The Humans (11 page)

Where we are from there are no names, no families living together, no husbands and wives, no sulky teenagers, no madness.

Where we are from we have solved the problem of fear because we have solved the problem of death. We will not die. Which means we can’t just let the universe do what it wants to do,
because we will be inside it for eternity.

Where we are from we will never be lying on a luxurious carpet, clutching our chest as our faces turn purple and our eyes seek desperately to view our surroundings for one last time.

Where we are from our technology, created on the back of our supreme and comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, has meant not only that we can travel great distances, but also that we can
rearrange our own biological ingredients, renew and replenish them. We are psychologically equipped for such advances. We have never been at war with ourselves. We never place the desires of the
individual over the requirements of the collective.

Where we are from we understand that if the humans’ rate of mathematical advancement exceeds their psychological maturity, then action needs to be taken. For instance, the death of Daniel
Russell, and the knowledge he held, could end up saving many more lives. And so: he is a logical and justifiable sacrifice.

Where we are from there are no nightmares.

And yet, that night, for the very first time in my life I had a nightmare.

A world of dead humans with me and that indifferent cat walking through a giant carpeted street full of bodies. I was trying to get home. But I couldn’t. I was stuck here. I had become one
of them. Stuck in human form, unable to escape the inevitable fate awaiting all of them. And I was getting hungry and I needed to eat but I couldn’t eat, because my mouth was clamped shut.
The hunger became extreme. I was starving, wasting away at rapid speed. I went to the garage I had been in that first night and tried to shove food in my mouth, but it was no good. It was still
locked from this inexplicable paralysis. I knew I was going to die.

Die.

How did humans ever stomach the idea?

I woke.

I was sweating and out of breath. Isobel touched my back. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, as Tabitha had said. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all
right.’

The next day I was alone.

Well no, actually, that’s not quite true.

I wasn’t alone. There was the dog. Newton. The dog named after a human who had come up with the ideas of gravity and inertia. Given the slow speed with which the dog left its basket, I
realised the name was a fitting tribute to these discoveries. He was awake now. He was old and he hobbled, and he was half-blind.

He knew who I was. Or who I wasn’t. And he growled whenever he was near me. I didn’t quite understand his language just yet but I sensed he was displeased. He showed his teeth but I
could tell years of subservience to his bipedal owners meant the very fact that I was standing up was enough for me to command a certain degree of respect.

I felt sick. I put this down to the new air I was breathing. But each time I closed my eyes I saw Daniel Russell’s anguished face as he lay on the carpet. I also had a headache, but that
was the lingering after-effect of the energy I had exerted yesterday.

I knew life was going to be easier during my short stay here if Newton was on my side. He might have information, have picked up on signals, heard things. And I knew there was one rule that held
fast across the universe: if you wanted to get someone on your side what you really had to do was
relieve their pain
. It seems ridiculous now, such logic. But the truth was even more
ridiculous, and too dangerous to acknowledge to myself, that after the need to hurt I felt an urge to heal.

So I went over and gave him a biscuit. And then, after giving him the biscuit, I gave him sight. And then, as I stroked his hind leg, he whimpered words into my ear I couldn’t quite
translate. I healed him, giving myself not only an even more intense headache but also wave upon wave of fatigue in the process. Indeed, so exhausted was I that I fell asleep on the kitchen floor.
When I woke up, I was coated in dog saliva. Newton’s tongue was still at it, licking me with considerable enthusiasm. Licking, licking, licking, as though the meaning of canine existence was
something just beneath my skin.

‘Could you please stop that?’ I said. But he couldn’t. Not until I stood up. He was physically incapable of stopping.

And even once I had stood up he tried to stand up with me, and on me, as if he wanted to be upright, too. It was then I realised the one thing worse than having a dog hate you is having a dog
love you. Seriously, if there was a
needier
species in the universe I had yet to meet it.

‘Get away,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want your love.’

I went to the living room and sat down on the sofa. I needed to think. Would Daniel Russell’s death be viewed by the humans as suspicious? A man on heart medication succumbing to a second
and this time fatal heart attack? I had no poison, and no weapon they would ever be able to identify.

The dog sat down next to me, placed his head on my lap, then lifted his head off my lap, and then on again, as if deciding whether or not to put his head on my lap was the biggest decision he
had ever faced.

We spent hours together that day. Me and the dog. At first I was annoyed that he wouldn’t leave me alone, as what I needed to do was to focus and work out when I was going to act next. To
work out how much more information I needed to acquire before doing what would have to be my final acts here, eliminating Andrew Martin’s wife and child. I shouted at the dog again to leave
me alone, and he did so, but when I stood in the living room with nothing but my thoughts and plans I realised I felt a terrible loneliness and so called him back. And he came, and seemed happy to
be wanted again.

I put something on that interested me. It was called
The Planets
by Gustav Holst. It was a piece of music all about the humans’ puny solar system, so it was surprising to hear it
had quite an epic feel. Another confusing thing was that it was divided into seven ‘movements’ each named after ‘astrological characters’. For instance, Mars was ‘the
Bringer of War’, Jupiter was ‘the Bringer of Jollity’, and Saturn was ‘the Bringer of Old Age’.

This primitivism struck me as funny. And so was the idea that the music had anything whatsoever to do with those dead planets. But it seemed to soothe Newton a little bit, and I must admit one
or two parts of it had some kind of effect on me, a kind of electrochemical effect. Listening to music, I realised, was simply the pleasure of counting without realising you were counting. As the
electrical impulses were transported from the neurons in my ear through my body, I felt – I don’t know – calm. It made that strange unease that had been with me since I had
watched Daniel Russell die on his carpet settle a little.

As we listened I tried to work out why Newton and his species were so enamoured of humans.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What is it about the humans?’

Newton laughed. Or as close as a dog can get to laughing, which is pretty close.

I persisted with my line of enquiry. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Spill the beans.’ He seemed a bit coy. I don’t think he really had an answer. Maybe he hadn’t reached
his verdict, or he was too loyal to be truthful.

I put on some different music. I played the music of someone called Ennio Morricone. I played an album called
Space Oddity
by David Bowie, which, in its simple patterned measure of time,
was actually quite enjoyable. As was
Moon Safari
by Air, though that shed little light on the moon itself. I played
A Love Supreme
by John Coltrane and
Blue Monk
by Thelonious
Monk. This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human. I listened to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by Leonard Bernstein and
‘Moonlight Sonata’ by Ludwig van Beethoven and Brahms’ ‘Intermezzo op. 17’. I listened to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, Prince, Talking
Heads, Al Greene, Tom Waits, Mozart. I was intrigued to discover the sounds that could make it on to music – the strange talking radio voice on ‘I Am the Walrus’ by the Beatles,
the cough at the beginning of Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ and at the end of Tom Waits songs. Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a
pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics. I thought about my speech at the Museum of Quadratic Equations. With the Beach Boys I got a strange feeling, behind my eyes and in my
stomach. I had no idea what that feeling was, but it made me think of Isobel, and the way she had hugged me last night, after I had come home and told her Daniel Russell had suffered a fatal heart
attack in front of me.

There’d been a slight moment of suspicion, a brief hardening of her stare, but it had softened into compassion. Whatever else she might have thought about her husband he wasn’t a
killer. The last thing I listened to was a tune called ‘Clair de Lune’ by Debussy. That was the closest representation of space I had ever heard, and I stood there, in the middle of the
room, frozen with shock that a human could have made such a beautiful noise.

This beauty terrified me, like an alien creature appearing out of nowhere. An ipsoid, bursting out of the desert. I had to stay focused. I had to keep believing everything I had been told. That
this was a species of ugliness and violence, beyond redemption.

Newton was scratching at the front door. The scratching was putting me off the music so I went over and tried to decipher what he wanted. It turned out that what he wanted was to go outside.
There was a ‘lead’ I had seen Isobel use, and so I attached it to the collar.

As I walked the dog I tried to think more negatively towards the humans.

And it certainly seemed ethically questionable, the relationship between humans and dogs, both of whom – on the scale of intelligence that covered every species in the universe –
would have been somewhere in the middle, not too far apart. But I have to say that dogs didn’t seem to mind it. In fact, they went along quite happily with the set-up most of the time.

I let Newton lead the way.

We passed a man on the other side of the road. The man just stopped and stared at me and smiled to himself. I smiled and waved my hand, understanding this was an appropriate human greeting. He
didn’t wave back.
Yes, humans are a troubling species
. We carried on walking, and we passed another man. A man in a wheelchair. He seemed to know me.

‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘isn’t it terrible – the news about Daniel Russell?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was there. I saw it happen. It was horrible, just horrible.’

‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’

‘Mortality is a very tragic thing.’

‘Indeed, indeed it is.’

‘Anyway, I had better be going. The dog is in quite a hurry. I will see you.’

‘Yes, yes, absolutely. But may I ask: how are you? I heard you’d been a bit unwell yourself?’

‘Oh, fine. I am over that. It was just a bit of a misunderstanding, really.’

‘Oh, I see.’

The conversation dwindled further, and I made my excuses, Newton dragging me forward until we reached a large stretch of grass. This is what dogs liked to do, I discovered. They liked to run
around on grass, pretending they were free, shouting, ‘
We’re free, we’re free, look, look, look how free we are!
’ at each other. It really was a sorry sight. But it
worked for them, and for Newton in particular. It was a collective illusion they had chosen to swallow and they were submitting to it wholeheartedly, without any nostalgia for their former wolf
selves.

That was the remarkable thing about humans – their ability to shape the path of other species, to change their fundamental nature. Maybe it could happen to me, maybe I could be changed,
maybe I already was being changed? Who knew? I hoped not. I hoped I was staying as pure as I had been told, as strong and isolated as a prime, as a ninety-seven.

I sat on a bench and watched the traffic. No matter how long I stayed on this planet I doubted I would ever get used to the sight of cars, bound by gravity and poor technology to the road,
hardly moving on the roads because there were so many of them.

Was it wrong to thwart a species’ technological advancement? That was a new question in my mind. I didn’t want it there, so I was quite relieved when Newton started barking. I turned
to look at him. He was standing still, his head steady in one direction, as he carried on making as loud a noise as he possibly could.

‘
Look!
’ he seemed to bark. ‘
Look! Look! Look!
’ I was picking up his language.

There was another road, a different one to the one with all the traffic. A line of terraced houses facing the park.

I turned towards it, as Newton clearly wanted me to do. I saw Gulliver, on his own, walking along the pavement, trying his best to hide behind his hair. He was meant to be at school. And he
wasn’t, unless human school was walking along the street and thinking, which it really should have been. He saw me. He froze. And then he turned around and started walking in the other
direction.

‘Gulliver!’ I called. ‘Gulliver!’

He ignored me. If anything, he started walking away faster than he had done before. His behaviour concerned me. After all, inside his head was the knowledge that the world’s biggest
mathematical puzzle had been solved, and by his own father. I hadn’t acted last night. I had told myself that I needed to find more information, check there was no one else Andrew Martin
could have told. Also, I was probably too exhausted after my encounter with Daniel. I would wait another day, maybe even two. That had been the plan. Gulliver had told me he hadn’t said
anything, and that he wasn’t going to, but how could he be totally trusted? His mother was convinced, right now, that he was at school. And yet he evidently wasn’t. I got up from the
bench and walked over the litter-strewn grass to where Newton was still barking.