It was now six months since the ship had crashed, disintegrating on the outskirts of the alien city. Since then, the survivors had huddled together in this huge, echoing building, through which the aliens moved in periodic tides, bent on their own mysterious alien purposes.
Obedient to the well-remembered survival manual, Lieutenant Howie had meticulously salvaged anything and everything which might possibly be useful: wire, paper, bottles, cans. He kept it all in his survival shelter: the box, made of laminated layers of a flexible brown material, which served him as his home.
"a.n.a.lysis," said Howie, seizing his opportunity. "Translation. Interpretation."
The idea that he could actually alter reality through his own efforts was empowering. With amazing rapidity, he began to acc.u.mulate materials. On scavenged sc.r.a.ps of paper, he wrote down his linguistic data. The nanotechnological devices must have completed a partial brainwipe, for he found he could no longer read or write. No matter: he invented his own phonetic alphabet to record the semantic world around them.
Five days, ten. Ten days, twenty. Howie was flying. Genius burnt within him. Problems collapsed under the impact of his genius. He realised - this was the crucial breakthrough - that the sounds emitted by the aliens achieved meaning through a complex interrelationship with the aliens" hand gestures and the movements of their eyelashes.
Finally, Howie felt he had reached the point where he almost had the problem licked. By the time Earth came to rescue him, he would be chatting away as an equal with the aliens. He would be a guest on alien tv talkshows, a visiting lecturer at their universities. Why, he might not even want to be rescued at all! Confidence pumped through him. Another 72 hours and he would know - he would have cracked the problem. He would have won the key to the alien tongue.
And then, unexpectedly, the aliens attacked.
The alien shocktroops came at dawn. They came in force, insectile ent.i.ties dressed in fluorescent orange uniforms with faceless bubble helmets. Water was their weapon. With water, they destroyed the encampment of boxes, sending the surviving crew members scrambling in all directions.
The notes! Howie"s precious researches! His self-devised alphabet! They would be swept away, destroyed! But there was no way to save them. The sheer bulk of his research material was too great to be rescued from this swift, brutal, unpredicted attack.
Well.
Try to reason with them.
Try to show them that he, too, was a rational being!
In desperation, Howie grabbed a chunk of charcoal left over from the fire on which he had roasted the dead cat. He attacked the nearest concrete wall, imprinting it with unmistakable symbols of his status as a creature of the intellect.
Mathematics: the common language of all intelligent beings. A language which must transcend any gulf, no matter how great. His salvation! Why hadn"t he thought of it before? Deftly, he sketched out a half-circle, then marked the right angle which a triangle makes any time it attempts to fill that half circle to capacity.
"There!" said Howie. "I too have a mind!"
Then the water knocked him off his feet, and the shock troopers manhandled him outside and dumped him in the sunlight.
When he tried to return, uniformed aliens barred the way. They meant to exclude him. But what was he supposed to do? Plainly, they regarded him as a problem. Yet their manner of dealing with the problem was irrational. What was he going to do: abolish himself? If they were not going to kill him, imprison him or build him a cage, what could they expect? Inevitably - he had no choice - he would build himself another box somewhere else.
Howie rummaged in one of the voluntary taxation bins in which the aliens dumped their surplus wealth. From it, he extracted a discarded container which still contained a little of the familiar brown sugar-water, laden (as was often the case) with the remnants of melting ice cubes. He also found one of the ma.s.s-produced alien ration sacks containing (they often did) the bones of a small, unknown animal, some meat still clinging to the bones.
Nearby: a seat.
His plan: sit. And eat. And drink. And then, while his researches were still fresh in memory, attempt the memorial reconstruction of his ruined scholarship.
But there was a problem: his brain was shrinking.
Yes, it was indisputable. Even as he stood there, his brain was shrivelling and shrinking, contracting violently as it dehydrated. The alien nanotechnological devices had got inside his skull and were compressing the miraculous machinery"s of his mind. Already, his brain was no larger than a walnut. Within the chamber of his skull, his brain sat loose on a metal stand uneasily supported (through a mechanism he could not clearly envisage) by his neck bones.
Careful now, Howie. Your brain is sitting there loose. One wrong step and you"ll lose it.
He could see it. If once his brain spilt from that polished metal stand, then it would go rattling down to the draughty s.p.a.ces where the waters of his kidney echoed past the calcified architecture of his liver. It was terror, sheer terror, to know his vulnerability. Make it to the seat, Howie. If you can make it to the seat without spilling your brain, you might have a chance.
Then: collision.
One of the aliens ran slap-bang into him.
And, as his brain spilt, Howie had the hallucinatory impression that one of the aliens actually spoke to him in an Earthling tongue.
"Get away from me, you filthy old b.u.m."
So ran Howie"s hallucination.
Then the momentary hallucination pa.s.sed, and the speech of the aliens was the same old meaningless gibble-gabble. And Howie sat on the seat, listening to the minute scratching - it sounded like rats chewing away at something inside the walls of a very old house - as the alien technological devices began to build something inside his skull.
He had lost his brain. He could feel his brain very distictly: it was lodged beside the herniated ma.s.s in his abdomen. No way to get it back. Never mind. In adversity, opportunity. He would figure out how to think without a brain. And he would translate the alien tongue, and make himself a master of the alien ways, and learn their secrets. And so, when the Fleet finally arrived, he would be ready for them.
"I may not think," said Howie, "but I am."
It was a position to fight from: a place to stand. And, given that, in time he could bend all of reality to his will.
[Originally published in Kimota 13, Autumn 2000].
EUGENE.
by Paul Finch.
St. Bede"s Juniors hadn"t been used as a school, or anything at all for that matter, for close on ten years. It stood alone in an area of post-industrial wasteland, the terraced houses which had once crowded up to it long demolished and bulldozed away, leaving a litter of bricks, girders and shattered concrete in their wake.
It was the only building left standing in a square mile of such desolation, so rumour had it they might some day open the old place up again - but none of the locals believed that. It had been too long gone, had St. Bede"s... too long empty and boarded up from the outside world.
Certainly, the three youths, who on the night in question had arranged to meet by the single streetlight on the edge of the rubble, were convinced the old school was finished. Otherwise, they might never have considered the scheme they had in mind. Even then though, thanks to an awful event in all their recent histories, it was still a perilous mission.
"I"m telling you... skinny mags, cigs, the lot," Shane enthused. "All there... just waiting to be stripped out. Just waiting for us."
The two other members of the trio gazed uncertainly across the wasteland to the huge structure, which loomed stark and black in the October night.
"Where?" asked Neil, after a moment. Of the three, he - with his father a doctor and his mother a JP - had perhaps most to lose if things went wrong.
"Eugene"s old pad, on the top floor," said Shane. "In a locker."
"Oh Christ!" Neil closed his eyes in horror.
"Oh b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, Neil!" spat Shane. "Come on. It"ll be a piece of p.i.s.s."
Shane was a wiry fourteen-year-old, who"d already been on the wrong side of the law several times but whose family scarcely cared - "family" consisting of a habitually drunken mum and her heavily tattooed boyfriend. Of the three of the lads, Shane was the toughest, the leanest and the meanest, and though he respected Neil for his honesty and his ready wit, saw himself and himself alone as the leader.
Daz, who hailed from a kind of social middle-ground between the two of them, was a gawping, listless youth, and had a tendency to ape the strongest personality present. In this group, it was invariably Shane.
"Yeah, come on Neil," Daz agreed. "It"ll be a piece of p.i.s.s."
They followed an old cobbled road, once a key artery of the neighbourhood, now a sad remnant of an age past, winding uphill through the waste of flattened buildings. There were no streetlights here and total darkness quickly descended. Neil shivered dramatically.
"What you so scared of, anyway?" wondered Shane, as always at the front.
"Who"s scared?" asked Neil sharply.
"You"re scared!" laughed Daz, though his own voice was several octaves higher than normal.
"Alright!" Neil finally admitted. "What do you think I"m scared of? It"s Eugene, isn"t it."
Shane snorted. "Eugene! Big deal!"
"You weren"t saying that when he was hanging round here," Neil retorted.
Shane stared at him. "Who wasn"t?"
"You were scared s.h.i.tless that night he chased us!"
Shane chuckled. "You may have been scared s.h.i.tless, but I wasn"t. I"m not scared of some nowty old bloke."
Neil shook his head darkly. "He wasn"t a bloke. He was a devil."
Daz scoffed. "Oh yeah, course!"
"Our kid reckons there was never any caretaker called Eugene at St. Bede"s," Neil went on. "And he ought to know... he was still there when it closed. He reckoned that Eugene was just some weird bloke who hung around the place after it shut down."
"And you reckon he"s still going to be here now, do you?" Shane didn"t even bother to look round as he picked his way up through the debris. "A year and a half later!"
"No... if you must know!" Neil hissed. "I reckon he"s dead at the bottom of that hole he fell down!"
Again Shane snorted.
"He"s not dead!" Daz a.s.sured them, in a brittle voice which indicated that this was something he hoped rather than knew.
"We never went back to check, did we!" Neil said.
Daz looked sharply away, but Shane had had enough. He rounded on them. "So what if he is dead?" he snapped. "There"s nothing to be scared of at all then, is there!"
Neil didn"t even dare think an answer to that one.
Up close, St. Bede"s was a red-brick Victorian Gothic - all towers and steep gable roofs of grey slate. The main doors were closed and padlocked and the long-broken windows covered over with rusted sheets of corrugated iron, but access was easy enough for Salford"s young skirmishers... if they really wanted it.
The three youths scrambled over a wall to the rear of the school, crossed a narrow yard where bins and bike sheds had once been kept, and pa.s.sed through an open gateway to the old playground. This too was narrow and hemmed in by high brick walls, its concrete floor strewn with slate and pieces of pipe which over the years had dropped down from the towering structure.
Against the main building, in one corner, stood a small outhouse with a sagging tar-paper roof. It was the old coal shed, and it was over this where Shane"s planned route to the interior lay... for three feet above it, a metal shutter had fallen away, exposing a single window in the wall, its timber frame and panes of gla.s.s long gone. As far as anyone knew, this was now the only way in to St. Bede"s.
Initially the three lads held back however. The door to the coal shed hung open, a foul, chilling blackness flowing out.
None of them needed to go in there to know that a huge hole still yawned in the middle of the flimsy wooden floorboards - a huge hole where Eugene had crashed through into the underworld that dreadful night a year and a half ago, when the game of bait-the-caretaker had finally gone one stage too far.
"Do you think he realised we only meant to lock him in?" Daz whispered. "That we didn"t know the floor was so weak?"
"The floor wasn"t weak," Shane replied, out of the corner of his mouth as though someone in the coal shed might be eavesdropping. "He was just a fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d, wasn"t he."
"We still should"ve told someone," said Neil, hanging further back than the others. At any moment he expected a vast shape to explode out at them. "We shouldn"t have left him down there without telling anyone. What if there was no way out for him and he died? What if he was lying there injured? Our kid reckons they"re thirty feet deep, those cellars."
Shane scoffed. "So? We got away with it, didn"t we? Come on!"
He moved quickly to the wall adjoining the shed and swung up it, apelike. The brickwork was old and pitted and made good scaling, and a moment later he was standing upright on the coal shed roof, beating the dust from his hands. "I wouldn"t worry, Neil," he said, looking down at them. "Even if he did die... rats would"ve scoffed the evidence by now."
"Knowing Eugene, he"d have scoffed the rats," Neil replied.
Shane gave a recklessly loud burst of laughter. This kid from the suburbs was always good for a funny. That was what they kept him around for.
Neil and Daz followed Shane up, then edged carefully along towards the window, backs pressed firmly to the school wall. The coal shed roof felt frail and rickety beneath them. Its tar paper cover hung in alarmingly between the old joists, which showed every two or three feet like ribs. It was a ma.s.sive relief to reach the aperture, though the unlit s.p.a.ce beyond it was far from welcoming. The window-sill was wide however and made from concrete, affording them a proper foothold, as one by one they clambered through.
Once inside, they could feel the immense building shifting slowly around them, its weight creaking from hinge to hinge. A darkness filled it like black powder, and the air was damp and reeked of mildew.
Shane climbed down from the sill first and immediately splashed ankle-deep into cold water. "s.h.i.te!" he hissed.
"What"s up?" asked Neil, following him straight into it. "Ugh!"
Neither of them bothered to warn Daz, but groped their way sideways along a wall of what felt like cold, greasy tiles. Gradually, as their eyes became used to the half-light, they worked out the room"s dimensions. It was long with a very low-ceiling, and placed at regular intervals along the opposite wall were the pale, curved shapes of urinals. Down at the far end, almost invisible, the lads could just see the tall, skeletal frames of old toilet cubicles.
"What on earth are we walking in?" Neil wondered.
"Stop moaning, eh!" said Shane. "These are the lads" bogs. Steps lead up from here to the first floor cloak-room. Then it"s all easy."
Daz joined them, and they pushed on, shuddering at the rank slops swimming around their trainers. Above their heads hung the dust-thick rags of old cobwebs. The tiled walls were cracked and filthy, but still bore faint scrawlings of graffiti - odd faces, semi-obliterated swear-words. A minute later they located the door and Shane grated it open on its badly-corroded hinges. A blackness lay beyond which could only be described as impenetrable.
"Come on," Shane said, pressing into it.
Dutifully, Neil and Daz followed, neither giving voice to their misgivings.
A narrow flight of slippery stone steps ran up to another door, this one hanging open. They reached it, then stopped to listen. They could sense a cavernous s.p.a.ce in front of them. The silence seemed to whisper back from the farthest reaches of the building. They huddled together in the doorway, even Shane.
"Can you believe little kids used to come to school here?" said Daz in his smallest voice.
"Wonder what happened to them all?" Neil replied.
"Well they"re all out there in the dark, holding their breaths and waiting for us, aren"t they!" said Shane scornfully. "You know... having a giggle-like! I mean, Jesus! Come on!"
Boldly, he moved on, and they followed, hands outstretched in front of them, pa.s.sing slowly through the pitch-black jungle of benches and cast-iron pillars that was the old cloakroom. Neil imagined them surrounded by the flirting shades of children - swarming hordes of long-dead juniors, charging silently in and out for coats and pump-bags, as they had done for generations past; scurrying through the endless dark perhaps, in mortal terror of that infinitely more ghastly shade - Eugene!
Eugene! It was some prissy name for that guy.
Neil cringed as he remembered that night - the last time, until now, they"d ever dared come near this place. He remembered Eugene, that monstrous misshapen slab of a man - the size of the Incredible Hulk - chasing madly after them through the school"s corridors, his arms outstretched, his great booted feet clomping on the floorboards and flagstones, his throat full of those twisted, distorted sounds... that screaming yodel he came out with instead of speaking normally.