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For supper, Cyfal ate part of a dead wild animal he had cooked. Privately revolted, Balank ate his own rations out of the trundler. In this and other ways, Cyfal was an anachronism. Hardly any timber was needed nowadays in the cities, or had been for millions of years. There remained some marginal uses for wood, necessitating a handful of timber officers, whose main job was to fix signals on old trees that had fallen dangerously, so that machines could fly over later and extract them like rotten teeth from the jaws of the forest. The post of timber officer was being filled more and more by machines, as fewer men were to be found each generation who would take on such a dangerous and lonely job far from the cities.
Over the eons of recorded history, mankind had raised machines that made his cities places of delight. Machines had replaced man’s early inefficient machines; machines had replanned forms of transport; machines had come to replan man’s life for him. The old stone jungles of man’s brief adolescence were buried as deep in memory as the coal jungles of the Carboniferous.
Far away in the pile of discarded yesterdays, man and machines had found how to create life. New foods were produced, neither meat nor vegetable, and the ancient wheel of the past was broken forever, for now the link between man and the land was severed: agriculture, the task of Adam, was as dead as steamships.
Mental attitudes were moulded by physical change. As the cities became self-supporting, so mankind needed only cities and the resources of cities. Communications between city and city became so good that physical travel was no longer necessary; city was separated from city by unchecked vegetation as surely as planet is cut off from planet. Few of the hairless denizens of the cities ever thought of outside; those who went physically outside invariably had some element of the abnormal in them.
‘The werewolves grow up in cities as we do,’ Balank said. ‘It’s only in adolescence they break away and seek the wilds. You knew that, I suppose?’
Cyfal’s overhead light was unsteady, flickering in an irritating way. ‘Let’s not talk of werewolves after sunset,’ he said.
‘The machines will hunt them all down in time.’
‘Don’t be so sure of that. They’re worse at detecting a werewolf than a man is.’
‘I suppose you realise that’s social criticism, Cyfal?’
Cyfal pulled a long sour face and discourteously switched on his wristphone. After a moment, Balank did the same. The operator came up at once, and he asked to be switched to the news satellite.
He wanted to see something fresh on the current time exploration project, but there was nothing new on the files. He was advised to dial back in an hour. Looking over at Cyfal, he saw the timber officer had tuned to a dance show of some sort; the cavorting figures in the little projection were badly disorted from this angle. He rose and went to the door of the hut.
The trundler stood outside, ever alert, ignoring him. An untrustworthy light lay over the clearing. Deep twilight reigned, shot through by the rays of the newly risen moon; he was surprised how fast the day had drained away.
Suddenly, he was conscious of himself as an entity, living, with a limited span of life, much of which had already drained away unregarded. The moment of introspection was so uncharacteristic of him that he was frightened. He told himself it was high time he traced down the werewolf and got back to the city: too much solitude was making him morbid.
As he stood there, he heard Cyfal come up behind. The man said, ‘I’m sorry if I was surly when I was so genuinely glad to see you. It’s just that I’m not used to the way city people think. You mustn’t take offence – I’m afraid you might even think I’m a werewolf myself.’
‘That’s foolish! We took a blood spec on you as soon as you were within sighting distance.’ For all that, he realised that Cyfal made him uneasy. Going to where the trundler guarded the door, he took up his laser gun and slipped it under his arm. ‘Just in case,’ he said.
‘Of course. You think he’s around – Gondalug, the werewolf? Maybe following you instead of you following him?’
‘As you said, it’s full moon. Besides, he hasn’t eaten in days. They won’t touch synthfoods once the lycanthropic gene asserts itself, you know.’
‘That’s why they eat humans occasionally?’ Cyfal stood silent for a moment, then added, ‘But they are a part of the human race – that is, if you regard them as men who change into wolves rather than wolves who change into men. I mean, they’re nearer relations to us than animals or machines are.’
‘Not than machines!’ Balank said in a shocked voice. ‘How could we survive without the machines?’
Ignoring that, Cyfal said, ‘To my mind, humans are turning into machines. Myself, I’d rather turn into a werewolf.’
Somewhere in the trees, a cry of pain sounded and was repeated.
‘Night owl,’ Cyfal said. The sound brought him back to the present, and he begged Balank to come in and shut the door. He brought out some wine, which they warmed, salted, and drank together.
‘The sun’s my clock,’ he said, when they had been chatting for a while. ‘I shall turn in soon. You’ll sleep too?’
‘I don’t sleep – I’ve a fresher.’
‘I never had the operation. Are you moving on? Look, are you planning to leave me here all alone, the night of the full moon?’ He grabbed Balank’s sleeve and then withdrew his hand.
‘If Gondalug’s about, I want to kill him tonight. I must get back to the city.’ But he saw that Cyfal was frightened and took pity on the little man. ‘But in fact I could manage an hour’s freshing – I’ve had none for three days.’
‘You’ll take it here?’
‘Sure, get your head down – but you’re armed, aren’t you?’
‘It doesn’t always do you any good.’
While the little man prepared his bunk, Balank switched on his phone again. The news feature was ready and came up almost at once. Again Balank was plunged into a remote and terrible future.
The machines had managed to push their time exploration some eight million years ahead, and there a deviation in the quanta of the electromagnetic spectrum had halted their advance. The reason for this was so far obscure and lay in the changing nature of the sun, which strongly influenced the time structure of its own minute corner of the galaxy.
Balank was curious to find if the machines had resolved the problem. It appeared that they had not, for the main news of the day was that. Platform One had decided that operations should now be confined to the span of time already opened up. Platform One was the name of the machine civilisation, many hundreds of centuries ahead in time, which had first pushed through the time barrier and contacted all machine-ruled civilisations before its own epoch.
What a disappointment that only the electronic senses of machines could shuttle in time! Balank would greatly have liked to visit one of the giant cities of the remote future.
The compensation was that the explorers sent back video pictures of that world to their own day. These alien landscapes produced in Balank a tremendous hunger for more; he looked in whenever he could. Even on the trail of the werewolf, which absorbed almost all his faculties, he had dialled for every possible picture of that inaccessible and terrific reality that lay distantly on the same time stratum which contained his own world.
As the first transmissions took on cubic content, Balank heard a noise outside the hut, and was instantly on his feet. Grabbing the gun, he opened the door and peered out, his left hand on the door jamb, his wristset still working.
The trundler sat outside, its senses ever-functioning, fixing him with an indicator as if in unfriendly greeting. A leaf or two drifted down from the trees; it was never absolutely silent here, as it could be in the cities at night; there was always something living or dying in the unmapped woods. As he turned his gaze through the darkness – but of course the trundler – and the werewolf, it was said – saw much more clearly in this situation than he did – his vision was obscured by the representation of the future palely gleaming at his cuff. Two phases of the same world were in juxtaposition, one standing on its side, promising an environment where different senses would be needed to survive.
Satisfied, although still wary, Balank shut the door and went to sit down and study the transmission. When it was over, he dialled a repeat. Catching his absorption, Cyfal from his bunk dialled the same programme.
Above the icy deserts of Earth a blue sun shone, too small to show a disc, and from this chip of light came all terrestrial change. Its light was bright as full-moon’s light, and scarcely warmer. Only a few strange and stunted types of vegetation stretched up from the mountains toward it. All the old primitive kinds of flora had vanished long ago. Trees, for so many epochs one of the sovereign forms of Earth, had gone. Animals had gone. Birds had vanished from the skies. In the mountainous seas, very few life-forms protracted their existence.
New forces had inherited this later Earth. This was the time of the majestic auroras, of the near absolute-zero nights, of the years-long blizzards.
But there were cities still, their lights burning brighter than the chilly sun; and there were the machines.
The machines of this distant age were monstrous and complex things, slow and armoured, resembling most the dinosaurs that had filled one hour of the Earth’s dawn. They foraged over the bleak landscape on their own ineluctable errands. They climbed into space, building there monstrous webbed arms that stretched far from Earth’s orbit, to scoop in energy and confront the poor fish sun with a vast trawler net of magnetic force.
In the natural course of its evolution, the sun had developed into its white dwarf stage. Its phase as a yellow star, when it supported vertebrate life, was a brief one, now passed through. Now it moved toward its prime season, still far ahead, when it would enter the main period of its life and become a red dwarf star. Then it would be mature, then it would itself be invested with an awareness countless times greater than any minor consciousnesses it nourished now. As the machines clad in their horned exoskeletons climbed near it, the sun had entered a period of quiescence to be measured in billions of years, and cast over its third planet the light of a perpetual full moon.
The documentary presenting this image of postiquity carried a commentary that consisted mainly of a rundown of the technical difficulties confronting Platform One and the other machine civilisations at that time. It was too complex for Balank to understand. He looked up from his phone at last, and saw that Cyfal had dropped asleep in his bunk. By his wrist, against his tousled head, a shrunken sun still burned.
For some moments, Balank stood looking speculatively at the timber officer. The man’s criticism of the machines disturbed him. Naturally, people were always criticizing the machines, but, after all, mankind depended on them more and more, and most of the criticism was superficial. Cyfal seemed to doubt the whole role of machines.
It was extremely difficult to decide just how much truth lay in anything. The werewolves, for example. They were and always had been man’s enemy, and that was presumably why the machines hunted them with such ruthlessness – for man’s sake. But from what he had learnt at the patrol school, the creatures were on the increase. And had they really got magic powers? – Powers, that was to say, that were beyond man’s, enabled them to survive and flourish as man could not, even supported by all the forces of the cities. The Dark Brother: that was what they called the werewolf, because he was like the night side of man. But he was not man – and how exactly he differed, nobody could tell, except that he could survive when man had not.
Still frowning, Balank moved across to the door and looked out. The moon was climbing, casting a pallid and dappled light among the trees of the clearing, and across the trundler. Balank was reminded of that distant day when the sun would shine no more warmly.
The trundler was switched to transmission, and Balank wondered with whom it was in touch. With Headquarters, possibly, asking for fresh orders, sending in their report.
‘I’m taking an hour with my fresher,’ he said. ‘Okay by you?’
‘Go ahead. I shall stand guard,’ the trundler’s speech circuit said.
Balank went back inside, sat down at the table, and clipped the fresher across his forehead. He fell instantly into unconsciousness, an unconsciousness that force-fed him enough sleep and dream to refresh him for the next seventy-two hours. At the end of the timed hour, he awoke, annoyingly aware that there had been confusion in his skull.
Before he had lifted his head from the table, the thought came: we never saw any human beings in that chilly future.
He sat up straight. Of course, it had been an accidental omission from a brief programme. Humans were not so important as the machines, and that would apply even more in the distant time. But none of the news flashes had shown humans, not even in the immense cities. That was absurd; there would be lots of human beings. The machines had covenanted, at the time of the historic Emancipation, that they would always protect the human race.
Well, Balank told himself, he was talking nonsense. The subversive comments Cyfal had uttered had put a load of mischief into his head. Instinctively, he glanced over at the timber officer.
Cyfal was dead in his bunk. He lay contorted with his head lolling over the side of the mattress, his throat torn out. Blood still welled up from the wound, dripping very slowly from one shoulder onto the floor.
Forcing himself to do it, Balank went over to him. In one of Cyfal’s hands, a piece of grey fur was gripped.
The werewolf had called! Balank gripped his throat in terror. He had evidently roused in time to save his own life, and the creature had fled.
He stood for a long time staring down in pity and horror at the dead man, before prising the piece of fur from his grasp. He examined it with distaste. It was softer than he had imagined wolf fur to be. He turned the hairs over in his palm. A piece of skin had torn away with the hair. He looked at it more closely.
A letter was printed on the skin.
It was faint, but he definitely picked out an ‘S’ to one edge of the skin. No, it must be a bruise, a stain, anything but a printed letter. That would mean that this was synthetic, and had been left as a fragment of evidence to mislead Balank…
He ran over to the door, grabbing up the laser gun as he went, and dashed outside. The moon was high now. He saw the trundler moving across the clearing toward him.
‘Where have you been?’ he called.
‘Patrolling. I heard something among the trees and got a glimpse of a large grey wolf, but was not able to destroy it. Why are you frightened? I am registering surplus adrenalin in your veins.’
‘Come in and look. Something killed the timber man.’
He stood aside as the machine entered the hut and extended a couple of rods above the body on the bunk. As he watched, Balank pushed the piece of fur down into his pocket.
‘Cyfal is dead. His throat has been ripped out. It is the work of a large animal. Balank, if you are rested, we must now pursue the werewolf Gondalug, identity number YB5921 stroke AS25061. He committed this crime.’
They went outside. Balank found himself trembling. He said, ‘Shouldn’t we bury the poor fellow?’
‘If necessary, we can return by daylight.’
Argument was impossible with trundlers. This one was already off, and Balank was forced to follow.
They moved downhill toward the River Pracha. The difficulty of the descent soon drove everything else from Balank’s mind. They had followed Gondalug this far, and it seemed unlikely he would go much farther. Beyond here lay gaunt bleak uplands, lacking cover. In this broken tumbling valley, Gondalug would go to earth, hoping to hide from them. But their instruments would track him down, and then he could be destroyed. With good luck, he would lead them to caves where they would find and exterminate other men and women and maybe children who bore the deadly lycanthropic gene and refused to live in cities.
It took them two hours to get down to the lower part of the valley. Great slabs of the hill had fallen away, and now stood apart from their parent body, forming cubic hills in their own right, with great sandy cliffs towering up vertically, crowned with unruly foliage. The Pracha itself frequently disappeared down narrow crevices, and the whole area was broken with caves and fissures in the rock. It was ideal country in which to hide.
‘I must rest for a moment,’ Balank gasped. The trundler came immediately to a halt. It moved over any terrain, putting out short legs to help itself when tracks and wheels failed.
They stood together, ill-assorted in the pale night, surrounded by the noise of the little river as it battled over its rocky bed.
‘You’re sending again, aren’t you? Whom to?’
The machine asked, ‘Why did you conceal the piece of wolf fur you found in the timber officer’s hand?’
Balank was running at once, diving for cover behind the nearest slab of rock. Sprawling in the dirt, he saw a beam of heat sizzle above him and slewed himself round the corner. The Pracha ran along here in a steep-sided crevasse. With fear lending him strength, Balank took a run and cleared the crevasse in a mighty jump, and fell among the shadows on the far side of the gulf. He crawled behind a great chunk of rock, the flat top of which was several feet above his head, crowned with a sagging pine tree.
The trundler called to him from the other side of the river.
‘Balank, Balank, you have gone wrong in your head!’
Staying firmly behind the rock, he shouted back, ‘Go home, trundler! You’ll never find me here!’
‘Why did you conceal the piece of wolf fur from the timber officer’s hand?’
‘How did you know about the fur unless you put it there? You killed Cyfal because he knew things about machines I did not, didn’t you? You wanted me to believe the werewolf did it, didn’t you? The machines are gradually killing off the humans, aren’t they? There are no such things as werewolves, are there?’
‘You are mistaken, Balank. There are werewolves, all right. Because man would never really believe they existed, they have survived. But we believe they exist, and to us they are a greater menace than mankind can be now. So surrender and come back to me. We will continue looking for Gondalug.’
He did not answer. He crouched and listened to the machine growling on the other side of the river.
Crouching on the top of the rock above Balank’s head was a sinewy man with a flat skull. He took more than human advantage of every shade of cover as he drank in the scene below, his brain running through the possibilities of the situation as efficiently as his legs could take him through wild grass. He waited without stirring, and his face was grey and grave and alert.
The machine came to a decision. Getting no reply from the man, it came gingerly round the rock and approached the edge of the crevasse through which the river ran. Experimentally, it sent a blast of heat across to the opposite cliff, followed by a brief hail of armoured pellets.
‘Balank?’ it called.
Balank did not reply, but the trundler was convinced it had not killed the man. It had somehow to get across the brink Balank had jumped. It considered radioing for aid, but the nearest city, Zagrad, was a great distance away.
It stretched out its legs, extending them as far as possible. Its clawed feet could just reach the other side, but there the edge crumbled slightly and would not support its full weight. It shuffled slowly along the crevasse, seeking out the ideal place.
From shelter, Balank watched it glinting with a murderous dullness in the moonlight. He clutched a great shard of rock, knowing what he had to do. He had presented to him here the best – probably the only – chance he would get to destroy the machine. When it was hanging across the ravine, he would rush forward. The trundler would be momentarily too preoccupied to burn him down. He would hurl the boulder at it, knock the vile thing down into the river.
The machine was quick and clever. He would have only a split second in which to act. Already his muscles bulged over the rock, already he gritted his teeth in effort, already his eyes glared ahead at the hated enemy. His time would come at any second now. It was him or it…
Gondalug alertly stared down at the scene, involved with it and yet detached. He saw what was in the man’s mind, knew that he looked a scant second ahead to the encounter.
His own kind, man’s Dark Brother, worked differently. They looked farther ahead just as they had always done, in a fashion unimaginable to homo sapiens. To Gondalug, the outcome of this particular little struggle was immaterial. He knew that his kind had already won their battle against mankind. He knew that they still had to enter into their real battle against the machines.
But that time would come. And then they would defeat the machines. In the long days when the sun shone always over the blessed Earth like a full moon – in those days, his kind would finish their age of waiting and enter into their own savage kingdom.
Just Passing Through (#ulink_e1a79b72-eb9b-5e87-acf1-62ed711fd871)
Colin Charteris climbed out of his red Banshee, stood for a moment stretching by it. The machine creaked and snapped, the metal cooling after its long duel across the motorways of Europe. Charteris took off his inflatable padded lifesuit, flung it into the back of the car, turned up the temperature of his one-piece to compensate for what felt like near-nudity. Hero: he had covered the twenty-two hundred kilometres from Catanzaro down on the Ionian Sea to Metoz, France, in twenty-four hours’ driving, and had sustained no more than a metre-long gouge along the front outside fender.
Outside Milano, where the triple autostrada made of the Lombardy plain a geometrical diagram, he had narrowly avoided a multiple crash. They were all multiple crashes these days. The image continued to multiply itself over and over in his mind, like a series of cultures in their dishes: a wheel still madly spinning, crushed barriers, buckled metal, sunlight worn like thick make-up over the impossibly abandoned attitudes of death. Charteris had seen it happen, the fantastic speeds suddenly swallowed by car and human frames with the sloth of the super-quick, when anything too fast for retina register could spend forever spreading through the labyrinths of consciousness. By now, the bodies would all be packed neatly in hospital or mortuary, the autostrada gleaming in perfect action again, the death squads lolling at their wheels in the nearest rastplatz, reading paperbacks; but Charteris’s little clicker-shutter mechanisms were still busy re-running the actual blossoming moment of impact.
He shook his head, dislodging nothing. He had parked beside Metoz cathedral. It was several centuries old, but built of a coarse yellow stone that made it, now prematurely floodlit in the early evening, look like a Victorian copy of an earlier model.
The ground fell steeply at the other end of the square. Stone steps led down to a narrow street, all wall on one side and on the other prim little drab narrow façades closing all their shutters against the overwhelming statement of the cathedral.
Across one of the façades, a sign said, ‘Hotel des Invalides’.
‘Krankenhaus,’ Charteris said.
He pulled his suitcase out of the boot of the Banshee and dragged himself over to the hotel, walking like a warrior coming across a desert, a pilot walking over a runway after a mission. He emphasised the tragedy of it slightly, even grunting as he walked. The other cars parked in the square were a shabby bunch. Removing his gaze from his own egotistical landscapes, he saw this part of the cathedral square had been bought up as a used car lot. There were prices in francs painted to one side of each windscreen, as if denoting the worth of the driver rather than the vehicle.
