The Man Who Would Be Kling Read online

  ‘I’m not sure handled is the mot juste.’

  ‘Emoji, did you say?’ The bar was playing ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ (the Motorhead version) and the conversational acoustics were not good.

  ‘Mot,’ I said, loudly, ‘juste.’ So much for impressing her with my français.

  She said, ‘I saw the surveillance footage from that case, you know?’

  This was actually interesting. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Satellite footage. They got quite a way inland actually, further than almost anybody else – more than two, and nearly three kilometres.’ Precise measurements of distance are not the idiom of the zone. ‘Then they vanished.’

  ‘Vanished?’

  ‘Gone, like breath into the whatsit, wind is it? Disparu.’

  ‘Does that often happen?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said stretching in her seat a feline way. ‘It was just two dots really. But we traced them all the way into the zone. No, wait, that’s not it. They were on horses, or something, so not dots. Rice grains, say, moving awful slow over the landscape. Then: gone.’

  ‘Beamed up, perhaps,’ I said. She assumed I was joking, and made thereby an ass of her and, I guess, of me too.

  ‘It’ll probably be that they fell into a hole. Rice grains isn’t right; baked beans. Big enough to see some detail, but maybe our target slips into a hole in the ground, or gets dragged down into tall grass by a predator and eaten.’

  ‘Not very likely, that, in the highlands of Kafiristan,’ I noted.

  ‘Or quicksand. A cave – there are a thousand reasons why they might just pop off the surveillance. Anyway, they vanished, and they haven’t been spotted since. Dead I guess.’

  The perky way she said this rubbed me up the wrong way. It’s no laughing matter, really, death.

  In the event, my new friend was playing the arm’s-length tease game, and when I tried to insinuate myself closer she reminded me that she was married and kissed my cheek with a tragically serious expression on her face, and went off. So I went back to my hotel room alone to watch CNN. Poor old Chillingworth, I thought. I was less heartbroken by the fate of Dallas. He had struck me as something of a brute. Callous of me, I suppose. Conceivably racist too.

  I had two weeks off, and went home. After that I was in Tehran for a month, and I was not on the rota to go back up to Kabul for another half a year, except that the station officer got bitten by some insect that left them with a fever hot enough to cook crumpets on their naked skin, they said, and lesions on the brain (and early retirement), so they flew me back up to Peshawar, and I rode in a bus back to the old city. In one sense, better than flying over the mountains; in a series of other, boneshaking, sweating, headaching senses, rather worse.

  Three

  Returning to Kabul felt like a homecoming. First time it had ever felt like that, I have to say. At any rate, Alí was pleased to see me. He hadn’t been sure when I was coming, and had no supplies for supper, but it didn’t matter. I ate in one of the cafes on Chicken Street – Sharif’s it was: I recommend it – and renewed my acquaintance with the proverbially hospitable Afghanis, or at least with that remnant of their people not diaspora-ed all across the world by the advent of the Zone. And the sky overhead slid the colour bar right-to-left on an epic scale from pale blue to straw yellow and tangerine and coughsweet red, and the sun went down in glory. Birds of prey circled in the dusky air, and bats grew bold enough to come out and to zip through the air like shuttles on an invisible loom. The scent of jasmine and frying wild-onions and diesel possessed the air.

  I said goodnight to the people in Sharif’s, and wandered without haste back towards the UN house. And there, on the road, was an old beggar, like a historical re-enactor from the nineteenth-century. He was wrapped about with a filthy cloak, much too big for him, and when he got up to follow me he moved his feet one over the other like a bear. He was bent into an r, his head practically sunk between his shoulders – this rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by name, crying that he had come back. ‘Can you give me a drink?’ he whimpered. ‘Thirst is impairing my logic.’ Croaky though it was, I realised that the voice was female.

  It was only then that I realised Chillingworth had returned from the Zone

  ‘Chillingworth!’ I cried. ‘Chillingworth, Chillingworth – you’re alive.’

  I helped her back to the UN house. She coughed the whole way, a scratchy strained sound like a fox-cub’s bark. At One point she fell to the ground and I had to help her up.

  Inside, I sat her at the table on the ground floor, since stairs seemed pretty strongly counter-indicated by her broken-down physical condition. She panted and gasped and struggled to get her breath back. I offered her the last of the brandy, but she mumbled something about how there was no alcohol on her home world and she wouldn’t sink so low as to start drinking like a human. I opened a new bottle of water and she drank some of that, then she said, ‘But I’m half human, of course I am. Why would I deny my heritage? Maybe I will have a snifter of that brown distillation, that alcohol liquid,’ and she started coughing again, shaking dust out of the seams of her ragged cloak as she did so. Over and over the cough repeated, like a glitch in a recording. Finally she controlled it enough to take the glass of brandy in her right hand, and I saw that her fingers had been deformed, or twisted, or burned, or something. What?

  ‘Chillingworth,’ I said. ‘Where’s Dallas?’

  And at this she looked at me with a weird intensity, and then she hoiked up a kind of kitbag onto the table, and it thudded onto the wood with an unpleasant solidity, as if it had a small bowling ball inside.

  I did not want to look inside the bag.

  ‘My God, woman,’ I cried, practically shouting at her. ‘You survived! You went into the Afghanizone and came out again, and you’re – you’re –’

  ‘Changed,’ she rasped. She put her head down on the table and slept, but for no more than a minute. I went through to the other room, and luckily the phone was working. So I called the medical centre and asked them to come to the U.N. house and attend an urgent case. On our way, they said. There in a jiffy. I went back through and watched her.

  She woke with a start. ‘I've never stopped to just look at clouds before,’ she said. ‘Or rainbows. You know, I can tell you exactly why one appears in the sky, but considering its beauty has always been out of the question.’ Then she started coughing again, but in a new way, a shorter, more musical series of hiccoughy noises. It took me a moment to realise that she was weeping.

  ‘Chillingworth,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get a doctor to look you over, alright? Why don’t I help you upstairs and you have a lie-down, and in a bit we’ll get a medic to look you over.’

  ‘It is alien mariner and she stoppeth– do you remember me?’

  ‘Of course I do!’

  ‘Listen. Give me more brandy and listen.’

  ‘That’s the last of the brandy.’

  ‘The doctor will have some, won’t she? Doctors carry brandy don’t they? For its medicinal – medicinal – purposes of – though my species does not consume synthenol. But this would be the real thing, wouldn’t it? Where was I?’

  ‘You’re a bit scattered, mentally,’ I told her. ‘But you’re the most compos mentis of anyone who has ever been inside the zone, and come out again. This is huge – this is really huge.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We rode our donkeys up past the old airport, ruins now of course, with the mountains on our left, and we kept going. Kept all the way along. Do you think it a coincidence that the zone drew its borders at the site of an old airport? It’s about travel, isn’t it. Going and coming, technologically augmented coming and going. Boldly going. We went. Dallas was all bravado, at first. Today was a good day to die, he told me. More than once. But it soon grew hot, and he was sweaty inside his cos-.’ She made a kind of strangulated noise.

  ‘Costume?’

  ‘Uniform. But then we took the road up through the mountains, aiming to go up and
over, and near the top it got horribly cold. We had winter coats and gloves and hats in our luggage, of course, and we put those on, but I got a fierce headache, and Dallas was strangely silent. The mules didn’t like it, either.’

  I knew the mountains she meant, from old accounts and maps (obviously I’d never been there). Compared with the Kush to the south and the Himalayas to the east they were pinpricks. But tall enough to have snow at the summit; and hard going for somebody unused to it.

  ‘I saw strange things at the top,’ Chillingworth said.

  ‘What kinds of strange things?’

  ‘Aurorae, I guess. Big blocks, I mean like concrete blocks, maybe: seven or eight metres long, three or four wide, one or two thick, and just hurling about in the sky. White noise, and white noise leaching into the air so that I thought it was a blizzard – but then you’d look back where you’d just come from, and the way was clean and sunlit and the air was sharp but still. I said to myself: be logical, May. For without logic, what is there? But I failed to integrate my sense data into a coherent system of comprehension.’

  ‘Pretty vivid hallucinations. Sounds like.’

  ‘I thought so, I assumed so. Of course I thought so, I assumed so at the time I thought so. But it wasn’t. That wasn’t. You see. The blocks, a mustardy-grey colour, were sort of swirling up and over, and then swarming down. Like birds. There were a great many of them. Not all of them were in motion; the closer to the ground they came, the slower, differing speeds one to the other but slower. There was a place, in the pass, where several of them were just there, motionless, suspended a few feet above the ground –in all sorts of orientations with respect to the path. I don’t know. I don’t know. We examined them, and they sure felt like stone, only warmer than the rocks of the mountains. Approximately smooth to the touch. Sharkskin, maybe. And then one trembled, and swung up and the next thing it was dancing away like a leaf in an autumn gust. Up and through, chaotic pattern, and then eventually to come down again, I don’t know. It caught Dallas’s mule on its knee, it did, as it swung up, and the beast wailed and ran, and there was blood. I didn’t hallucinate the blood. I touched it with fingers and it was wet and sticky to the touch.’

  ‘Strange.’

  ‘And then we were on a downward path, and came below the snowline, and into a valley. Dallas’ mule was limping pretty bad, and its coat was all sticky-tar on that leg. But we hadn’t come with a medical tricorder, so there wasn’t anything we could do. The logical thing would probably have been to put the creature out of its misery and maybe use Dallas’s big blade to butcher it and eat it – for although my people are vegetarian, we will eat meat in an emergency, you see. But Dallas grew fierce at the mere suggestion, and so we trudged on.

  ‘We passed the shell of an old tank, half dug into the hillside, the metal of its gun-barrel ripped and ribboned like tinfoil, and the whole of the front covered with rough-textured marmite-coloured rust. It looked like a coat of fur. Relic of the last century. A little further were some old houses, roofless, mudbrick and adobe. Then a bright aluminium hanger; corrugated panels a little speckled with age and the padlocks holding the doors shut rusted into solid brown fists, but shining in the sunlight still. Graffiti painted roughly on the northward wall, some words in Arabic and some in Cyrillic.

  ‘Further down the mules found some grass to eat. Then there was a pebbly descent to a river, and Dallas’ mule did something horrible to its ankle on the pebbles. Such an unlucky beast. It brayed and brayed, and a dismounted Dallas looked glum. “It cannot go ahead,” he said, and swore in his native tongue.

  ‘So he retrieved his sidearm from the luggage, and aimed it at the creature’s head. He held it, like that arm’s length; and the moment stretched – the gushing of the river, like the sound of distant applause, the bright sunlight, the fragrant breeze, the wheezing of the wounded mule. Trees shifting uncomfortably in the wind, for all the world as if they were embarrassed.

  ‘Then the mule stopped wailing, and put its heavy head up and heehawed three or four times. I tell you now, my friend, there is no shame in saying that I never learnt Dallas’ language – his homeworld language, I mean. We all rely on the universal translator nowadays, don’t we?’

  ‘Do we?’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘I remember now,’ she rasped. ‘We did debate whether it was appropriate to gift your United Nations with the translator technology. But until you discover Warp Drive for yourself, then it was decreed to leave you. Prime directive, you know.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, wondering where the doctor was. ‘We quite understand.’

  The kitbag lay on the tabletop. I had no desire to look inside, but I supposed I would have to at some point.

  ‘At any rate, after the mule chucked out its raucous noise, Dallas became very agitated. He dropped the gun to the ground – crazy, no? Dropping it might have caused it to discharge accidentally, and one of us might have been shot!’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘No. Still, I rebuked him. He was trembling, and backing away from the beast. “What is the matter?” I demanded. “What is wrong?”

  ‘”You heard it?” he said. And when I said I heard only braying, Dallas said, “It spoke my language. It talked to me.” Oh I was dubious; of course. It is not logical that a dumb beast should become loquacious, of a sudden, however strange the zone might be. It is not recorded anywhere that such things have happened.’

  ‘Nothing much is recorded, though,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Logic suggests Dallas was mistaken. But he was shaking as though he had a fever. I said: “What is it? What did the ass say to you?” And he: “Clear as day, in my father-tongue, the language of my homeworld, it said What have I done unto thee, that thou wouldst smite me with this firearm?” “Pretty strange thing to say,” I said, but Dallas had his back to the steeper side of the gully now, and the mule had limped down to the river and was drinking. “You don’t recognise the words?” he yelled at me. “You never read the Bible?” “I have of course heard about this work, an anthology of ancient human holy writing,” I said, and I confess I spoke with the disdain that was not wholly logical. “I am of course aware of it, though I have never studied it.” “You weren’t raised with thrice-weekly visits to the South Peckham Pentecostal Chapel,” Dallas snarled at me. “Of course not,” I told him. “And neither were you – you were raised on Kronos.” I had to repeat this last truth three or four times before it sank in, and something of the madness departed from Dallas’ eyes. “Only outsiders call it that,” he growled at me, and I knew he was back with me. “We native-born have a different word, not fit for the unclean ears of the galaxy’s weakling-species.”

  ‘We both went down to the river and washed and found some shade and drank bottled water and ate some of our supplies. The hale mule we tied to a tree, and the injured mule, no longer inclined to speech, limped mournfully amongst the stones of the riverbank. Dallas kept looking about, as if he expected to see someone, or something.

  ‘“I consider it unlikely, and therefore illogical, that the human holy Bible would mention firearms,” I told him. “It is hard,” he replied, and then fell to chewing or mumbling his words. Then he tried again. “It is hard to translate the human Bible’s concepts into my language. All that peace and forgiveness: weakness, despicable weakness, so far as we are concerned. Simple as that. There is nothing holy about weakness.” “And what is weaker than a crippled mule?” I asked. Dallas scowled at me, and his eyes filled with water – with rage, I suppose, since one of his heritage would surely not burst into tears at such a trivial provocation.

  ‘He wandered into the scrub, and communed with himself for a quarter hour or so. When he came back to me, he was no longer weeping, and was more like his old self. “We cannot proceed with the injured mule. Therefore we must redistribute the baggage. The good mule must carry a great deal, which means you cannot ride. We must walk alongside the mule, and shoulder some of the weight ourselves. As I am stronger, I shall carry
more. The greater the glory to me!” I sought to correct him: “My homeworld has a significantly higher gravity than Earth’s. Therefore my strength is perfectly competent to the task.” But he was in a quarrelsome mood – I mean, even for one of his race. “If your planet truly had a higher gravity your species would have evolved to be squat and muscular, not tall and lean as you are.” This was a deliberate insult, and I may have said some things in reply which, though of course truthful – since my kind cannot lie – were perhaps not diplomatic. I did not use precisely the word cowardice, although it may have been implied. In a fury Dallas took up his firearm again and walked over to the mule.’

  ‘And shot it?’

  ‘No. It turns out, and neither of us had realised it, but the gun was fitted with a chip – handguns all are, nowadays, I suppose. At any rate, the chip had malfunctioned in the zone and the weapon would not fire, not into the donkey’s head, not into the air. It was useless.’

  ‘He had his blade,’ I pointed out.

  ‘A savage way to kill a mule,’ Chillingworth said. ‘In the end we left the creature by the water.’

  I was going to say to die a slow and painful death? Wasn’t that rather cruel? But I thought better of it.

  Chillingworth took a breath, tried to breathe it out and started coughing again. This went on for a while, and the colour of her face went from a kind of pale-yellow to a sort of red-gold. Eventually she got the hacking under control, and took another sip of water.

  ‘We went on,’ she rasped, ‘with one beast, and it was hard walking in the heat of the day, and then easier in the cooler evening. Then we set up tents, one each, and we slept, and before I went to sleep I felt two emotions.’

  ‘Emotions?’ I said.

  She looked sad, her head shaking from left to right, back and forth as if with a Parkinsonian tremor. ‘I know. It is shaming. But I am committed to the truth, to the truth always. And the truth is, I felt two distinct emotional reactions. One was a form of elation – something which my people do not entirely disdain. It is the proper reaction, for instance, to solving a difficult mathematical problem, or resolving some logical paradox. In this case I felt elation that …. Elation that …’