He wore the dark glasses in preparation for later developments. Behind them, his eyes were surprisingly human, with irises the colour of rusty steel.
Much later, I met an old man who remembered Greygori Sanguival from a long time before. “Weird little man,” the ancient told me. “Always running about, like there wasn’t enough time. Little fidgety man.”
Greygori Sanguival was no longer little, although the robe hid the precise and current topography of his body. Despite the lurching and reaching for balance, he moved with a perilous grace, like a stilt-walker, as though any moment he would collapse in upon himself. He consumed a steady diet of chemicals to maintain the state and alignment of his body, and to foster further developments along his grand plan. ‘Developments’: that was his very mild word for them.
He was a real scientist. Trethowan would have approved of his methodology. The field of Greygori’s study was Greygori. The Transforming Man was already a legend in a lifetime that had stretched over a century and a half. It was impossible to guess his age. It was difficult enough to guess his species.
“You are to perform such services as I should need of you,” he told me, as he teetered through the tunnels of Underworld. “Chiefly these will be dealing with the factions, procuring things I want. You will be my agent, you understand?”
I told him that I did, because I sensed that certainty was my best shield.
His aim, the dream into which, by carefully measured stages, he was transforming himself, was secret. His laboratory was the room into which none was allowed save the man himself. All he said was that mankind was doomed, and he intended to make himself into a shape that the world would permit to last.
He should have been a true monster, stalking the caverns of Underworld like a nightmare. Instead there was a flaw in his soul, some sliver of humanity he had not been able to pluck out. He recalled how he had been, feelings that existed in him only as memories of those memories. Striving towards his unspeakable goal, some part of him was yet jabbed by thoughts of all that he had cast away. A sculptor at the Academy once told me that she simply removed from her block of stone everything that was not like the thing she wanted. The Transforming Man had tried to serve himself in such a way, and now felt a keen wind course through the holes he had left. As his form grew monstrous, according to the minutes of his plan, so the reaction of even Underworld society had grown more towards revulsion, and it hurt him. Until this nagging splinter was removed, he would be forever haunted by the ghost of his forsworn former self. That was why the concealing robe. That was why the smoked glasses, for his eyes would soon enough be the eyes of something other than human. That was why he chose me. He no longer wished to go amongst the people of Underworld, just as, long ago, he had made the decision to eschew the surface. He needed a man to run his errands and gather the all-important components of his experiments. That was me.
There was definite cachet to being henchman (I can think of no better word) to the Transforming Man. I walked with impunity through Underworld. I had no badge, but they knew me for what I was. Perhaps some spectre of my master clung to me, tainting the air with his amorphous shadow. Once, three thugs were on the very point of knifing me, up against a wall, grim and efficient as ever the Marshal would be, when one of them saw my face and gasped out, “It’s Sanguival’s man!” and they ran off and left me alone. They all knew that the Transforming Man would avenge any damage done to his property.
Whilst I was the acceptable face of Sanguival on the outside, the chores within Greygori’s little suite of chambers were done by the only other member of his faction. This was Arves Martext, Emil des Schartz’s bookish associate.
He was probably a year short of fifty, by his reckoning, but looked far older. In a city where the rich could afford to stretch their straining lifespans to eighteen decades and more, Arves aged. He told me that exposure to the bloated, dying sun caused his body to consume itself, burning away into premature senescence. Bad debts and worse chances had led him down here, but in the darkness he aged only as others did, bit by bit rather than all at once. He was bound to the Underworld with cords as strong as his life.
The Transforming Man’s suite of chambers included his ever-sealed laboratory, several small rooms that Arves and I used to sleep in (Greygori slept in the lab, if indeed he slept) and a library. This had originally held Greygori’s files, and these still occupied one wall, tens of thousands of loose-leaf sheets crammed with a handwriting that changed markedly as the notes progressed. The rest of the room had been taken over by Arves’ collection. He was still a man fired by books and had only increased the breadth of his reading since going underground. He surely owned more works than any other single individual in Shadrapar. Social sciences, physical sciences, satires, translated fiction of the ancients (which may have been fact, it was impossible to tell) and of course, shelves and shelves of critiques. He loved to read and to be surrounded by books, all that dormant knowledge like a warm, protective garment. He loved to run his hands over the spines. They were his life.
When I came along, I managed to broaden his life a little, in between my errands. I bartered for a shoddy chess set. It was nostalgia on my part, thinking back on my games with Helman, but Arves remembered how to play, and we sat for long hours pushing pieces across the board with an equal lack of skill.
Then, of course, Greygori discovered us playing one night. We froze up as that blinkered visage loomed suddenly in the doorway to the library, and he swung over to us, a long breath hissing out between his teeth. One hand reached down with an alien articulation and touched one of the pieces delicately.
I think he was remembering some distant sunlit time when a smaller man of more orthodox shape had enjoyed a game of chess.
After that, I played against him too, about once every two weeks when the mood took him. That remaining hook of humanity would haul him from his researches and we would play and talk. Once our miniature armies were stumbling across the board, words came out of him. It was the most he had spent in one room with another human being for a long time, and so he talked. Small talk, meaningless talk: he never spoke of his researches nor the politics of the factions that dominated Underworld chatter. He spoke of points of history and etymology, landmarks of the Upperworld, Masters he had known at the Academy (like Arves and myself he had studied there). It was all talk that would be diverting and reassuringly normal, had not the speaker been such a thing as he. I had the impression that it was only that last human vestige talking; the remainder of his augmented brain was elsewhere, plotting its own ascension.
*
The economy of Underworld worked on three levels. First was barter. Everyone who had something was best advised to find someone who needed it, and had something useful in exchange. Everyone who wanted something should get hold of something else worth having. It was a system that worked moderately well for day-to-day transactions, small items, low values. There were the obvious drawbacks (what if the person who has what you want, wants nothing you have?) but it was the easiest way to do anything. It was really only the next logical step to the migratory circling of Upperworld property as it was leant out and borrowed endlessly.
Secondly there was money, which was required by anyone who dealt with the surface – a surprising number of the factions had shady little deals going on in sun-side Shadrapar. Money was of relatively little use in the Underworld proper. People were only interested in trading for something that had a value in and of itself, rather than an abstract. Coins became another thing to barter for, if you needed to deal with the people above.
Finally, there was the rather arcane notion of credit. Let us say that a big deal was taking place, like the one I witnessed between the Meat Packers and the Friendly Society. In that case the Friendlies were to procure some hundred measures of a recreational drug from a surface pharmaceutical bar. If the Packers wanted to pay by barter then the Friendlies would have been taking an awful lot of bric-a-brac off with them. Instead, they used the idea of credit. The priest of the Temple would assign an agreed value to the Friendly Society’s efforts, and this would be logged in the Temple’s recording machine as a debt owed to them by the Packers.
Ah, you say, a debt – you’ve heard that one before. In the Underworld, though, the Temple ensured that debts were honoured. A member of the Friendly Society could go to the Meat Packers any time later and demand services, goods, whatever was available. They would go to the Temple again, and the priest would broker an agreed value to be taken off the debt. Had it been left to fallible human hands it would undoubtedly have failed. The Temple machine, however, could remember the state of every single debt, great and small, new or centuries old. Indeed, a vast amount of debt-trafficking went on within the machine, so that great sums could change hands without anything physical happening at all. It could even tell, in some mysterious way, who had recorded each transaction: frauds could be tracked down. Perhaps it read their hands as they touched its mirror. It should be obvious that, glowing frozen giant or not, the Coming Man was not what the Temple was about. The machine was all.
Sergei had a name in his own tongue for the Temple machine, translating as “something which reckons” – a poor phrase for such a marvel. According to Sergei they had these machines where he came from, albeit of a complexity several orders of magnitude less.
Sergei had a lot to say about where he was from. There, he claimed, everyone was as tall as he, and many were as pale (although none so thin, I think). Where he came from, the story ran, was the past.
*
“I am soldier,” he told me. “Where I come from, we were at war. Not the wars you think of, not a killing war. We had only just got over the last killing war. This was hidden war. Spies, economics, a war of face. My people were locked in deadly struggle against our enemies. We stockpiled weapons, always deadlier. We must show the other side our science is better, or they think us weak and then everyone must use those weapons. They try many experiments…”
Here he paused. We were in the rooms of his Collective, drinking a liquor that his people refined from mould.
“We try anything that may help. Men study the mind, strange energies, travel into space. Then there is my project, for which I am test pilot. Top secret: only one man outside it knew. A time experiment. Travel in time, you control history. We make the war as though it never was. That was what we dream.
“We have many failures: dogs, pigs, mice. Some go nowhere. Others die from the radiations. Some disappear. Maybe they travel, who can say? We could not bring them back. In the end the project was to be shut down. We were very bitter. We want one last test.”
“I was volunteer. No family, no-one to miss me. The project was life, to me. We made a machine to take a man into time, forward one hour. Easy test. If things go wrong, machine has controls so that I make it return. I was trained as space-pilot. I never got into space. Instead, I would be the first man in time.
“Obviously something goes wrong,” he stated flatly. “Calculations or machinery or something. I am here, where not one soul remembers my people or what we fought for. How did war end? Who can say? I am here at arse of time with little people, with foreign language, with illness.”
“And the machine?”
“Past hope. Destroyed.” Sergei took a long swallow of his drink. “Did not make the journey. I survived. I am not sure it was to be wished. I do not like this time.” He slammed the empty glass down. “I am a cosmonaut of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and I want to be in year nineteen-seventy-two, not in this time of ruins waiting for world to die. I want to be somewhere with hope.”
None of it made much sense to me.
Sergei had joined up with the Morlocks first of all. They were a pro-active and impolite debt-recovery crew who put his imposing appearance to good use. He spent two years with them, getting a grasp of our language.Then he chanced upon a lost cavern where the ceiling had given way, exposing a long-abandoned business office above. The premises above sported several large and grimy skylights, and in the wan illumination of these, Sergei and his new-formed Collective farmed vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. This enabled him to extract a decent livelihood from the fungus-glutted palate of the Underworld. His Collective he ran as an equal partnership of all its members.
Sergei was always on the lookout for new ways to gain credit at the Temple. He had some expensive hobbies and habits. In his spare time he was working on a vast and intricate machine. He told me that he was trying to replicate the vehicle that had transported him. Others told me he had been working on it ever since they had known him, and it had done nothing but expand into a webwork of levers, cogs, generators, pistons and valves. He was known as the Watchmaker by some.
Sergei was sick, too. About three times in the span I knew him he went off to Aleisa’s House, a faction of medical engineers. He said that he had his blood and bones completely purged there, a process that indebted him to the House a frightening amount. He said that our time was unhealthy for him, that there were high levels of energy and radiations and that it had taken its toll on him: that was why he was so thin. Even the light of the sun made his corpse-pale skin burn. Like Arves, he was a prisoner of the Underworld.
*
I discovered the truth about the Fermers when I arose too early one day. Blundering across the room to find a lamp, my hand brushed something soft and slightly leathery that twitched at my touch. I leapt back and fell over a chair that Arves had put out, left in pitch darkness with the knowledge that there was some thing loose in the room. The immediate thought was that it was some experiment of Greygori’s got free.
I held my breath and waited, and heard faint, scuffing footsteps as the creature made its way around the room. It was moving away from me, so I made a careful progress in search of the lamp, walking each hand carefully forwards in case there were more things in the dark. After some fumbling, I got it lit.
In the light of the pale flame was revealed a stunted, dwarfish thing, approximately humanoid in shape but with no discernible features. It was a pale sepia in colour and there were little tendrils and feelers jutting from its lumpy body. It did not react to the light, but instead made its plodding progress towards one corner of the room, where it deposited an armful of the slabby fungus-food that was the Underworld staple.
Arves joined me, woken by the light.
“What is it?” I demanded of him, and he answered, “It’s a Fermer. They grow the fungus.”
I stared at him, not really understanding what he was saying.
“They live in the myoculture caves,” he explained, as the squat little monster began shuffling back across the floor. “They’re some experiment from times past. Someone wanted to be self-sufficient down here and engineered the Fermers. Whoever made them is long gone but the Fermers go on tending their crops just like they always have.”
I shuddered as the malformed little thing stumped out of our rooms and away down the tunnels.
“It’s free food,” Arves said. “Mostly it goes to set places for distribution, but the Master has trained them to bring some directly here, somehow. He didn’t want to have to go and fetch it. Where did you think the food came from?”
“I thought it just…” I had not thought about it. “But what are the Fermers? What do they eat? Why do they keep on giving us food?”
Arves spread his hands wide and yawned. “They’re fungus-creatures. The Master dissected one once. They eat rot, the rot of the ages below and the rot we produce. As for the why, why not? They do it because it’s what they do.”
*
In between the varied tasks I undertook for Greygori, I found time for a little society. Underworld was different from above, in that everyone was visibly working to survive or promote their faction. There was not the veneer of leisure and civilisation that hid the workings of upper Shadrapar.
There were moments of quiet and contemplation, though. I remember one very clearly: a sunrise. Because our business in the world above needs must be conducted by darkness, we lived when the surface world slept, and crawled to our beds at dawn. So it was that, after a hard day for us all, we were sitting out in the shadow of a ruined building looking towards the east where a faint lightening of the sky was outlining the shapes of Shadrapar. Sergei was there, and Arves, Giulia Nostro and I. Sergei was already on good terms with the other two, and I fitted into their odd dynamic easily. We all had our odd obsessions and beliefs. Giulia had her maps of the Underworld that could never be finished. Sergei had his crazy invented past, and I had my dreams of saving the world through the energies of the mind. Superannuated Arves with his bibliomania and allergy to the sun was the most normal of all of us.
On that night we sat out in the slightly chill air (which Sergei complained was humid and too warm) and looked up at a cloudless sky. We had a bottle of harsh, clear spirits from Sergei’s Collective, and Sergei had a gun, too: an old projectile pistol in case of Outriders. Outriders were one of the few external menaces in the Underworld, making forays into our delvings. There had been pitched battles between the Outriders and some of the larger factions. Most of the surface citizens had no idea such things went on.
There were no Outriders that night, and we were drawn there for respite from the intrigues beneath, and for the sun. A while in the darkness and you needed a glimpse of the sun. Even Arves and Sergei craved its light, who were its victims and its enemies. The four of us watched the ebbing night out, drank Sergei’s keen alcohol and talked. Sergei asked whether Arves and I had discovered what Gregor Samsa (as he called Greygori; some private joke) was actually turning into. Giulia spoke of discoveries the Fishermen had made deep down. Arves recited some poetry he had acquired. I related a good joke I had heard from the Organ Donor Boys.
It was a happy time. It was not to last. Even so, I was allowed to put down the crushing burden of Helman’s death, of Jon and Rosanna’s deaths. I was allowed to forget about the Angels’ persecution. It was a healing time.
Then the light on the architectured horizon deepened and the sun shouldered its way up with the dogged grind of a lame man on a long journey. It had been months, and I had forgotten what it looked like. The deep red dawn shone across the buildings of Shadrapar to light Sergei’s deep eyesockets and gaunt cheeks, touch the lines about Giulia’s eyes and deepen Arves’ wrinkles. Another morning in Shadrapar.
There was a precious sliver of time between the sluggish appearance of the sun and the city’s awakening. In that span we watched the light creep into every corner of the waking city, brightening from that deep chemical red to something like old, scratched gold. By then Sergei was already feeling the scorch of it and Arves was worrying about his longevity. We retreated to the protective dark and went our own ways to bed, and slept out the hours that the surface lived its life in, until the sun dropped from the sky once again.