by Adam Roberts
‘As it should be. And you have enough raw material to go on with?’
Soop hiccoughed, a high-pitched sound. ‘We,’ he started, and then he stopped himself.
‘What?’
‘The raw data the Centre sends,’ said Heston, smoothly, ‘is more than adequate to our needs.’
‘Good,’ said Jeunet, giving Soop a hard look. ‘Good. So. Is it this rice farmer’s tale you are going to give me? I mean, is it in a fit and decent condition to give me?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Tomorrow, then,’ said Jeunet, with finality, and he got to his feet leaving his drink untouched.
~ * ~
2
Jeunet made his way to the guest hut in the lee of the small cliff, a scalloped white slice cut like a smile into the green of the hill. Soop, following Heston, took the opposite direction, along the upward path to the broad hall. From this slightly higher position, no more than twenty yards above the terrace and beach below, the view opened up: the three other islands, like three green lids sealed over the blue-green pans of their own reflections; and beyond that, far away under the glassy sunlight, the broad low ebony-coloured bar of the mainland. They walked up in silence. A week or so earlier, Soop had uncovered several key story-texts -visual narratives, that amongst other things explained why the name Heston was so popular amongst followers of the Man of the Strong Arm. An actor with that name had appeared in several heroic texts from the industrial period. Soop found a subversive pleasure in silently contrasting Heston’s short, pen-thin frame and moist eyes with the rugged handsomeness of the original strong-man actor - a towering, jut-jawed, bulky individual. Of course it hardly mattered, given the weapon at his belt, whether Heston were muscular or not.
‘Come along,’ Heston said, without looking over his shoulder.
At least, Soop told himself, Jeunet looks like Jeunet. Jeunet the Great. And, more, Jeunet the Great had not been only an actor. Visual narratives were slippery. It was harder recovering them, and if they were in colour (which, Soop thought, was a necessary precondition for modern interest) then they were much more likely to contain unacceptable or harmful material than written texts. That was one reason amongst many why Soop preferred the latter.
They were at the top of the path now. A handful of tiny white clouds went along the sky, passing one after the other close across the sun as if wiping its face. A broadcast of glitter speckled the sea beneath in a swathe from mid-ocean to horizon, looking like nothing so much as myriad droplets of sweat discarded by the strenuously gleaming sun.
Clearly, then, Jeunet’s boat was coming for him tomorrow. He had said tomorrow, meaning, have the story ready for me to take away then.
Soop had worked with Heston long enough, on this remote place, for the older man not to need to give instruction to the younger. Soop knew that Heston would go off for his siesta, just as Jeunet had gone for his; and that in the meantime Soop was to work on preparing a copy of the heroic story in a finished form for the visiting superior to inspect. The afternoons and early mornings were Soop’s golden times. Free from the restraint of his elder he roamed uninhibited through the word-forests hauled, unsystematically and indeed erratically, from the databases of the degraded past. Most of it had already passed through the filter of the historians, those guardians of orthodoxy, and all dangerously historical material been removed. But this process could never be pure, for, Soop often thought, although the peoples of the degraded past had evidently lived in what must have been a thoroughly exhausting fever dream of image, fantasy, dream, scientifiction, speculation, oddity and imaginary worlds, nevertheless some of this art was grounded in the business of historical living. From time to time he would uncover stories set not in a clean and uplifting fantasy place, but actually in that vanished, degraded world. Soop sometimes worked on retrieving accounts of imaginary cities that suddenly shifted their meaning and revealed themselves to be actual accounts of urban living. That was why Soop preferred the science fiction: set on distant worlds no human had ever even come close to actually visiting, these stories - or most of them - were free to give vivid life to the heroic narrative of strength and purity. But then again, mostly Soop found comfort in the mere blocks of texts, the characters and numbers and incomprehensible jumbles of queer symbols, a third of it garbage, deliberately or otherwise. Yet purge the text of this code, as it was called, and more often than not it would be possible to follow long unbroken strings of language all along their thrilling length to conjure heroes - flights through the daysky and the nightsky, journeys to other worlds, into the comforting vales and forests of fantasy lands.
Heston had gone to his room for his sleep now, and Soop walked through the workshop. Women were cleaning it, and they leapt away from him and pressed their backs to the walls as he passed through. Some of them automatically zipped up their eyeslits. Others looked to their maitre for leadership as to whether to flee the room entirely; but Soop had not communicated anything to the maitre, and her swathed form could only shudder with uncertainty. He passed straight through, opened the rear door and stepped outside.
There was a glade outside, sown with smooth lawn and surrounded on three sides by solid curtains of foliage, irregular and pitted masses of several mingled shades of dark green. As soon as he stepped through the door, this solid vegetative curtain shook, and a body darted out from it. It was a female, dressed in trousers and a white kaftan, and shockingly bareheaded - a mass of hair of a gleaming blackness tied in a stem at the back.
‘That’s the second time you’ve come here naked,’ said Soop, in an amused voice.
The girl fumbled at the scarf around her neck and pulled it hurriedly over the crown of her head.
‘Still,’ said Soop, uncomfortably aware of his body’s automatic reaction to the proximity of this individual, and speaking to create a tiny heroic narrative of his own in which that arousal was an irrelevance, ‘it’s not as if you’re a woman.’
‘My husband,’ she said, in her execrably-accented English, ‘has a different opinion.’
‘You never cease to astonish,’ said Soop, excited still further by her bold-facedness in answering him back - in speaking to him at all. ‘Husband indeed! So, so. Have you got more for me?’
She held out a fishstick-sized chip.
‘And that?’
‘Moon.’
‘Moon?’
‘I mean,’ she said, after swallowing and licking her lips, ‘it’s another version of the moon story. The Armstrong story. That’s what I mean.’
‘The one you gave me yesterday?’
‘It’s a very popular story from that period,’ she said, glancing anxiously at the open door behind him. ‘Very popular. There are hundreds of different retellings of it.’
‘I’ve heard you whistle that tune before,’ said Soop, fumbling in his satchel for payment. ‘And I’ll tell you straight up, I’m not paying you hundreds of times for the same story. I’m intrigued as to how this version is different from the one you sold me yesterday. I’ll take it. It’s a good story, if a little dour. It’s good, it’s heroic. It’s just a little dour.’ She took the money. And he took the data stick. And that was the end of their exchange, except that they both loitered there, in the clearing.
She kept staring at him. Extraordinary!
‘There’s a very important man who’s come to visit us,’ said Soop, his heart thundering in his chest with the excitement of imparting this news to her. But why should he care about impressing her? Barely even a her!
‘Very important?’
‘A very senior man.’
‘Seems to me,’ she replied, ‘all your men are senior.’
‘You say that,’ burst out Soop, in a little spurt of laughing exasperation, ‘as if it is a strange thing!’
And then, after all her extraordinary behaviour, the female asked the most extraordinary question of all. She said, ‘Does this senior man have weapons?’
It
flashed upon Soop that there was something fantastic, something otherworldly, or perhaps more accurately something anachronistic, in her manner; and occurred to him further that, paradoxically, this was the reason he kept coming back to talk with her. Something about her echoed, or hinted at, the art, or at any rate some of the art he was employed to read, here on this remote place where contamination (that most terrible thing) could be more easily contained. As if, to speak more fancifully, she had flown through time to be here today, as some of the heroes of science fiction sometimes did, like the hero from out of the Well at the Century’s End, to visit some distant future people. She hadn’t of course; she was just a barbarian female. But the glamour of possibility haunted Soop’s young mind. Come from the past where women might ask any and every impertinent question. He looked at her again. Her scarf was slipping back once more, for she had no more care for her nakedness than a child, or a beast. Her eyes seemed enormous, yet not enormous in the way a beast’s eyes are large, but rather in a distinctly if exaggeratedly human manner: the black of her pupils seemed to bleed into the intensely dark brown of her irises, and these two extraordinary circles were moated by sheer white - luminous, almost gleaming, as if lit by some element within her. These eyes might hypnotise him. Yet she wasn’t even a person. Fascinating contradictions.
‘Well?’ she prompted.
‘He is very strong,’ said Soop, thinking back to her impertinent question. Merely saying the words was enough to send the twinge of awe through his belly. He thought of Jeunet, taking his afternoon repose in the hut by the sea, just a few hundred yards away; all that manliness, strength and potency coiled, as it were, in rest. But his natural ebullience would not permit awe to silence him for very long. ‘Of course he is armed.’ He plucked his own pistoletta from his belt and, not meaning to threaten or intimidate her, but merely because it fell to him as the most natural way of showing it off to an interested party, he pointed its muzzle at her. Her striking eyes went even wider than before, and her shoulders snapped up and back. A tremor became evident in her whole body. ‘This,’ said Soop, carelessly, ‘would kill you easily enough, of course. Erase you. But the sort of weaponry he carries . . .’ It was wonderful even to contemplate it. ‘This whole island . . .’he said, moving the muzzle from left to right to gesture at the place as a whole. ‘All of it . . . it’s a great strength he has . . .’
Over their heads, in that portion of sky demarcated by the hemming treetops, four distant bitterns moved, as if sliding magnetically across a blue screen.
‘Anyway,’ he said, putting his pistoletta back in his belt. ‘You asked.’
She had gone very pale.
‘I wish I knew why you’re so interested,’ he added despondently, feeling somehow thwarted, although he could not say why, or of what. ‘I don’t know why you’re so interested in his weapon. You’ve got your money, haven’t you? Shouldn’t you be running back? Where,’ he added, almost at a shout, ‘do you get all these stories from anyway?’
‘He’s here for the stories,’ she said, in a voice from which the earlier colour, the tones of will, was now quite emptied out - a small voice.
‘The superior? Of course he is.’
‘I can bring you stories.’
‘You? Yes, you can. What do you mean by saying that?’
‘Good stories.’
‘Of course you can,’ he retorted, puzzled.
But she was trembling now in quite a marked manner. She was shaking so hard now that her scarf had fallen again around her neck. The naked skin of her face did not fascinate Soop so much as the hair. The purity of colour of her hair, like grooved plastic set upon her head, startled him somehow. ‘Your misfortune,’ he said, ‘is to have been born outside’ (he supposed her to have been born outside - or, no, that is not quite right; he supposed nothing about her because, except on those afternoons where they met here, in this clearing, at the back of the workshop, he thought nothing about her at all. But faced with her now, his brain did the best it could, as far as supposition went), ‘to have been born outside the protection of the Man of the Strong Arm.’
‘Your Leader.’ She almost gasped it.
‘Yes. Strength - but,’ he interrupted himself, ‘what on earth are you so confounded scared about?’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Is it the gun?’ He tutted. ‘I was only showing you the gun. I wasn’t about to shoot you with the gun.’
She shook her head slightly.
‘Not the gun?’ he persisted. ‘Then what? I do wish you’d stop being so scared, because it makes it hard to speak with you. What is it?’
She nodded, or rather inclined her head backwards a little to point with her chin. To point past Soop’s left arm. With an inward shudder and a constriction in his throat, Soop turned about.
~ * ~
3
Jeunet, the great Jeunet himself, was standing in the doorway observing the scene with languidly self-confident potency. For long seconds Soop had no idea what to do, or what to say. It was alarming that Jeunet was here. It made Soop alarmed to think that Jeunet had been listening in on his conversation with the female. He tried to master his alarm through his own strength, but it wasn’t easy.
Jeunet’s hand hung easily, loosely, beside his pistol. ‘He wasn’t wrong,’ Jeunet said, apparently addressing the female. ‘He said I could destroy the whole island, in stages or all at once. That’s true. Nothing but the truth.’
‘Strength,’ she hissed.
‘Jeunet,’ said Soop. Then, ‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘I wanted to have a word with you before I lay down,’ Jeunet replied.
‘Of course,’ said Soop. ‘Of course. A word - I’d be delighted. I could wake Heston, if you like.’
‘A word with you alone,’ said Jeunet. It was disconcerting that, although he was talking with Soop, he kept looking at the female. She, in turn, kept glancing hurriedly over her shoulder, as if trying to spy her way to escape.
‘You,’ said Jeunet to the female. ‘If you turn your back I’ll put a hole in you the size of my fist.’ She looked straight back at him, as bold as ever. ‘A good deal of your blood would come out of such a hole,’ Jeunet went on. ‘Innards, too. You’d lie on the grass and die in great pain.’
‘You have my attention,’ she said, with her terrible accent.
‘She was selling me stories,’ said Soop, in a weirdly squeaky voice. His own heart was rattling in his chest like a wind-up toy - like those castanet-like chattering teeth that you set on a tabletop and leave to clatter away.
‘I gathered as much,’ said Jeunet.
‘It’s research,’ Soop said quickly. ‘It’s, eh, ah, one of the avenues of research we pursue here at the station.’ He could not imagine why he wanted to save this female’s life. Even had she been a woman, he would hardly have cared - and she wasn’t even a woman. But still he gabbled on. ‘She brings data with archaic stories. She lives in one of the villages, I suppose. She brings me the data.’
‘And you pay her?’
‘Small sums.’
‘Where does she get them from?’
‘As to that,’ said Soop hurriedly, ‘well, I don’t know, I couldn’t say.’
‘They could be forgeries.’
‘As to that,’ Soop leapt in, ‘I don’t believe so. I trust my judgment. I think I could tell a contemporary pastiche of antique science fiction, and the real thing. I’ve read a great deal of the stuff - of heroic fiction from—’
He dried up, abruptly, in mid-sentence, and stood there with his mouth open. What was he saying? He couldn’t remember what he was saying.
So there was a little period of silence, filled only with the myriad scratching and piping noises made by the jungle insects, and with the distantly mournful booming of the bitterns away in the distance.
The stranger was trembling very visibly. She was terrified. She knew, Soop saw, that her life was almost at an end.
‘So you have bought a story?
’ Jeunet said, eventually.
‘It’s a moon story.’
‘A fantastic voyage to the moon?’
‘Precisely so.’ Alarm took away his own words, so he fell back on a lecturer’s manner. ‘Any student of the ancient traditions of science fiction will tell you that voyages to the moon have a long pedigree in fantastic storytelling. Voyages to the moon and the sun - because both bodies can be seen most clearly, right there in the sky - take precedence over voyages to the planets and stars. This one is about a hero called Armstrong who flies up to the moon.’
All through this strange interview Jeunet stood in the doorway, his hand hanging leisurely next to his pistol. But the strange thing was that his eyes remained fixed on the female. He stared at her with a bewildering intensity, given that she was, as Soop had to remind himself several times - nobody at all.
‘Tell me this story,’ he said.
