The Man Who Would Be Kling Read online

  The Man Who Would Be Kling

  NewCon Press Novellas

  Set 1: (Cover art by Chris Moore)

  The Iron Tactician – Alastair Reynolds

  At the Speed of Light – Simon Morden

  The Enclave – Anne Charnock

  The Memoirist – Neil Williamson

  Set 2: (Cover art by Vincent Sammy)

  Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Bedevilled Poet – Simon Clark

  Cottingley – Alison Littlewood

  The Body in the Woods – Sarah Lotz

  The Wind – Jay Caselberg

  Set 3: The Martian Quartet (Cover art by Jim Burns)

  The Martian Job – Jaine Fenn

  Sherlock Holmes: The Martian Simulacra – Eric Brown

  Phosphorous: A Winterstrike Story – Liz Williams

  The Greatest Story Ever Told – Una McCormack

  Set 4: Strange Tales (Cover art by Ben Baldwin)

  Ghost Frequencies – Gary Gibson

  The Lake Boy – Adam Roberts

  Matryoshka – Ricardo Pinto

  The Land of Somewhere Safe – Hal Duncan

  Set 5: The Alien Among Us (Cover art by Peter Hollinghurst)

  Nomads – Dave Hutchinson

  Morpho – Philip Palmer

  The Man Who Would be Kling – Adam Roberts

  Macsen Against the Jugger – Simon Morden

  The Man Who Would Be Kling

  Adam Roberts

  NewCon Press

  England

  First published in the UK by NewCon Press

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF

  February 2019

  NCP 178 (limited edition hardback)

  NCP 179 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Man Who Would Be Kling copyright © 2019 by Adam Roberts

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Peter Hollinghurst

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN:

  978-1-912950-04-1 (hardback)

  978-1-912950-05-8 (softback)

  Cover art by Peter Hollinghurst

  Cover layout by Ian Whates

  Minor Editorial meddling by Ian Whates

  Book layout by Storm Constantine

  One

  Officially I was running the Kabul station as a clearing house, its status somewhere between an official embassy and a tourist office. Of course there were hardly any tourists, and the reason that countries saw no point in maintaining an official embassy in that empty land was the same reason I was rarely troubled with actual embassy business. Mostly what I was doing was keeping my eyes and ears open, and reporting back. Digital reception up there was most unreliable, and although cars and planes worked some of the time it wasn’t possible to predict when they might suddenly stop working, which made the short hop over the mountains to Peshawar a nerve-wracking business. Peshawar was where I filed most of my reports, because it was far enough away from the Zone to have reliable data storage, and reliable communications.

  Not that I tended to have very much to say.

  When international bigwigs came to visit they tended to arrive via state-of-the-art dirigible balloon, so as to be sure not to plummet from the sky if the electrics suddenly cut out. But nothing so fancy was laid on for me. I flew over the Kush in a small plane, jets shrieking like dental drills, gritting my teeth with my two or three fellow passengers (usually military), and then I flew back again. Since the old Bagram airport was too close to the fuzzy borderline, a new strip had been built to the south-east of the city.

  There was lots of room. The population of Kabul rattled around a city much too large for it: a weird patchwork of houses whole and ruined, some sectors flattened by war going all the way back to the Soviet invasion that had never been rebuilt. The UN mission was a four storey house, narrow and dark, with dust in-between the floorboards.

  The early morning, when it’s warmer outside a house than in, I would sit on my first floor veranda and let the sun warm me lizardly, and drink fresh yellow tea and listen to the noises. People going to work, vegetable sellers’ cries, the occasional car, the lines of pilgrims who came to pray (for the zone, against the zone, it hardly mattered). It’s one of the few places on Earth where there are no drones in the sky, which makes a pleasant sort of change. The only aircraft visible are small as gnats, crawling through the very high sky. There’s a debatable ceiling to the effect, and a thousand metres higher a secure ceiling, and higher than that the UN and other agencies fly planes; observation runs, mostly, although what they think they’ll see by plane that they can’t see by satellite I don’t know. Occasionally these very high planes drop bombs. Again, God knows what they hope to achieve. Knocking on some kind of door.

  The effect of the Afghanizone on electronic machines is not predictable. You’ll hear people say that it makes simple machines complex and chaotic, and makes complex machines moronic, or kills them outright. But it’s not as straight forward as that. There are few electronic items simpler than a spark plug, but driving a car into the zone won’t make your car a supercomputer: nine times out of ten the vehicle will simply die on you. Or it might explode. Something weird happens, of course, but exactly what is precisely the issue. So a drone might blow-up in mid-air, or might drop to the ground and not explode at all. Planes tend to drop unsmart bombs, antique ordnance, but at the height at which they fly there’s no way of guaranteeing these bombs will fall onto their proper targets. Whatever those targets are. In a Peshawar hotel bar, one time, a very drunken woman called Sonia Kiazi told me the high command did indeed have a strategy, and that strategy was to bomb any geometric structure that hadn’t been there the last time they looked. I asked: ‘but why?’ She lifted her shoulders and opened her eyes very wide and grinned, and burbled ‘who knows? But we can hardly do nothing, can we. Can’t just sit by and do nothing.’ ‘Geometric, like, what – buildings? Tents?’ I asked. ‘Landscape,’ she said, wagging her head. ‘Not hangers and pentagon-structures. Mountains. Features of the—’ and then she was sick into my lap. She was a beautiful woman, but it takes more erotic desire than I possess to persevere in the hoursthat follow washing vomit out of my clothes and helping a retching, swearing, staggering woman up to her hotel room. I didn’t see her again.

  Sometimes these bombs stray perilously close to Kabul. You can hear them coming, a flute-like whistling sound that sinks to a pleasant C#. The hillsides around the city, and occasionally its ruined western suburbs, sprout gigantic cauliflowers of dust, and the impact communicates itself most intimately through the ground to your very feet. The windows bow and bulge inwards. From time to time we are shelled from other directions, although this is a rare occurrence and the ordnance shot by cannon or dropped by mortar tends not to provide the biggest bangs.

  There’s always dust. Bombing stirs up more of it. War, in essence, is the business of taking coherent structures of stone and concrete and milling them to fine dust.

  Most days, though, nothing at all happens. Snow on the Kush feeds many rivers, so the fields to the south and east are well watered, and farmers do well. Some grow hashish and gene-tweaked opiate plants. They can hardly compete with the big operation in south west China, though, so this is small scale. A certain amount of UN money moves about, but since the electrics here are so unreliable conventional banking can’t be relied on. There has been talk of printing an old-style currency for the country, but this strikes me as unlikely ever to happen. Back to paper scrip? Really? In practice an even more ancient currency circulates: gold and silver coins, and there’s an elaborate system of IOUs that sometimes get driven down to Pakistan to get cashed.

  One time m
y bosses sent me down to Quetta to ‘liaise’ (the word they used) with a damn-fool project to tunnel underneath the zone, and so discover how deep into the Earth it goes. I was to favour them with the benefit of my expertise, which amounted to pretty much gaping like a goldfish and looking startled, but who was I to argue? They’d tried it once at Ghazni, but the thing about the Afghanizone is that it pulses, sends out odd little tendrils of effect – impossible to predict when or where, and equally impossible to predict what effect the tendrils will have. An Iranian mining corporation, backed with big money from China and the US, had put a vast tunnelling machine into the earth west of the zone, and then the zone had borked it – so now howevermany billions of dollars of kit was stuck there forever. The new plan was to put in place a great many small-format diggers in positions all along the southern border. It was equally expensive and almost equally pointless, but that wasn’t my call.

  Anyhow, pursuant to this liaison they put me on a train from Peshawar running south of Afghanistan all the way to Quetta, and the joy of it was that, since I was on the southern flanks of the mountains, my Kindle worked. So I was able to read. And read I did.

  There were half a dozen people in my compartment, and most were absorbed in the view through the wide windows. It was a pretty cool vista: light of impressive clarity and massiveness illuminating the southern flanks of the Hindu Kush. Nature imitating Rothko. Two passengers were having an excited conversation about the Rolling Stones playing Beijing, or at least the two of them left alive playing Beijing, heroically weathered as they were. ‘The Eroding Stones’, said one, and both laughed, though the other laughed more from politeness than hilarity. I tried to concentrate on my reading. But Chillingworth – I discovered her name later – slid into the seat next to mine. She was a tall, narrow-bodied woman with cheese-yellow hair, and prominent eyebrows the colour of purple grape.

  ‘You’re the Station Manager at Kabul,’ she said.

  ‘Can neither confirm nor,’ I told her, without meeting her eyes.

  Swipe left for a new page.

  ‘I’ve a favour to ask you, friend,’ she persisted. ‘Concerning a man called Dallas.’

  I looked at her then. The mountains rolling past behind her head, and the sunlight shaking off the snow at their peaks and parsing its magnificent glimmer everywhere. I looked back at my book without saying anything.

  ‘I’ve been in your line of work, friend,’ she said.

  ‘My work doesn’t run to lines,’ I told her. ‘Nothing linear about it, more is the pity.’

  ‘I know whereof you speak. And Dallas is ex-army. Dallas is a he,’ she added. ‘Not the place.’

  ‘Bully for him.’ I wanted her to stop talking and to leave me alone.

  Then she said, ‘Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra,’ and I realised I was going to have to help her.

  ‘You been peeking at my reading matter?’ I asked her, accusatory somewhat, but then I said, ‘Shaka. When the walls fell.’

  ‘Say rather, friend: Temba,’ she told me, ‘Temba. His arms wide. Say rather Mirab. His sails unfurled.’

  I sighed. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to talk a moment about my friend Dallas, and to situate him so as he might be your friend too. We’re all part of the same Fandom, after all, and there might come a day when he might want a glass of Afghan tea and a half-hour chat on the terrace of your official residence, up in Kabul.’

  ‘There’s no need for the cloaky dagger,’ I told her. ‘It’s a UN mandate. Your friend can simply apply to come.’

  ‘He wants to go further than that. Upcountry.’

  ‘Then he’s bonkers.’

  ‘Not illegal, though, I think? Such travel?’

  ‘It’s strongly discouraged. You want the lecture?’

  ‘He’s researched it pretty thoroughly. We have a plan.’

  ‘You and he?’

  ‘It’s not certain whether I can accompany him. I’m hoping to. But if I can’t make it then I’m hoping – look, look, I have no desire to bug you. I’ll let you get back to your Diane Duane. It’s only: well, if a heavily-built black man with a South London accent knocks on your door, you’ll know who he is. Either way, your life will be long, you will prosper, and I will leave you in peace now.’

  She moved to a different seat and I returned to my book. Just one more weirdo. There’s no shortage of them. Then again, she was right about one thing: I had no grounds to look down upon Fandom. Fandom had been my tribe for many years. Lions and phasers and bears; oh my.

  Anyhow, I went to my meeting in Quetta, and wasted my time, though not as comprehensively as they were wasting theirs. They listened politely to what I told them, which was a polysyllabic periphrasis of don’t bother, and then evidently decided that I had been touched in the brain by some tendril or other of the Afghanizone, and ignored me.

  I went back to my posting. Months passed, and I forgot all about my fellow in Fandom and her friend. She had said he would come calling.

  He didn’t show, though some others did. A high-profile Missouri webevangelist came to Kabul with the declared and crowdfunded mission (funded very generously indeed) to exorcise the whole of Afghanistan. It was the devil, this man said, the devil, running free because of mouse-lambs – I think it was – which improbable creatures had kept the blood of Christ out of the land. Hence the zone. This would come to all these benighted people, in time, he told me over coffee. The zone would; across Arabia and Malaysia and the wrong bits of Africa. It was the withdrawal of God’s grace from the world, because of their heathen religion. This year, next year, the whole region would fall silent. He could stop it, though, with a properly performed exorcism. He was well-connected and I was advised to provide assistance, which I did. He blessed the whole land with holy water, and preached a lengthy sermon, and went away again.

  Some military types visited. A new kind of drone – steam powered, it might have been, I don’t know – was tested, and I assume it failed. They didn’t tell me. Visitors were not common. Most of the months of the year, wherein no-one came to call, and the thermometer line twerked inch by inch up to the top of the glass, and my apartment was darkened to just above reading light, those summer months were a palpable oppression upon the spirit. The nights were very cold.

  I got sick, and was feverish for a while; then I recovered. My cook, Alí, prepared delicious vegetable curries, and piles of fragrant rice steaming like dry-ice and hiding within its mound a great many almonds and raisins and nuggets of artificially grown protein. Then I would be lying awake in the small hours because the aircon refused to reboot after the last outsplurge of the Zone. Hot, hot. On the other hand, it never gets proper India-hot in Afghanistan, since there is too much cool air blowing off the Himalayas. Too much rain and too high a latitude. But in the summer it gets hot enough to wake in sweat, and lie there listening to the odd squawks and crunching sounds of midnight, softened by distance into melody, and to think: what’s that? Is that – something? That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the advertisements say, ‘it must be experienced to be believed.’

  One Saturday night I was about to go to bed alone, if only I could summon the energy to haul myself out of the recliner on the veranda and up the narrow stairway to my room. The stars overhead were absolutely implacable in motionlessness, diamond pixels against the blackest shade of purple, and I watched them. From time to time one would slide slowly east to west – satscanning the area, I suppose. A door opened on the far side of the city and some strummy guitar music, probably live, spilled out, and then the door shut and the cicadas made the eardrums inside my ears shake and shudder.

  I could have shrieked aloud.

  Alí’s shift was over, but he had not yet gone home. He coughed, in an embarrassed way. Someone to see me, he said. Sometwo, in fact.

  I hauled myself up, and went inside; Alí lit a gaz-lamp to plump up the space with brightness, and the next thing two people stepped confidently into the little room. I recognised the woman Chilli
ngworth, although she was dressed differently. The other I took to be Dallas. He was a foot taller than she, and dressed in an elaborate cosplay outfit. There was something wrong with his forehead.

  They sat, at my invitation, and I poured some of the brandy I kept, since this was a UN property and not legally an Afghani house, and legally foreign territory, and so no insult was offered to the Prophet by the possession of such fluids, although we kept schtum about the existence of such a supply. I took a good look at the two of them.

  ‘What we have to say, my friend,’ Chillingworth announced, ‘might well be of interest to you. For we two are going upcountry.’

  ‘Both of you together? Insanity. You understand why that’s insanity?’

  ‘We have a plan,’ grumbled Dallas, and leaned forward. He was wearing a blocky jacket, leather by the look of it, divided into panels. Over this he wore a sash that looked like two hundred rivets glues together, and there was a medallion round his neck a red enamel circle over which three curve-edged interlocking triangles were inlaid, a long vertical black knifeblade shape and two stubbier blades flowing down and away left and right. Naturally I recognised it. But the most impressive part of this outfit, coming clearer to me as he leaned into the light, was the forehead: two parallel lines of ridging marched like a topographic map of mountainous country up his high brow.

  ‘It’s no prosthesis,’ Chillingworth told me, with satisfaction. ‘Not a rubber forehead glued over his old forehead. My ears, neither.’

  I looked again, and saw that her ears had been surgically altered to give them the shape of a poplar leaf.

  ‘They put lines of a sort of biogel,’ she explained, nodding at Dallas’ head, ‘which is a genetically engineered material grown from a sample of your own cartilage.’

  ‘Hurt,’ growled Dallas, sounding very unlike the culture to which he had decided he belonged, ‘when they stuck the needle in, I can tell you.’