About half an hour Chen’s phone bleeped. He listened and nodded, shifting himself around in the wicker chair. Neither Miranda nor I spoke after he’d finished the call. Neither of us wanted to hurry the news that we were going to be turning straight round at the other end.
‘Well,’ said Chen, eventually. ‘The image is genuine. A three-dimensional object of some type was photographed using a camera of some kind.’
‘But?’ I said, as professionally as I could.
‘As for the object’s constitution, they can’t tell.’
I nodded. Miranda turned to me.
‘What is it with you guys? Why do you have to keep doing this? You heard what they said. It’s genuine.’
‘It could be a genuine model. A genuine fake.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it’s happened before. Twenty five times.’
‘Twenty six,’ Chen said, waving for more coffee.
‘But,’ I said, ‘We’ve had over two hundred and sixty contacts that were complete fakes. Mocked up in an image app., no object ever there at all. So it’s rare anyway.’
‘And so there’s a chance it could be real?’
Her eyes were too wide, her mouth too ready to smile, for me to say anything crushingly realistic. Chen wasn’t looking at me, but he was waiting too.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It could be an animal’s.’
I don’t know why it falls to me to say the word. I try not to. We all do, especially Chen. Most of the time we just talk about ‘them’ or seeing ‘one’. We have books and CD-ROMs lined round the office, floor to ceiling, with pictures and footage of every one that ever existed. Chen knows the names, habits and particulars of thousands. I’ve tested him, in our long fallow periods, and he does. Sometimes we talk about them, try to describe them to each other, speculate about which one we’d most like to see. But most of the time it’s ‘them’. Another protection mechanism, another way of not hoping too much.
Chen and I are funded by the WorldCon. We’re secure: it’s a priority. For now. Miranda is a student on secondment from PsychStat. She’s been on secondment for rather a long time now, and we pretend she isn’t in when they call to politely enquire when she’s coming back. She’s caught the bug, and it’s a rare bug, so we let her stay. Not a lot of people know about us, but it’s no secret. Our job is to watch, and to wait. To sit in our office, listening for the phone, watching the in-tray, in case someone, somewhere, sees an animal. And if someone says they have, we do what we’re doing now—get the hell out there as quick as we can. Then we troop home again, because they’re all hoaxes or honest mistakes. Everybody knows there are no animals any more. A chimpanzee called Howard was the last one, and he died over seventy years ago.
What can I say? We fucked up. We thought we could go on building the Cities, growing concrete and steel until it covered every continent, and do so without it ruining the world for everyone else. We thought we could keep tweaking the environment and climate and not trigger fractal changes that dominoed entire ecosystems. We thought, or seemed to, that the animals would get by, find a way of coping. We let people kill them for skins, or ornaments, or food. We let tourists carve initials on their homes. We talked about economic necessity, about quality of life for humans. If push came to shove, we thought the zoos would be enough.
But they weren’t. When we’d finally squeezed them out of their habitats and screwed up their food chains it turned out the animals didn’t like the zoos so much after all. They stuck them for a while and then, as if on cue, they gave up and rather pointedly died. Then we looked around the cities we’d wrought and realised that they were empty. Between the teeming people, down the sides of the endless streets, above the continual gleam, there was nothing left but space. Suddenly we realised we were alone, and beneath the ever-present clatter of humankind, the world seemed very quiet.
To some of us, anyway. I guess most people don’t care that much. They’ve never known any different. I haven’t, if I’m honest. There’s not been a single confirmed sighting of an animal in my lifetime.
The thing with me was my grandmother. She was an unusual person—or, as my mother would have it, ‘bonkers’. But she had a lot of time for me, and I for her, and she told me things about her life I don’t think anyone else ever knew. The story I could hear time and again was about how she saw a cat once, when she was a little girl.
She was walking home from school, through S734 sector of AmerCity, when she saw a small shape slink out from round a corner. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at it. Something, about a foot high and covered in short grey fur, sat and looked back at her from about ten feet away. It had green eyes, long hairs growing out of its cheeks and a thin tail which it curled neatly around its feet. It was not, my grandmother realised, human.
Very quietly, she squatted down so as to see the animal on its own level. It watched her gravely, sniffing. My grandmother noticed the way the pupils in the eyes ran up and down, saw the sturdy little paws planted firmly together, and then the creature moved. Holding her breath, and a little frightened, my grandmother watched as the animal sloped carefully towards her, following a curved path as though it was walking some line she couldn’t see. It paused after a few feet and cocked one of its ears, as if listening. Then it walked right up to her.
My gran carefully raised one of her hands until it was in front of the animal’s face. Equally carefully, the animal pointed its nose and sniffed her hand. It pushed forward, rubbing its face against her knuckles, bending its head round and making a soft and throaty humming noise. It looked up at her and made an odd sound, like a door falling open in an abandoned house, and then it rubbed its head against her hand again like a kiss.
There was a noise behind her, and my grandmother turned to see a man walking across the intersection about twenty yards back. Her mouth was half open to say something, to call him over, and then she clamped it shut.
When she turned round the animal was gone, and she never saw it again.
She ran home then and burst into the kitchen shouting. At first her folks thought she was telling tales, but the more she told them the more they had to admit it sounded like a cat. They sent out a search party and looked for five hours, but they didn’t find it.
My grandmother spent the rest of her life wishing the man hadn’t chosen that moment to cross the street, and that she’d known that what cats liked was to be tickled behind the ears and rubbed under the chin. She may have been the last person who ever saw it, and she wished with all her heart she could have said goodbye from us in the proper way.
And she told me about it, and I listened, and here I am today. Because though everyone knows there can’t be any animals left now, there are those of us who still look. We have the faith. I do, anyway. Chen has something else. Chen may have actually seen an animal.
He thinks he did. Thirty years ago, when wandering a disused sector in AfriCity, he saw a shadow move high above him, in a tower where the floors had caved in. A shape swung across a gap. His glimpse of it lasted less than four seconds. He’s the first to admit he was doing a lot of drugs at the time, but he says it wasn’t like that. He knows how unlikely it is, but he thinks it might have been a primate. Something stirred the air with a mind of its own. It was something different, something that wasn’t us, wasn’t part of the noisy machine that chugs away in our claustrophobic world. He stopped doing drugs then, because he realised what he was trying to escape from and what he was looking for. He’s been searching ever since, at first on his own, and then officially. It’s not faith with him. It’s need. It has been his life, and it’s the nearest he’s got to something that makes him happy.
Governments give us money and all the backup we could ever want. We have InterContinent Passes that mean customs and immigration can fuck right off as far as we’re concerned, and I could mobilize an entire army if I had a good enough lead. Nothing I asked for would be too much, now that it’s too late.
‘So,’
I said. ‘Chen. Best guess?’
‘Difficult to say,’ he said, enjoying every word. This was making it official, a kind of ritual we’d developed over the few times it had gotten this far. ‘It depends on the size. There’s nothing to give us any scale.’
‘But a mammal.’
‘Definitely. Could be a dog, cat. Could be a primate. It could be loads of things. Why the hell couldn’t they have sent us a video?’
That was frustrating. The colour of the faeces could have told us something—though if there was an animal still alive somewhere in AfriCity, its diet would hardly have been traditional. We’d always received videos in the past, though most of them turned out to be footage of fakes and the other alleged specimens were never found.
The faking thing is strange. There’s not a lot of point. So few people on the planet think about animals any more. But some of them must go out of their way to pretend they’re still around. I used to wonder why they would do that, why people who had never seen an animal should try to keep their memory alive through faking their tracks and faeces. Then I considered what I do for a living. Maybe it isn’t so different.
Miranda was drumming her fingers hard on the table. I raised an eyebrow at her.
‘So—how long before I get to kill you?’
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Why does this have to take so long?’
None of the other passengers were in a hurry to leave the Mall when we landed at AfriCity. I’m not surprised. What they’d disembark into would look exactly the same as where they’d been for the last two hours, and the same as where they’d come from in the first place. It was like walking down a neverending street that was the same at both ends. I don’t know why they bother.
We had no problem getting out of the MegaMall first. I started to get my pass out but it wasn’t necessary: a delegation was waiting for us at the gate. We shook hands hurriedly and trotted towards the exit of the terminal.
Introductions were made in the car, which was open-topped like an old-fashioned Jeep. The man in charge was a Lieutenant Ng, local security forces. He was fired up but deferential and eager to do the right thing. They usually are, which is strange. Our only advantage is book learning, and the fact that we spend our lives preparing for this kind of thing, guardians of a flame who spend their whole time looking for a match. Maybe that’s it. In a way we have a quest, an old-fashioned mission, of a hopelessly romantic kind. Things like that sit oddly with brushed concreform and neon, seem to stand out in an eerie light like buildings in front of a storm. Perhaps that commands respect, or something. Curiosity, perhaps.
The Lieutenant got out a map and indicated where we were going. The alleged sighting had been made in AfriCity 295, a disused sector about four hours’ drive away. A flipper would have got us there quicker, but the noise would have scared any animal away. As soon as the report had come in a corps of soldiers had cordoned the area off. Nothing could have come out, and more importantly, no-one could go in. Someone who got to an animal before we did could have set their own price. They could ask for the world.
When we were buckled in the driver put his foot down hard and we pelted off down the street. People looked up vaguely to watch the car speed by, then hurried off towards the stores. There’s always something new to buy, always something shinier. Ng watched them with an odd expression on his face, and I realised that despite being in the army he was one of us. One of the people who’d like to see something old, every now and then. After a moment he looked across at me and pointed downwards at the road surface.
‘This is where the river used to be,’ he said.
I wondered how he could tell.
The sectors started to go to seed after about two hours. There’s no obvious reason for it, as far as I can tell, but it happens everywhere, and it seems it always will until we need every single square inch all the time. One day a sector will be buzzing and full of life, then suddenly it will be a place where no-one lives deliberately. Within a few years it will be empty, but there’s too many people for anywhere to remain like that for long. So a decade later it will be redeveloped, made new again, and people will start to move in. The population shifts around the planet, year by year, almost as if we have to move a little, every now and then, as if migration is a need that never quite went away.
It was getting dark, and I was glad to have an escort. Caring about legends is the preserve of the comfortably off and the socially integrated. The kind of people who live in the interzones don’t give a shit. A long time ago Chen and I received a call and came to an area like this near what used to be Atlanta in AmerCity. We nearly didn’t make it out. The call was a fake, planted to draw people in. We lost all our gear and our research assistant, and both of us spent three weeks in hospital. Since then we don’t go in without ground support.
Then, fairly abruptly, the sector was empty. Even the rubbish drifting down the street looked old and forgotten. There’s nothing in the world more empty than one of man’s places when he isn’t there, and this area looked deader than the other side of the moon.
Ng conferred on a communicator and got specific co-ordinates, and then we turned a corner to find that we were there.
I could tell something was wrong before the car stopped moving. About ten soldiers stood in formation in the middle of a deserted and crumbling crossroads.
Ng muttered something irritable under his breath, and suggested we stay in the car. He climbed stiffly out and walked up to one of the soldiers. Like Ng, the soldier was wearing a beret, presumably implying they were of the same rank. Chen looked across at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged and lit a cigarette.
A few moments later Ng returned.
‘The corps will be accompanying you into the sector,’ he said. Though immaculate with military professionalism, he was fuming.
‘That’s not possible.’ Chen said.
‘They can’t,’ Miranda said. ‘They’ll scare off anything within a mile radius.’
Ng looked at me. ‘The corps,’ he said again, ‘will be accompanying you. The sector is dangerous, and you must have protection.’ He clearly didn’t believe this, and I didn’t either.
‘Political?’ I asked. He inclined his head slightly.
‘No way,’ said Chen. ‘Fuck politics. Jesus, if you think we can take the risk of blowing…’
‘Lieutenant Hye will oversee the operation. He assures me that his men are aware of the need for silence.’
‘I don’t care how damn quiet they are, that’s not the point,’ Miranda shouted.
I held out a hand. ‘It’s been hours already. We’re here. There’s no point wasting time when we can’t change the situation. Let’s go.’
I hate always being right, but someone has to do it.
Hye’s men were indeed quiet. As Chen, Miranda and I walked down the centre of the road three abreast, I had to keep checking behind every now and then to see if they were still there. They were, fanned out across the road. And they were carrying guns.
‘What is this crap?’ Chen asked, quietly.
‘What Ng said, I guess. Some pointless political game.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Neither do I.’
When we’d been walking for about five minutes Ng appeared soundlessly behind us.
‘We are now in Subsector 4. The sighting of the material allegedly took place within this area.’
‘We don’t know where?’
‘No. The photo was left without any further statement.’
‘Okay. See if you can get them to drop back a little further.’
They did, but not much. Following standard procedure, Chen and I headed toward the sides of the road, carefully scanning the ground and keeping half an eye on our motion and infrared sensors. Miranda walked down the centre, casting glances up at the walls of the buildings on either side. Many were empty shells, and a few looked as if they’d been burnt out. This sector’s demise had been more violent than most.
After about t
wo hundred yards, I began to see a glow in the twilight ahead. This meant habitation. I stopped.
‘We’ve passed the core of the disused area.’
The theory Chen and I worked on was that if any animal was still alive, it would tend to seek out places as far from humankind as possible. Though it might roam the fringes of inhabited areas in the search for food, we reasoned that it would want to sleep somewhere safe.
‘Do we turn around?’ Miranda asked. She was looking balefully at the soldiers, who’d also stopped, and were standing in a line ten yards away.
‘Yes,’ Chen said curtly, rubbing his chin. ‘Then fan out down each of the side streets we’ve passed. Then after that we go into each building and search on each floor.’
Miranda looked up at the fading light. ‘Maybe we should ask the soldiers to…’
Suddenly she stopped, something that looked like terror on her face. She pointed behind me. ‘Oh my God.’
I whirled and stared at the shadows at the base of the building about five yards away. ‘What,’ I said. ‘What?’
The wall disappeared in a stroboscopic blaze. Line after line of red arcfire sliced into it until the whole of the front of the building crashed down. Two of the soldiers darted forward into the rubble.
I stumbled backward, falling into Miranda, and the two of us crouched down until the noise had stopped.
When I looked up Chen was marching furiously up to Hye.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
I leapt up and ran towards him.
Hye stared impassively at Chen, and shoved him hard in the chest. Chen wavered, but didn’t fall, and instead launched himself at the soldier.
Luckily Ng got there and yanked Chen away, and I grabbed Chen’s arms and tugged him backward. He was kicking and shouting and I almost couldn’t hold him.
Ng squared up to Hye. ‘Explain,’ he barked.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 45
