Stone Gods (22 page)

The barman switched off the news. 'You'd better get out of here,' he said. 'Nothing to stop you.'

'Where's my robot?'

'Don't ask me. This is a place where anything can happen. I guess' she went with those girls. They live inside.' He gestured with his thumb. 'Rich refugees.'

'I thought you said there were no refugees here.'

'From the War, no, there aren't. From Tech City — all the time. People are coming in droves. You don't look stupid, so what do you think this is all about — this Japanese stuff?'

'It's your fault, You set their golf-buggies on fire.'

'Not me personally. They were a set-up. It's obvious. They wanted something to happen to them. They wanted an excuse. MORE excuses.
 

'You think that?'

'Sure of it. It's been brewing faster than Black Market beer. MORE want in. You should get out.'

'I can't leave without Spike — she's making a TV broadcast tonight.'

'Should have thought of that before you took her for a walk.'

I opened my mouth to protest. He held up his hand, glancing at the clock on the wall. 'You got a few hours. OK. You can search for her, if you want to. I'll take you through.'

My face must have registered confusion. He patted me with a palm the size of a spade. 'Through to the Back. This is the Front. We live in the Back.'

I followed him down the train and past a restroom sign that said, 'LADIES/GENTS ONLY', and another that said 'DOGS ONLY'. There was a water-tap beside it. My guide turned and held out his right spade. 'My name's Friday,' he said. 'What's yours?'

I said, 'Billie Crusoe.'

We passed through the train and down a ramp into what looked like a gladiatorial arena. All around the arena were shanty-houses of three and four storeys, most with balconies supported on scaffolding poles and rigged with planks. Dogs and cats ran up and down, squirrels and monkeys swung from balcony to balcony. Chickens scratched in the dirt, and a donkey harnessed to a cart was waiting patiently to pull a fridge. A fat woman; in front of one of the houses, was cooking over a tin barrel, flames escaping from under the pan. The child next to her was wrestling with a baby leopard.

'This is the Playa,' said Friday. 'We meet here when there's anything to decide. See that bell?'

I looked up. I was in a Spanish
playa
, built like a favela, and here in front of me was a Venetian campanile.

'We don't have planning laws,' said Friday. 'You can build what ever you like here. It's multi-cultural.' He laughed like a chain-saw. 'The bell rings when we meet.'

'How many people live here?' r asked.

He shrugged. 'No one counts. The city stretches on — way past here and into the Unknown.'

'What's in the Unknown?'

'If I could tell you that, it would be Known, wouldn't it? It's radioactive. It's re-evolving. It's Life after Humans, whatever that is, but you know what? It can't be so much worse, can it?'

This was a strange man, a man, I'd say, with a Front and a Back.

He wasn't just a barman at all.

'And animals,' he said, 'wild animals — you be careful if you go too far.'

'What wild animals? Where from?'

Friday pointed to the monkeys. 'They came from the Zoo after the bombing. There were animals all over the place. Some were shot, some escaped. The ones who escaped came here, like everything else that didn't want to go back into a cage.'

A Cadillac — pink — blasted past, fumes and fire bursting from the exhaust. A guy sat perched on the back with a museum piece sound-system, speakers the size of tea-chests, and a flashing red'n'blue Wurlitzer Playbox. He was wearing more gold than an Aztec at a funeral.

'PARTY!' he shouted. 'PARTY!'

'That's tonight,' said Friday, 'but first you'd better find your robot.'

* * *

I took out my phone and stabbed at the buttons. No signal. No one to call. But who am I calling? In the detritus of texts and messaging, who am I really talking to and who is really there?

MORE has a dedicated number: Txt X. It's a finger-and-thumb Samaritan line. Tell us your troubles, and we'll respond. It's a robot, but it doesn't seem to matter — it's a reply, a cry back from the Universe. Pick up a signal from a pulsar and say yes.

Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.

Keep me in the mop bucket or the slot where the grill pan goes, but don't let me go because I love you.

Alone in the Playa, the sound of a throaty microphone caught my attention. An old man boiled brown by the sun was placing two pairs of kitchen steps a few metres apart, and laying a length of roofing baton between them.

An electronic keyboard crocodile-clipped to a car battery, and a nut-faced gypsy woman husking into the lollipop microphone announced a new attraction — the goat that walked the plank. Up he went, tiny cloven hoofs making a cymbal out of the step-ladder, leather lead jerked gently by the grandfather in his stained woollen suit. Across the plank went the goat, in time to the keyboard and the wonder-working commentary of the woman, who began to sing 'MY WAY'. Her son bounded forward into the ring with a hula-hoop of fire and coaxed two poodles out of the van. Yes! Through the fire, legs stretched behind and before like flying dogs. Yes! The goat has reached the end of time, is turning round and coming back, dragging the world with him, an inflatable globe on the end of his lead.

The daughter came forward, fringed dress, high heels, bustier, red lips, black hair. She was clapping her hands, hustling for money, and the waist-stripped boys gathering round started throwing coins and cigarettes.

It was going well until a bullet-headed dog shot into the performing ring and started a fight with one of the poodles. The son went to grab it, swearing in Spanish, but the dog bit him, toppled the goat-plank, and swerved, circular and away, down a gap between two leaning buildings.

I started to run. It was the bull terrier.

It is not easy to keep up with a terrier. I have never understood the physics of legs. My legs are longer, so why can't I keep up with a dog? Even dogs with very short legs run faster than humans with long legs. How does this work?

I clutched my bag to me and concentrated on the chase. I hardly noticed the trash-cans we toppled, the crates we crashed through, the mounds of scrap metal we leaped, like we were hurdling at the Olympics. There was a streaming ditch — we jumped it. There was barbed wire — under it for the dog, ripped shirt for me. Allotments, cabbages, sheds, trees, a forest ahead . . . The dog vanished.

I stopped, winded, alone, taking it in.

In front of me, barring my way, was a petrified forest of blackened and shocked trees, silent, like a haunted house. I moved towards it, frightened of what I would find, with an instinct for danger that only happens when there really is danger.

I moved through the first rows of trees. Their bark had a coating — like a laminate. Further in, deeper, I could see that these trees were glowing. Was this place radioactive?

Underfoot was soggy, not mossy soggy, not waterlogged, but like walking on pulped meat.

It wasn't only that the forest was silent — no bird noise, animal sound, tree cracking, it was that I had become silent. My footsteps sank into the pulp, and because I was afraid, my whole body had quietened itself, like a child hiding in a cupboard, afraid of the adult outside.

My heart was beating too fast and I was sweating. Beyond the No Zone was the Red Zone, policed and controlled. Was this the edge of the Red Zone?

'Walk backwards slowly.' I heard the voice and didn't turn.

I did as I was told and, step by step by step, came out from the brink of the forest into the field where I had lost the dog.

'Stand still.'

I stood still. I heard a crackling, like a bad transmitter. 'You're radioactive, but it will pass.'

I turned round. There was Friday. 'You followed me!'

'Someone had to —I told you to be careful. This is the Dead Forest.'

'The Red Zone?'

'Part of it. They don't patrol it here because they hope it will kill us all. If you can't nuke your dissidents, the next best thing is to let the degraded land poison them. But it's not quite happening like that. A lot of us have been sick, a lot of us have died, but it's changing. Something is happening in there. I've been in with a suit. There's life - not the kind of life you'd want to get into bed with, or even the kind of life you'd want to find under the bed, but life. Nature isn't fussy.'

'Who are you?' I said.

He smiled. 'Come and get something to eat.'

We walked back across the field towards the tended area and the beginnings of the buildings. Friday took me towards a low shack made out of steel girders sunk upright into concrete and bolted together at their necks, Frankenstein-style. Corrugated iron had been screwed to the frame and painted bright blue. There were no windows but the roof was made of clear corrugated plastic.

Inside the bright and cheerful room, a long seventeenth-century elm table ran down the middle, surrounded by an assortment of chairs. The walls had been windproofed with old duvets, held in place with cross-wise ropes, and the floor seemed to be insulated with tamped-down sand covered with cheap rush matting, like a giant table mat. There was a fireplace and a TV turned on with the sound down. There were bookshelves stacked with books. I touched them.

Books had been lost like everything else in the War, and Post- 3 War we hadn't returned to print media. Natural wastage was the economic argument: why go back to something that was on the way out anyway? You can order books from Print on Demand, but most people use Digital Readers now, or don't read at all. The younger kids have never known book culture so they don't miss it.

'Books,' I said, using the noun like a memory prompt.

'Books came here like people and animals,' said Friday. 'Certain people, certain animals, looking for a landing-place.'

He went through a curtain into a makeshift kitchen. There was a strong smell of coffee as he turned the hand grinder.

I took a book from the shelf — James Cook,
The Journals
:
At daybreak I sent a Ship to looke for a landing-place.

'What was that?' called Friday.

I didn't answer, went through into the kitchen area where he was spooning the strong ground coffee into a jug.

'Can you throw a match on the burner?'

I hunted around for the pack and gingerly lit what can only be described as one of those Tarmac burners the Murphys used to use when mending the roads. The wide flame scorched my nose. Friday banged down a huge tin kettle and started to heat a frying-pan.

'After the bomb . . .' he said, but I wasn't listening. I was remembering.

No one in the West believed we would be bombed. North Korea, China, Pakistan, Iran, all too different, too factionalized. We spread our wars where necessary, and called it peace-keeping. It was bloody and messy. There were terrorists, there were local incidents, a bus here, a bank there, the Eurostar blown up - that was bad. JFK crippled by a ground-staff effort planned over six years.

But that only made the fight for FREEDOM more urgent.

Then the bomb — bombs — that left the cities of the West as desperate and destroyed as the cities of the East where we had waged our righteous wars and never counted the cost.

After the fire-rip, after the heat, after the towers that fell in rubble, after the houses that collapsed like sucked-in paper bags, after the molten rain, the nuclear wind, the blacked-out sun, the buildings with their fronts torn off, the riverside apartments gutted, the river a stinking ditch, the roads blocked with concrete and ash, the burning that made surfaces unwalkable and fired cars untouchable, the running away, the refugees, the helicopters hanging in the choked air, the never-stopping sound of sirens, the hoses shooting filthy water over steaming metal. The ugliness of the ruins — that was a shock — the ugliness of what we had built, the ugliness of how we had destroyed it, the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of twenty-first-century world.

Whiteout. Done.

I had been in the British Library, researching the history of artificial intelligence. It was the books that saved my life. As the building collapsed I fell on to a raft of books, and stacks of books fell on to me, knocking me unconscious but casing me from further damage. I came round, pushed myself out of the mountain of books, and started to walk home through the blasted streets, in shock, aware, somewhere, that people were running and screaming, and that everywhere, like one of those archive films of detonated demolitions, buildings were falling.

The noise must have been devastating but I didn't hear it. My brain had turned off the sound in my head. I found out later that this happens: that the brain can refuse sensory input in order to protect itself And so I walked through a silent, falling, burning world until I came to where my home had been.