Grazing The Long Acre (31 page)

“Swearbox,” piped Rafe, who had grown chirpy while the others grew morose, and was now a rock, a shoal, an infuriating danger to shipping.

“Go and eat your head.”

“They’ll paint the crates with essence of consciousness,” explained Carter, doom-laden. “Or some crazy Borgs will break the Convention. They’ll create actual supernuminal ‘Artificial Intelligence’ nanotech, and inject it into matter.”

“So fucking what. You won’t be redundant, you’re a doctor.”

“Ooops! Swearbox again!”

“Does not compute, man! If it’s a true AI it’ll have civil rights and they won’t be able to make it do anything. We’ll unionise it, it will be on our side—”

The alien laid his black velvet head on his slender arms on the tabletop and sighed, very softly. All seven of them took this as an outrageous insult. They’d have fallen on Batman and torn him limb from limb, except that they knew there’d be hell to pay. The navigator quit the saloon and retired to her section. God, let this be the peak. Let us be over the mountain, this is unbearable.

They were over the mountain.

Elen reported their position, news which was greeted with exhausted relief. Now there was nothing for her to do but watch the tumblers fall: watch the numbers cascade into resolution, not a phase-point out of place. She loved this part and hated it.

 She went down to the hold to visit the Tomb Wife, for the last time. There was a rumour that they’d all be given free passes for the Exhibition, but she didn’t think she’d go. The relationship had been formed here, in the dim-lit cavern under a sea-mount. It wouldn’t be the same in normal space. The tomb greeted her with its shimmering silence, with the stillness of a grief embraced; set in stone.

“Hello?” she whispered. “I think I’m here to say goodbye.”

She was not surprised when Sigurt joined her. They smiled at each other and sat for a while; but the black teardrop beckoned. The alien succumbed first. He hooked his long fingers into twin curves in the carving, that she hadn’t noticed, and was through the doorway in one movement. There weren’t any steps, thought Elen. The entrance is supposed to be like that. She tried to copy his action but couldn’t find the handholds. She had to make the same scrambling jump as before; and followed him to the chamber where the partners faced each other, the “wife” poised forever in that gesture of farewell.

Emotion recorded in art was the
rosetta stone
, the only (and frequently deceptive) common language of the Diaspora. Elen wasn’t sure what a
rosetta stone
had been, originally. Sigurt would probably know. But she felt she understood the message of that unfinished caress; the speech in those bright, half-hidden eyes. The dead are gone. The Tomb Wife stayed with
herself
. She stayed with the life that had ended, rather than going on, a different person—

How strange, how beautiful.

Sigurt had gone further into the tomb. At length she heard him coming back. She didn’t have to look around, she could clearly picture him leaning in the ancient doorway. She imagined
staying with herself
, in the country of no duration. As often as she left this homeland and woke into forgetfulness, she never got used to the wrench of parting. Oh, she thought. I need not leave. I can stay. If I hadn’t taken this berth, if I had never met Sigurt, I would never have realised that I could do this! With a rush of immense gratitude towards the alien she knelt, she crept on her knees to the offertory table and settled there, curled against the stone.

“The Tomb Wife was obliged to remain,” said the archaeologist, behind her, in a tone of mild apology. “For all eternity, with the partner to whom she was bound. But in special conditions it might be possible to make, well, a kind of exchange. One ghost for another. I may have lied to you a little. In your terms, it happened long, long ago. In
my
lifetime, the time I have spent awake, it was not so long ago as all that.”

Faintly, in her mind’s eye, Elen saw that she had let a transcription error get past her, and what was happening to her now was the consequence. In absolute terms there was no saloon, no eminent alien, no hold full of tombs, there was nothing but the storm, never anything but the storm, the blizzard, and she was falling into it, into the thrilling void of terror that every starfarer knew was waiting—

Emotion can deceive. The sentient bipeds barely knew anything about each other, as yet. Misconceptions abounded, wild mistakes were only found out when it was too late. A family divided by a single language, thought Elen: knowing at the same time that everything, the stone against her cheek, Batman’s deception, was a translation, and really there was only the blizzard. Yet in the last paradoxical moment, annoyed that it had to happen, that she would not stay here entirely, she felt herself splitting, giving birth to the person who would go on.

—and saw herself walking away with Sigurt, arm in arm: glimpsed, through the veil of Elen the Navigator’s physical form, the Tomb Wife’s caped shoulders, the delicate black domino of velvet fur, the gleam of the lovers’ eyes.

IN THE FOREST OF THE QUEEN

Aymon Bock was not taken with the Montsec American Monument. It seemed inflated: a Doughboys’ monster donut, dominating a landscape that
really
didn’t need any more reminders of war and death. Surely the hectares of white crosses, another thick-sown field of them every time you turned a bend, were sufficient? The only way to escape the thing was to drive up there, which Aymon and his wife Viola duly did. They left the car, climbed a momentous flight of steps and walked around the circuit of massive fluted columns. Built in 1930, damaged in WWII, restored 1948.

“Designed by Egerton Swartwout,” remarked Viola. “Sounds like a German name, and it looks like Nazi architecture, isn’t that ironic.”

‘The Doughboys didn’t fight Nazis. They were here in 1918, they fought one of the last great battles of the Great War, down there below.

Viola sighed and nodded. She knew all about the Doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force, their gallant part in licking Kaiser Bill; the various rationales suggested for that nickname (the dumpling shape of an Infantryman’s buttons, the dust of battle, a derogatory reference to apprentice bakers’ boys…). The Doughboys were the reason, or one of the reasons, for this pilgrimage to North Eastern France.

The only other visitor was a stooped young man in mis-matched tweed jacket and tan chinos, laden with camera equipment, who did not have kin remembered here, he was just interested in the AEF. So Amon was in his element: pointing out his great-grandfather’s name, explaining the strategic importance of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, General John J Pershing’s objectives, the difficulties that beset the American boys, in their biggest operation on French soil—and Viola was released to gaze in peace at the landscape of what had been the “St Mihiel Salient”. The wooded ridges, the lush green, lake-dotted plain, the tide of forest lapping at its shore.

Aymon remembered that his penchant for talking to strangers tended to get him into trouble with Viola, and he wanted her on his side, today of all days. He bid the young man from Kentucky a courteous goodbye, before he’d even scratched the surface of his knowledge, and came to join her.

“It looks so peaceful now.”

“Did you know,” said Viola, “this is
still
one of the most sparsely populated areas in Europe? Right here, practically next door to Paris, and all those big, packed, developed cities? It’s a boneyard, a graveyard, a derelict munitions dump. I warned you. Didn’t I warn you? The eastern flank of
La Belle Fran
ce is just battlefield after battlefield. Who’d want to come here, work here? How do you plan to attract the good people?”

“Money,” said Aymon. “Space, freedom, natural beauty. You’re so wrong: this location is perfect. We’ll be fighting them off with sticks.”

Aymon Bock was an extremely wealthy man. He’d been loaded before he was thirty, avoided getting his fingers burned in a long career of daring start-ups; and finally, in what he still felt was youthful middle age, he wanted to give something back. He looked on the grinning slackers who were this generation’s overnight billionaires, not with envy but with trepidation; and felt his long-ago hippie roots stirring. He meant to do something
good
, and since this region of France was (according to family legend) his ancestral home, he had chosen the forests of Argonne for the site of his Foundation. Having a French son-in-law also helped; though Jean-Raoul had been almost as hard to convince as Viola herself.

“There’s another Great War going on, Vi. The world’s in crisis, don’t you understand that? The Bock Foundation is going to be a beacon in the storm: here, where my people came from. I’m the one to do it, I know I am. I have the experience, the talent for spotting ventures that will
fly
, and for hiring the guys, the scientists, the technologists, who are really going places. I’m tired of all the defeatism, the denial and plain lies. It’s time to get organised, pull together, and see this Global Warming, Climate Change bogey for what it is: a dazzling
opportunity
. A new industrial revolution.”

“You’re such a romantic. If you want to be a war hero like your great-grand daddy was, why don’t you set up a Sustainable Technology Centre in the Sudan? Or closer to home, in Down South, Black Hispanic USA, the newest Desperate Developing Nation on the block?”

“I give a heap of money away to good causes, Vi. You know I do. But it’s pouring water in a bucket full of holes: and you know that too. A man like me, with my expertise, is better employed turning out new buckets.”

“Those Developing Nations,” remarked Viola, heading for the steps, “can be such a hassle to deal with. Where there’s human suffering there’s dirty politics. Business dies, and God forbid Aymon Bock should get his fingers burned at last.”

“I’m doing this for you, too. It’s going to reboot your career. You’re going to design for me.”

“Now you’re talking crazy. Designers have to be cool, and middle-aged women are not cool. Only youth is cool, in a woman.”

“That’s ridiculous! That’s antediluvian thinking, this is the Age of the Grey Tigress. What about Vivienne Westwood?”

“She’s in fashion and she’s pushing seventy. Thanks a lot.”

“Hell, did I say the Bock Foundation? I misspoke myself. It’s going to be the Viola Canning Bock Foundation.”

Viola laughed, touched in spite of herself. Say what you like about Aymon Bock, he could do irony: he could laugh at himself. She took a vintage Hermès scarf from her $6,000 shoulder bag, and tied it over her hair, Grace Kelly-style. He liked to drive the gun-metal Aston Martin he’d chosen for this trip with the top down, and the wind in his golf-tan wrinkles.

Of course he did.

She was a disappointment to her husband because she’d taken a career break, long ago, and never got around to mending it. She couldn’t convince him that it would be madness for her to return to the fray: a wealthy woman, playing with her husband’s newest toy. She’d be a laughing stock. But Ay’s own “career” was in the same state. The money produced itself now, without Aymon’s assistance: churning out mounds and mounds of cash, like that infernal salt mill in the fairytale. The money-maker and his wife were over. They were on the downslope, and this eco-technology fantasy just proved it.

“We’re barely middle-aged,” cried Aymon, as they drove away. “We have half our lives ahead!” And went off into one of his one-man brainstorms: Microgeneration. Virtual Tourism. The billions to be made in the development of
efficient
recycling. Get the basic patents, the ones that are going to change the entire world…We are both drowning, thought Viola, fully aware that her age was no excuse for anomie. We are both lost, we’ve always been lost. It’s just that Ay doesn’t know it. And deep inside her, like a tiny stone fetus curled around her heart, she felt what she might have been: shining, shining.

Discontent was all she had left, her only proof that life could have been better, could have been
wonderful
.

Down on the plain, when they reached the boundary of Aymon’s new real estate, there was certainly a sense of crossing some kind of crucial border. The wide fields of ethanol-fated corn (where Aymon muttered about the dumb European energy policy, not yet woken up to the exploded concept of biofuels) had given way to water meadow, then suddenly they faced a wall of trees. There was no signage. The road surface, equally suddenly, deteriorated to dirt, with a few scabby patches of asphalt.

“Are you sure this is the right place?”

Aymon had been enlarging on the fortunate partnership of Jean-Raoul and Madeleine. Their daughter the biochemist, brilliant and flighty, who’d taken up computer science as a sideline, currently spent her time modelling neurotransmitters, out in the wild blue yonder. Jean-Raoul Martigny, however, was a scientist with a sound business mind, always took Aymon’s advice, understood that
sustainable
dies if it means
non-profit-making
.

He paused in this pleasurable rant—leaving Maddy with her head in the clouds, Raoul with his feet on the ground—and punched up the help menus on the dashboard map.

“Heck. Something’s wrong with this…”

The Aston Martin was a beautiful car, and as guilt-free as a classic performance roadster can well be, but its subsystems had proved unreliable. Or else there was something in the air, interfering with the signal…Aymon could feel the prickling heaviness, an electric storm on the way.

There was an old man watching them from the edge of the trees.

A welcome sight, in the ringing, silent
emptiness
of this countryside, where you could hardly believe that crowded old Western Europe was all around. Aymon had pulled up, meaning to try some diagnostics. He leaned out, and made his inquiry. The old fellow set down his axe—he really was carrying a long-handled, ancient-looking axe—and came ambling over, cautious of his joints as the Tin Woodsman.

“Hi,” said Aymon, ever trustful of the universal power of the English language. “Would you mind telling us where we are, sir?”

The old fellow stared at the foreign car as if he’d never seen anything like it, and said something Aymon didn’t catch at all, except that the word
forêt
was in there. Viola explained the problem, in her passable French. The Tin Woodsman scratched his seamed and bristly chin, peered into the car and looked long at their GPS screen, shaking his head and murmuring: a voluble excursion, presumably in the local dialect, from which Viola could only snag “unbelievable!” She tried again, and managed to learn that he’d never heard of the projected Bock Foundation, and didn’t recognise the number of the minor Departmental Road they were looking for.

“But there
are
roads through the forest?,” she persisted, still in French.

The old man looked completely blank, a senior moment, then he spoke again, in a careful, strangely-accented English. “There are plenty of paths.” He smiled. “Perhaps too many. You can go in, easily. But you may not come out.” He nodded, pleased with his joke, and went back to his axe.

“Let’s go,” snapped Viola. “We were heading in the right direction five minutes ago. And we have the paper maps. ”

“What a damned language,” remarked Aymon, consolingly, as they passed into the embrace of the trees, and the world behind disappeared. “Don’t feel bad. It’s okay in print, but I can never understand a word when they start talking. Beyond restaurant dialogue, anyhow.”

“I understand French. I can’t do quaint dialects.”

“Yeah, well. They always remember a little English in the end.”

The forest had a placid, timeless air of expectation: as if it had been waiting for them, and welcomed them with quiet satisfaction. The trees were poplar and ash, oak, beech and hazel, and other nameless European species. None of any great size. The understory was a mass of climbers, vines, briars and ferns: but there was nothing sinister, no dripping, ghostly lichens. Still no signage, and the GPS screen was a fuzz of grey. Aymon grinned at his wife, and took a turn at random down another of the dirt-paved tracks. He drove slowly, appreciating the experience. Strangely, although the driving surface was horrible, the broad verges were evenly shorn to the height of a healthy suburban lawn. Maybe the Tin Woodsman came down here weekly, on a horse-drawn mower.

“Are you trying to get us lost? I should be throwing out a trail of breadcrumbs,” Viola commented, uneasily.

“I want to get a feel for the place, never been here in the flesh before. We’ll meet a landmark of some kind soon. If we don’t, there’s a compass on the dash. You’re sure we have the right
numero
in that map folder of yours?”

Viola was not sure. She kept paper maps out of nostalgia for the old days, when she’d been the map-navigating queen of their travels; but she’d come to rely on that fickle modern technology…She decided, in the interests of marital harmony, that she wouldn’t check the folder yet.

Aymon had been noticing long, regular shapes among the trees by the roadside: mostly wrapped in some kind of tarp. Then he saw the numbered tags, like mailboxes without the mailbox, and it dawned on him that he was seeing cords of firewood. The forest belonged to the commune; to the local people. It was not farmed for timber, it was portioned out, household by household, for winter fuel; sound energy policy for a change. This was one of the rights he’d agreed to respect, for an interim period, while he investigated the issue. But now the woodpiles, the dismembered flesh of the wood laid out like that, right under the noses of the living trees, were somehow very disturbing. He found himself wondering how the forest felt about the arrangement. Death by inches, endlessly repeated. Reminded him of the story of the hillbilly with the three-legged pig.

“A hog as good as that, you don’t eat him all at once…”

Viola felt nothing, except a practical concern about the coming storm—something in the air, not exactly oppressive, but electric. She looked up. The sun was invisible, the flowing band of sky was cloudless, a billowing deep blue canopy, a bride’s train, a robe…At last they reached a crossing place where several tracks met, around an open green crown. Aymon pulled up, carefully parallel to the mown grass, as if he feared a sudden rush of traffic. The sun was still invisible, the electric sky without a cloud, the forest vistas unbroken. A jaybird flashed across the clearing and called loudly, one indignant note. They smiled at each other.

“The old guy said we were ‘
À L’Orée de la Forêt de la Reine
,’” said Viola. “On the threshold of the Forest of the Queen. So we’re in the right woods, unless there are multiple Queens’ Forests around here. Which queen was it, Ay? When did she reign? What was her name?”

“I don’t remember. Could be Marie-Antoinette for all I know. The history’s on file, it’s in the documents, we can find out. Let’s take a walk.”

“Not out of sight of the car.”

“Okay, okay…Hey, I have my pocket knife, I’ll cut flashes on the trees. It’s just a small, suburban, European forest, honey. It won’t bite.”