Stone Gods (28 page)

I shouldn't be here, fugitive, lost, but time has become its own tsunami, a tidal wave sweeping me up, crashing me down. You can change everything about yourself — your name, your home, your skin colour, your gender, even your parents, your private history — but you can't change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.

This is our time.

The small boy was whimpering. I gave him the bottle of milk. He knelt down and poured some into his one good cupped hand, and gave it to the dog to drink. When he had done that with half of the milk, he drank the rest straight off. We went on.

I knew we would come back to the telescope.

Far out, too far to see with the human eye or to hear with the human ear, is everything we have lost. We add to that loss feelings that are unbearable. Send them out into deep space, where we hope they will never touch us. Sometimes, in our dreams, we see the boxed-up miseries and fears, orbiting two miles up, outside our little world, never could rocket them away far enough, never could get rid of them for ever.

Sometimes there's a signal, and we don't want to hear it: we keep the receiving equipment disused, we never updated the analogue computer. Shut off, shut down, what does it matter what happens if we can't hear it?

But there it is — repeating code bouncing off the surface of the moon. Another language, not one we speak — but it is our own.

I don't want to recognize what I can't manage. I want to leave it remote and star-guarded. I want it weightless, because it is too heavy for me to bear.

Sometimes I think it would be better if I had no feelings at all. Like Spike, I could be neural and not limbic. Like her, I would have no need of emotion. I associate feeling with sadness; and sadness is a void, my empty space. Feeling is empty space. But space is not empty.

Above me, the sky is drilled with stars, ancient light, immense distances, new worlds. If we found another planet, we could leave everything behind, start again, be safe. It would be different, wouldn't it? Another chance.

There's my father leaving for Ireland. There are the Pilgrim Fathers sailing for America.

The new world - El Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfowndland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc'd upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found ...

The telescope was tilted. The beacon at the tip of the radio antenna was lit up. There was a light on in the hut.

'I am picking up the signal,' said Spike.

The old man was standing, hands in his trouser pockets, looking from the dish to the hut. He went towards it, opened the door. He went inside. I could see his shape moving across the window. He seemed to be talking to someone.

'Billie,' said Spike, 'why are you crying?'

'Because it's hopeless, because we're hopeless, the whole stupid fucking human race.'

'Is that why you are crying?'

'And because I wish there was a landing-place that wasn't always being torn up.'

'Is that why you are crying?'

'And because I feel inadequate.'

'There's a story about a princess whose tears turned to diamonds.'

'I'm not a princess and my tears are tears like everyone else's.'

'But they are not everyone else's, Billie. They are your tears.'

And my tears are for the planet because I love it and because we're killing it, and my tears are for these wars and all this loss, and for the children who have no childhood, and for my childhood, which has somehow turned up again, like an orphan on my doorstep asking to be let in. But I don't want to open the door.

'Billie,' said Spike, 'leave me here and go on.'

'I'm not leaving you. Go where?'

'Find your way home.'

'It's not home — it's where I live. That's different.'

'At least you have somewhere to live.'

I looked at the small boy and the small dog. 'I could take them with me.'

'They wouldn't let you look after them. They'd take the boy to hospital, where he will die, and they will have the dog put down.'

'Yes ... '

'They'll say it's in the best interests of the boy.'

'Yes ... '

'But it will break his heart.'

'Yes.'

'And his heart is the one thing they haven't broken.'

'Spike?'

'Yes?'

'Why do you say these things now?'

'I am among humans.'

'That must be depressing for you.'

'I can't be depressed.'

'No ... '

'But I will learn.'

'Spike — this is never going to work. Humans can't do it — either we kill each other or we kill the planet or both. We'd destroy the lot rather than make it work.'

'It's taken you a long time to get here.'

'Sixty-five million years since the dinosaurs.'

'That's when the signal was sent.'

'What?'

'It is dated.'

'I thought you couldn't read it.'

'I can.'

'What does it say?'

'It doesn't say anything as such. It is one line of programming code for a Robo
sapiens
.'

The old man came out of the hut. He was waving his arms, excited. We went over to him. The room was humming. 'The analogue computer is driving the dish,' he said. 'I have found what can only be described as a message in a bottle — except that it isn't in a bottle, it's in a wavelength.'

When we approached it, polar-swirled, white-whirled, diamond-blue, routed by rivers, we found a world still forming. There was evidence that carbon had once been the dominant gas, and after that methane and, finally, oxygen, thanks to the intervention of cynobacieria. Oxygen creates a planet receptive to our forms of life.

Like Orbus, Planet Blue is made up of land and sea areas, with high mountain ranges and what appear to be frozen regions. We have landed two roving probes on the planet and expect a steady supply of data over the coming months. The planet is abundantly forested. Insect life, marine life and mammals are evident. It is strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million years ago, with the exception of the dinosaurs, of which we have no record on Orbus.

* * *

'A new planet,' he said. 'Imagine what we could do if we found a new planet.'

There it is, travelling through the sky, the winning ball with the lucky number on it — not the proto, the almost, the maybe, but this one, Planet Blue, which wanted life so much she got it.

Ranging through the wrecks of stars, burned and blasted, would you find it, alone in the Milky Way, a landing-place?

And if you did find it?

The old man was sitting at the data-print of the computer. I took the manuscript out of my bag, dropped the pages, picked them up again, shuffled as a pack of cards.

'What's that?' Spike asked.

'It's what I told you about, today, yesterday, when, I don't know when, it seems a lifetime ago.
The Stone Gods
.'

'I wonder who left it there?'

'It was me.'

'Why, Billie?'

A message in a bottle. A signal. But then I saw it was still there ... round and round on the Circle Line. A repeating world.

Is this how it ends?

It isn't ended yet.

'The book isn't finished, but this is as far I could go.'

'What shall I do with it?'

'Read it. Leave it for someone else to find. The pages are loose — it can be written again.'

* * *

In the cave, with Spike, watching the snow fall, watching the snow fall like Leonids, sparking and starting new worlds that last a second, return, reform, begin again, I wondered if there is a place beyond this, where the dark dice didn't play, where life itself became the winning number, not gambled away later by people like us who valued life so little that we lost it.

A human society that wasn't just disgust.

Noises of whooping and drumming, celebrating the finding of the Egg, as tho' one oaf with a stolen prize could change life and its lot. It will proceed as before: the fighting, the killing, the lack, the loss, for power, for envy, for every stupidity that man can devise.

And here, on my knees, is the little world I wanted to hold for ever, lightly, as the world itself is held in the sky lightly, without threats or fears, without supports of any kind, its own self, a garden of great beauty in a field of stars.

Holland, he said, pointing to a star nearest the moon, and I will clip my heart to him there, as a signal of my love. No flag, no territory, no fortress, no claim, but this love.

She did love me, for the forty weeks that I was her captive or she mine. We were each other's conquered land. We were matched in power and helplessness. We were the barter and the prize, what we played for, what we lost. The dark dice, a two and a one, one became two, then two became two ones. A kingdom lost in a single throw. It's risky, but it's our only chance.

Come back one day. I'll know it's you. I can track you because we are the same stuff.

* * *

In the cave, last of the light, beginning of the long dark, I held Spike's head while her eyes closed. I drew up my knees to give her the warmth from my body, pulled my coat around her against the cold.

Already the door is opening and he must go within. The timbered ceiling of the long hall is coffered with stars.

It was the last time we were together; her heart and mine. She did love me, love like a star, light years gone.

'Where are you going, Billie?'

If I could tell you that I could tell you everything — everything about me. There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn't have separate regions for past and future; only the present is differentiated by the brain.

We split time into three parts. The brain, it seems, splits it twice only: now, and not now.

So in the not-now, I can say that I was set adrift in an open boat, and after a while learned how to make a rudder and oars, though I never mastered a sail and its wind. The wind blows where it will, and I have many times arrived at the unexpected.

But I never found a place to land.

I put the pages on the desk, picked up Spike and kissed her lightly on the mouth, Then I put her on top of the pages.

'See you in sixty-five million years, maybe.'

'Billie?'

'Spike?'

'I'll miss you.'

'That's limbic.'

'I can't help it.'

'That's limbic too.'
 

I set off, away from the telescope, down through the valley and across the plain of the night. I had no direction or real purpose: I wanted to walk until my mind was still. Far off, I could hear the noise of guns and shouting. I would go back when I could, but not now.

A quantum universe — neither random nor determined. A universe of potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.

Love is an intervention.

Why do we not choose it?

I didn't notice the soldiers coming towards me. Two humans dressed as androids, no faces, no soft skin, combat gear, helmets, guns. One of them shouted something from behind his black visor. I couldn't hear, I shook my head. We stood still, the three of us. They didn't come towards me. I smiled, turned, walked on. There was another shout. I walked on. Then I heard three reports in quick succession, and I fell down. There was blood, a lot of blood, a surprising amount of blood, was what I thought —
so much blood that they had to burn the sheet
. No, that was a long time ago.

The moon is full. There's a star just by. That's what I can see from where I am. Then, for a while, I have' to close my eyes.

When I open my eyes again, I'm at the bottom of the track. My body is lying at an angle. My clothes are muddy. I know I'm bleeding but the wound was always there.

I look down at my body, small and familiar, and I feel affection, and some regret, because I can't go back there again.

I set off up the track, and it's very dark here under the trees, but the gunfire noise has stopped, and I can hear birds, which is strange because it is so dark.

On my left is the broad, active stream with watercress growing in the fast part, and flag iris on the bank, and a willow bending over the water, and a foam of frog spawn, and a moorhen sailing the current.

I know this track, this stream, I've been here before, many times it seems, though I can't say when. The track rises steeply, and I must quicken my pace. Looking back, it's very dark.