The Land Leviathan

by Michael Moorcock

  The station came in sight a day or so later—merely a barracks surrounded by a few native brick huts and the whole enclosed by a serviceable wall. This was where our Native Police and their commanding officer had been killed and I admit that I prayed that I would find it as I had left it. There were signs of fighting and few signs of habitation and this cheered me up no end! I stumbled through the broken gateway of the little fort, hoping against hope that I would find the detachment of Punjabi Lancers and Ghoorkas I had left behind on my way to Kumbalari. Sure enough there were soldiers there. I shouted out in relief. I was weak from hunger and exhaustion and my voice must have sounded thinly through the warm spring air, but the soldiers sprang up, weapons at the ready, and it was only then that I realized they were white. Doubtless the Indian soldiers had been relieved by British.

  Yet these men had recently been in a fight, that was clear. Had another band of Sharan Kang’s men attacked the fort while I had been on my expedition into the old hill fox’s territory?

  I called out: “Are you British?”

  I received the stout reply: “I certainly hope we are!”

  And then I fell fainting on the dry dust of the compound.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Dream—and the Nightmare— of the Chilean Wizard

  Naturally enough, my first words on regaining consciousness, lying on a truckle bed in what remained of the barracks’ dormitory, were:

  “What’s the year?”

  “The year, sir?” The man who addressed me was a young, bright-looking chap. He had a sergeant’s stripes on his dusty scarlet tunic (it was a Royal Londonderry uniform, a regiment having close connections with my own) and he held a tin cup of tea in one hand while the other was behind my head, trying to help me sit up.

  “Please, sergeant, humour me, would you? What’s the year?”

  “It’s 1904, sir.”

  So I had been ‘lost’ for two years. That would explain a great deal. I was relieved. Sipping the rather weak tea (I was later to discover it was almost their last) I introduced myself, giving my rank and my own regiment, telling the sergeant that I was, as far as I knew, the only survivor of a punitive expedition of a couple of years earlier—that I had been captured, escaped, wandered around for a bit and had only just managed to make it back. The sergeant accepted the story without any of the signs of suspicion which I had come to expect, but his next words alarmed me.

  “So you would know nothing of the war, then, Captain Bastable?”

  “A war? Here, on the Frontier? The Russians...”

  “At the moment, sir, this is one of the few places scarcely touched by the war, though you are right in supposing that the Russians are amongst our enemies. The war is world-wide. Myself and less than a score of men are all that remains of the army which failed to defend Darjiling. The city and the best part of these territories are either under Russian control or the Russians have been, in turn, beaten by the Arabian Alliance. Personally I am hoping that the Russians are still in control. At least they let their prisoners live or, at worst, kill them swiftly. The last news we had was not good, however...”

  “Are there no reinforcements coming from Britain?”

  A look of pain filled the sergeant’s eyes. “There will be little enough coming from Blighty for some time, I shouldn’t wonder, sir. Most of Europe is in a far worse plight than Asia, having sustained the greatest concentration of bombs. The war is over in Europe, Captain Bastable. Here, it continues—a sort of alternative battle-ground, you might call it, with precious little for anyone to win. The power situation is grim enough— there’s probably not one British keel capable of lifting, even if it exists...”

  Now his words had become completely meaningless to me. I was aware of only one terrifying fact and I had become filled with despair: this world of 1904 bore even less relation to my own world than the one from which I had sought to escape. I begged the sergeant to explain recent history to me as he might explain it to a child, using my old excuse of partial amnesia. The man accepted the excuse and kindly gave me a breakdown of this world’s history since the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It was radically different either from your world, Moorcock or from the world of the future I described to you.

  It appears that, by the 1870s, in Chile of all places, there had emerged the genius who had, in a few short years, been responsible for altering the lot of the world’s poor, of providing plenty where once there had been famine, comfort where they had been only grinding misery. His name was Manuel O’Bean, the son of an Irish engineer who had settled in Chile and the Chilean heiress Esmé Piatnitski (perhaps the wealthiest woman in South or Central America). O’Bean had shown signs of an enormous capacity to learn and to invent at an extraordinarily young age. His father, needless to say, had encouraged him and O’Bean had learned everything his father could pass on by the time he was eight years old. With the resources made available by his mother’s wealth, O’Bean had nothing to thwart this flowering of his mechanical genius. By the time he was twelve he had invented a whole new range of mining equipment which, when applied to his family’s holdings, increased their wealth a hundred-fold. Not only did he have an enormous talent for planning and building new types of machine, he also had the ability to work out new power sources which were less wasteful and infinitely cheaper than the crude sources up to that time in use. He developed a method of converting and reconverting electricity so that it did not need to be carried through wires but could be transmitted by means of rays to almost anywhere in the world from any other point. His generators were small, efficient and required the minimum of power, and these in turn propelled most of the types of machinery he invented. Other engines, including sophisticated forms of steam-turbine depending on fast-heating liquids other than water, were also developed. As well as the mining and farming equipment he developed in those early years, O’Bean (still less than fifteen years old) invented a collection of highly efficient war-machines (he was still a boy and was fascinated, as boys are, with such things), including underwater boats, mobile cannons, airships (in collaboration with the great flying expert, the Frenchman La Perez) and self-propelled armoured carriages sometimes called “land ironclads”. However, O’Bean soon abandoned this line of research as his social conscience developed. By the time he was eighteen he had sworn never to put his genius to war-like purposes again and instead concentrated on machines which would irrigate deserts, tame forests, and turn the whole world into an infinitely rich garden which would feed the hungry and thus extinguish what he believed to be the wellspring of most human strife.

  By the beginnings of the new century, therefore, it seemed that Utopia had been achieved. There was not one person in the world who was not well-nourished and did not have the opportunity to receive a good education. Poverty had been abolished almost overnight.

  Man can live by bread alone when all his energies are devoted to attaining that bread, but once his mind is clear, once he has ceased to labour through all his waking hours to find food, then he begins to think. If he has the opportunity to gather facts, if his mind is educated, then he begins to consider his position in the world and compare it with that of other men. Now it was possible for thousands to understand that the world’s power was in the hands of a few—the landowners, the industrialists, the politicians and the ruling classes. All these people had welcomed O’Bean’s scientific and technical advances—for they were able to lease his patents, to build their own machines, to make themselves richer as those they ruled became better off. But twenty-five years is enough time for a new generation to grow up—a generation which has never known dire poverty and which, unlike a previous generation, is no longer merely grateful that it has leisure time and more than enough to eat. That generation begins to want to control its own fate in myriad ways. In short, it seeks political power.

  By 1900, in this world, civil strife had become a fact of life in almost every nation, large and small. In some countries, usually those which had been the mo
st backward, revolutions succeeded, and, attended by a fanatical nationalism, new power groups were formed. The Great Powers found their colonial territories snatched from them—in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas—and since the sources of power were cheap and O’Bean’s patents were distributed everywhere, since military power no longer depended so much on large, well-trained armies (or even navies), these older nations were wary of starting wars with the newer nations, preferring to try to retain their positions by means of complicated diplomacy, by building up ‘spheres of influence’. But complicated diplomatic games played in the far corners of the world tend to have a habit of creating stronger tensions at home, so in Europe, in particular, but also in the United States and Japan, nationalism grew stronger and stronger and fierce battles of words began to take place between the Great Powers. Trade embargoes, crippling and unnecessarily unfair tariff restrictions were applied and returned. A madness began to fill the heads of those who ruled. They saw themselves threatened from within by their young people, who demanded what they saw as more social justice, and from without by their neighbouring countries. More and more resources were devoted to the building up of land, sea and air fleets, of large guns, of armies which could control dissident populations (and at the same time, hopefully, absorb them). In many countries enforced military service, after the Prussian model, became the norm— and this in turn brought an increasingly furious reaction from those who sought to reform their governments. Active, violent revolutionary methods began to be justified by those who had originally hoped to achieve their ends by means of oratory and the ballot box.

  What O’Bean himself thought of this nobody knows, but it was likely that he did feel enormously guilty. One story has it that on the inevitable day when the Great Powers went to war he quietly committed suicide.

  The war was at first contained only in Europe, and in the first weeks most of the major cities of the Continent and Britain were reduced to ash and rubble. A short-lived Central American Alliance lasted long enough to go to war with the United States and quickly achieved a similar end. Huge mobile war machines rolled across the wasted land; sinister aerial battleships cruised smoke-filled skies; while under the water lurked squadrons of subaquatic men-o’-war, often destroying one another without ever once rising to the surface where more conventional ironclads blasted rivals to bits with the horrifically powerful guns invented by a boy of thirteen years old.

  “But most of the real fighting’s over now,” said the sergeant, with a tinge of contempt. “The fuel ran out for the generators and the engines. The war machines that were left just—well— stopped. It all went back to cavalry and infantry and that sort of stuff for a while, but there was hardly anyone knew how to fight like that—and precious few people left to do it. And not much ammunition, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re down to about one cartridge each.” He tapped the weapon which hung at his belt. “It’ll be bayonets, if we ever do meet the enemy. The bally Indians’ll be top dogs—those who’ve still got swords and lances and bows and arrows and that...”

  “You don’t think the war will stop? People must be shocked by what’s happened—sickened by it all.”

  The soldier shook his head, waxing philosophical. “It’s a madness, sir. We’ve all got it. It could go on until the last human being crawls away from the body of the chap he’s just bashed to bits with a stone. That’s what war is, sir—madness. You don’t think about what you’re doing. You forget, don’t you—you just go on killing and killing.” He paused, almost embarrassed. “Leastways, that’s what I think.”

  I conceded that he could well be right. Filled with unutterable gloom, obsessed by the irony of my escape from a relatively peaceful world into this one, I yet felt the need somehow to get back to England, to see for myself if the sergeant had told me the truth, or whether he had exaggerated, either from a misguided sense of drama, or from despair at his own position.

  I told him that I should like to try to return to my own country, but he smiled pityingly at me, telling me that there wasn’t the slightest chance. If I headed, say, for Darjiling, then I was bound to be captured by the Russians or the Arabians. Even if I managed to reach the coast, there were no ships in the harbours (if there were harbours!) or the aerodromes. My best plan, he suggested, was to fall in with them. They had done their duty and their position was hopeless. They planned to get up into the hills and make some sort of life for themselves there. The sergeant thought that, with the population killing itself off so rapidly, game would proliferate and we should be able to live by hunting—“and live pretty well, too”. But I had had enough of the hills already. For better or worse, as soon as I had recovered my strength I would try to get to the coast.

  A couple of days later I bid farewell to the sergeant and his men. They begged me not to be so foolhardy, that I was going to certain death.

  “There was talk of plague, sir,” said the sergeant. “Terrible diseases brought about by the collapse of the sanitary systems.”

  I listened politely to all the warnings and then, politely, ignored them.

  Perhaps I had had my share of bad luck, for good luck stayed with me for the rest of my journey across the Indian subcontinent. Darjiling had, indeed, fallen to the Arabians, but they had evacuated the shell of that city soon after occupying it. Their forces were stretched pretty thin and had been needed on the home front. There were still one or two divisions left, but they were busy looking for Russians, and when they discovered that I was English they took this to mean that I was a friend (towards the end, I gathered, there had been some attempt to make a pact between Britain and Arabia) and these chaps were under what turned out to be the utterly false impression that we were fighting on the same side. I fell in with them. They were heading for Calcutta—or where Calcutta had once stood—where there was some hope of getting a ship back to the Middle East. There was a ship, too—a, to them, old-fashioned steamer, using coal-burning engines—and although the name on its side was in Russian, it flew the crossed-scimitar flag of the Arabian Alliance. It was in a state of terrible disrepair and one took one’s life in one’s hands when going aboard, but there had been a chance in a million of finding any kind of ship and I was not in a mood to miss it. She had been an old cargo ship and there was very little room, as such, for passengers. Most of the men were crowded into the holds and made as comfortable as possible. As an officer and a ‘guest’ I got to share a cabin with four of the Arabians, three of whom were Palestinians and one of whom was an Egyptian. They all spoke perfect English and, while somewhat reserved, were decent enough company, going so far as to lend me a captain’s uniform and most of the necessities of life which I had learned, in recent months, to do without.

  The ship made slow progress through the Bay of Bengal and I relieved my boredom by telling my companions that I had been the prisoner of a Himalayan tribe for several years and thus getting them to fill in certain details of their world’s history which the sergeant had been unable to give me.

  There was some talk of a man whom they called the “Black Attila”, a leader who had emerged of late in Africa and whom they saw as a threat to themselves. Africa had not suffered as badly from the effects of the war as Europe and most of her nations— many only a few years old—had done their best to remain neutral. As a result they had flourishing crops, functioning harvesting machines and a reserve of military power with which to protect their wealth. The Black Attila had growing support in the Negro nations for a jehad against the whites (the Arabians were included in this category, as were Asiatics), but, at the last my informants had heard, was still consolidating local gains and had shown no sign of moving against what remained of the countries of the West. There were other rumours which said that he had already been killed, while some said he had invaded and conquered most of Europe.

  The ship had no radio apparatus (another example of my good fortune, it emerged, for the Arabians had never reached the point of signing a pact with Britain!), and thus there was no means of confirming
or denying these reports. We sailed down the coast of India, through the Gulf of Mannar, managed to take on coal at Agatti in the Laccadives, got into heavy weather in the Arabian Sea, lost three hands and most of our rigging, entered the Red Sea and were a few days away from the approach to the Suez Canal when, without any warning at all, the ship was struck by several powerful torpedoes and began to sink almost immediately.

  It was the work of an undersea torpedo-boat—one of the few still functioning—and it was not, it emerged, an act of war at all, but an act of cynical piracy.

  However, the pirate had done his work too well. The ship sighed, coughed, and went to the bottom with most of her passengers and crew. I and about a dozen others were left clinging to what little wreckage there was.

  The undersea boat lifted its prow from the water for a few seconds to observe its handiwork, saw that there was nothing to be gained by remaining, and left us to our fate. I suppose we should have been grateful that it did not use the guns mounted along its sides to finish us off. Ammunition had become scarce almost everywhere, it seemed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Polish Privateer

  I shan’t describe in detail my experiences of the next twenty-four hours. Suffice to say that they were pretty grim as I watched my companions sink, one by one, beneath the waves and knew that ultimately I should be joining them. I suppose I have had a great deal of practice in the art of survival and somehow I managed to remain afloat, clinging to my pathetic bit of flotsam, until the late afternoon of the next day when the monster rose from the waves, steaming water pouring off its blue-black skin, its great crystalline eyes glaring at me, and a horrible, deep-throated roaring issuing from its belly. At first my exhausted mind did see it as a living creature but my second thoughts were that the undersea torpedo-boat had returned to finish me off.