part0020

He seemed unconcerned by the alien entity’s presence. He offered a hand, and though Forrester would have liked not to, he took it and allowed himself to be hauled up. He almost tumbled over again; his injured leg and foot were practically useless. All that kept him standing was a stubborn determination that, if only in this one small matter, Forbes mustn’t win.

“My stick,” he muttered, and pointed to where it lay discarded. At a gesture from Forbes, one of the soldiers brought the branch over, eyeing the length of wood as if it might turn into a viper and bite him. They were nervous, Forrester realised, as much as it was possible to be this close to the entity. All of them were nervous except for Forbes, or perhaps he merely hid his reactions better. Forrester struggled to imagine how anyone could look upon the inconceivable being before them and feel anything but awe. Yet there was no sign of awe in their faces.

“You’ve made quite a mess of yourself,” Forbes observed conversationally .

“You left me little choice.”

“Maybe we could have played things better,” Forbes acknowledged. “Still, it’s all worked out in the end.”

He signalled the nearest soldier to lend Forrester a shoulder as they retreated up the passage. The man seemed embarrassed by the situation, as Forrester himself was. Whoever Forbes might be working for, these others appeared to be common soldiery, no doubt sworn to secrecy. What must they make of it all?

As Forrester and the assigned soldier stumbled along together, Forbes fell in beside them. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” he said, with a nod toward the stone walls. “There have been humans down here since prehistoric times. There are traces of paintings in some of the deepest caves. Since then, they’ve been used by smugglers—we’re not so far from the coast as you might think—and for a long while they were a silver mine. That’s why the original house was built.”

“You seem to know the place well,” Forrester responded, not feigning interest. Even had he cared what Forbes had to say, his mind remained with the entity. To leave it felt like relinquishing one of his own limbs.

“Oh, I did my research. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find somewhere suited to our needs? And in the time available? This location was nothing short of a godsend. We couldn’t be anywhere near the civilian population, for obvious reasons. I suppose we could have done without a cover story, but it seemed wisest to introduce you to the truth piece by piece, and the house gave us an opportunity to do that.”

They’d reached to where the tunnel levelled out, and daylight was dimly visible as a narrow stripe ahead. Forbes, bored with his own monologue or by Forrester’s undisguised indifference, abandoned his lecturing. When they came finally to the entrance, the air was cooler than Forrester remembered, and the shadows had grown long. It must be early evening, and he wondered again how much time he’d spent in the cave. Outside, the two lorries he’d last seen parked in the garage at Sherston were pulled up. The soldier assisted Forrester into the rear of one, and then he and the others took up the remaining spaces. Moments later, they were off.

The road was in an atrocious condition. No surprise there, it had surely been in disuse for years or even decades. It occurred to Forrester that they were travelling away from Sherston, but likely that was just the way the ancient highway ran, and they would ultimately loop around.

In the musty, petrol-smelling interior of the lorry, as they bounced from dip to rut, he had nothing to do except think, the one thing he least desired to do. He couldn’t begin to process his experience with the entity. Already the recollection had the semblance of a dream. Easier to grasp was the fact that he was being taken back to captivity, and to whatever tribulations Forbes and his mysterious director chose to devise.

At least now Forrester understood what the whole business was about. For them to keep more secrets from him would be futile, and perhaps he had a card or two of his own to play, where before he’d had none. Yet taking comfort from such speculation was hard, for it seemed to him that even his traumatic flight across the moors had been better than unending imprisonment. Maybe he’d have been best off to die out there, if that had meant he died free.

After a point, he could feel that they’d left the old moorland road for one more recently surfaced. They were heading uphill too, rather than descending as they had been. Forrester studied the faces around him and found them all closed. If he weren’t here, would they be discussing what they’d just seen? Or would they be every bit as stupefied as they were now?

Eventually, the lorry stopped. But it was only a pause, during which he heard a metallic creaking that must be the gates being opened. When they drew to a fresh halt a minute later, the engine rattled into silence. The soldiers disembarked, all but the one assigned to aiding Forrester, who sullenly helped him debus. They were in the garage adjoining Sherston. A wheelchair was waiting for Forrester, and there with it, of course, was Sergeant Campion.

“Good to see you again, lieutenant sir,” he said, with a teasing grin that in no way suited his demeanour.

Ignoring him, Forrester let himself be lowered into the chair. Then, with the soldier’s assistance, Campion manoeuvred him back to his room. There they deposited him on his bed, and without a word, the soldier began to work at removing Forrester’s boots.

“I can manage,” Forrester said softly—then, more forcefully, “I can manage .”

The soldier scowled and stood up.

“He can manage,” Campion parroted, as though the soldier might not have heard. “Well, if you say so, sir.”

And they left, Campion dragging the wheelchair behind him. The door slammed. Forrester caught the rattle of the key.

He considered his own booted feet. Could he really manage? He was tired unto death. He glanced, bleary-eyed, around the room. Everything was as he remembered. It was as if the preceding twenty-four hours had never happened.

Forbes and Campion had won, and they’d done so conclusively. It would be easy to give in.

Yet he hadn’t lost entirely. His victory was small, almost invisibly so, but he knew deep down that it was real. He’d found the strength to oppose them, and that strength remained, waiting to be drawn upon. All he had to do was not let go.

Forrester finished removing his boots, though every twist made him shudder. Then he took off his uniform and changed into his nightclothes. He got up, balancing against the wall, went through to the bathroom, and washed. Lastly, he brushed away the dirt his trousers had left on the sheets, as well as he could. Only once that was done did he let himself crawl under the bedclothes and surrender to the tidal wave of sleep descending over him.

On the first day, food was brought at his usual mealtimes by a nurse, though not by Abhaya as he’d hoped it would be. Forrester had wanted to thank her, but in her absence, he realised he was also apprehensive for her.

Soon after breakfast, the doctor who’d inspected him before the ice experiment came. He removed Forrester’s filthy bandages, tutting at the mess. “You’re lucky you didn’t cripple yourself.”

It struck Forrester that, aside from orders such as Unbutton your shirt and Tilt your head , these were the first words the man had spoken to him. He felt a stirring of anger, and then frustration as it subsided, washed away beneath a rising tide of serenity. He knew now what he’d suspected for a long time: that the emotion was not his own. It was imposed somehow by the entity in the cave, and he yearned to resist. More than ever, he had a right to be angry.

Yet anger was denied him. All right, but he could still protest without it. Perhaps being forced to defend himself calmly was even to his advantage. “I’m lucky I wasn’t crippled in Forbes’s experiment, the one you gave me the all-clear for. I wonder, doctor, what does the Hippocratic Oath have to say about torture?”

The doctor regarded him sourly. “I didn’t torture you,” he noted.

“And I didn’t cripple myself,” Forrester replied, and was satisfied when the doctor had no answer .

Instead, he spent a good quarter of an hour checking the gash in Forrester’s leg and then cleaning, treating, and rebandaging his foot, all of which he did with surprising gentleness. Once he’d finished, he said, “Where you haven’t torn your blisters, you’re actually healing well. You’ve a strong constitution, Lieutenant Forrester. Try and exercise a little, if doing so is bearable. I’ll have them send you up a stick.”

He sounded unexpectedly human, or at least like any busy country doctor, harried but basically sympathetic.

“Thank you,” Forrester said, and meant it.

The walking stick materialised along with his breakfast the next morning, brought by the same nurse. It was an appealingly sturdy-looking rod of some hard wood, without a handle and polished to a shine. He could envisage it as having belonged to Sherston’s owner, an accessory for when he rambled upon the barren moorlands.

As soon as the nurse left, Forrester had his first practice, pacing in a circle until he got dizzy. His right foot was in a sorry state; as the doctor had intimated, he’d torn open every blister, leaving the sole a mess of pocked flesh. Nonetheless, the doctor had salved and bandaged the damage thoroughly, and Forrester found that, with the aid of the stick, he could hobble quite capably.

If they want me a cripple, he thought, then they’ll have to break my legs.

His conviction, previously half-formed, had come to resolution in the night: having begun to resist, he could not stop. The response to this setback was to dissent more thoroughly. The only responsibility of the wrongly imprisoned man was escape.

When walking became too painful, he invented other ways to exercise. He devoted his ingenuity to the task for most of the morning, and when he got tired, read in snatches, briefly returning to the Marcus Aurelius and then abandoning philosophy in favour of Shakespeare’s Tempest . The revelations of the day before last were already growing faint, and he knew he mustn’t let them fade altogether, lest he convince himself he had imagined the wonders he’d witnessed.

Now I will believe that there are unicorns , he read. But there were beasts in Africa very like unicorns, and nothing else anywhere on Earth that resembled the creature he’d seen.

After lunch, he returned to his exercise, and kept up the new regimen for the remainder of the day, working brain and body in turn. When he could bear no more of either, he ran a hot bath, washed thoroughly, and then sat massaging his tired muscles.

Later, the nurse came with his dinner, and Forrester greeted her pleasantly, which earned him a distrustful, “Good evening.”

He slept deeply, his mind hushed with a pleasant sort of tiredness, and woke refreshed. When the nurse arrived with breakfast, he decided to make a stab at conversation. “Do you think I might go down to the common room today?” he asked, more for something to say than from any real hopefulness.

The nurse looked uneasy. “Perhaps you could. But there’s no one there.”

That took him by surprise. “Have they been confined as well?”

“Sent away,” she said, and then, as if afraid she might have imparted too much, clammed up hurriedly.

After she’d left, Forrester set to interpreting what she’d let slip. But he quickly concluded that there was nothing overly strange about it. Giving the impression that the place was a hospital for shell-shocked officers had suited Forbes’s needs. However, Forrester was the only one he’d desired to fool, and now the deception was futile .

Forrester felt sorry for Major Morgan, no doubt carted back to wherever he’d come from. He’d find his mistreatment extraordinary, as many of them would, but they wouldn’t take long to put the behaviour down to bungling military bureaucracy, and the blackouts to some experimental therapy. If there was one thing Forrester had learned from the war, it was the remarkable capacity of the human mind to ignore what couldn’t be made sense of.

He spent the day as he had the preceding one, and the pleasures of exercise and reading weren’t dulled by repetition. Calluses were forming on his foot, and with the stick he could walk adequately. He remembered the boundless expanse of the moors, the cool breeze upon his face—and for a while was free once more.

That evening, as the nurse was departing with his dinner tray, he said to her, “I’d like you to pass a message to Major Forbes. Tell him I know he’ll have been waiting to speak with me, and I appreciate his patience. Please tell him too that I feel sufficiently rested to answer any questions he may have.”

The nurse looked at Forrester as if she hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but all she said was, “Yes sir.”

Forrester was dressed and ready. Campion had brought the wheelchair and a second man to assist, the same soldier as before. Forrester, who’d spent part of the morning rearranging the padding around his foot and adjusting his boot until he was bordering on comfortable, stood up, clasped his stick from beside the bedside table, and said, “I won’t be needing that, thank you, sergeant.”

Campion, caught off guard as Forrester had hoped he’d be, waved the second soldier away distractedly. He hesitated while Forrester joined him in the passage and then locked the door. Leading the way in the direction of Forbes’s office, he stole glances at Forrester, who through practice had learned to put his weight on the stick without appearing to, so that for the first time in weeks he was walking more or less normally.

After his third such fleeting look, Campion could no longer restrain himself. “You’ve been busy, sir. We’ll have you running laps at this rate.”

That was the opening Forrester had been waiting for. “It must be perplexing,” he said, “to be a bully here. How is it, Sergeant, to be always wanting to harm someone and yet to find doing so impossible?”

Campion glared at him with brief hatred, which dimmed immediately beneath the entity’s influence. “It’s not so impossible.”

There was something gravely disquieting in his emphasis, and Forrester had no desire to probe further. All the same, he could see that Campion was shaken. When they came to Forbes’s door, he knocked harder than was needed, and when Forbes called, “Enter,” he spun away, leaving Forrester to let himself in.

Forbes was by the window, looking out. When he turned, his expression was eager almost to the extent of agitation. “Lieutenant Forrester,” he said.

“Major. Or should I be using a different title these days?”

Forbes smiled with genuine-seeming amusement. “Straight to the point, is it? All right then, let me reintroduce myself. I’m neither a neurologist nor a psychiatrist, as you’ve probably guessed. And, as you surmise, nor am I currently a major, much as it remains useful to have once borne that particular rank. I was an SMO in the army, until I got retired out, and just now I hold a civilian office, in an organisation presently going by the name of MI5, though at the rate they keep changing their minds, I’ll be amazed if that holds beyond the year.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Forrester admitted.

“Nor should you have. The MI stands for military intelligence, and while there are many who’d deem that an oxymoron, we like to think we’re a touch cannier than our counterparts in the regular forces. We’re spy catchers, first and foremost, though our purview has grown wider than that of late. We let Special Branch take the credit for our successes and keep our heads down, as a rule.”

“I see little reason to believe anything you tell me,” Forrester said, “but accepting for the time being that it’s true, what business is this of your MI5? You can’t imagine that thing came here to spy for anyone?”

Forbes barked out a laugh. “There’s a concept! No, it’s only that they had no one else to go to. Once they’d secured it, they hadn’t a clue what to do next, and not much interest either, with a vital offensive all ready to begin and their distinctly prosaic outlook. Of course, we could see the bigger picture—the potential that was there.”

“I’m sure,” Forrester granted.

“You needn’t know the precise details of our operation, even if I were in a position to share them with you. Suffice to say that the necessity of the deceptions you’ve been fed was decided on by numerous members of my organisation and was in no way intended to be malicious.”

A sudden thought occurred to Forrester, or rather, a sudden certainty. “There’s no director, though, is there?”

“No,” Forbes admitted, “not in the sense you were led to believe. The wider scope of our endeavours was determined in concordance with others, but the final details were invariably left up to me.”

“Including my torture,” Forrester said.

“Yes. Including your torture.” Forbes no longer seemed shy of the word. “But I don’t want to dwell on the past, and neither, I think, do you. We’re at the nub of the matter now, aren’t we?”

Forrester, who’d been across the desk from Forbes, relying on his stick for support, decided that this was the time to sit. The pause gave him a useful second in which to consider. “I’m tired of playing games,” he said carefully. “I think honesty would serve both of us better.”

Forbes stayed standing near to the window. “I agree. There was a period when your ignorance served a valid purpose, but we’ve surpassed that. You’ve seen it up close, as very few men have. You have an idea of what we’re dealing with.”

Forrester’s suspicion flared. “You let me find it.”

“Not quite,” Forbes replied. Nevertheless, he seemed pleased at the possibility. “I simply ensured that there were no impediments to deter you. You might have got clean away, but I had a hunch that it wouldn’t allow that.”

Was that what had happened? Had the entity truly manipulated him? No, bad luck had played its part. However, he had reached a juncture, somewhere upon the moors or even as late as when he’d stumbled over the mine entrance, when he had fallen under its sway. Whether it had summoned him or only beckoned and hoped he’d listen he couldn’t judge, though he felt intuitively that to force its will on others was not in the thing’s nature.

“We’ve taken to calling it the Guest,” Forbes said. “But I find that a little glib, don’t you? A guest can leave, after all. Departmentally, we refer to it as Operation Hummingbird. Somehow more appropriate, if you ask me.” He paused to stare out of the window as if he half expected to see his Guest floating there in its nest of chains. “I suppose you’re curious as to how we came by it?”

“It was hit by a shell,” Forrester said. “It was lost, disorientated. The shell couldn’t damage it, not really, but the shock was too much. And falling to earth, that was even worse. I doubt we could imagine the horror it felt; I doubt we have the mental vocabulary to do so. But if you can conceive of being transported without warning to the farthest void of space, that would give you some distant notion. By the time it was close to recovering, it had already been captured.”

“Ah.” Forbes was beaming. Initially, that one syllable appeared to be all he had to contribute. Then he added, ponderously, as though the statement was something to be savoured, “So you have been in touch.”

“Only when I was down there,” Forrester answered wearily. But he realised that wasn’t true: his dreams had been fragments—distorted, muddled fragments—of the same communication, confused with the effluence of his subconscious. Maybe he could have contacted the Guest all along, had he interpreted them correctly.

“I would like to hear the details,” Forbes said, and his tone made clear that it was not a request.

Forrester sighed. He had no desire to cooperate, but nor was there anything to be gained by antagonising Forbes needlessly, and he sensed that he was far past the point where deceptions could aid him.

“I had an ... experience. I ... I touched its mind, or else it touched mine. But our interaction was...” He struggled to find the right term, or even to make a shape of his recollections, which seemed now so remote and incredible. “It was imperfect ,” he tried. “There’s a level beyond which we can’t understand them and they can’t understand us. For example, in my—let’s call it a vision—I thought of myself as male, as fundamentally me. But it isn’t male. It’s nothing of the sort. Do you see? Communicating would be like talking to someone in a language in which you didn’t know a single verb. There are basic, insurmountable absences.”

“Well,” said Forbes, “let’s not throw around words such as ‘ insurmountable’ just yet. These are still early days. But clearly you’ve learned some things about it, perhaps a few we haven’t ourselves identified. In return, I presume you’d like me to fill some of the gaps in your knowledge?”

“I’d like to know about the blackouts,” Forrester said. “Obviously they’re connected, but how?”

Forbes, leaning back against the windowsill, his fingers laced, looked abruptly professorial. “I’ll come to those in a moment, if you don’t mind. We believe they may be a development of the wider calming effect, which is an involuntary mechanism, so far as we can establish. Our Guest projects it in a rough sphere, with itself at the centre. The effect diminishes progressively and isn’t regular. We’ve theorised that it may involve some kind of radiation or ultrasound, which different intervening substances interfere with to varying degrees. At any rate, it’s certainly a form of self-defence. As you’re bound to have noticed, its primary effect is a considerable reduction in the mental capacity for violence, such that deliberately hurting our Guest becomes almost impossible.”

There were troubling connotations to that phrasing, almost impossible . Yet Forbes had only paused to catch his breath, and Forrester was too interested to interrupt.

“Then there’s its secondary defence: the sleep-inducing effect, or blackouts as you refer to them. Those are also probably unconscious. As far as we can ascertain, they’re somewhat like a knee-jerk reaction, which activates the instant the Guest suffers a certain degree of discomfort. We can’t begin to explain the how and why, though goodness knows we’ve tried. The best we’ve managed is to stimulate the phenomenon under controlled conditions.”

So Forrester’s misgiving had been correct. “How?” he asked. “You shouldn’t be able to harm it.”

Forbes smiled, and there was something awful in that smile. “Not directly ,” he said, “no. Within the radius of its defensive field, even planning to do so isn’t feasible. Quite the challenge, I’ll admit.”

“But you found a way.” Forrester made no attempt to mask his disgust.

“We found a way,” Forbes concurred, and was there the faintest trace of shame in his voice then? If there was, it vanished as he continued, “Ingenious, if I do say so. You were the unfortunate test subject of a similar process. What we discovered was that a plan could be constructed outside of the Guest’s influence. If the procedure was broken into its constituent parts and each was carried out by a separate individual, all of them unimaginative enough not to speculate about whys and wherefores, then that plan could be put into action. A man could press a switch that would set off an explosive charge, for instance, without knowing that was what he was doing or that he’d thereby be committing an act of aggression.”

Yes, it made sense, of an appalling sort. They’d encountered a deterrence that made violence all but impossible, so of course they had found a way to circumvent it. Human ingenuity at work; no wonder Forbes looked proud. And Forrester grasped now why they’d selected so obscure a torture for him. On the other side of the wall would have been a soldier who knew only that, at a given time, he had to open a sluice gate to let iced water flow. How easy not to ask why, how easy to fall back on years of ingrained discipline.

Forbes, who’d been watching Forrester’s face and no doubt had read effortlessly the thoughts occurring behind it, said suddenly, “You don’t like me, and you don’t trust me. That’s understandable.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

“However, I hope you can see that you have no reason to dispute my patriotism. ”

“I don’t dispute it. I simply don’t believe that patriotism, on its own, is necessarily much of a virtue.”

“Nor should you,” Forbes allowed. “I’m not ruled by blind nationalism. You must know that there are those who’ve begun to suggest that the war is being protracted for motives other than the ones with which we entered into it; that our goals have escalated from defence to territorial ambition.”

“I’ve heard that said,” Forrester agreed.

And, he realised, he wasn’t sure he rejected the argument. Did he truly accept that such slaughter as he’d witnessed could ever be rationally justified, that any sane person wouldn’t revolt from its ghastly excesses? But how much of his scepticism was the influence of the thing that Forbes insisted on referring to as his Guest? Had Forrester felt so strongly before? Yes, but only once, and only for a moment. That night on the battlefield, when the awfulness of it all had boiled up like steam in a kettle and he’d surrendered to grief and despair.

Just a moment. The one in which he’d first seen the light, when he had first encountered the Guest. Was that why it had chosen him? Because his mind had contained something it could comprehend?

“Those rumours are spread by the pacifist movement and are untrue,” Forbes continued. “No one desires anything except an end to this war. But that end has to be on our terms, ones which leave us in a position of strength. Any other outcome would be tantamount to surrender.”

“I don’t think your Guest would view it that way,” Forrester pointed out.

“Perhaps not. But does that mean it couldn’t be persuaded to help us?”

Forrester flinched. He had known this was coming, surely he’d known, but to hear the notion phrased so bluntly...

“I doubt it could be persuaded to do anything ,” he said.

“Might that depend upon who did the asking? ”

“Damn it, Forbes,” Forrester snapped, his patience exhausted, “why don’t you just tell me what it is you want?”

Finally, sharply, Forbes sat down. He clasped his hands on the desktop and leaned forward, his eyes aglitter, his whole body rigid with tension. “Imagine if the Guest could be guided. Imagine entire sections of the German trenches rendered unable to fight, men in their hundreds and thousands laying down their arms. Imagine a road cut through occupied territory, all the way to Berlin, a road of men incapable of resistance. Imagine Berlin itself, without a single soul capable of even hurling a pebble in its defence. A wholesale surrender, a total, bloodless victory. Imagine that, Forrester. Thanks to that thing, thanks to you, it’s within our reach.”

For a minute, Forrester could only stare, at first at Forbes and then at nothing—or rather, at the scenes within his mind, so clear as to seem superimposed upon reality. He could envisage what Forbes had described. He and the Guest back at the front, cutting a swath through the enemy, a swath not of violence but of peace, while behind them, men who’d otherwise have left the war for shallow graves or ravaged into too many pieces to bury instead walked away alive.

The prospect was absurd, incredible. Yet Forbes’s vision was compelling: that they’d been delivered a tool with the capacity to end the war, and with scarcely a drop more of blood shed. How could anyone resist that, or want to?

Except that the tool was not a tool. Except that the tool was alive, intelligent, and a prisoner, as Forrester himself was a prisoner.

“Absolutely not,” he said. He was surprised by how sure he sounded, and then by how sure he was . “That thing you keep calling your Guest is a member of another species.” Striving for the right phrasing, Forrester saw that he was trying to articulate a concept that few before him had ever needed to put into words. “A member of a sentient, non-terrestrial race, something altogether alien. Even if I believed that what you’re proposing was genuinely achievable, which I don’t, to drag it into our conflict would be an obscenity.”

Forbes leaned back, the tension leaving him, as though an electric current had been flowing through him and now had been shut off. When he spoke again, his passion had been replaced by a curious deadness, almost a disinterest.

“Yes, we thought you might feel that way,” Forbes said. “I do hope you’ll change your mind.” When he met Forrester’s gaze, his eyes, too, were without expression. “If only because, if you don’t, we’ll have no choice but to change it for you.”