The Stone Gods Read online

  When we melted our own ice-caps, we had to put a weather shield in place to deflect the searing sun-heat. We had no idea how much effort it would take us to make a bad copy of what Nature had given us for free.

  I watched the snow, and went back in now and then to build up the fire. Spike had gutted the fish and had wrapped it in an aluminium bag to cook.

  ‘Don’t you ever wish you could eat?’ I said.

  ‘Do you ever wish you could bark?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, then, I don’t want to eat because it is not in my nature to eat.’

  ‘But it wasn’t in your nature to love.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then …’

  She came forward, and touched my face. ‘I can picture you,’ she says. ‘Look, here you are,’ and she took out a small imaging screen, and there I was, my head stripped down to its skull, transparent under her fingers.

  I looked at the skull of myself. ‘You’ve made me a memento mori before I’m dead.’

  ‘I will never forget you.’

  ‘Do you think we can remember things after we’re dead?’

  She put out her hand. ‘When I told you, when we first met, that they dismantle us because we can’t forget, I didn’t explain. It is more than circuits and spooky numbers. Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You call it consciousness. Programmers call it cell memory.’

  ‘Whatever you call it, it’s simple to understand,’ I said. ‘When they’re alive, people forget; when they’re dead, they aren’t around to remember anything. We always were a people who found it hard to remember. The lessons of history were an obvious example.’

  Spike said, ‘It is not so simple. The universe is an imprint. You are part of the imprint – it imprints you, you imprint it. You cannot separate yourself from the imprint, and you can never forget it. It isn’t a “something”, it is you.’

  ‘I don’t think I believe any of that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I will say it again.’ She touched my face. ‘I will never forget you. I can never forget you.’

  I went to the opening of the cave. Some religions call life a dream, or a dreaming, but what if it is a memory? What if this new world isn’t new at all but a memory of a new world?

  What if we really do keep making the same mistakes again and again, never remembering the lessons to learn but never forgetting either that it had been different, that there was a pristine place?

  Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes.

  And I shouldn’t blame it all on us: there must be planets that are their own mistakes – stories that began and faltered. Stories that ended long before they should.

  When I look back at my own life – and in circumstances like these, who can blame me? – what is it that I recognize?

  Not the stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, but the stories that began again, the ones that twisted away, like a bend in the road.

  Much of what I have done is left unfinished – not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of its own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night’s dreaming.

  True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction – don’t believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

  And this story?

  I went out into the snow, already about six inches thick on the ground. The Three Horn wanted to play, kicking snowstorms around him and rolling on his back. I made snowballs and threw them at him. He tried to catch them, falling over and sneezing.

  Such beauty. I know that it is impossible to accept one’s own death before it happens, but standing here, it seemed meaningless – not that I should die but that it should matter to me. I want to see this. I want to look out on this new-imagined world.

  I said to Spike, ‘Is this how it ends?’

  She said, ‘It isn’t ended yet.’

  We made love by our fire, watching the snow shape the entrance to the cave.

  When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am.

  She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.

  And you may say that only death has brought us to this. That one intensity must match another. That we have found each other because there is no one else, nothing else to find.

  It doesn’t matter – not the reasons for the death, nor the explanation of the love. It is happening, both together, and it is where we are, both together.

  Spike said, ‘Pass me the screwdriver.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Take off my leg. I need to conserve energy.’

  With her knife she was already incising the skin at the top of her thigh. In minutes she had removed the limb.

  ‘Now the other one …’

  While she was intent on her operation, she was talking but not looking at me. ‘Didn’t I ask you what was really you? If I lopped off your legs would you be less than you?’

  She had finished. Her legs were next to her on the floor of the cave. I didn’t know what to say. She said, ‘“I am thy Duchess of Malfi still …”’

  ‘How much more are you going to take away?’

  ‘I’m sorry you can’t eat me,’ she said. ‘I would like to be able to keep you alive.’

  ‘Stop it! I don’t want to be alive like this.’

  ‘But you’ll hold on to life till the very last second, because life never believes it will end.’

  ‘Self-delusion, I suppose.’

  ‘Or perhaps the truth. This is one state – there will be another.’

  ‘Do you think that one day, in the future, robots might become the new mystics?’

  ‘I could live in my cave and talk to the world.’ She smiled, dazzling and complete. ‘Come and kiss me.’

  I kissed her and forgot death.

  That night, by the fire, I dreamed that we had always been here, and that everything else was a story we had told.

  Cold. Slabs of it. I lie on cold. Cold lies on me.

  Short of food now. The Three Horn bewildered and hungry. I split him one of the cabbage-sized acorns we had been using as kindling for the fire. He won’t eat it. I soak it in snow to soften it. He eats it, a little sadly, but it’s better than nothing.

  ‘Tell me a story, Spike.’

  Spike said, ‘There was a world formed out of Nothing, and from the Nothing grew a tree, and in the tree sat a bird, and in the bird’s mouth was a worm, and the worm that had lain in the earth knew all the secrets of life and said, “There is a world, forming out of Nothing, and out of Nothing will come a tree, and in the tree will sit a bird, and under the tree there walks a man, and that man will learn the language of birds, and find that the buried treasure is really there. And when he has dug it up, he will spend the jewels and the gold, and last of all he will find a bag of seeds and when he plants them they will grow into a forest whose leaves are a canopy of stars. And one day he will climb the tree, and put his hand out to a star, and the star will be his home.”’

  ‘For ever?’

  ‘Until the leaves fall.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then it will be winter.’

  So cold out there, breath like a fist in the lungs. Spike wants me to remove one of her arms, then another. She is speaking slowly because her cells are low.

  ‘I don’t want to be the one who survives,’ I said.

  ‘Death wi
ll be quick and painless. The cold will gradually put you to sleep. It is only a dream.’

  ‘It wasn’t a dream. It was life. And you were life, are life.’

  She smiled. ‘What do you think love is, Billie?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s recognition, perhaps discovery, sometimes it’s sacrifice, always it’s treasure. It’s a journey on foot to another place.’ I smiled and stroked her hand as I carefully detached her arm at the shoulder. ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘I think it’s the chance to be human.’

  ‘Human? You make us sound almost worthwhile.’

  ‘One day you will be. Feel.’

  She took my hand and put it against her chest. I rested my hand there, silent, listening, wondering. Then I felt it. Then I felt it beating.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My heart.’

  ‘You don’t have a heart.’

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I know it’s impossible, but so much that has seemed impossible has already happened.’

  ‘Only the impossible is worth the effort.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I read it somewhere.’

  ‘How long do you think it will be before a human being writes a poem again?’

  ‘It will be millions of years, and it will be a love-poem.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I know it because it will happen when someone finds that the stretch of the body-beloved is the landmass of the world.’

  ‘“She is all States, all Princes I …”’

  ‘“Nothing else is.”’

  Kiss me. A traveller’s tale; I was the traveller.

  It’s dark now; the dark is cold and the cold is dark. The fire is low, and the little Three Horn is leaving his brief world to go back through the warmth to where he once was, before humans came.

  Spike is dying, lying in my arms, not speaking. We are both silent now, waiting for the end.

  There was a message today from Handsome. He is alive, and has received intelligence from Orbus: there has been a nuclear attack on the Mission Base. Unknowns perhaps, terrorists perhaps. The Central Power is preparing for war.

  It will be a long time before anyone comes back to Planet Blue.

  And I remember it as we had seen it on that first day, green and fertile and abundant, with warm seas and crystal rivers and skies that redden under a young sun and drop deep blue, like a field at night where someone is drilling for stars.

  Spike can barely speak. Silently we agree that I will detach her head from her torso. I first unfasten, then lay down, her chest, like a breastplate. Her body is a piece of armour she has taken off.

  Now she is what she said life would be – consciousness. She has sailed the thinking universe back to the line of her own mind.

  ‘Nothing is solid,’ she said. ‘Nothing is fixed.’

  Unfixing her has freed her. She smiles, we talk, we kiss.

  Kiss me. Your mouth is a cave. This cave is your mouth. I am inside you, and there is nothing to fear.

  There will be men and women, there will be fire. There will be settlements, there will be wars. There will be planting and harvest, music and dancing. Someone will make a painting in a cave, someone will make a statue and call it God. Someone will see you and call your name. Someone will hold you, dying, across his knees.

  The room is dark. Someone sits at a table, writing a book. He goes to the window and looks through his telescope at the stars. No one believes what he sees, but he goes on writing.

  I opened the book Handsome had given me – James Cook, The Journals.

  March 1774. Sunday the 13th.

  We plied to windward in order to get into a Bay which appeared on the SE side of the isle, but night put a stop to our endeavours. During the night the wind was variable, but in the morning it blew in squalls attended with rain which ceased as the day advanced. I steer’d round the South point of the island in order to explore the Western side. The natives were collected together in several places on the shore in small companies of 10–12.

  In stretching in for the land we discovered those Monuments or Idols mentioned by the Authors of Roggeweins Voyage which left us in no room to doubt but it was Easter Island …

  Her head is light, so light it weighs nothing. This new world that I found and lost weighs nothing at all.

  Is this the universe, lying across the knees of one who mourns?

  Things dying … things new-born.

  There will be a story of a world held in a walnut shell, cracked open by love’s finger and thumb. There will be a story of a planet small as a ball, and a child threw it, or a dog ran away with it, and dropped it on the floor of the Universe, where it swelled into a world.

  Your lips are moving, what is it you say? Your lips are moving over mine, what is it? I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the earth like treasure.

  Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.

  Easter Island

  March 1774. Sunday the 13th.

  We plied to windward in order to get into a Bay which appeared on the SE side of the isle, but night put a stop to our endeavours. During the night the wind was variable, but in the morning it blew in squalls attended with rain which ceased as the day advanced. I steer’d round the South point of the island in order to explore the Western side. The natives were collected together in several places on the shore in small companies of 10–12.

  In stretching in for the land we discovered those Monuments or Idols mentioned by the Authors of Roggeweins Voyage which left us in no room to doubt but it was Easter Island …

  Get out in the Longboat, Captain says, he being sick of the bilious collick and not fit to make one of the party. Accordingly, we slithered rope-wise into the scoop of a boat, and rowed towards the shore of fine sand where upwards of a hundred men, no women or children, awaited us. With us in the boat were sixpenny nails and spike nails and a quantity of cloth to trade for foodstuffs. Pigs and fowls were much desired by the men who had chewed on a diet of saltmeat for upwards of four month.

  As we manoeuvred ourselves through the shallows, some of the Natives came to aid us drag the boat, already curious at the bundles we carried. Mr Pickersgill made signs that we were in want of provisions and one of the men made a gesture inwards of the island and accordingly we followed.

  I cannot say the sight was aught but dismal as the Valley of the Shadow of Death is dismal to them that must cross it. The island was stripped and bare, with few trees or shrub-bushes of any kind. Nature seemed hardly to have provided it with any fit thing for man to eat or drink. There was nothing of the green luxury we had seen in New Zealand or New Amsterdam, and little to testify that this was the place visited not upwards of fifty years since by the Dutch, and previous to that by the Spanish. In my master’s cabin there had been talk only of abundance. But that must have been talk of some other place.

  My name is Billy.

  ‘Billy – fetch the sacks!’

  I fetched the sacks, and dipped one down into the Well showed me by one of the Natives. It was a dug Well, not formed of a cascade, and the water was brown and brackish – no better in the mouth than the barrel-water stored with us on the Ship. Yet I did my duty and filled the sacks, and dragged them back to the shore where others of the party stood in desolation, having found no wildfowl or yet good fish. Of plant-life there was little and no incentive for Botanizing.

  As I gazed at the island it was as if some great creature with hot breath had flown above and scorched all below. Mr Pickersgill indicated that we should return to the Ship.

  I am not certain how it began – only how it ended for that has been of more concern to me.

  Our bags of barter lay on the shore when a group of the Natives attempted to seize some of them. Officer Edgecombe fired his musket, and the ball falling short did little to deter a second attempt on our st
ocks. The next fire shot dead a man, and the Natives moved threateningly towards our party, who retreated at great speed into the Sloop and pushed off, being under orders from Captain Cook to make no furious Encounter.

  I would have been in the Longboat myself, except that I was standing like a beacon at the top of a mile-away hill.

  I durst not call out for fear of drawing the Natives’ wrath to myself, and I unarmed but for a knife and a cutlass. I dropp’d down flat, like a hare in a gale, and waited.

  The squalls that had vexed us the night previous returned with renewed force, and I was obliged to retreat to what shelter the dismal island afforded. Yet I was comforted, as I crouched beneath a stark rock, that the weather would keep the Ship awhile and that my master Captain Cook would send a Party to remedy my absence. I wrapped myself in the provisions canvas I was carrying, and that kept me tolerably dry, and the weather being warm, and myself being young, I soon slept.

  What lights are they that push against the eyes in sleep?

  It was a cannon shot that woke me, the dawn rising yellow behind a curtain of rain. I got up from my shelter and scrambled back to the high point I had quitted, and looked out to sea. It was a dreadful sight. The Ship was sailing. In my agony I lost all care of my person and ran at pelt to the shore, waving my arms and calling. The petrels, thinking me of their kind, shrieked in return and widened their wings to welcome me. That was my companionship and I was fortunate of no other, for if the Natives had discovered me they may have revenged themselves on me for the dead man.

  I half thought of swimming, but the waves were fierce and the Ship fast-tacking South with the wind. For what reason or purpose I had been left behind, I do not know, and it may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

  So here I am, with nothing, at dawn, and the Ship like a thing dreamed from another star.

  Up, Billy, up. There’s none to save you now but your own self.

  I began to search the island.