Looking for Jake (23 page)

And then the tain.

Glass democratised. Though we fought it, though we sought to keep it arcane. Glass became mass, in scant centuries, and the tain, that dusting of metal that stained its underside, with it. You put out lights at night and trapped us even then in your outlines. Your world was a world of silvered glass. It became mirrored. Every street had a thousand windows to trap us, whole buildings were sheathed in tained glass. We were crushed into your forms. There was no minute, and not a scrap of space where we could be other than you were. No escape or respite, and you not noticing, not knowing as you pinioned us. You made a reflecting world.

You drove us mad.

Once there was a room of mirrors in Isfahan, hundreds of years ago. Lahore's palace was ringed by Murano glass and Venetian tain.
What misery is this?
we thought when those places were built. We would stare at each other, each of us trapped in that place, our bodies fractured, staring at each other, scores of us taking the same form, scores snared when one person entered those rooms.
What have they done?
And then there was Versailles. Our bleakest place. The worst place in our world. A dreadful jail.
It can be no worse than this,
we thought then, stupidly.
We are in hell.

Do you see? Can you understand why we fought?

Every house became Versailles. Every house a hall of mirrors.

So far from the dangerous heart of town, the soldiers of the Heath were able to relax discipline a little. In the little false forests of the park, those not on guard duty played cards and smoked, read, listened to cassettes.

Between the little tents was a variety of equipment and furniture, in disrepair and in good condition. Stacking plastic chairs and wooden desks that looked pilfered from schools, ranged randomly: trunks and boxes, all map-stained by weather.

The unit was swollen with incomers, with Londoners who had joined up to fight. The full-timers spoke with accents from around the country, used the jargon unthinkingly and tersely, moved their equipment without effort. The others, men and women whose uniforms were imperfectly pieced together and amended, who walked and swung their weapons with self-conscious care, were recent volunteers.

Sholl saw a girl in her midteens, wearing a Robbie Williams T-shirt above her camouflage trousers, uncertainly hefting her rifle, while a burly Mancunian private showed her, gently, how to take aim. There was a group of young men listening to hip-hop on a cheap machine that stripped it of bass, looking at maps, bickering in the slang of south London estates.

The CO gave Sholl lager, and good food, and let him sleep. Sholl was surprised at his own exhaustion. Before the officer left him, they talked, in the most general terms, about the war. Sholl was careful not to discuss his plans, not to preempt himself. But along with what he said was communicated something calm, a sense of something preparatory. He did not discuss his plans, but with his unexplained invitation
—whether you'd join me—
with his measure, he set himself apart.

When he woke, Sholl emerged from the tent into the damp clearing, and quietly toured the camp. The men and women of the unit were in their groups, as before, quietly working or playing, but he saw them watching him. Sholl knew instantly that they suspected him, though they could not have said of what. His conversation with the CO, his invitation, had been reported.

He exchanged a few greetings. Steam rose from cooking and laundry, and smoke from small fires. Sholl watched it, so that he did not yet have to meet the soldiers' eyes. They wanted something from him, and knew that it would be forthcoming. He had not come to them like the other frightened Londoners; he had not arrived as a refugee to be made safe. He had brought them something.

The change in the camp was not overt, but it was clear. The soldiers were expectant. The soldiers watched Sholl as if he were a Jesus, with nervous, hopeful interest, and scepticism and excitement. Sholl's mouth was dry. He was not sure what to do. The officer approached him.

“Mr. Sholl,” he said. “Would you like to talk to us? Would you like to tell us why you're here?”

Sholl had thought it would take a little time to come to this. He had wanted a day to feel for the mood of the camp, before he spoke. He had expected to be interrogated by the commander alone, or perhaps with a few lieutenants. He had prepared himself to persuade that audience. He had not thought that with the breakdown of structures, primitive democracy would assert itself.

The CO knew he was in charge by nothing but the approval of his troops. He was not a stupid man; he understood that “need to know” had become a dangerous condescension. There was no one to court-martial the insubordinate, and there never would be any more. He needed his women and men to agree with his orders.

He sat with them and leaned against a tree and smoked. They did not look at him. They were still turned to Sholl.

Sholl sat. The legs of the chair sank an inch into the wet earth. Sholl put his head in his hands and tried to make himself ready. He tried to turn the confrontation into a discussion. He started by asking questions.

“We try to get messages to other units. We're still scanning for word from the government, or top brass or whateverthefuck.” The commander's voice failed for a second. The idiocy of the statement was obvious. Everyone knew that there was no government, and no one in charge of the army's ragged remains. Sholl nodded as if the remark made sense, not needing to press the point.

His questions were answered. Messianism still clung to him—not sought, but useful—and the soldiers told him what he wanted to know guardedly, and waited, knowing that soon he would tell them why he was there.

“So you're trying to get your orders, I understand that,” said Sholl. “But what do you do day to day?”

They patrolled the edges of the Heath. Unlike the maddened Bermondsey renegades (of whom they had heard, and at whom they were disgusted—“We should go fucking sort
them
out, never mind the fucking imagos,” someone shouted) they welcomed what few civilians made it to join them. There were very few. There were no children. No one had seen any children for weeks.

They patrolled the Heath, and when they saw the enemy harassing or murdering humans, they tried, where they could, to intervene. They made some minor incursions into the streets that were roamed by murderous imagos, trying to find survivors. “We know where there are some—in a school up by the hill, we think—but we can't get to them. There's a nest of vamps in the tube station.” That, Sholl already knew.

The vampires and other imagos had not come up onto the grassland, and so the troops were still alive, but that was just contingent. They might come any time. The soldiers patrolled and waited and scanned the airwaves with their crappy radios, and waited.

“What
happened?
”

The question came at Sholl suddenly, breaking through his own queries about the soldiers' habits—how many, how often, where, why. The man who asked it had no reason to expect an answer from Sholl—a drab-faced newcomer sat among soldiers—but he asked it again, and others echoed him, and Sholl knew he had to answer.

“What happened? Where did they come from? What happened?”

Sholl shook his head.

“From the mirrors,” he said, telling them what they already knew. “From the tain.”

He used the language he had stolen from his physics books, a language of laws and propositions named after the living and dead who had formulated them, and made it seem as if he spoke it fluently. A cheap shot. He told them (regretting the jargon instantly) that
en one sine theta one still equals en two sine theta two.
Except in certain circumstances.

Except in the case where
en one equals minus en two.
Except for reflection.

There is something called the Phong Model, Sholl said. It's a graph. It's a model to show how light moves. The shinier the surface, the more precise and bright the reflected light, the narrower the range in which it can be seen. The model used to describe how light bounced off concrete and paper and metal and glass, its angle of specular reflection narrowing, approximating the angle of incidence, its bright spot brightening, as the surfaces became more mirrored.

But something happened, and now Phong describes a turning key.

It used to be a sliding scale. Asymptotic. An endless approximation to infinity or zero. It's become a threshold. As the reflected brightness grows more precise, as its angle of exit narrows to more closely mimic its entry, it's approaching an edge, it is becoming a change of state, he said. Until a critical moment is reached: until light meets the sheen of a gloss surface, and everything alters, and the light unlocks a door, and what was a mirror becomes a gate.

Mirrors became gates, and something came through.

“We know that,” one of the men shouted. “We know that already. Tell us what happened. Tell us how it happened.”

That, Sholl could not do. He could tell them nothing they had not heard from the vampires that taunted them sometimes: they were the most comprehensible of the imagos.

The soldiers stayed, though, still watching him. They wanted him to be special: they were anxious to forgive him. They asked him questions that allowed him to be circuitous, to seem vaguely wise. He had travelled through London's ruins, that they only looked out over. He could tell them much more about the city than they could learn from their cautious and pointless sorties.

“I want your help,” Sholl told them suddenly. Many of them looked away from him. The officer held Sholl's eyes. “I've got a plan. I can
end
this. But I need you to help me.”

Still the men and women waited. There was no revelation in this. Sholl could only stumble on. He started to tell them what it was he wanted to find, where he wanted to go, and with that, finally, he provoked a few gasps from them. Some of them expostulated. He told them what he wanted them to do, what he wanted them to achieve, and where they must go.

Even now that he had roused them, there was very little of the discussion Sholl had expected. The soldiers on the heath wanted to be convinced. But they were not suicidal. They needed more than his exhortation.

He spoke in elegant insinuations, avoiding details but giving them enough to entice them. He was afraid to proceed alone, and he whispered at them, secrets, things he had heard, things that only he could do. He waited for them to be intrigued, and to join him.

  To his astonishment, and dismay, they did not.

You made us
hurt
each other, and ourselves. You made us blood each other, when you fought in front of your looking glasses. You ignored them, and us, but we could not resist. When you conducted your knifings, your shootings dead. When you slit your own throats and watched the blood leak out of you, and out of us. We
stabbed
each other, for your vainglorious whims, and accompanied you in suicide. And where your mortuaries were glazed, you trapped us there, and made us rot with you.

We fought you. There were ways.

Your world mirrored, and caught us in more webs of light. We had to make your houses, your clothes. Where you had animals we had to make them too, moulding the matter of our world into the cowed shapes of your dogs and cats, animating them, dandling them like marionettes as your pets snuffed mindlessly and licked the mirrors. Exhausting and humiliating. But vastly worse was when you looked at yourselves. Then, we could only make puppets of us. Your sentience demanded it, our presence, unknowingly.

The bonds and boundaries were not stable. In the beginning, when reflection was rare, each event was a trauma, and we had no strategies. Where there were two mirrors or more they pulled chains of us together and locked us all into identical mimicry, in recursive tunnels of only one of you. As the tain spread, we learnt to fold our space, so fewer of us were snared.

Where tiny parts of you were fleetingly reflected, the snippets of us that took your shapes were almost disengaged, almost independently born. There were never fast-fixed rules, hard lines: we learnt strategies. But some things were unchangeable. Where you were reflected, always, one of us at least was stitched to you.

Endlessly we were drab copies. The impurities and stains that had given us some relief were taken. As we tried to hide behind one, we were laid bare in another. Even where we stretched and warped we did it at your whim, forced into
your
pathetic parodies of your own outlines, in bent circus mirrors.

But some of us, some few, some ones and twos, found we could break free. By a caprice we never understood, as we were watched by you our unconscious tormentors, some of us found the strength to rebel.

It would start and finish in an instant. Our revolts. A rush of freedom, a sudden certainty that we could move, a look up and a luxuriant stretching out and murder, a coming through. You would not withstand us, little men and women staring up dumb as your own faces came for you, your own arms crooked and pushing through the mirror.

And when you were done and finished, we were in your world.

A parliament of spies. It was a troubling victory. We were fixed, fast-frozen in these idiot bodies.

The mirrors broke with our passage. We found others. Pressed ourselves against them, staring into the empty rooms beyond the glass, and whispered into them. Whispered until our siblings heard us, and in that way we would make murmured plans. We received orders and gave them, and squabbled over them. We were deep under cover, and our tribes cajoled and begged us, and made the case for their strategies.

Some of us killed ourselves. We could do that, in the bodies that encased us. We could die. It was a horrid revelation, but the temptation of that new experience was too great for some.

We went to war. A fifth column.

There were plans we could make. To keep the tain covered, to slow the encroaching empire of mirrored glass. It made for strange allegiances.