Link Arms with Toads! (10 page)

“
Laura, come and look! We’re being interviewed.”

She joined me on the sofa and frowned. “That’s not right. We didn’t talk to anyone. They must have generated computer doubles!” She was more infuriated by the fact her doppelgänger had the wrong accent than by the process itself. I snapped the teevee off.

“
What happened to reality after the millennium?”

She shook her head. “We had to make it different, you know. How can we go on otherwise? It’s a joint effort.”

“
I suppose so. But living constantly in the future is exhausting. I just hope it’s worth it in the long run.”

Laura chuckled and went off to brew a drink. She knows I will never regress, despite my complaints. There are communities who have reverted, but they hold no interest for me. She returned with a pair of peppermint tea bags dangling from her earlobes. The joke depressed me. I decided to retire to the spare bedroom, the one that overlooks the hovertracks. If a mysterious creature really was loose in the neighbourhood, I wanted to make certain it left my vegetables alone.

Laura removed one of the tea bags and popped it into her mouth. She will never allow a malfunctioning kettle to deprive her of a nightcap. I turned away and wearily climbed the stairs, glad to be free of her vice. I was once addicted to her fresh wit and menthol sense in a similar way, but something had happened. She was no longer the female I knew. Perhaps my earlier doubts about her identity were based on subconscious insights rather than my nurturing of neuroses in preparation for learning Klingon grammar. But if she had been an impostor since the day we first met, how would I be able to verify the difference?

News Channels were able to create convincing replicas, so there was no telling what governments were capable of doing. I had often suspected the majority of Londoners were copies rather than originals but it never seemed important. Now, in my own house, the possibility was chilling. In Laura’s case, there was an extra dimension to her disparity, elements of unearthliness that suggested an alien source. I imagined the population split between official doubles, sanctioned by the Federation, and agents planted by extraterrestrial authorities.

Having worked for the Environment Ministry in the Somerset lagoons, tagging bison with radio-collars, I was acutely aware of the attachments affected by my fellow humans. Naive visual statements were not enough to explain the continued popularity of body piercing. Nobody could remember why the trend had started, so many decades ago, though some cited tribal instincts in revolt against the present. What if Laura’s nose rings, and those of her kind, were monitoring tags for intelligences from a distant galaxy? Control through fashion, a trick.

NARCISSAT was already setting, tumbling toward the flooded counties of the west. I stood by the window and watched the mirror dispensing bad luck all the way to the infected towns of Wales. When the light was gone and the shadows thickened on the embankment, I detected a vague movement in the thistles. Was this Laura’s monster? I could hardly deny something ravenous had been at our bins, yet the expanding woman was reason enough for the disorder. I had no desire to multiply entities beyond necessity, especially when the entities were horrid.

I opened the window and leaned out. The window box betrayed various signs of recent activity. In the moss that separated the petunias there was a miniature crop-circle. On this modest scale the usual explanations for the phenomena — whirlwind, hoax, mating hedgehogs — were more absurd than the possibility that an alien spacecraft had used the location as a landing strip. I brushed the scarred moss with a finger, wondering again about the print on the hovertracks. Filled with a sudden urge to revolt, I called down in the forbidden Esperanto:

“
Kiu vi estas? Kien vi iras? Ne iru en la gardenon!”

Along the street, other windows were raised. I waited for soldiers, searchlights, the paraphernalia of trouble. Distant voices mumbled, fell into silence again. Bored with the irony of it all, I retreated, sitting on the bed, shaking. How long could any of us keep this up? The pressure to ignore the date and begin a straightforward life was immense. At last I rose and fled, down to the living room.

Laura was ransacking a cupboard for a torch. “The animal is outside and it’s talking to itself in Esperanto.”

“
I am inclined to doubts,” I sighed.

“
No, I heard it. Come on, we’ll get it this time.”

I trailed her through the kitchen and into the garden. Looming over the far wall was a giant head, tongue lolling in a steaming mouth, horns curling forward over oily lashes. Fireflies perched on its lips, burning the dusk like flecks of luminous spittle.

Laura hid her face in her hands. “It’s grotesque!”

“
No, I think it’s a cow,” I replied.

“
What are you talking about? They were outlawed nearly twenty years ago. Is someone illegally breeding them?”

“
I guess so. No other explanation. There’ll be a reward if we catch it. Which of our neighbours could it be?”

We approached the creature warily, stepping lightly on the volcanic dust that coated the path. It seemed docile enough, watching us through the widest eyes I have ever seen. But before we reached it, a thunderous rhythm paralysed our resolve. Something new was coming closer, confusing the experience. Across the tracks, visible as a deeper absence of light, a gargantuan shape crushed the sky. It was the expanding woman, sheathed in stiff leathers, a Stetson pulled down over her brow, mounted atop her husband. She tugged the reins looped round his neck and he increased his pace. In one huge hand she swung a lasso.

Laura frowned. “I can’t see any futurism in this.”

“
Nor I. We better leave them to it.”

We crept back into the house and held each other in the little room under the stairs. She was close but cold.

“
Laura, suppose the expanding woman is just fat? Not a myth at all, not a living urban legend, but a human being? She may be the last genuine person on the planet for all I know. I mean, everybody is trying so hard to be what the century wants that we’ve lost ourselves. What if there is nothing mysterious about her great size?”

She draped her arm around my shoulder. “Don’t give up now. Would it help if I came up with a scientific explanation? Perhaps she’s a mirage, a woman whose image has been magnified by a convex lens of polluted air. It’s all that benzene in our atmosphere.”

I grimaced. There was less free oxygen available these days, a fact with one unexpected benefit. Fewer cell-damaging oxidisers had increased the life expectancy for anyone who survived the toxins. I already felt a chain of years bearing me down. To be born in a previous century is hard enough, a previous millennium is unbearable. I remained sullen and Laura lost patience, her nose rings signalling.

“
What did you expect? Did you think ordinariness was ever a choice? How can we continue living simply when the date is futuristic? Blame the numbers, everybody has to work for them.”

“
But I’m overdosing on imagination!”

There was little more she could do for me. Yet some comforts thrive in complexity. The teevee can offer much.

In the spare bedroom, I wait by the window with the remote control. During a party last month it fell into a bowl of rum punch. It has never been quite the same since. It can now influence the hovertrains. I check my watch and raise the device, aiming it at the tracks. The Philadelphia to Waterloo express is due any minute now. It amuses me that after three thousand miles of transatlantic tunnel, a voyage can come to grief in an Ealing allotment. With the appropriate buttons I can make a train pause, fast forward or rewind. Tonight I intend to try an experiment, something truly futuristic. I will change channels.

(1998)

All Shapes Are Cretans

“
All Cretans are liars.”

–
Epimenides the Cretan

The college contains a chapel that is never visited. We were bored one night and decided to explore the secret recesses of the building. Wrather remembered a key on an obscure library shelf; I recalled a hammer in a dusty storeroom. His arguments were more persuasive. The lock turned with difficulty but the heavy door swung quietly on ancient hinges. I was surprised at our sense of exhilaration. The interior was not at all creepy. We lit the warped candles at the altar and waited for the flames to settle. There was no dust and very few cobwebs.

Wrather was not a religious man, at least no more than myself, but the strange simplicity of this chapel, its unambiguous mystery, induced in him an appropriate mood. We discussed a supreme being, solitary but perhaps not lonely, who had created everything, including feelings of isolation. We neither believed nor doubted the qualities of this deity, merely questioned what they were. Vastness in any category must be reduced to analogy, or no serious attempt to comprehend why it may never be properly understood can be made. I raised the subject of omniscience, the ability to know everything.

Smiling to himself, Wrather announced, “The shape that a person creates during their whole lifetime simply by moving: imagine its complexity! But the mind of God can grasp this figure as easily as a human can visualise a circle or a square. That is omniscience.”

I was too weary to nod my agreement. An abrupt tiredness had replaced my excitement. I stood and waited for him to recognise my condition, which bordered on paralysis. He stepped forward and the spell was broken. I was trying too hard to absorb the unnatural but not unwelcome ambience of my environment. I wondered if his assertion was original to him. From the way he winked in the magical gloom, I suspected not. We left the chapel and locked it behind us. I have never been back since, but we returned the key to its shelf. It is still there.

*

Shortly after this incident, Wrather was offered a position in a private university in Iráklion. He accepted less for reasons of an increased salary than the opportunity to escape our dismal climate. He preferred warmth to dripping eaves. Over there, it was possible to sleep on the roof under the stars. He welcomed this fact, though he had no intention of testing it. He did not want the fuss of a leaving party, so he deliberately argued with his colleagues during his final week. I was too busy to regret his departure. We had never been close friends. We had almost nothing in common.

My career remained undistinguished for the next ten years. I was neither satisfied nor bitter, but one morning I entered my office and found him sitting in my chair. He was engaged on a global lecture tour that included this college. He expressed disappointment that I was unaware of his schedule. I answered that I never took an interest in such events. In a nonchalant tone, he informed me of his importance. He had become famous in his field. Then with a false modesty that was unpalatable, he blushed.

“
It was partly your doing,” he said. “The breakthrough is all mine, of course, but you provided the clue.”

“
What have you discovered?” I asked.

He stood and gripped the edges of the desk. “The geometry of human morality. The shape a person makes over their entire lifetime determines the character of that person: good or evil.”

I spoke truthfully. “That is remarkable.”

“
Indeed. The research involved was enormous. I selected people already renowned for travelling as my subjects. Even so, only those who had made records of their movements were of use. Precise data was often impossible to obtain. I could not hope to chart the exact shape of a lifetime without approximations. I settled for nodes at regular intervals along that figure. For instance, I might discover that Subject X had travelled from London to Buenos Aires and from there to Santiago, Bogotá, Kingston, Miami, Atlanta and New York. That shape is easily plotted. But it would be much more difficult to determine which streets in those cities had been walked down: which parks, theatres, shops and hotels had been visited. Those are the
epicycles
of the overall shape. The mind of God does not disregard them merely because they are insufferably small and complex.”

“
There is no solution to that problem,” I said.

He chewed his lip. “But an attempt can be made to achieve greater accuracy. Perhaps Subject Y is more meticulous than X. He has detailed the streets and buildings. He has noted every room he has entered. But still the motions he made inside those rooms, the shapes created as he walked from one side to the other, are unknown. Even Subject Z who
has
recorded these tiny voyages from wall to wall, across landscapes of carpet and floorboard, cannot possibly have itemised the even smaller journeys through space of every muscle, the involuntary twitchings and tics during sleep.”

“
A subject would have to be followed from birth to death,” I replied with a snort, “or tagged with electronic sensors.”

He grinned hugely. “That is exactly what will happen. For the meantime, my approximations must suffice. But the real revelation of my work is that behaviour is intimately linked with the geometrical qualities of the final shape. Good lives tend to have more curves; bad lives tend to have more corners. The weight of my evidence is substantial.”

“
What will you do with such information?”

“
That is the main purpose of my lecture tour. I propose to experiment on
living
subjects, men and women still in the act of creating their lifetime shapes. By analysing the part of the shape they have already made, it should be possible to extrapolate it into the future, to complete the figure and work out now whether the person is good or evil.”