by Adam Roberts
“Wrong?”
“An England-shaped sea where England-land should be. An Atlantic-shaped landmass where the ocean should be. You know what I’m talking about.”
“Of course I do. This is my world. Of course I do.”
“My ankle is hurting fit to scream,” said Vins.
The stranger moved his arm in the darkness. “This,” he said, “will have to go.” Vins assumed he was pointing at the shuttle. “You’ve no right to dump this junk here. I’ll have it moved, I tell you. And you—you are trespassing on a forbidden world. You, sir, have incurred the penalty for trespassing.”
“You can see pretty well for such a dark night,” said Vins.
“You can’t?” said the stranger, and he sounded puzzled. “Old eyes, is it?”
“I’m thirty-three,” said Vins, bridling.
“I didn’t mean old in that sense.”
There was a silence. The quiet between them was devoid of cricket noise; no blackbird sang. The air was blank and perfectly dark and only the meanest dribble of starlight illuminated it. Then with a new warmth, as if he had finally understood, the stranger said: “You’re a homo neanderthalis?”
“And I suppose,” replied Vins, as if jesting, “that you’re a homo sapiens?” But even as he gave the words their sarcastic playground spin he knew they were true. Of course true. A creature from the spiritus mundi and from dream and childhood game, standing right here in front of him.
“You’re from Earth, of course,” the sapiens was saying. “You recognised the map of Europe. You steered this craft here. I don’t understand why you came here. You boys aren’t supposed to know this place even exists.”
Vins felt a hard knot of something in his chest, like an elbow trying to come out from inside his ribs. It was intensely uncomfortable. This being from myth and legend, and the race of Homer and Shakespeare and Mohammed and Jesus, and standing right in front of him now. He didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything for him to say.
“You want,” the human prompted, “to answer my question?”
“You’re actually a homo sapiens?”
“You never met one?”
“Not in the flesh.”
“I lose track of time,” said the homo sapiens. “It’s probably been, I don’t know. Centuries. It’s like that, out here. The time—drifts. You got a name?”
“Vins,” said Vins.
“Well, you’re a handsome fellow, Vins. My name is Ramon Harburg Guthrie, a fine old human name, a thousand years old, like me. As I am myself. And no older.” He chuckled, though Vins couldn’t see what was funny.
“A thousand years?” Vins repeated.
“Give or take. It’s been half that time since your lot were shaped, I’ll tell you that.”
“The last human removed herself four centuries ago,” said Vins, feeling foolish that he had to speak such kindergarten sentences.
Ramon Harburg Guthrie laughed. “Shouldn’t you be worshipping me as a god?” he asked. “Or something along those lines?”
“Worship you as a god? Why would I want to be doing a thing like that? You’re species homo and I’m species homo. What’s to worship?”
“We uplifted you,” Ramon Harburg Guthrie pointed out. “Recombined you and backed you out of the evolutionary cul-de-sac, and primed you with—” He stopped. “Listen to me!” he said. “I’m probably giving entirely the wrong impression. I don’t want to be worshipped as a god.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Vins. “There’s nothing sub-capacity about my brain pan. I speak from experience, but also from scientific research into the matter, using some of the many homo sapiens skulls that have been dug out of the soil of the Earth. I’ve spent twelve years studying science.”
“Our science,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie.
“Science is science, and who cares who discovered it? And if you care who discovered it, then it’s not your science, Ramon Harburg Guthrie, it’s Newton’s and Einstein’s.”
But his tone had wandered the wrong side of angry. The homo sapiens lifted whatever it was he was holding in his right hand. When he spoke again, his high voice was harder-edged. “I built this place,” he said. “It’s mine. It’s a private world, and visitors are not allowed. I don’t care about your brain pan, or about my brain pan, I only care about my privacy. Are there others?”
“We crashed,” said Vins, feeling a sense of panic growing now, though he wasn’t sure exactly why. It was more than just the mysterious something the man was holding in his right hand. It was another thing, he wasn’t sure what.
“I don’t care how you came here. You’re trespassing. Not welcome.”
“It’s hardly fair. It’s not as if you put up a sign saying no entry.”
He scoffed. “That’d be tantamount to shouting aloud to the whole system, here I am! That’s be like putting a parsec-wide neon arrow pointing at my home. And why would I want to do that? I built my world away from the ecliptic and down, it’s as flat as a coin and its slender edge is angled towards Earth. You can’t see me, you inheritors. Nobody on that polluted old world. You don’t know I’m here. There are similar ruses used all about this solar system, and eyries and haunts, radio-blanked bubbles and curves of habitable landscape tucked away. A thousand baubles and twists of landscape. Built by the old guard, the last of the truly wealthy and truly well-bred. Who’d trade-in true breeding for a mere enhanced physical strength and endurance?” He spoke these last five words with a mocking intonation, as if the very idea were absurd. “And, yes, I know your brain pans are the same size. But size isn’t everything, my dearie.”
Vins was shivering, or perhaps trembling with fear, but he summoned his courage. “I’m no dearie of yours,” he said. “What’s that in your hand anyway? A weapon, is it?”
“How many were there in your crew?”
Of course Vins couldn’t lie, not when asked a direct question like that. He tried one more wriggle. “A severely spoken and impolite question,” he said.
“How many in your crew?”
“Four,” he said. “Including me.”
“Inside?”
“Are they inside? The ship?”
“Are they inside, yes.”
“No. They wandered off. They were seduced by this world, I think. It’s a beautiful place, especially when you’ve been tanked up in a spaceship for three months. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place”
“Thank you!” said the homo sapiens Ramon Harburg Guthrie. And, do you know what? There was genuine pleasure in his voice. He was actually flattered. “It’s my big dumb object. Big and dumb but I like it.”
The sky, minutely and almost imperceptibly, was starting to pale over to the west. The silhouette had taken on the intimations of solidity; more than just a 2D gap in the blackness, it was starting to bulk. Dark grey face propped on dark grey body, but there was a perceptible difference in tone between the two things, one smooth and one the rougher texture of fabric.
“You didn’t build this,” said Vins. “I’m not being disrespectful, but I’m not. Only—who can build a whole world? You’re not a god. Sure the legacy of homo sapiens is a wonderful thing, the language and the culture and so on. But build a whole world?”
“Indeed, I did build it,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie levelly.
“How many trillions of tonnes of matter, to pull one g?” said Vins. “And how do you hide an Earth-sized object from observation by...”
“You’ve done well,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie, “if you’ve taken the science with which we left you and built space craft capable of coming all the way out here.” He sounded indulgent. “But that’s not to say that you’ve caught up with us. We’ve been at it millennia. You’ve only been independent a handful of centuries. Left to your own devices for a handful of centuries.”
The light was growing away behind the western horizon. The human’s face was still indistinct. The object he held in his right hand wa
s still indistinct. But in a moment it would be clearer. Vins was shivering hard now. It was very cold.
“That’s no explanation, if you don’t mind me saying so,” he said, with little heaves of mis-emphasis on account of his shivering chest and his chattery teeth. The human didn’t seem in the least incommoded by the cold.
“It’s not a globe,” he said. “It’s my world, and I built it as I liked. It’s not for you. It’s me-topia. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“It’s beautiful and it’s empty, it’s void. There aren’t even deer or antelope or cows. How is that utopia?”
He was expecting the human to say each to his own, or I prefer solitude or something like that. But he didn’t. He said: “Oh, my dearie, it’s void on this side. I haven’t got round to doing anything with this side. There’s world enough and time for that. But on the other side of the coin, it’s crowded with fun and interest.”
“The other side,” said Vins.
“It’s a little over a thousand miles across,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie. “So it’s pretty much the biggest coin ever minted. But it’s not trillions of tonnes of matter; it’s a thin circular sheet of dense-stuff, threaded with gravity wiring. There’s some distortion. You know, it appears to go up at the rim, highlands in all directions, and on both sides, which is odd.”
“Which is odd,” repeated Vins. He didn’t know why it was odd.
“It’s odd because it’s a gravitational effect. It’s not that the rim is any thicker than any other place on the disc. But the gravitational bias helps keep the atmosphere from spilling over the sides, I suppose. I lost interest in that a while ago. And the central territories are flat enough to preserve the landscape almost exactly.”
“Preserve the landscape,” chattered Vins.
“I had it pressed into the underlying matter: the countries of my youth. That’s on the other side. On this side is the reverse of the recto. It’s the anti-Europe. But landscaped, of course. Water and biomass and air added; not just nude to space. No, no. It’s ready. Sometime soon I’ll live over this side for a while.”
“The anti-Europe,” said Vins. The cold seemed to be slowing his thought processes. He couldn’t work it out.
“Stamp an R in a sheet of gold, and the other side will have a little—standing proud,” he said. “You know that. Stamp a valley in one side of a sheet and you get a mountain on the other side.”
The light was almost strong enough to see. That grey predawn light, so cool and fine and satiny.
“Stamp a homo neanderthalis out of the hominid base matter,” Ramon Harburg Guthrie said, as if talking to himself, “and you stamp out a backwards-facing homo sapiens on the verso.” This seemed to amuse him. He laughed, at any rate.
Vins put a knuckle to his eyes, and rubbed away some of the chill of the night. His features were—just—visible in the grey of the pre-dawn: a long nose, small eyes, a sawn-off forehead and eggshell cranium above it. Like a cartoon-drawing of a sapiens. Like a caricature from a schoolbook. A stretched out, elfin figure. A porcelain and anorexic giant.
“You’re not welcome,” Guthrie said, one final time. “This world is forbidden to you and your sort. I’ll find your crewmates, and give them the sad news. But I’ll deal with you first, and I’m sorry to say it, because I’m not a bloodthirsty sort of fellow. But what can I do? But—trespassers—will be—’ and he raised his right hand.
This was the moment when Vins found out for sure what that right hand contained. It was a weapon, of course; and Vins was already ahead of the action. He pushed forward on his muscular neanderthal legs, moving straight for the human: but then he jinked hard as his sore ankle permitted him, ninety-degrees right. The lurch forward was to frighten Ramon Harburg Guthrie into firing before he was quite ready; the jink to the right was to make sure the projectile missed, and give him a chance of making it to the long grass.
But Ramon Harburg Guthrie was more level-headed than that. It’s true he cried out, a little yelp of fear as the bulky neanderthal loomed up at him, but he kept his aim reasonably steady. The weapon discharged with a booming noise and Vins’ head rang like a gong. There was a disorienting slash of pain across his left temple and he span and tumbled, his bad ankle folding underneath him. There was a great deal of pain, suddenly, out of nowhere, and his eyes weren’t working. The sky had been folded up and propped on its side. It was grey, drained of life, drained of colour. But it wasn’t on its side; Vins was lying on the turf beside the rock, and it was the angle at which he was looking at it.
There was a throb. This was more than a mere knock. It was a powerful, skull-clenching throb.
Nevertheless when Ramon Harburg Guthrie’s leg appeared in Vins’ line of sight, at the same right-angle as the sky, he knew what it meant. This was no time to be lying about, lounging on the floor, waiting for the coup-de-grace of another projectile in the—
He was up. He put all his muscular strength into the leap, and it was certainly enough to surprise Ramon Harburg Guthrie. Vins’ shoulder, coming up like a piston upstroke, caught him under the chin, or against the chest, or somewhere (it wasn’t easy to see); and there was an ooph sound in Vins’ left ear. He brought his heavy right arm round as quick as he could, and there was a soggy impact of fist on flesh. Not sure which part of flesh; but it was a softer flesh than Vins’s thick-skin-pelt. It was a more fragile bone than the thick stuff that constituted Vins’s brain pan. Although, as he had said, the thickness didn’t mean that there was any compromise in size.
The next thing that happened was that Vins heard a rushing noise. He looked where Ramon Harburg Guthrie had been, and there was only a thread, string wet and heavy with black phlegm, and it wobbled as if blown in the dawn breeze, and when Vins looked up he saw this string attached to the shape of a flying human male. The string broke and then another spooled down, angling now because the flying man (propelled by whatever powerpack he was wearing, whatever device it was that lifted him away from the pull of the artificial gravity) was flying away to the north.
Stunned by his grazed head it took Vins a second to figure out what he was seeing. The string was a drool of blood falling from a wound he, Vins, had inflicted on the head of Ramon Harburg Guthrie. “Clearly,” he said aloud, as he put a finger to his own head-wound, “clearly he’s still conscious enough to be operating whatever fancy equipment is helping him fly away.” His fingers came away jammy with red.
“Clearly I didn’t hit him hard enough.”
The sun was up now. In the new light Vins found the gun that, in his pain and shock, and in his hurry to get away, Ramon Harburg Guthrie had dropped.
~ * ~
The sixth morning
Whilst the figure of the sapiens was still visible, just, in the northern sky Vins hurried inside the shuttle; he pulled out some food, the first aid pack, some netting. It all went into a pack, together with the gun.
When he came out the sapiens was nowhere to be seen.
His head was hurting. His ankle was hurting.
He hurried away through the long grass, following the path that Murphy had originally made. He didn’t want to leave a new trail, one that would (of course!) be obvious from the air; but he didn’t want to loiter by the shuttle. Who knew what powers of explosive destruction Ramon Harburg Guthrie could bring screaming out of the sky? It was his world, after all.
There were a number of lone trees growing high out of the grass before the forest proper began, and Murphy’s old track passed by one of these. Vins let the first go, stopped at the second. He clambered into the lower branches, and shuffled along the bough to ensure that the leaves were giving him cover. He scanned the sky, but there was nothing.
There was time, now, to tend to himself. He pulled a pure-pad from the first aid and stuck it to the side of his head, feeling with his finger first. A hole, elliptically shaped, like the mouth of a hollow reed cut slantways across. Blood was pulsing out of it. Blood had gone over the left of his face,
glued itself into his six-day-beard, made a plasticky mat over his cheek. He must look a sight. But he was alive.
He ate some food, and drank more than he wanted; but it wouldn’t do to dehydrate. Exsanguinations provoke dehydration. He knew that. He was a scientist.
The leaves on the tree were plump, dark-green, cinque-foil. There were very many of them, and they rubbed up against one another and trembled and buzzed in the breeze. The sky was a high blue, clear and pure.
~ * ~
The sixth afternoon
