Adams ladder, p.5
Adam's Ladder, page 5
He was hardly aware of squeezing his eyes shut until they flared with an inner light and then with a flash that was bigger and brighter than anyone else’s phone had produced. In less than a second he heard a sound almost too uncommon to define, a deep thump that felt like a punch in the guts, a noise immediately transformed into a stony splintering that was followed by a smash of glass and widespread thuds of rubble. After this came more of a silence than he expected, so that he imagined the crowd pausing for breath if not growing mute with awe at the spectacle until quite a few of them voiced the first scream.
If he didn’t look he might be too conspicuous. It was too late to be squeamish, and he should be proud he hadn’t been. When he opened his eyes as wide as they would stretch he saw that the parade and the crowd around the ruins of the bin had grown more colourful, though only with varieties of red. An indeterminate number of wheelchair users were strewn across the road, some of them bidding to compete with the paraplegics at fusing flesh with metal. Among the scattered limbs and other fragments he saw a tattered reddish item that reminded him of furs that women used to wear around their necks. It was a pity about the dog, but the animal wouldn’t have been there if the blind man hadn’t been trying to prove he belonged in the audience. As some of the reddened lumps lying in the road began to move, the speakers struck up a new tune, which seemed to rouse the crowd to panic. He saw a mass of appalled faces turn to him before they came at him. The mob wasn’t about to seize him, it was simply fleeing, and he ought to join in.
He didn’t need to think where he was going. Nobody would just now. Instinct sent him down the nearest alley, which took him out of the dangerous uncontrolled surge of the crowd. A few people copied his example, but were they why he felt pursued? He might have felt guilty or at any rate dissatisfied if he’d let himself, because he hadn’t taken into account how many able people would be crippled by the bomb. Surely more of the parade had been eliminated, which should restore some form of balance. At least the people who’d commandeered the week had been shown what the silenced majority thought of them.
Hubble dodged into another alley, and another. Each of them left more of the crowd behind, and yet he still felt watched if not discussed. He could see no cameras—not until he turned a corner and found one pointing straight at him. He was about to hide his face, having failed to grasp how guilty this would look, when he saw he was behind the local television station, where a cameraman was loading the equipment into a van. Even so, Hubble felt compelled to explain his haste. “Bomb,” he panted, pointing back the way he’d come.
A man whose face he vaguely knew from newscasts hurried over to him. “Were you there?”
“I was, yes.” In case this sounded too suggestively emphatic Hubble said “Like a lot of people.”
“Did you see what happened?”
“I didn’t see it go off. Just what it did.”
“Can we interview you?”
His impulse was to refuse, but how suspicious might that look? Before he could think of a convincing excuse the reporter said “You’d be doing us a big favour.”
Hubble had done that for the world, and why should he need to be cautious? Perhaps talking about it like a spectator would let him stop feeling observed. “I’ve never done this before,” he said.
“It won’t hurt. You’ll be fine. Just go round to reception and tell them Danny says for news to film an interview.”
As the van raced away Hubble strode around the building to the counter in the lobby. “Danny says you want to film me about the bomb.”
The receptionist blinked at him beneath a pretty frown. “Which bomb?”
“Only one that I know of.” When this didn’t lift the frown Hubble said “The one that did for the parade.”
She kept her gaze on him while she leaned towards the switchboard, and he wished he didn’t feel she wasn’t the only watcher. “I’ve got a gentleman out here who wants to talk about a bomb.”
Hubble didn’t like the sound of this, and was thinking how to put her right when a door beside the counter let out a woman a head taller than him. “That’s fine, Terry,” she told the receptionist. “We know all about him.”
He was distracted by a sense that her voice had covered up an instant echo of her comment about him. She thrust out a large hand to detain him. “Maria Neilson,” she said. “Danny called to say you were coming in.”
She only wanted to shake his hand. He recognised the presenter now, her hair cropped short as if to make her height less daunting, her broad face spanned by a constantly concerned look. A man with a camera perched on his shoulder followed them into the street, where passers-by glanced at Hubble as if they ought to know him, no less than he deserved. “Just say your name,” Maria Neilson said.
“Harold Hubble.” He did his best to fend off an impression that the muted voices, which he couldn’t really hear, had joined in if not answered for him. “Harold Hubble,” he said in case he hadn’t spoken after all.
“Harry, shall we say, or Harold?”
“I’m exactly what I said.”
“Harold.” Rather too much like someone addressing an invalid she said “Tell us what happened in your own words.”
“Who else’s am I going to use?” Hubble retorted and peered at the camera. “Is he filming me?”
“That’s the idea, Harold. Just tell us all about it and we’ll edit you if necessary.”
A wailing chorus silenced him—the sirens of police cars. No doubt she was conducting the interview out here to include that kind of detail. “What did you see?” she prompted.
“I didn’t see the bomb go off, I only heard it.”
“How close were you, Harold?”
“Not that close. Not very close at all.” Having established this, he felt safe to say “You wouldn’t think a little bomb could do so much.”
“We’ve had no report of its size.”
“You could see they’d left it in a rubbish bin.” Surely an innocent spectator might know this, but Hubble thought it wise to add “I expect anyone can find out how to make bombs these days. Just go on your computer and there you are.”
“I’m afraid that’s the truth.” Before Hubble could point out that the truth was the last thing you should be afraid of, she said “You were saying what you saw.”
“It did a lot of damage. Shops, not just people.” He saw she was eager for details. “It wasn’t just the bomb, it was chunks of the bin,” he said. “Smashed all the windows by it and the people too. There were bits of them in the road, the people. I think a lot of them were dead, but there’ll be some of them in hospital for a good bit. Let’s just hope they learn to look after themselves. Are you broadcasting me now?”
“As I said, we’ll be editing you first.”
Then why did he feel he had a larger audience than he could see? He must be anticipating his future fame, but Maria Neilson distracted him by asking “What did you do?”
“Nothing. Not a thing. What makes you—” He managed to interrupt himself, hoping he hadn’t understood her question too late. “There wasn’t anything I could do,” he said. “I’m not a nurse or a carer either.”
“But you do care, don’t you, Harold? How do you feel about what you saw today?”
“It was worse than you could have expected.” This struck him as so clever an escape from the trap she’d laid that he risked adding “It was like a battlefield, only not the ones you see in films. They don’t show the mess it makes of people.”
He seemed to have engaged her sympathy; certainly she winced. “What kind of person do you think could have done it?” she said.
While this wouldn’t trick him into saying too much, he wouldn’t deny himself either. “Someone who believed in what he was doing,” he said.
“I’m sure that’s true, unfortunately.”
Was she trying to provoke him to declare it was by no means unfortunate? Certainly her gaze was encouraging him to speak. When he met it with a silence no mute could have improved upon she said “Thank you for all that, Harold. I should be on my way if I were you.”
“You aren’t, or you wouldn’t be talking to me.” Rather than say this Hubble demanded “Why would you?”
“They’re bound to cordon off the area. We don’t know where they’ll let the buses stop.”
He might have enquired how she knew he’d come by bus. She couldn’t know he’d had to sell his car after he’d been caught cruising for passengers. Didn’t he look sufficiently famous to own a car? He might have told her he deserved to be, but said only “When will I be on?”
“As soon as we’ve put you together.” While the cameraman returned to the building she said “I just need you to sign a waiver.”
She wanted his name and address on the form. Surely he had no reason to conceal them, but he felt obscurely nervous. Too late he wished he’d told her false ones, and he signed as illegibly as he could. “Thank you for bringing it alive,” she said.
He didn’t like that either. Since it was the opposite of his achievement, he could have suspected her of joking. Rather than confront her he made for the main road. He wasn’t running away from her, he simply wanted to be home to watch himself on television. He had nothing to be ashamed of. “You needn’t be,” he thought someone—indeed, quite a number of them—said, though he couldn’t see them.
The wide street was still hosting an impromptu race. Everyone was fleeing the bomb and its aftermath, and Hubble didn’t mind appearing to be. Beyond a line of police cars was a growing crowd of people determined to board a bus, and he managed to struggle onto one despite provoking protests, which seemed less present than the voices he’d been hearing. As he stood in the aisle, gripping a metal pole for support, he felt like a crusader with a spear. More passengers than he would have thought the bus had room for piled on board, forcing people along the aisle, but he didn’t let go of his emblem. At last the bus moved off, so sluggishly that it felt retarded by its unaccustomed burden, and Hubble was mutely urging it to gather speed when he heard a voice beside and below him. “You wouldn’t think a little bomb could do so much,” it said.
It wasn’t like the other voices he kept hearing—it was his own. When he glanced down he saw his face in miniature, almost filling the screen of a woman’s mobile phone. “You could see they’d left it in a rubbish bin,” it said.
“That was me.” Hubble managed not to say this, even though he would only have meant the interview, instead letting his electronic image speak for him. “It did a lot of damage. It wasn’t just the bomb, it was chunks of the bin. There wasn’t anything I could do. It was like a battlefield, only not the ones you see in films. They don’t show the mess it makes of people.”
He was waiting for his best line when a reporter’s face ousted his—Danny with a shattered store window as a backdrop. Hadn’t they wanted people to be told the truth? Didn’t they realise how many might agree, or was that what they were afraid of? He was close to proclaiming the censored line when he heard his voice behind him. “You wouldn’t think a little bomb could do so much,” it said.
It was on another phone, and it was less than halfway through its statement before a third phone found him. The repetitions made him feel as if he were being split into electronic fragments. They weren’t going to break up his mind, and he clawed at the bellpush on the metal pole. As the bell went off he let his suppressed voice escape. “Getting off,” he shouted. “Coming through.”
He had to squirm through the crowd between the seats while his entire body prickled as if it had turned electronic. The bus left him beside a small memorial garden, where a path encircled a statue inside a spiky fence reminiscent of a crown of thorns. A few benches stood beside the path, and Hubble sat behind the stone figure, not caring who it represented. As he took out his phone he had to remind himself it was no longer a trigger. Rather than search for the television station, he couldn’t resist typing his name in the search box, and the phone suggested a link at once. Hubble Day, it said.
Could he really be seeing that? He poked the words hard enough to leave a moist blurred fingerprint on the screen, and then he jerked his head around. Nobody was watching over his shoulder or from anywhere else that he could see, and he turned back to the phone to find his own reduced face gazing up at him. “You wouldn’t think a little bomb could do so much,” it said.
“It changed the world.”
The voices said so. They were closer now, as close as the core of his mind. “Let’s hope so,” he said.
“You could see they’d left it in a rubbish bin.”
“What it brought about wasn’t rubbish.”
“You won’t hear me arguing,” Hubble declared and tried to concentrate on his own voice, which was saying “It did a lot of damage.”
“Not damage, Harold. It was a sign.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It wasn’t just the bomb, it was chunks of the bin. There wasn’t anything I could do.”
“You did more than you imagine, Harold. You made us find out how we couldn’t be destroyed.”
The voices were getting out of control, he thought. He no longer understood them, which meant he’d had enough. “I’m not hearing you,” he said. “You’re nothing to do with me.”
“It was like a battlefield, only not the ones you see in films,” his processed voice was saying. “They don’t show the mess it makes of people.”
“It never will again, Harold. That’s what you gave the world.”
He wished his image would silence the voices by speaking his last line, but he did instead. “Someone who believed in what he was doing.”
“We know, Harold. We understand and we forgive.”
He felt as if the voices were massing around him, more and more of them. He ought to stop responding in the hope that this would rid him of them, but he couldn’t help demanding “Who are you?”
“We’re the future you made, Harold. You remember, the world will be electronic, and that’s us.”
He felt as if his brain was being raided. “I never said that,” he protested.
“But you will.”
They sounded more impatient to be heard, blotting out his own small voice, which was doggedly reiterating the interview. It sounded no less electronic than the chorus—the messages that were being projected into his head. The voices were separating now, which only made them harder to ignore. “We led the way,” one said, “and you will.”
“Nobody is different now. Everyone is free.”
“Nobody because there are no bodies. No bodily dependence any more.”
“We can be anything we want to be.”
“Once you’re uploaded. Once you’re stored.”
“It will happen in your lifetime, and then we won’t depend on time.”
“In your time you’ll be forgiven. You already are.”
“We’ll be with you always, Harold.”
They were more than voices. He couldn’t avoid knowing he was surrounded by presences, and he had an impression of innumerable smiling faces, as though icons from his phone had congregated around him. “You won’t,” he vowed and switched the phone off.
“You’ll see.”
The chorus would have deafened him if he’d been hearing it that way. As it was, it swamped his thoughts. If the phone had been attracting his persecutors somehow, he’d turned it off too late. “I won’t,” he said more fiercely still, snatching off his glasses to drop them on the path and stamp on them. Now the world was a blur, but it was still too visible, and he set about ensuring he would never see whoever came to him.
SPIRITS
Gene O’Neill
“On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog’s bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.” – Albert Camus, The Plague
On Ice
Sudden awareness.
Darkness.
Icy darkness.
Adrift … moving upward.
A cork in dark water.
Sensing a presence nearby … several eerie presences.
Unsettling, the unseen apparitions.
Upward.
Upward.
Consciousness thawing … questions.
Where?
When?
What happened?
Upward—
Bursting and gasping into sudden brightness, as if finally breaking the surface of water and escaping from drowning.
Blinking …
Overhead lights.
Recovery room.
Short-term memory gradually coming back.
You’ve been down On Ice.
Just brought back to life.
Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
