The Humans (25 page)

A blue plastic bag floated by on the wind. The bearded man rolled a cigarette. He had shaky fingers. Nerve damage.

‘Ain’t no choice in love and life,’ he said.

‘No. That’s true. Even when you think there are choices there aren’t really. But I thought humans still subscribed to the illusion of free will?’

‘Not me, chief.’ And then he started singing, in a mumbled baritone of very low frequency. ‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone . . .’

‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Andrew,’ I said. ‘Sort of.’

‘What’s bothering you? You got beat up? Your face looks like shit.’

‘Yeah, in lots of ways. I had someone love me. And it was the most precious thing, that love. It gave me a family. It made me feel like I belonged. And I broke it.’

He lit the cigarette, which flopped out of his face like a numb antennae. ‘Ten years me and my wife were married,’ he said. ‘Then I lost my job and she left me the same week.
That’s when I turned to drink and my leg started to turn on me.’

He lifted up his trousers. His left leg was swollen and purple. And violet. I could see he expected me to be disgusted. ‘Deep vein thrombosis. Effing agony, it is. Effing
fucking
agony. And it’s gonna bloody kill me one of these days.’

He passed me the cigarette. I inhaled. I knew I didn’t like it, but I still inhaled.

‘What’s
your
name?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘Winston bloody Churchill.’

‘Oh, like the wartime prime minister.’ I watched him close his eyes and suck on his cigarette. ‘Why
do
people smoke?’

‘No idea. Ask me something else.’

‘Okay, then. How do you cope with loving someone who hates you? Someone who doesn’t want to see you again.’

‘God knows.’

He winced. He was in agony. I had noticed his pain on the first day, but now I wanted to do something about it. I had drunk enough to believe I could, or at least to forget I couldn’t.

He was about to roll his trousers down, but seeing the pain he was in, I told him to wait a moment. I placed my hand on the leg.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Don’t worry. It’s a very simple procedure of bio-set transference, involving reverse-apoptosis, working at the molecular level to restore and recreate dead and diseased cells.
To you it will look like magic, but it isn’t.’

My hand stayed there and nothing happened. And nothing kept on happening. It looked very far from magic.

‘Who
are
you?’

‘I’m an alien. I’m considered a useless failure in two galaxies.’

‘Well, could you please take your damn hand off my leg?’

I took my hand away. ‘Sorry. Really. I thought I still had the ability to heal you.’

‘I know you,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve seen you before.’

‘Yes. I know. I passed you, on my first day in Cambridge. You may remember. I was naked.’

He leant back, squinted, angled his head. ‘Nah. Nah. Wasn’t that. I saw you today.’

‘I don’t think you did. I’m pretty sure I would have recognised you.’

‘Nah. Definitely today. I’m good with faces, see.’

‘Was I with someone? A young woman? Red hair?’ He considered. ‘Nah. It was just you.’

‘Where was I?’

‘Oh, you were on, let me think, you’d have been on Newmarket Road.’

‘Newmarket Road?’ I knew the name of the street, because it was where Ari lived, but I hadn’t ever been on the street myself. Not today. Not ever. Though of course, it was very
likely that Andrew Martin – the original Andrew Martin – had been down there many times. Yes, that must have been it. He was getting mixed up. ‘I think you might be
confused.’

He shook his head. ‘It was you all right. This morning. Maybe midday. No word of a lie.’

And with that the man stood up and hobbled slowly away from me, leaving a trail of smoke and spilt alcohol.

A cloud passed across the sun. I looked up to the sky. I had a thought as dark as the shade. I stood up. I took the phone out of my pocket and called Ari. Eventually someone picked up. It was a
woman. She was breathing heavily, sniffing up snot, struggling to turn noise into coherent words.

‘Hello, this is Andrew. I wondered if Ari was there.’

And then the words came, in morbid succession: ‘He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s
dead
.’

I ran.

I left the wine and I ran as fast as I could, across the park, along streets, over main roads, hardly thinking about traffic. It hurt, this running. It hurt my knees, my hips, my heart and my
lungs. All those components, reminding me they would one day fail. It also, somehow, aggravated the various facial aches and pains I was suffering. But, mostly, it was my mind that was in
turmoil.

This was my fault. This had nothing to do with the Riemann hypothesis and everything to do with the fact that I had told Ari the truth about where I was from. He hadn’t believed me, but
that hadn’t been the point. I had been able to tell him, without getting an agonising violet-tainted warning. They had disconnected me, but they must still have been watching, and listening,
which meant they could probably hear me now.

‘Don’t do it. Don’t hurt Isobel or Gulliver. They don’t know anything.’

I reached the house that, up until this morning, I had been living in with the people I had grown to love. I crunched my way up the gravel driveway. The car wasn’t there. I looked through
the living-room window, but there was no sign of anyone. I had no key with me so I rang the doorbell.

I stood and waited, wondering what I could do. After a while, the door opened, but I still couldn’t see anyone. Whoever had opened the door clearly didn’t want to be seen.

I stepped into the house. I walked past the kitchen. Newton was asleep in his basket. I went over to him, shook him gently. ‘Newton! Newton!’ But he stayed asleep, breathing deeply,
mysteriously unwakeable.

‘I’m in here,’ said a voice, coming from the living room.

So I followed it, that familiar voice, until I was there, looking at a man sitting on the purple sofa with one leg crossed over the other. He was instantly familiar to me – indeed, he
could not have been more so – and yet, at the same time, the sight of him was terrifying.

For it was myself I was looking at.

His clothes were different (jeans instead of cords, a T-shirt instead of shirt, trainers in place of shoes) but it was definitely the form of Andrew Martin. The mid-brown hair, naturally parted.
The tired eyes, and the same face except for the absence of bruises.

‘Snap!’ he said, smiling. ‘That is what they say here, isn’t it? You know, when they are playing card games. Snap! We are identical twins.’

‘Who are you?’

He frowned, as if I’d asked such a basic question it shouldn’t have been asked. ‘I’m your replacement.’

‘My replacement?’

‘That is what I said. I am here to do what you were unable to do.’

My heart was racing. ‘What do you mean?’

‘To destroy information.’

Fear and anger were sometimes the same thing. ‘You killed Ari?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? He didn’t know the Riemann hypothesis had been proved.’

‘No. I know. I have been given broader instructions than you. I have been told to destroy anyone you have told about your’ – he considered the right word –
‘
origins
.’

‘So they’ve been listening to me? They said I was disconnected.’

He pointed at my left hand, where the technology still evidently lived. ‘They took your powers away, but they didn’t take theirs. They listen sometimes. They check.’

I stared at it. At my hand. It looked, suddenly, like an enemy.

‘How long have you been here? On Earth, I mean.’

‘Not long.’

‘Someone broke into this house a few nights ago. They accessed Isobel’s computer.’

‘That was me.’

‘So why the delay? Why didn’t you finish the job that night?’

‘You were here. I did not want to hurt you. No Vonnadorian has killed another Vonnadorian. Not directly.’

‘Well, I’m not really a Vonnadorian. I am a human. The paradox is that I’m light years from home, and yet this feels like my home. That is a strange thing to feel. So, what
have you been doing? Where have you been living?’

He hesitated, swallowed hard. ‘I have been living with a female.’

‘A female human? A woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Outside Cambridge. A village. She doesn’t know my name. She thinks I am called Jonathan Roper. I convinced her we were married.’

I laughed. The laugh seemed to surprise him. ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘I don’t know. I have gained a sense of humour. That is one thing that happened when I lost the gifts.’

‘I am going to kill them, do you know that?’

‘No. Actually, I don’t. I told the hosts there is no point. That’s about the last thing I said to them. They seemed to understand me.’

‘I have been told to, and that is what I will do.’

‘But don’t you think it’s pointless, that there’s no real reason to do it?’

He sighed and shook his head. ‘No, I do not think that’, he said, in a voice which was mine but deeper, somehow, and flatter. ‘I do not see a separation. I have lived with a
human for only a few days but I have seen the violence and hypocrisy that runs through this species.’

‘Yes, but there is good in them. A lot of good.’

‘No. I don’t see it. They can sit and watch dead human bodies on TV screens and feel nothing at all.’

‘That’s how I saw it at first, but—’

‘They can drive a car thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can
despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children.’

‘Yes, there is a bad logic here, I agree with you, yet I truly believe—’

He wasn’t listening. He stood up now, stared at me with determined eyes as he paced the room and delivered his speech. ‘They believe God is always on their side, even if their side
is at odds with the rest of their species. They have no way of coming to terms with what are, biologically, the two most important events that happen to them – procreation and death. They
pretend to know that money can’t buy them happiness, yet they would choose money every time. They celebrate mediocrity at every available opportunity and love to see others’ misfortune.
They have lived on this planet for over a hundred thousand generations and yet they still have no idea about who they really are or how they should really live. In fact, they know less now than
they once did.’

‘You’re right but don’t you think there is something beautiful in these contradictions, something mysterious?’

‘No. No, I do not. What I think is that their violent will has helped them dominate the world, and “civilise” it, but now there is nowhere left for them to go, and so the human
world has turned in on itself. It is a monster that feasts on its own hands. And still they do not see the monster, or if they do they do not see that they are inside it, molecules within the
beast.’

I looked at the bookshelves. ‘Have you read human poetry? Humans understand these failings.’

He still wasn’t listening.

‘They have lost themselves but not their ambitions. Do not think that they would not leave this place if they had the chance. They’re beginning to realise life is out there, that
we
or beings like us, are out there, and they won’t just stop at that. They will want to explore, and as their mathematical understanding expands, then they will eventually be able to
do so. They will find us, eventually, and when they do, they will not want to be friends, even if they think – as they always do – that their own ends are perfectly benevolent. They
will find a reason to destroy or subjugate other life forms.’

A girl in a school uniform walked past the house. Pretty soon, Gulliver would be coming home.

‘But there is no connection between killing these people and stopping progress, I promise you. No connection.’

He stopped pacing the room and came over to me, leant into my face. ‘Connections? I will tell you about connections . . . An amateur German physicist works in a patent office in Bern in
Switzerland. He comes up with a theory that, half a century later, will lead to whole Japanese cities being destroyed, along with much of their population. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters. He does
not want that connection to form, but that does not stop it forming.’

‘You’re talking about something very different.’

‘No. No, I am not. This is a planet where a daydream can end in death, and where mathematicians can cause an apocalypse. That is my view of the humans. Is it any different from
yours?’

‘Humans learn the errors of their ways though,’ I said, ‘and they care more for each other than you think.’

‘No. I know they care for each other when the other in question is like them, or lives under their roof, but any difference is a step further away from their empathy. They find it
preposterously easy to fall out among themselves. Imagine what they would do to us, if they could.’

Of course, I had already imagined this and was scared of the answer. I was weakening. I felt tired and confused.

‘But we were sent here to kill them. What makes us any better?’

‘We act as a result of logic, of rational thinking. We are here to preserve, even to preserve the humans. Think about it. Progress is a very dangerous thing for them. The boy must be
killed, even if the woman can be saved. The boy knows. You told us yourself.’

‘You are making a little mistake.’

‘What is my mistake?’

‘You cannot kill a mother’s son without killing the mother.’

‘You are speaking in riddles. You have become like them.’

I looked at the clock. It was half-past four. Gulliver would return home at any moment. I tried to think what to do. Maybe this other me, this ‘Jonathan’ was right. Well, there
wasn’t really a maybe. He
was
right: the humans could not handle progress very well and they were not good at understanding their place in the world. They were, ultimately, a great
danger to themselves and others.