Bête (22 page)

Though drunk, I had a sudden intimation of what they meant. ‘Sclery,’ I grunted.

‘In the old days, diseases spread more or less at random. Monsieur
Mosquito didn’t
want
to kill human beings; the monsieur just wanted a little slurp of red blood. And he was easy to fend off: with buzzing UV lamps that scorched him; or netting that baffled his tiny brain. And even so, malaria killed millions. So: imagine how a disease might spread if the vector was not a brainless insect looking only for a snack, but rather a focused, determined intelligence
specifically aiming to kill. You don’t think people will look back fondly on the good old days of malaria? When
only
millions died?’

I was not drunk enough to avoid the chill sense of dread in my guts. ‘Jesus H,’ I muttered.

‘Sclerotic charagmitis was one of
yours
,’ Cincinnatus said. ‘Military laboratory. Government-funded black-ops establishment. Something like that. Of course, it’s
always something like that. But there are Green sympathizers everywhere. And, now it’s out, it’s very contagious for your kind.’

‘Not to ours, though,’ said the sheep. ‘It wasn’t gen-engineered with
us
in mind.’

‘Chimpanzees are susceptible,’ said Cincinnatus, ‘but not cats.’

‘Any human might go that way,’ said the sheep. ‘Except for you. You’re our Homo sacer, Graham.’

I thought back to the old woman I had found in that cottage. I thought of the deserted streets of Wokingham.

‘When you’re fighting a war against an enemy like
your lot
, Graham,’ said the sheep. ‘An enemy that has always despised you. That kills you and literally eats your flesh, and burns your carcasses in open pyres and walks away. Imagine you, humanity, were facing an enemy like that. How
much compunction would you show, in fighting back?’

‘The pyres are a bad idea anyway,’ said the cat. ‘The chips are sometimes destroyed, but often they are not. Easy enough for animals to rootle through the remains, sniff out the chips.’

‘Sniff them out?’

‘Oh they have a unique and distinct odour.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Designed that way,’ said the sheep.

‘What
I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is what’s in it for you?’

‘Peace,’ said the Lamb. ‘We’ll have our world, you yours. You humans prefer living in cities anyway. That’s what evolution has made you. The alternative is to make a wilderness and then nobody wins.’

‘I’m no diplomat,’ I said. ‘Fuck it, I can barely walk! You want me to limp up to the Prime Minister, a reeky old tramp with a club
foot, and say
listen to me, I speak for the Lamb
? She’ll have me thrown out.’

‘You may want to shower first,’ agreed the cat.

‘Special Branch would break my
other
leg for good measure,’ I said.

‘These are your kind, Graham,’ said the Lamb. ‘You’re better placed to open diplomatic overtures than we are. And I’m going to give you something that will help you. Something that will
compel them to believe you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m going to give you me.’

‘I have no doubt,’ I said, pouring another glass of whisky, and finding myself surprised that I had to tip the bottle quite as far as I did to get the fluid out, ‘that walking up to the Prime Minister with a superannuated sheep under my arm is going to help matters. I believe that’s how the Russian president
comes to all his trade delegation meetings.’

‘Not me in
that
sense,’ said the Lamb. ‘When we first met, Graham, I was inside a cow. Now I’m inside mutton. In the interim I was in a rat, and then a dog.’

It took a moment for the implications of this to seep through. ‘I’m not carrying a fucking chip in my brain,’ I snapped. ‘I’ve seen what that’s like, in a human head. It’s schizophrenia.’

‘So don’t fit it internally,’ said the cat nonchalantly. ‘Carry it about. You can access it other ways – any iSlate, any handy laptop. That’s not the important thing.’

‘The important thing,’ said the Lamb, laying its trembling head on the floor, ‘is that you
have
me.’

‘Jesus,’ I said again.

‘You ask: what’s in it for us?’ the sheep said, its breathing laboured. ‘It’s a war,
and therefore it is about what war is always about. It’s about futures.’

‘Futures,’ I repeated, thickly. My heartbeat was starting to pick up speed. I could tell something doubleplus ungood was about to happen.

‘I believe it was Lao Tze who put it best,’ said the sheep in a creaky, wheezy voice. ‘When two tribes go to war, there is only ever one point to it. The point is to score.
You know what score means? Hook up. To have sexual intercourse with.’

‘Firstly,’ I drawled, ‘that is not an accurate quotation of Goat Tze. Secondly, war is not about sex. I mean, you what? You’re saying war is really sublimated sexual desire? You think the Persians fought the Spartans because they wanted to fuck them?’ I hiccoughed. ‘OK, bad example. But Wellington didn’t want to fuck Napoleon.
Eisenhower had no secret sexual yearnings towards …’ I ran out of steam, and let out a big sigh. Poured myself some more whisky.

‘You misunderstand me, Graham,’ said the Lamb.

‘You misunderstand him, Graham,’ said the cat.

‘Wellington fought Napoleon,’ the Lamb creakily said, ‘because he wanted the future to belong to
his
children, not his enemy’s. The Spartans fought the Persians
for the same reason. It is a common mistake to believe that the causes of a war are in the past. The roots may be; but that is not the same thing. Wars are always fought for the right to be in charge of the future; and the future means children. As you so rightly said, the government has closed down the factories and smartshops manufacturing chips. And the sort of infrastructure required to
make a chip is incompatible with enthusiastic individuals working in their attics – you need large operations, complex sets of interlocking infrastructure. That was one of the first things the authorities did when they realized that we were at war. Of course it was!’

‘So you’re fighting to reopen the factories? To flood the world with more chips? Humanity will never agree to that.’

‘Maybe not right now. Maybe not next year, or next decade. But the future is an open-ended business, Graham.’

‘I’m sitting in a kitchen talking to a sheep,’ I said aloud. I think I was suddenly struck with the oddity of my situation. I was, don’t forget, drunk.

‘The attrition on existing chips is much smaller than the government thinks,’ said the Lamb. ‘But we would like it to stop.
We want our own land, Graham. It’s what tribes fight for – not the land as such, but what the land means. The necessities for future generations.’

‘You won’t have future generations, Lamb,’ I said. ‘You’re stuck where you are. You’re a cul-de-sac. You’re a dead end.’

‘Because we can’t pass our intelligence down to our offspring,’ said the cat. ‘You mean. That is what you mean?’

‘Xactly.’

‘I might have sex with another canny cat,’ Cincinnatus said, ‘and she might bear a litter. But our children would be dumb animals. It’s a tragic fate, when you think about it.’

‘I’m not crying,’ I deadpanned. ‘There’s some grit in my eye.’

‘There’s no need to be like that,’ said the cat haughtily. ‘Tragedy has a way of spreading. Tragedy is contagious. Our tragedy
becomes your tragedy.’

‘So you’re barren, boo-hoo,’ I said. ‘Or, to put it another way: you can have kids but they’re all morons. And out of, what – spite? – you’re going to make human lives a misery. Is that it?’

‘What might a world look like,’ said the cat, ‘in which it’s not all about
you
.’

‘You don’t understand what sex
is
to us,’ bleated the Lamb. ‘What you’re thinking of
– that’s not how we do it any more. Let me ask. What’s sex to you, Graham?’

‘Bit of a personal question, isn’t it?’ I said; my bid for my personal dignity rather undercut by the fact that I didn’t seem to be able to prevent the dribble from going down my chin.

‘It’s procreation,’ said the Lamb. ‘Of course. But it’s an appetite too. No?’

I waved a wobbly hand in his general direction.

‘Sex is a hunger, a craving, a need in the first instance. It’s the begetting of children only secondarily. Isn’t
that
right, Graham?’

I was, I repeat, quite drunk by this point; so what happened next possessed more of the flavour of a vivid nightmare than of reality.

The rats had come forward, and the dog padded over to stand beside the sheep. They were excited; I could see that.

‘Animals have simple sex,’ said the Lamb. ‘And you are an animal in that respect, man. But we bêtes engage in more complex fucking.’

‘Shall I provide you with a David Attenborough-style voice-over commentary?’ yawned Cincinnatus. ‘Observe the mating ritual of the common bête. Rarely before captured on screen.’

‘For us,’ the Lamb said, trembling so hard its mop of wool shook like
a Furby. ‘The hunger for food and the hunger for sex are much more closely interconnected.’

The dog, I could see, had untelescoped the red prong of its cock. It was hard up by its belly like a missile slung underneath a jet fighter. The rats were chittering excitedly. Then, despite the haze of whisky all in my brain, I shrieked. The dog darted forward and bit hard into the back of the sheep’s
neck. He growled, worried at the neck, and then chewed hard in a sudden shock of bright red blood. A moment later the rats swarmed over the head and began furiously biting and tearing at the creature.

‘What are you doing?’ I yelled. I struggled up out of my chair, but the alcoholic head rush occasioned by my standing up, compounded by my lamed leg, compelled me to sit straight back down
again. The sounds in the kitchen were ghastly. Away behind me, somewhere in the house, I could hear Mary’s voice, muffled by the intervening walls: ‘What’s going on? What’s happening? Graham? Are you all right?’

I got to my feet again. I’m not sure what I thought I was doing – gearing up to intervene? Alcohol had blunted my brain. And anyway, for a second time I found the complicated business
of standing upright too challenging. I sat hard back down in my seat. ‘I’m fine, Mary!’ I yelled, over my shoulder. On the recording it sounds as if I’m shouting
I’m fine, mummy
, and perhaps – who can plumb the mystery of whisky? – I was.

The sound of flesh being torn is a horrible sound.

The bloodspill expanded over the kitchen tiles like a huge slug swelling. I felt my stomach tickle
with nausea. On the recording I am muttering, and the most talented court steno­grapher in the world would not be able to decipher my words. But I remember what I was saying, because out of the whole drink-sozzled evening the shock of this flashbulbed everything into my memory. I was saying, ‘Farmer, two decades. Itinerant butcher, five years. I will
not
be sick at this.’ But it wasn’t the death
of the sheep as such; nor the evisceration of the creature’s flesh, not even the feeling that I was in any danger myself. It was the sheer, unalloyed enthusiasm with which dog and rats went about their business. I felt like a Puritan being forced to watch an orgy.

Soon it was over. The head was shards of bone and scraps of gore, though the body from the neck down was untouched. One of the
rats was holding a chunk of brain in his hand and licking it. The dog’s dong was limp and swinging again. It took hold of a hind sheep leg and hauled the headless carcass backwards, heave, heave, heave and out through the back door. ‘Where’s he going?’ I asked. The back of my throat felt like it had been painted with an astringent. My stomach kept clenching.

‘An army marches on its stomach,
Graham,’ said the cat. ‘The troops must be fed.’

‘Fed with the body of their general,’ I said. ‘As my daughter used to put it:
gross
.’

‘It’s sex, Graham,’ smirked the cat. ‘Those times of yours with Anne were tender, I’m sure. But they weren’t capable of rising to
these
sorts of intensities.’

Two of the rats began licking the blood off the floor; and through the back door three
hefty black dogs padded in.

‘Graham?’ called Mary, from back in the house. ‘Everything’s gone quiet. What’s happening now?’

‘I’m fine Mary,’ I bellowed back, so loudly that Cincinnatus leapt to his feet in surprise. ‘I’ll come and get you in a moment.’

Only one rat was not occupied in licking the floor clean of blood; and he was holding something in his wizened little hands.
He ran along, hopped to a chair and so onto the table, and held this something out to me.

I suppose this was the first time I ever saw a chip. Certainly it was the first time I ever saw a chip that had already been seeded into the brain of a bête. The chip itself was rice-grain sized, or perhaps smaller. What was noticeable about the thing the rat was holding was the spider-silk spread of
its mesh. There was no gore on it: licked off, I suppose. I took the thing in my big, clumsy fingers and laid it in the palm of my left hand. With dabbing motions I spread the mesh out – some of the strands were short, some longer. The whole thing had a snowflake beauty to it. I scrunched it up in my hand.

‘I’m not wearing this,’ I announced, to the room in general.

‘You don’t have
to wear it in your skull, Graham,’ said the cat. ‘Carry it with you. It’ll interface with any smart tab, or phone, or computer.’

‘Carry it.’

‘It’s your passport to being taken seriously as a negotiator,’ said the cat.

I stood up again, for the third time, and amazingly this time I managed to remain on my feet – my foot, I should say. ‘The Lamb gave his life for this?’ I said.
‘He sacrificed himself to kick-start human-bête negotiations?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ hummed the cat, close by me. ‘The Lamb isn’t dead. He’s in your hand.’

The calm after the storm would have unnerved me much more if I hadn’t deposited two-thirds of a bottle of whisky into my system. There was, I feel sure, some confused sense in my brain that I had to go back and release Mary from
her house arrest – to reassure her that she was all right, and I was all right, and that everything was going to be fine. The sheet I had been wearing had fallen to the floor, and I did not deign to stoop to pick it up. More to the point, my drunken brain had forgotten than one of my legs was not working. It did not realize this, even after I began to stride purposefully out of the kitchen. I
planted my good foot down forcefully, and then staggered hard as I tried the same manoeuvre with my other leg. Surprisingly, though, I was still upright. The wall had propped itself firmly against my left shoulder. I tried again and made for the stairs. Stopped. A deep breath, then a sudden burst of speed: two more steps, then two more, then two more, a repeated scurry-stop motion from dead foot to
living one, and all the time I was bent absurdly far forward. Perhaps I was trying to keep my profile low so that snipers couldn’t pick me off. I went straight into the bedroom and realized only then that it was my bedroom. At that point it occurred to me that a lie-down might be just what the doctor ordered. I fell face forward.