Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  James Holden and Simon King make this point in their critical study of the conceptual breakthrough: ‘We think we are travelling out there, boldly going to a final frontier; actually we are always returning home, and the final frontiers are those which define our existences (birth, death, and the process of conceptualisation in between) rather than any external architecture of the universe.’ [James Holden and Simon King, Conceptual Breakthrough: Two Experiments in SF Criticism (Inkerman Press 2007).] The great dome in which are embedded the stars turns out to be the inside curve of our own craniums. The breakthrough - Star Trek’s ‘final frontier’ - has more to do with the boundaries that hem our mundane existences. ‘Hieronimo’ needed, therefore, to be a story that positioned itself on the boundary between radically different modes. It is focalised through the consciousness of an observant but not canny 13-year old, a figure deliberately poised between childhood and adulthood. The main narrative event in the text is the death of the protagonist’s father; and to foreground the radical disruption entailed in passing from life to death, it needed to be a violent death. Finally the dreamy Hieronimo is fascinated by the sky, and speculates on the relationship between that aerial, cosmic world and the mundane world he inhabits. The ending of the story, though oblique, is designed to take the reader back, reflexively, to the image printed at the head of the narrative - the circle theme works itself out formally as well as on the level of content - to enact the process of breaking through, a gesture in the direction of the startling apprehension of transcendental realisation rather than the laborious deadening explanation of the same.

  The second tale, ‘Jerie’, elaborates these themes in a far-future setting, in ways too obvious to need elaborating here.

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  ~ * ~

  Pied

  A commercial excavation in Poland broke inadvertently upon the cavern of the Sang-Mangeant - the Santamanga, we called them, though how far from saintly they were! A light that blinds you with the many flakes of its brightness. Tens of thousands of Santamanga, revealed in a tangle of limbs in the darkness, and breaking out howling upon the earth. They were like wasps; they were like scorpions and rats; the vampire of legend, only real, and bitter in their hunger for our lives.

  They spread across Europe and into Russia, devouring all they encountered, and they spared nobody. Pale faces; their mouths took colour from their meals. They were always hungry. Daylight hurt them as a hailstorm might, but it did not kill them. And we said: ‘These are monsters from storybooks,’ because we hoped that storybook remedies might redeem us. But the old ways did not stem their advance; for it took too much time to deploy them, and by the time we had destroyed one of the Santamanga a dozen more humans had fallen victim to the plague. They swarmed at night by the millions, and until first light touched the bell-towers and slanted roofs they were everywhere. The sunset mocked our spilt blood.

  The governments tried to handle the situation as governments do, with armies and weapons and assaults from land and sky. They made new guns, and primed them with projectiles filled with an ingenious American gel — irradiated with ultraviolet light and luminous. It was effective up to a point, but it was not cheap; each bullet cost $1750, and myriad bullets were fired, and dozens needed to strike the target before they were disabled. By the time the first marines were airlifted in, the plague had spread so far that it could no longer be contained by so complicated and costly an approach. Scorch the Santamanga with whatever fires and bombs you liked, they did not die: still they roamed on, and their burns healed. Shoot them with ordinary bullets and they roared and rushed you and tore your rifle from your hands, your hands from your arms. The new UV-bullets were not in sufficient supply. Then there was a dispute between the American factories that produced them and the American government about payment, or tax irregularities, or something, and the supply was halted.

  So it was that we found ourselves, suddenly, on the edge of annihilation.

  Who saved us? Who but he?

  He lived in a compound in central Spain, where the hills are polished to indigo by the heat of the sun, where the cactus grow and where palmtrees scrum together around waterholes. There were conflicting stories about how long he had been alive.

  The representatives of seven nations came to supplicate him, and he promised to rid the world of the Santamanga altogether if we agreed to meet his price: a trillion dollars, and the right for the territory around his compound to be recognised as a sovereign state, under his sole rule, an enclave within Spain perfectly independent of EU jurisdiction. He was promised all this, and eagerly, provided only that he rid the world of the vampires.

  So he set out. He took a village priest, a humble Andalusian churchman, to bless the oceans - seven trips in a jet-plane, all in the same day, girdling the earth. And then the natural cycle of the climate became our ally. For, from the oceans, moisture evaporated upwards, holy water now, into the clouds; and from the clouds precipitated down a holy rainfall. So it was that every shower, from drizzle to monsoon, bit the flesh of the Santamanga like acid, and melted them in screams of agony. And within three months not one of them was left alive, save for a few desiccated figures dug under the sands of the Gobi desert like bugs, and growing weaker and drier by the day. For even the Santamanga needed water.

  How the world cheered! Such celebrations! Gratitude poured upon him from a million letters and emails; he was granted awards and prizes - Nobel’s Peace, the Vatican’s Golden Medal, a dozen others. He did not actively refuse these honours, but neither did he travel to collect them. Simply, he waited for the fulfilment of his deal.

  The governments of the world met to discuss the status of his enclave, and the discussions became protracted, for there were complicated legal discussions to be undergone. ‘For was it not a humanitarian act?’ they asked, publicly. ‘How could such heroism ever be measured in terms of mere money?’ ‘And was it not an insultingly simple stratagem?’ they asked, in private. ‘Any of us might have thought of it. It cost him scarcely a few thousand dollars - and the Santamanga are destroyed now. Why should we waste trillions on this one individual?’

  He pressed for payment of his fee, and the governments deferred payment on the grounds that they needed the money for reconstruction of Asia and Europe, which had been ravaged by the vampires; and then they held out on the grounds of various legal technicalities; and then on the grounds that payment should be in terms of release from duties of tax and of educational and cultural credits. Eventually they declined to pay him altogether, on the grounds that, legally, the Nobel prize money had constituted the first payment of reward, and that since he refused to travel to Stockholm to collect that prize he had in effect declined all remuneration for his actions.

  They did not think they would need him again.

  But of course they did, for something had broken in the simple functioning of the world, and evils that mankind had hitherto only seen in nightmares had become violently real. Locusts the size of bats filled the skies. Blood rained from the heavens. Much worse: corpses fought their way through the loose-packed dirt of graves and walked again, undead. They poisoned and assaulted the living, and wasted the land. They devoured people, not for nutrient - since, being dead, they needed none - but in an empty rage for destruction. No weapon could combat them. Limbs or torsos peppered with bullets meant nothing to them; as with ants, destroying their heads only made them fiercer. No holy water bothered them.

  The covenant of death had been broken, it seemed.

  Worse still, in Scotland, it was reported, a scientist had stitched together body parts and reanimated the corpus with a triple-modulated ionic charge. He made monster after monster, not content with assembling body-parts from human corpses, he grafted the limbs of animals onto men’s torsos, or the heads of dogs and cattle onto the necks of the deceased. Not undead, but rather re-living, these creatures moved with the ferocious purpose of a new and terrible form of vitality. A dozen such beasts were made, before the
creatures turned on their creator and held him down, and pulled the flesh from his bones in fist-sized chunks. Then, mad with incoherent rage and remorse, the beasts spilled into the Caledonian forests. They killed where they chanced upon people, and wrecked all they laid their hands upon.

  These trials were most terrible afflictions - hundreds of thousands died, millions were overwhelmed with grief and terror. It was the end of the world, surely. It was surely the Devil himself at work amongst us. The Santamanga, that we had thought the worst, had been nothing more than malign John-Baptists, crying the way. The ultimate evil would burst, before the year ended, from Temple Mount and roll the globe into the darkness of his cloak.

  No priestly exorcism had any effect upon these awful manifestations of the Last Days. No scientist could develop an effective countermeasure.

  There was a popular upsurge: mass rallies, the spontaneous outpouring of the will of people all about the world. He had saved us before; he could save us again. We must pay him the money - for why hold back some sum of dollars when the alternative was the very end of the entire world? We must crawl on our bellies to ask his forgiveness.

  So representatives of the superpowers, and of the five great faiths, and the world’s three most beautiful movie stars, and a great delegation of the desperate travelled to central Spain. ‘Forgive us!’ they cried. ‘We wronged you! Save us again, and we shall pay you what we owe you, and anything more that you ask of us. Can you help us?’

  He met the leaders of the delegation upon the roof of his building, where the sun was hottest. The terrace garden had wilted. He stood amongst those parched plants, tall in a white linen suit, and his sunglasses were circles of swimming-pool blue. He looked over the landscape. ‘I love this land,’ he said, ‘because it resembles unwritten parchment. But I discover that human beings, mostly, loathe the unwritten page. You must pay me forty trillion dollars, and give me the whole of the Iberian Peninsula as my fiefdom, and I will rid you of these zombies and creatures, and solve the other problems.’

  Anything! Anything!

  Binding contracts were signed, and witnessed, and seals were placed upon them. Everything was witnessed and transmitted and sorted. And he nodded his approval.

  So this is what he did. He travelled, first, to Scotland, and was taken through the army perimeter into the castle of the murdered scientist. There he gathered together the materials to replicate the reanimating technology, which he worked for a week to master. ‘It is a simple device,’ he announced eventually, carrying his portable version of the reanimating machine on a strap about his shoulders.

  The zombies, he said, were animated by a principle of undeath. The scientist’s Frankenstein machine gave life back to dead matter. Direct the beam of the former upon the latter and positive would cancel out negative. So troops were equipped, and they tracked the undead wherever the zombies roamed; they fired the ionising blast at their chests, and the undead, made alive again, fell to the ground, for their motile principle had been cancelled. As death ends life, so life ends death.

  He set up a workshop, with his own employees assembling the devices, and issued them to citizen armies. These devices were shipped to the five continents, and, individual by individual, the undead were given back life, and rendered inert.

  As for the original Frankenstein creatures - hideous, terrifying - these were living still in the northern Scottish wildernesses; some had stolen boats and travelled further north, to the Polar wastes, for their life essence cried out for the chill and deserted places.

  He tracked them in a small plane, himself and his second-in-command, and this is what he did: he sprayed them, when he found them, with an enzyme that dissolved away the threads stitching their body parts together. They fell into pieces.

  Now, the life that had been given them could not be ungiven. It lived on in these lopped limbs and heads, but eyeless arms scrabbled to the water’s edge, and eyeless legs thrashed and kicked their way there, and eyeless torsos crawled like inchworms, and all slopped under the sea, to roam the unlit ocean floors. And he gathered the severed, still-living heads into a great sack, and threw them all into the mid-ocean, with stones in their mouths.

  And there were other signs of the End Times, but he addressed them.

  The blood rain fell only from certain clouds, marked with ink-black striations, and these he seeded from above, using wide-winged planes, so that they rained their blood into overfished seas, where the nutrient brought forth great crops of sealife. He fished in the air with great nets and captured vast numbers of the locusts plaguing the land, and intensively farmed them, telling the world to rejoice in their coming, for beasts of such size rendered a great quantity of meat for a world starving after manifold sufferings. He established locust farms on four continents, and instead of destroying the wild swarms he tempted them into net-ceilinged valleys with choice lures, and he raised them there. Protein for the people.

  ‘Now I must have my reward,’ he said.

  The Vice-President of the United States herself went to his compound to discuss the terms. ‘We will pay you!’ they said. ‘We have promised! But to transfer so huge a sum in one lump would collapse the world economy - and this at a time when the population has been cut in half, and tax revenues severely depleted! Moreover, to hand over the whole of Spain would be to flout the democratic traditions of a sovereign nation! Let us pay you forty million dollars a month, every month, until the debt is repaid, and let us fund your campaign to run for election as President of Spain - such is the gratitude of the world that the Spanish people will surely vote for you.’

  ‘This,’ he said, angrily, ‘is not what was agreed. Unless you pay me what you agreed, you shall make me angry.’

  ‘But you must negotiate with us,’ they said. ‘We ask only that! It is the way of international relations! Negotiations, not unilateral demands, are the currency of politics. You are a world figure now. Negotiate, and we will arrive at a mutually satisfying resolution.’

  But he refused their offers, and withdrew himself.

  Of course the evils continued. We had merely been cutting the heads off the Hydra; we had not stabbed its heart. And its heart was the Devil himself. The land around Jerusalem became hot, and people could no longer live there; the buildings of the city crumbled to dust. The Pope himself travelled to the site to exorcise it; but no sooner had his helicopter touched down than a chasm opened in the dusty ground and swallowed it and him and he was never seen again.

  The Last Days were upon us.

  All eyes turned to him - for who could save us if he could not? But he was not to be found. He had withdrawn himself from the world. The moon turned red; wormwood and pestilence; the ground shook; the Mediterranean flooded into north Africa. The world was coming to an end. ‘This is his retribution!’ we said. ‘It is because we did not pay him what was agreed! He has punished us by withholding his help.’

  But then, from nowhere, and at the last moment, he reappeared. He walked into Jerusalem alone, with a small backpack, and a gasmask, and a silver suit, passed terrors and wonders. Then, watched by the world’s surveillance satellites, his image broadcast on all media, he drew a hyperpentagram upon Temple Mount itself, and spoke words of unprecedented power and charm. A crack spread starfishwise, and a low thunderous noise rolled from horizon to horizon. In a steam of midges Satan himself appeared.

  And our spirits sank to our bowels, for suddenly we thought: He is calling forth the Devil personally to do his bidding. ‘ This is his punishment!’ we wailed, in horrible comprehension. ‘He has unleashed Satan upon us!’

  But we were wrong. He had not come to destroy the world; he had come - alone - to vanquish Satan. And that is what he did.

  He did not assault the Devil with swords, nor attempt to overpower him with incantations; but instead he used reason, a more powerful snare than magic (for has not Reason challenged and overcome Magic across the world today?) He talked, and the Devil listened. He told the Devil’s
true nature to the Devil.

  This is what he said: ‘We know that despair is the greatest sin. We both know that you, Satan, the fount and superfluity of wickedness, are the universe’s greatest sinner. It follows that you are the most despairing creature the cosmos has ever known.’

  And the Devil groaned, as if, at last, somebody had plumbed the depths of his being; as if finally somebody had understood - he, Satan, the great depressive. He moaned with pitiful recognition. And he hurled himself downward, seeping through the cracks and plunging through the eddies of magma to the core of the earth, its dense metal core, where he lies to this day, like a depressed man who cannot rise from bed, trapped and impotent in his own misery.