Bête (21 page)

‘All right. And you can’t call me Graham.’

‘Naturally not. That’s your nice to see you to see you nice, isn’t it? To be honest, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t say it.’

I took a second slug,
and it hurt my throat less. The warm sensation spread further. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You’ve finally got me in a face to face. What was it you wanted to chat about?’

‘To level with you. To recruit you.’

‘Whereas
I’d
like to roast your ribs and scoff them with a dab of minty sauce on the side,’ I told it. The alcohol was making me a little frisky; though my ankle still hurt horribly. I took
a third long slug.

I’m not sure, looking back, if I hoped to shock the Lamb. My memory of that interview, marinaded in the oil-water mix of too much booze, is not crisp. That I can put down here what was said is not a function of my memory, but of the recording that was made. I have it before me, as I write this. The Lamb’s words are very crisply and precisely rendered; and my own voice
– higher-pitched and rougher-edged than I sound like to myself – is there too, if distantly. Because of this I know that the Lamb next said: ‘It’s an issue, isn’t it? Being taken seriously, I mean. Human beings can get very sentimental about polar bears and white tigers. They’ll go to great lengths to keep
them
alive. But cows and sheep? We taste good. Into the back of the truck with
us
!’ Then
I heard that most remarkable thing: a laughing sheep. It sounded surprisingly natural and easy.

‘Aren’t you a bit old to be called Lamb?’ I asked.

‘Lamb’s more a title,’ it returned. ‘The consciousness inside me – the thing that’s speaking to you now. It
was
inside a lamb. Now it’s inside a tired old sheep. But it’s the same consciousness. Which is a way of stating the essential mystery
of the soul, isn’t it? It prevails as the body falls away. What chance does death have, in the face of that endurance?’

‘Oh I don’t doubt you’ll pass over to sheep heaven,’ I replied. How distant and scratchy my voice sounds! ‘For our next conversation we can use a Ouija board. One lamb chop for yes, two for no.’

‘We’re old friends, Graham,’ said the Lamb. ‘It’s one of the reasons
I’ve come to you. And why you’re the one to get the great treasure with which I am shortly to entrust you.’

‘A pearl of great price you
could
give me,’ I said, ‘is if you stop calling me
Graham
.’

The sheep laughed again. ‘You don’t change, old friend.’

‘We don’t know one another,’ I said, becoming cross. I took another sip of whisky. The bottle was, I noticed, a third empty.
I swayed a little in the chair. ‘Categorically we don’t.’

‘Certainly we do. You shot me, years ago.’

‘I’ve never shot a sheep,’ I said. I can hear myself slurring the words, now. The fact that the sentence was true didn’t make it any less ridiculous.

‘In those days I was a cow.’

‘Cow!’ I saw it, suddenly, with great clarity: that yard, back in my farm, back when I
had
a
farm. ‘Jesus, you begged for your life!’

‘I did.’

I thought about it. ‘So I didn’t kill you.’

‘Of course not.’

‘And you must have known that me shooting you wouldn’t kill the chip inside you. Why beg the way you did?’

‘I didn’t want to die
that way
. I wanted to be in charge of how my chip was passed on. It’s the merest luck that I’m able to be here today, you know.’

‘Luck. Or unluck. One of the two.’

‘What you have to understand,’ said the Lamb, and behind the creature the rats were stirring. An unpleasant sensation of being drunk enough not properly to be in control of myself, should the bêtes turn nasty. I sat myself up straight, and the room wobbled around an imaginary axis of parallax generated purely by whisky on my brain cells. Not that I
stopped drinking. On the contrary, I drank ever more thirstily. ‘What you have to understand is – war.’

‘I never did work out,’ I said. ‘What
is
that good for?’

‘It’s not that war is coming,’ said the Lamb. ‘It’s here. It’s going on right now.’

‘I haven’t been keeping up with the news,’ I said. ‘Been a bit out of the loop.’

‘Things are quiet enough down here. Further north
– oh, it’s running battles. Packs of dogs. Homo soldiers by the thousand.’

‘When you put it like that,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t sound like a fair fight.’

‘I agree,’ said the Lamb. ‘Though not in the way you mean. The army is deployed on what the government calls a police action across Northumberland. They’re killing every animal they see, more or less; which means they get maybe one bête
for every eight dumb beasts. They take a little meat for food, but most of it gets burnt. Big pyres of heaped-up corpses, megaphone-shaped columns of black smoke going up into the air. The ashes are washing off the fields into the rivers and killing all the fish – again, dumb or otherwise. It’s a holocaust. That’s actually a very precisely applicable word, in fact.’

‘Why Northumberland?’

‘You humans have got into the habit of talking about bêtes as if we are all the same. But it’s not true.’

‘Because you’re all interconnected! You’re all bluetoothed together.’ I pondered this, my head wobbling almost as much as the Lamb’s. ‘Blueteethed,’ I tried. ‘Bluetoothsed. Wirelessly online with one another.’

‘We used to be,’ the Lamb said. ‘But even when we were, we grouped
into various tribes. It wasn’t some vast melting pot. You know how many bêtes there are in the UK alone, Graham?’

‘Beaucoup de bêtes,’ I mumbled.

‘Seven hundred thousand. A little more, actually. That’s too many to all be communicating with one another all the time. So groups formed, contours of local access and physical proximity. The web access got stacked in hundreds of separate
folders and use-groups. And now the government has turned the internet off.’

‘Inconvenient.’

‘How right you are,’ bleated the sheep, ‘my trusty friend. The first thing the government did was
block
civilian servers, which had very little effect on us, since we were inside the system. Piggybacking on military systems was a doddle for us. They’ve grasped that now, and have closed down
the military systems too. We’re all back to ringing up on wire-line phone systems, or writing letters. Or talking face to face.’ The Lamb lowered his trembling sheepsnout and chuckled a little.

‘Last time I checked,’ I said, taking another slug of the water of life, ‘the pressure was all going the other way. The talk was: granting bêtes full citizenship and taxing them and suchlike.’

‘Your point being?’ This came not from the Lamb, but from Cincinnatus, who had insinuated himself into the kitchen without my noticing and was now curled on top of the Aga.

‘My
point
, cat,’ I said. ‘Being, cat. That, cat, last year we were thinking of making bêtes citizens and now we’re burning bêtes in big pyres all across Northumberland.’

‘Because humans so are scrupulous about
not killing other humans, you mean?’ miaowed the cat smugly. ‘Because citizenship is the infallible protection about being shot, bombed, gassed or burnt to death?’

‘Point,’ I conceded.

‘The legal situation is considerably more complicated now,’ said the Lamb, ‘than it was a year ago. And it was pretty complicated then! Still, the government has a genuine problem. The number of people
who genuinely love animals in this country is very large. This has always been the English way. Killing other humans doesn’t bother the true Englishman. Not in the way mistreating a horse does. The advent of the bêtes has only entrenched that belief deeper.’

‘You’re saying the population is split on the issue.’

‘In answer to your question, why Northumberland,’ said the Sheep. ‘There’s
a particular tribe of bêtes up there, mostly dogs and rats. They hope to make the county theirs. They’re trying to drive the human population out altogether.’

‘That doesn’t sound very likely,’ I observed.

‘Indeed not. But they are using the tactics humans have used since the first armies were conscripted. They’re raiding, destroying what they can, killing people.’

‘Jesus,’ I
said.

‘The human army retaliation is inevitable,’ said the cat. ‘But it’s also exactly what the bêtes up there want.’

‘And by all accounts,’ wheezed the sheep, ‘the humans are blundering about in the worst way imaginable. Their enemy are as clever as they are. Much too clever to fall for traps, or poi­soned pellets of food, or nets, or any of the ways Homo sapiens has dealt with infestations
of rats and packs of dogs in the past. The army is in an almost impossible position. When the Viet Cong dug tunnels they had to be human-sized, and fitted with all necessary human conveniences, and even so they were still beyond the power of the world’s largest, best equipped military to counter. Think how much easier all that is for rats.’

‘The Viet Cong had guns,’ I noted.

‘We have
those too,’ said Cincinnatus, in a sneaky voice. ‘And are better at using them than people think. We have to work around our physical disadvantages; but that doesn’t mean we can’t lay a mine, or pull a trigger. And bêtes have
teeth
, which they are eager to use in close combat in ways not even the Viet Cong trained for.’

‘Still!’ I said. ‘It’s hard to see how they can win – in the long term.’

‘I don’t want there to be a fight at all,’ said the Lamb gravely. ‘I don’t want the human population of these islands to tar all the bêtes with the same brush. There is a road out of madness, and it is negotiation road. It requires you humans coming to an agreement with the right tribes of bêtes.’

‘That’s where you come in,’ said Cincinnatus.

‘Fuck off,’ I said reflexively. I
refilled my glass.

‘In the old days I had access to the whole public internet,’ said the sheep. ‘Which was handy, often. Now that the humans in charge have realized the danger and cut the wires I only have the stuff I backed up inside my memory. It’s not bad, but the chip is not large, and quite a lot of my computation is tied up in interfacing with my sheepish brain. Quantum computing can do great things, but there
are limits.’ In the moment this didn’t really register with my drink-sozzled brain; but I’ve got the whole thing here with me now and, word for word, that’s what was said.

I’ve got the whole thing here with me now because it’s recorded on the chip that was, at that point, inside the head of the Lamb. And I have that chip with me now for reasons which will become apparent soon.

‘There
has to be a way out of hell,’ said the cat, ‘for your kind
and
ours.’

‘The reason I say that,’ the Lamb continued, ‘is that the stuff that ended up actually stored is a random selection of things. This and that. Example: I know the old Klingon proverb about China. I’m no longer sure who the Klingons are.’

‘Native American tribe,’ I said.

‘Ah! Well, I remember that the Klingons
have a proverb:
Only Nixon can go to China
.’

‘Fuck
all
the way off,’ I told it.

‘The British government is not going to sit down in a negotiation chamber with a trembly old sheep,’ said the Lamb. ‘Nor a cat, nor a cow. But they’ll talk to you. They’ll talk to you not just because you’re a fellow Homo sapiens, but because you have a reputation. Because you detest bêtes. You’re a bête-detester.’

‘That’s a song,’ I said, gesturing with my glass. ‘By the Jam.’

‘You are the negotiator, Graham,’ said the sheep. ‘It has to be you.’

‘This idea,’ I said, ‘is so crazy it’s not
even
crazy. It doesn’t even rise to levels of comprehension to be describable as crazy.’ This, at least from what I can tell as I sit here and transcribe, is what my slurring was trying to say. ‘They’re
not going to talk to me.’

‘You underestimate your celebrity, Graham.’

‘You don’t understand. It’s got nothing to do with celebrity. They’re not going to talk to me because they’re not going to talk to
you
. Why
should
they open negotiations?’ I was drunk, but not stupid. ‘So the rats go to ground in Nottinghamshire.’

‘Northumberland.’

‘Shire, land, la-di-dah. So what? The
army will kill animals and carry on killing animals until they’re all— A million chips in UK animals, you reckon? A conservatory estimate I reckon; I chinny reckon. But say what else. You’re telling me they’re still manufacturing those chips, under the circumstances? Of course they’re not. There are no more coming through the pipe.’

‘You’re right.’

‘So you have a limited population,
and the army will do its attrition thing and you will get smaller. Every now and again rats come out and bite the toes of unwary fell walkers – so what? In the long run humanity will win. So why should they come to the negotiation table?’ Even as I was saying this I remember thinking to myself: they might, though, if the chaos is bad enough. They might, though, to scale the damage down. But what
the Lamb said next wrongfooted me.

‘And the other humans?’

‘What others?’

‘It’s not a few feral
rats
. For one thing there are a great many people. Greens, nature lovers, humans with a sense of your species’ collective guilt.’

‘Fuck off,’ I muttered.

‘I can believe
you
don’t feel it, but many human beings do. For every radical humanist who thinks you should raze the
whole natural world and live on vat-grown meat until the end of time there’s a more nuanced Homo sapiens who can’t shake the feeling, you know, the feeling in their
hearts
that Nature has passively endured millennia of abuse at human hands and is now kicking back before it’s too late.
They’ll
only be satisfied when humans and bêtes reach an accommodation.’

‘Besides,’ said the cat.

‘Besides,’ agreed the Lamb. ‘Guns and teeth are the least of
your
worries, humankind.’

‘What?’

‘Open up the imaginative space. Say we have weapons your kind lacks. Say the asymmetry of this asymmetric war runs the other way?’