Take No Prisoners (5 page)
Authors: John Grant
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Short Stories (Single Author)
My mind explored this concept, and then took it further.
Trains don't just
go to
stations, they
come from
them as well.
Which implied that, all my life so far, I'd been perceiving only one of the many railway tracks along which my personal train – my own personal "now" – had been traveling. Had I somehow been possessed of the ability to perceive the totality of the passage of my past time, I'd have experienced not just a single past but many. In other words, if I could happily accept that the future was unformed and therefore malleable, then I must also accept the far more difficult proposition that the past, too, was readily malleable. It's an old cliché that we mold our own futures. Is it feasible that, through our selective perception, we can likewise mold our own pasts?
If so, then there was another explanation for Andrew Brunner's omission of all those old World War II movies from his
Brunner's Companion to the Cinema
.
They were movies that had never been made.
Or, at least, they had never been made in the particular past which the consensus of the people alive in the world today had perceived, and indeed still perceived. Yet our train had been traveling along many lines at once, not just the one we'd noticed, and along one of those
other
lines it was perfectly plausible that the Allies had emerged victorious – perhaps the D-Day landings had been successful rather than a fiasco, or perhaps the traitor Oppenheimer's team had proved nuclear fission possible after all, rather than being misled by the nonsensical Jew science of the charlatan Einstein. I wasn't a historian, so I couldn't even begin to hazard a guess at these things. Whatever the details, it seemed to me that, just because we were able to perceive only a single past, we were getting a completely misleading picture of what the past had actually been like – we were regarding as simple something which had in fact been infernally complex, a huge number of different railway lines that knotted and unknotted as the history train sped along all of them at once. The past, in short, had been molded into its apparently immutable form not through any physical property of the universe but through the sheer inability of the human brain to perceive it fully.
Those movies hadn't been made in
our
past, but they had been made in
the
past.
Along at least one of the railway tracks of history, the victors in World War II had been the Allies, and their movie producers and directors had set about solidifying the past they preferred. Of course, they wouldn't have realized that this was what they were doing – they were merely making triumphal entertainments, just as our own moviemakers had created such propagandistic efforts as
The Rising Sun Shall Never Set
and
Private Kohl's War
and countless others you can certainly think of yourself – but that was the effect of what they did.
How the movies had been brought into
our
present was something about which I could hardly even begin to guess. Perhaps there are some people who are able to perceive directly that the train of time is always running along more than a single track, and perhaps one of those people succeeded in, as it were, moving the cans of film across from one side of the train to the other. Or perhaps they just slipped accidentally from a different track, of the many that constitute the passage of time, onto ours. However it came about, the anonymous proprietor of the Rupolo – and perhaps his counterparts in numerous small, scruffy suburban cinemas all over the country – had realized they represented a way of altering people's perceptions, and thereby of changing the shape of history, of reifying a different past.
And to a great extent it had worked – I knew that at first hand. Even to this day, whatever the evidence of my senses or my intellect, I know deep inside me that World War II was fought in black-and-white and that the winners were those slightly comical chappies with their strangled accents. At the time I was sitting on the train home and these notions were formulating themselves in my head, the knowledge was much stronger. Ever since I'd started going to the Monday matinees I'd been having those occasional but powerful flashes when the world around me seemed to be nothing but a charade, the powerful feeling that true reality was what I saw on the Rupolo's screen. Were my own experience to be repeated all over America or all over the world, to be shared by millions upon millions of others, then assuredly the consensus perception of which railway line the train had pounded along might change.
And the past with it.
The only reason the ploy had ultimately failed in my own instance was that I had begun to think of the movies analytically – it had been my conscious decision to continue watching them, but now on the basis that they were thrillingly
verboten
presentations. Had I continued to watch them uncritically, seeing them through the lens of my emotions rather than that of my intellect, I might have eventually come to see the world they depicted as the only possible past, the true history. No wonder the other Monday regulars at the Rupolo hadn't seemed disappointed by
Private Kohl's War
and
The Rising Sun Shall Never Set
. While I'd been watching those two ditchwater outings the rest of the audience had been watching something else –
The Fall of Berlin
, perhaps, or
Convoy to Nairobi
, or ... They'd seen those movies because there was no reason for them not to. I, on the other hand, had been able to see only movies that accorded with my own particular perception of the way the past had run. Along the railway track to which my perception was once more limited, the victors had made the movies that reinforced the consensual past.
~
Whoever those conspirators were – if they even existed outside the bounds of my own fertile imagination – their scheme patently failed, and not because of the cops busting cinemas like the Rupolo all over the country but because in due course no human being can continue to observe and accept outside stimuli completely uncritically: eventually, as with myself, the analytical faculty must step in to limit the scope of the mind. For me to say that this self-limiting mechanism of the brain is a tragedy might seem rather rich, coming as that statement does from someone who has made a lifetime career – and a very great deal of money – out of deploying that very same analytical faculty. Yet I stick to the contention. Without a full perception of the true, complicated nature of our past we are not fully prepared as a species to tackle the equally complicated, multiply braided future that awaits us. We will forever be blind to the flowering of the simultaneous realities of our own future, instead perceiving only a single stalk, permitting ourselves to glance neither to left nor to right as we charge ahead oblivious to the splendors all around us. It is a sterile course we are following, this faith in our perception that there is only a single, unique future, and I believe that in due course it will lead to our extinction. If there are other species out there among the stars, I have no doubt they will have learned not to make the same mistake we've made and persist in making, and that they'll thereby be equipped to deal with the future: to welcome it as the burgeoning treasure-store it is in a way we are not. Perhaps only here, on this world, has the mistake ever been made.
As for the movies themselves? As I've said, I am a rich man, and I've spent some of my wealth on employing researchers to try to track down those whose titles I can recall:
Albert RN
,
The Great Escape
,
Reach for the Sky
,
The Bridge on the River Kwai
... But so far they've come up with nothing, and I doubt that now this will ever change. What I still think of as The Rupolo Movies were, if you like, just temporary visitors to our consensual and ever-evolving history; whether they'll ever come back – or be brought back – is something about which one can't guess. My suspicion is that we've seen the last of them.
Every now and then I wonder what our consensual present would be like had we indeed been able to perceive a railway track along which one of the stations was the Allies winning World War II. Would things be so very much different? Would they be better or would they be worse? Again, who can guess?
This particular version of history has been very good to me. I've led an extremely comfortable life doing more or less exactly what I wanted to do, indulging my own especial passion and being paid large sums of money simply to enjoy myself. And most of the time, as I look around at the rest of the world, everything there seems pretty near ideal as well. But sometimes I wonder.
This week in the
New York Times
there was much reporting of the bloody suppression of yet another escape plot by the niggers in one of the slave camps of the South. Scores of them were shot or hanged, including children, and the ringleaders were roasted alive, as is the custom there. I am not one of those who would pretend that the niggers are anything other than a debased subspecies of humanity, but at the same time I cannot believe that this is right: I would not roast a dog or a cat alive, so how can it be right to do this to a nigger? The week before, two homosexuals were lynched in Massachusetts; that was considered to be such a routine occurrence that the story was given only a single paragraph tucked away at the bottom of page twelve. Again, can it be truly right to punish someone with death for their sexual preferences? To be sure, the law would have delivered them a jail sentence, which is certainly justified enough, but the tone of that single paragraph seemed to condone the actions of the lynch mob. I feel uneasy at the ease and frequency with which our penal system carries out executions, often of people who seem to me to be more mentally ill or impaired, or simply more independently minded, than genuinely criminal. And I wish that when vagrants are rounded up they did not simply disappear.
So, yes, sometimes I wonder.
The Glad who Sang a Mermaid in from the Probability Sea
Sand between my toes and the songs of the seas in my ears. Two songs, two seas. The water sea belongs to me because it lives and dies with me, with its perfect blue (I
made
it perfect) sheening to the horizon and the pure white froth of its mighty yet playful breakers. The probability sea belongs to me as it belongs to all, and owns all, having birthed all.
More song. Laughter-song. A mother. Her weans. The grave laughter-song of love.
And the smell of seaweed in my nostrils, sparking a joyous hunger. I throw back my head and see that the sun fills its decreed place in the sky, and I roar my delight in my creation as I turn, stretching my arms wide to embrace.
Oh, lady.
Oh, weans.
~
Once there was a ship that sailed the seas of The World. The ship was real – some friends once saw it sail – but now it has become in the Ironfolk mind like a myth, for all they know is that it had a name, and that it played an important part in ... something or other. That's what's been lost to them: what it was it did; why it was important. But its name is still remembered: the rusty little ferry was called the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
.
The Ironfolk revere names, though often they get them wrong.
I slaved aboard a different vessel called the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
, a vessel that sailed the probability sea. I was one of a hundred hundred slaves on a ship of crafted metal whose sleek lines and curved shine and unthinkable size – it was a month's walk from one end to the other – made a joke of its name. The joke, had the Ironfolk but realized it, was not on the dented ferry – of which they recalled so little – but on the great cargo vessel, for its presumption: it was one of many, and thereby unimportant; the ferry was one of one.
I slaved, and like the other slaves I sometimes schemed for the overthrow of the Ironfolk, secure in the knowledge that our plans – however intricate and perfect – would never fruit; our plotting was an irresponsible sport, hardly more. We moved from system to system, picking up extra Finefolk slaves to replace those who died of pining or of beating. But, more important, we embarked Ironfolk families by the hundred; rich families and soft families, usually, but often with the look of defeat in their eyes. We were not allowed to go too close to them, for fear that we might steal their weans – as if we would wish to (although sometimes the weans fled to us, recognizing that the same light shone in us as shone in them). The families were leaving their homes and the crowding of the Galaxy, leaving to be taken to new and echoing worlds across the great ocean. The Spiral of Andromeda was beckoning them, flaunting its faded starry finery at them, promising – false-promising – that all was fresh and virginal there.
The Ironfolk have a liking for virginity, believing it to be the natural order of things. This is one of the tapestry of beliefs that has always shielded their eyes from the reality of the universe. Virgin purity is something that must be
created
; reality is rough and promiscuous and noisy, with whisky on her breath. Andromeda herself was not like that, mind you: she was flashy and could be strident, but her mother had invented her as pure, and she remained that way all her days, shining as brightly as the stars of the spiral which bears her name. The most exquisite of her many sensualities was the dirt under her fingernails.
The Spiral of Andromeda is absent from my sky. I have no wish always to see reminders of my time of slavery.
~
Qinefer, my flass, is telling the weans a story. They are draped, one to either side, across her thighs as she sits cross-legged on the sand; their eyes are upturned shiningly towards hers, which are brown and deep like peaty, slow-moving river water. Tickles and hair-tugs punctuate the tale.
"So Brightjacket speaks again to the gathering," she says, for she is well past the once-upon-a-times in her telling, "and this time he punches his chest like
so
and he draws himself up to his finest height, and he says, 'The Ironfolk will see us dead, or will bend us to their chores. Have they not already banished the songs out of the streams? Is not even the cool voice of moonlight stilled, so that she and the wind can no longer sing their wistfulness together in the pine-branches? Have they not cast their nets of crafted metal across all the land, caging us? Yes!' – and here he strikes his chest again, only harder (harder than I would strike yours, my little glad) – 'All of this destroying they have done in their lack of grace, and there is no one who can tell when they will cease to do so. We have watched them in silence, if we have dared not to flee.'"
It's an old story, of course, one that dates right back to the times on Earth before it melded with The World. I grin and listen in on it, pretending that she won't know I'm doing so.
"'The Ironfolk's railways,' says Brightjacket, 'are like the spores of a dandelion clock, drifting everywhere, coming down anywhere, stiffening the land's music –
our
music – with the crafted metal of which they are shaped. When was the last time the Finefolk could dance in the Vale of White Horse? Or in a ring around the Cairngorms? Or among the tors – the tors
our
folk built – of Dartmoor? Twenty years? Fifty?'
"And the eldern among them nod, as so do the fly weans – even those who can ill recall ten years past, leave alone fifty. For metal that is shaped is graver to our kind than viper's bite or scorpion's sting – which are, my bonny young flass, more painful far than even your mother's skelp."
The two of them laugh together, the mother and her daughter. In this moment the two of them are of a single age. Which is as it should be. For all her words, Qinefer has felt neither snake's nor scorpion's wrath; the creatures of my world are peaceful with us, obeying the notes I instructed the inshore breeze to pluck on the sea-reeds. But I gave her my memories when first she swam ashore from the probability sea, which is why she knows of bites and stings. And why she knows the story of Brightjacket, and of how he led our kind to the Freedom. Though some memories I kept from her.
"'You nod in the simulation of wisdom!' cries Brightjacket angrily, and all hush at the anger in his voice. 'Wooden puppets can nod like that, when their strings are tweaked!' he says. 'But wisdom is more than knowing, or its pretence: wisdom is also
doing
, when the doing is wise!'
"None of them there like this overmuch. The eldern can recollect the times before the Ironfolk came, and all the Earth was a room for play. Even after, once the shaping of metal had begun, there were places in plenty where people could escape its bindings. Such places, indeed, there yet were; but they were shrinking, like rainpools in the hot sunlight. Always there still seemed to be enough, even if this year's enough had to be a bit less than the last year's. Even here where they've forgathered, deep in a cavern that some forgotten hand once carved out beneath Snowdon, it's as if they can hear the dead noise of the chains wafting close to them. What Brightjacket was doing, my wind-haired ones, was looking ahead, seeing a time when the rainpools would be all gone, as the interstices in the net of the railways were filled in by the roads where crafted-metal creations likewise roared. The seas were not immune to these monsters, and neither the skies overhead – although not even Brightjacket foresaw how the scattered metal birds would one day flock. Our folk have never been too good at looking forward, you see: that's another thing the assembly doesn't like – being reminded of the future.
"'All the time it's getting worse,' he says into the silence of their resentment. 'Soon there will be no room for us even to pipe simple Changing-spells on a fipple-flute, or to sing the song that brings Sirius's winter rising.'
"'But what can we do?' says an eldern dismissively – or maybe it was several eldern, or all of them together, their beards making a sound like cuckoo-spit shaking loose. 'We cannot fight the Ironfolk, not without weapons of crafted metal we can't; and they alone of all the Earth's creatures have ears that are deaf to our music. I have myself hurled a Chord-of-dying straight into the face of one, and he heard not a gnat's whine!'
"'You're right,' says Brightjacket forthrightly. 'We cannot fight them. The time when we could have done that is a million years gone. And we cannot stay, and let ourselves be destroyed. So surely you must see there is only one course open to us?'
"All is silence again. They know what he is talking about – naturally they do, for our folk have never been without wits, although often stupid, and blinkered, and loath to change their doings. But knowing a thing and admitting you know it are two quite different matters."
"Like you not knowing that Daddy's been listening to you the past few minutes?" says Larksease. She looks at me, then cringes back into the crook of her mother's arm as I glower my most impressively.
"That's not quite the same," says Qinefer, a laugh briefly splitting her voice into separate strands, "but it's near enough. Now, pay attention to me, you impudent minx – and you, too, my twitch-nosed buffo – and let your father do as he wills. Otherwise you'll never know what happened to Brightjacket."
They pay dutiful attention, even though they've heard a thousand times what happened to Brightjacket.
"'We cannot fight, and we cannot survive if we but bide,' he says at last, his chin in his palm as if he were thinking all this afresh. 'So what is there that is left for us to do? Why – we must surely flee!'
"This makes a growl rise above the heads of young and old alike, as if Snowdon had heard Brightjacket's words and was registering gruff disapproval. If you've never heard an angry mountain speak its anger, then you don't know what anger sounds like." Two pairs of wide eyes on hers. "For a while it looks as if they may join their voices in a song that would rend Brightjacket one limb from the other, but he holds out his palms to them, and at last the moment is past.
"Another eldern pushes his way to the fore. 'Our people do not flee!' he bellows. 'We have always faced down peril. We are not cowards, are we?'
"And there's a huge bay of agreeing to this, of course. Fine words are always good to cheer to; they've killed more armies than weapons have. Not one of the folk gathered there wants to stand up and say, 'Yes, I'm a coward. I admit it, and I want to save my furry skin.' Not one of them except Brightjacket, but he doesn't put it quite that way.
"'It is our duty,' he says gravely, 'to do all that we can to preserve our kind. To stay here is to accept not just our own deaths but also those of our weans; and from
their
weans we would be taking away the chance of their first opening of their eyes. Can any among you here say that we have the right to throw away those lives?'
"Once again there's a hubbub. Some folk say he's right; others say he's just weaving spoken-words, making a Deceiving-chord too subtle for any of them to recognize as such. But the end of it all – and the end is a long time in coming, I assure you – is that more than three-fourths of the folk in the cavern say that Brightjacket's right, and that only flight can save the Finefolk. But where can they flee to? Even the ocean's deeps are being plumbed by the Ironfolk and their tools of crafted metal.
"'To the stars,' says Brightjacket in response to their question, and he begins to laugh a little-boy laugh. 'To the stars – that's a place where we gallant lads and fair lasses can hide from the Ironfolk.'
"I told you that our folk are not fine at looking to the future, so no one thinks to say there are only so many stars in the skies, and that sooner or later the Ironfolk will take themselves and their machines to those places, too. If anyone thinks of that, they believe it to be so many millions of years away it hardly matters. Even Brightjacket – who keeps quiet on the subject, as he would – believes that at least
thousands
of years must go by before the Ironfolk learn the simplest music, let alone the complicated harmonies that must be meshed to open the pathways across the greater seas to the stars. And he's right, of course – the Ironfolk have
still
never learned to play the living music, and I doubt very much if they even know it exists. What he doesn't reckon on – none of them do – is that the crafted-metal machines might become strong enough to batter their way across the interstellar oceans; and then, later, discover a way of skipping across the crests of the probability waves."
~
When I gave Qinefer my memories, there were a few I held back, not wishing that she should live a life of fear. By the time the Ironfolk had discovered how to skip the waves, they'd also encountered enough of our worlds to have found out about the living music. I doubt if any of them will ever learn to play it, still less to sing it; yet they are aware enough of its existence to know that they should fear it, and to take precautions against letting any of our kind give voice. They know, too, that it is their crafted metal that stiffens the living music in us; that is why, when they come to each new world, they swiftly ring it with their steel-and-aluminum space-sailing vessels, so preventing as many as possible of us from opening up the oceanic pathways and escaping. The rest of us can soon be caught and enslaved; all the Ironfolk need to do is capture one of us alive, and threaten to cut out his or her vocal cords with a steel knife ... The rest submit themselves, rather than hear that happen.
My world was taken that way. I remember it as if it were only a century or two ago. Qinefer's recital of a bugaboo tale for the weans, even though I know it better than she does, has picked the scabs off memories. Ours was a well populated world, with upwards of a hundred thousand of us – almost as many as had once dwelt on Earth. Perhaps fifty score escaped; another fifty score died in futile fighting; the rest of us were loaded into colony vessels much like the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
, so that we could slave for their owners and in due course their passengers. In the last, of course, we were intended to be still slaving for them on the worlds in the Spiral of Andromeda.
