of putting the paper out.”

  56K Modem looked at me and pursed its lips. “All the same,” it said, “perhaps he would bear watching.”

  The elves had something roughly analogous to MI5. They called it The Library, and among other things it was charged with dealing with the Resistance. They hunted down ham radio operators and ham TV operators, they hunted down people who put together kit-cars in their garages or played guitars and sang to each other late at night. I thought it must be a pretty thankless task, but Modem seemed to find it fulfilling.

  “Rex isn’t with the Resistance,” I said again.

  “Harry Burns is.”

  More ice around my heart. “Harry’s not with the Resistance either.”

  “He’s at a meeting right now,” Modem told me. “Over on the outskirts of Sheffield. There are five of them in a house in Dore. They’re planning an assassination. We disapprove of assassinations.”