The Perimeter
Chris Beckett
The first time Lemmy Leonard saw the white hart it
was trotting past a sweet shop on Butcher Row at ten o'clock on a
Wednesday morning. He'd never seen such a thing and would have followed
it then if he hadn't seen PC Simon approaching. Lemmy was supposed to
be in school and the authorities were having one of their crackdowns on
truancy, so he had to slip down a side road until the policeman had
passed by. When he emerged, the deer had gone.
It was strange how bereft that made him feel. All
day the sense of loss stayed with him. He had no words for it, no way
of explaining it at all.
"Are you okay, Lemmy darling?” said his mother that
night as she brought him his tea. (She looked like a Hollywood starlet,
but without the overweening vanity.) “Only you seem so quiet."
It was raining outside. You could tell by the faint
grey streaks that crossed the room like interference on a TV screen.
* * * *
The second time he saw it was outside a pub off the
Westferry Road. It was two o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon and he was
with Kit Rogers, Tina Miller, and James Moss. He really wanted
to follow it then, but Kit had, just that minute, suggested they all go
into Grey Town and if Lemmy had proposed something else it would have
looked like he was afraid.
"Not Grey Town!” pleaded Tina. “I hate that creepy
place."
"Are you saying you're scared?” asked Lemmy with a
sneer.
"No I never but ... Oh all right then, just so long
as we don't meet that beggar. You know, the one who hasn't got any..."
"No, he's always on the same corner these days, over
on the Blackwall side,” said Kit with a sly look at James. “You won't
see him if we go in on this side."
Lemmy and his friends were Dotlanders. They were
low-res enough to have visible pixels and they only had 128 colors
apiece, except for James whose parents had middle-class aspirations and
had recently upgraded to 256. Up in the West End they would all have
looked like cartoon characters—even James—but down in Grey Town they
looked like princes, the objects of envy and hate.
It was like descending to Hades, going in there and
finding yourself surrounded by all those grainy faces. There were
outline faces, even, faces with ticks for noses and single lines for
mouths. Greyscale hustlers tried to sell them things, black-and-white
dealers tried to do deals, dot-eyed muggers eyed them from doorways and
wondered how much of a fight these Dotland kids would put up, and
whether they had anything on them that would make it worth finding out.
And then from the darkness under a railway arch came the sound that
Tina dreaded and that Kit and James had tricked her into hearing
"Bleep!"
Tina screamed.
"You said he was over by Blackwall!"
The boys laughed.
"You bastards! You set me up on purpose!"
"Bleep!" went the darkness again and a
plain text message appeared in green letters in the black mouth of the
arch:
Help me! Please!
Guiltily each one of them tossed a few pence of
credit in the direction of this unimaginably destitute being who could
afford neither a body nor a voice.
"I really hate you for that, Kit!” Tina said. “You know
how much that guy creeps me out!"
"Yes, but that's why it's so much fun winding you
up!"
And then they saw the white hart again, trotting
through the streets of Grey Town.
"There it is again,” said Lemmy, “let's go and..."
* * * *
But they were distracted by a commotion further up
the street. A small crowd of young Greytowners were heading their way,
laughing and jeering around a tall, solitary figure with an unruly mane
of long white hair and an immensely upright bearing who was striding
along in the midst of them, like an eagle or a great owl being mobbed
by sparrows.
They recognized him as Mr. Howard. He was a big
landlord in Grey Town and across the East End, and he came in
occasionally to look over his properties, always wearing the same
crumpled green velvet suit in true color and at as high a resolution as
it was possible to be, with real worn elbows and real frayed cuffs and
the true authentic greasy sheen of velvet that has gone for months
without being cleaned.
What was fascinating and disturbing about Mr. Howard
was his imperial disdain and the way he strode through Grey Town as if
he owned the place. He actually did own quite a lot of it, but
that was only one reason for his regal manner. The other reason was the
absolute invulnerability that came from his being an Outsider. Sticks
and stones would bounce off Mr. Howard, knives would turn. No one could
hurt an Outsider, or even stop him in his tracks.
"Spook!” yelled a tiny little black-and-white boy
from the curb with his little outline mouth. “Mr. Howard is a spook!"
"Peter! Over here! Now!" hissed the little
black-and-white woman who was his mother.
The little boy looked round, smiling triumphantly,
then saw her fear. He burst into tears and went running back to her.
And the two little cartoon characters cowered together in the shadow of
a doorway while Mr. Howard strode by.
Lemmy looked around for the white hart. But it had
gone.
* * * *
About a week later, Lemmy and the others were
hanging around Dotlands Market, checking out the stalls selling low-res
clothes and jewelry and shoes ("Never mind the resolution, look at the
design!"), the equally low-res food stalls ("It might look
low-res, darlin', but do you buy food to look at? The flavor is as
high-res as it gets!"), and the pet stores with their little low-res
cartoon animals ("These adorable little critters have genuine organic
central nervous systems behind them, ladies and gents! Real feelings
like you and me!").
"Look, Lemmy!” James said, pointing past the stalls,
“There's that white animal again!"
Lemmy took over at once. “Okay. Listen. Be quiet and
follow me!"
The deer was in a small dark alley between two old
Victorian warehouses, grazing on tufts of grass that grew up through
cracks in the tarmac. It lifted its head and looked straight in their
direction. They all thought it was going to run, but it bent down again
and calmly continued with its grazing.
"What is it?” Lemmy whispered as they drew
up with it.
He reached out and touched it. The deer took no
notice at all.
Kit shrugged.
"I'm bored. Let's go and do something else."
"Yeah let's,” Tina said. “I don't like this animal.
I'm sure it's something physical."
Lemmy and his friends didn't really understand
“physical” but there was something threatening about it. Lemmy had come
across a physical piece of paper in the street once, skipping and
floating through the air as if it weighed nothing at all. And yet when
it fell to the ground and he tried to pick it up, it was hard as iron
to his touch and he couldn't shift it any more than he could shift a
ten ton weight. And Outsiders were physical too in some way. They had
some kind of affinity with physical objects. That was what defined them
as being “outside."
"Physical?” Kit exclaimed, taking a step back. “Ugh!
Do you really think so? I didn't know animals could be
physical. Except birds, of course."
The deer lifted its head again and looked straight
past them down the alley. How could a creature be so alert, yet be so
completely indifferent to them even when they were so close? What else
was there in the world for it to be scared of ?
"Of course it's physical,” James said. “Just look
how high-res it is!"
"Yeah, even more than you, Smoothie,” said Kit.
And it was true. The deer wasn't at all like the
cheerful little low-res dogs and cats that people in Dotlands kept as
pets. You could see the individual hairs on its back.
But none of this concerned the white hart. It
finished the tuft of grass it was eating and moved off slowly down the
alley, as indifferent to their judgment as it was to their presence.
"Are you coming, Lemmy?” called Kit, as he followed
James and Tina back to the cheerful market.
* * * *
But Lemmy followed the white hart. He followed it
right across London, through back streets, across parks, over railway
tracks, in and out of low-res neighborhoods and high-res neighborhoods,
across white areas and black areas, through shopping centers, across
busy freeways.
It was slow progress. The deer kept doubling back on
itself or going off in completely new directions for no apparent
reason. Sometimes it stopped for twenty minutes to graze or to scratch
with its hoof behind its ear. Sometimes it would run and skip along at
great speed and Lemmy could barely keep up, though at other times he
could walk right beside it, resting his hand on its back. Once it lay
down in the middle of the road and went to sleep. Cars honked at it.
One driver even got out and kicked it, which would have made Lemmy mad
if it wasn't for the fact that the deer didn't even stir in its slumber
and the man hurt his foot.
"Bloody Council,” the driver said, glowering at
Lemmy as he hobbled back to his car. “I thought they were supposed to
keep these damned things out of here."
He—and all the cars behind him—had to drive up onto
the curb to get around the sleeping animal.
What things? Lemmy wondered. What things were the
Council supposed to keep out?
Five minutes later, the deer woke up and moved off
of its own accord.
Another time it went through the front door of a
small terraced house—not through an open door, but through the shiny
blue surface of a closed one as if it was mist or smoke. It was a
shocking and inexplicable sight, but such things happened occasionally
in London. (Once, when Lemmy was little, he and his mother had been
walking down a street when the whole section of road ahead of them had
simply disappeared, as if someone had flipped over channels on TV and
come to an unused frequency. A few seconds later it all returned again,
just as it had been before.) Lemmy waited and after a few minutes the
deer's antlers and head and neck appeared again through the door,
looking like a hunting trophy. Then it came right through and trotted
off down the street. (The blue door opened behind it and a bewildered
couple came out and stood there and watched it go, with Lemmy following
behind it.)
On they wandered, this way and that through the
suburban streets. But as evening began to fall and the street lights
came on, the deer seemed to move more purposefully northward. It was as
if its day's work was done, Lemmy thought, and it was going home. It
seldom stopped to graze now, it never doubled back. At a brisk trot,
occasionally breaking into a run, it hurried on past miles of houses
where families were settling down for the evening in the comfortable
glow of television. A few times Lemmy thought he'd lost it when it ran
ahead of him and disappeared from his view. But each time, just when he
was on the point of giving up, he saw it again in the distance, a
ghostly speck moving under the street lights, so he kept on going,
though he was miles away from home now and in a part of the city he had
never seen before.
* * * *
And then the white deer came to the last house in
London—and the city ended.
Lemmy realized London wasn't limitless, of course.
He knew there were other places beyond—there were stations, after all,
with gateways you could go through and visit New York or Florida or
Benidorm or Heaven or Space—but it had never occurred to him that there
might be a point where the city just petered out.
In front of him there was a row of orange lights
that stretched away, up and down hills, in a long winding line to the
east and west, along with a sign put up by the Council, one sign for
every five lights:
Perimeter of Urban Consensual Field
To the north, beyond the lights and the signs, the
glow of the orange lights continued for some yards but then stopped.
After that there was nothing: no ground, no objects, no space, just a
flickering blankness, like a spare channel on TV.
Lemmy hardly ever went to school and he could barely
read—and in any case it was his practice to ignore official signs. What
seemed important to him at that particular moment was that the white
hart had already trotted forward under the orange lights and into the
bare orange space beyond. Lemmy's Dotlands sense of honor dictated that
he couldn't stop. Even if he had no idea what a perimeter
was—let alone a consensual field—and even if it meant going
into still stranger territory when he already had no idea where he was,
he couldn't stop now any more than he could refuse a dare to go into
the middle of Grey Town or to walk up to Mr. Howard and call him a
spook to his terrifyingly high-res face.
And yet, almost immediately, he did stop,
not because he'd changed his mind but because, when it came to it, he
simply had no choice in the matter. He was just walking on the spot. It
was impossible to go forward. And words he had seen on the signs
appeared again, but this time flashing on and off in glowing green,
right in front of his eyes:
Perimeter of Field!
Perimeter of Field!
Perimeter of Field!
There was nothing he could do but stand and watch
the white deer trotting away to wherever it was that it was going.
Out in the orange glow it turned round and looked
back in his direction. And now, oddly, for the first time it seemed
distinctly alarmed. Had it finally noticed his existence, Lemmy
wondered? And, if so, why now, when several times it had let him come
up close enough to touch it and not seemed concerned at all? Why now,
when it had been happy to lie in a road and be kicked?
But whatever had frightened it this time, the deer
fled in great skips and leaps.
And as it crossed from the orange glow of the lights
into the flickering, empty-channel nothingness, it disappeared.
"I'm sorry. You were watching him, weren't you?”
said a woman's voice. “I'm afraid it was me that scared him off."
Lemmy looked round. The speaker was tall, extremely
ugly, and much older than anyone he had ever seen or spoken to—yet she
was very high-res. You could see the little marks and creases
on her skin. You could see the way her lipstick smeared over the edges
of her lips and the coarse fibrous texture of her ugly green dress.
"Yeah, I was watching him. I've been following him.
I wanted to know where he was going. I've been following him halfway
across London."
"Well, I'm sorry."
Lemmy shrugged. “He would have gone anyway, I
reckon. He was headed in that direction."
He looked out into the blankness in the distance.
"What I don't get though, is what is that out there
and how come he just vanished?"
The woman took from her pocket a strange contraption
consisting of two flat discs of glass mounted in a kind of frame, which
hooked over her ears. She placed it in front of her eyes and peered
through it.
"No, he hasn't vanished,” she said. “He's still out
there, look, just beyond the fence."
She clicked her tongue.
"But will you look at that big hole in the
fence there! I suppose that must be how he got in."
"I can't see him,” Lemmy said.
"Look just beyond the wire fence. In front of those
trees."
"I can't see no fence. I can't see no trees
neither."
"Oh silly me!” the old woman exclaimed. “I wasn't
thinking. They're beyond the consensual field, aren't they? So of
course you wouldn't be able to see them."
Lemmy looked at her. She was so ugly, yet
she behaved like a famous actress, or a TV presenter. She had the
grandness and the self-assurance and the ultra-posh accent.
"How come you can see it then? And how come that
animal can go out there and I can't?"
"It's a deer,” she said gently, “a male deer, a
hart. The reason it can go out there and you can't is that it is a
physical being and you are a consensual being. You can only see and
hear and touch what is in the consensual field."
"Oh I know it's just physical,” Lemmy said.
"Just physical? You say that so
disparagingly, yet every human being on earth was physical once."
Lemmy pretended to laugh, thinking this must be some
odd, posh actressy kind of joke.
"You don't know about that?” she asked him. “They
don't teach you about that at school?"
"I don't go to school,” Lemmy said. “There's no
point."
"No point in going to school! Dear me!” the woman
exclaimed—and she half-sighed and half-laughed.
"Well, it's like this,” she said. “In the city, two
worlds overlap: the physical universe and the consensual field. Every
physical thing that stands or moves within the city is replicated in
the representation of the city that forms the backdrop of the
consensual field. That's why you could see the hart in the city but not
when it went beyond the perimeter. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Nope,” said Lemmy shortly with an indifferent shrug.
"But how come it couldn't seem to see me
though?” he couldn't help adding. “Not even in the city?"
"Well, how could a wild animal see the
consensual field? Animals don't know that the consensual stuff is there
at all. You and I might go into the city and see busy streets bustling
with people, but, to the deer, the streets are empty. He can wander
through them all day and meet no one at all except, once in a while,
the occasional oddball like me."
Lemmy looked sharply at her.
"Like you? You're not a... ?"
The woman looked uncomfortable.
"Yes, I'm a physical human being. An Outsider as you
call us. But please don't..."
She broke off, touching his arm in mute appeal.
Lemmy saw for an instant how lonely she was—and, having a kind heart,
he felt pity. But he simultaneously wondered if he could run quickly
enough to get away before she grabbed him.
"Please don't go away!” the old woman pleaded.
“We're just people, you know, just people who happen still to live and
move in the physical world."
"So, you're like the animal then?"
"That's it. There are a few of us. There only can be
a few of us who are lucky enough and rich enough and old enough to have
been able to..."
"But how come you can see me then, if the animal
couldn't?"
"I can see you because I have implants that allow me
to see and hear and feel the consensual field."
Lemmy snorted.
"So you have to have special help to see the real
world!"
"Well, some might say that the real world is that
which is outside of the consensual field.” She pointed out
beyond the orange lights. “Like those trees, like those low hills in
the distance. Like the great muddy estuary over there to the east, like
the cold sea..."
She sighed.
"I wish I could show you the sea."
"I've been to the sea loads of times."
"You've been to manufactured seas, perhaps: theme
park seas, sea-like playgrounds. I mean the real sea which no
one thinks about any more. It just exists out there, slopping around in
its gigantic bowl all on its own. Nowadays it might as well be on some
uninhabited planet going round some far off star. So might the forests
and the mountains and the..."
Lemmy laughed.
"Things out there that no one can see? You're
kidding me."
The old woman studied his face.
"I'll tell you what,” she said. “You can't see
the trees but if you listen, you will surely be able to hear them.
Listen! It's a windy night. The sensors will pick it up."
Lemmy listened. At first he couldn't hear anything
at all but gradually he became aware of a very faint sound which was
new to him: a sighing sound, rising and falling, somewhere out there in
the blankness. He could have listened for hours to this sound from a
space that lay outside of his own universe.
He wasn't going to tell her that though.
"Nope,” he said firmly. “I can't hear nothing."
The woman smiled and touched his cheek.
"I must say I like you,” she said. “Won't you tell
me your name and where you come from?"
He looked at her for a moment, weighing up her
request.
"Lemmy,” he then told her with a small firm nod.
“Lemmy Leonard. I live down Dotlands way."
"Dotlands? My, that's a long way to have
come! That is halfway across London! Listen, Lemmy, my name is
Clarissa Fall. My house is just over there."
She pointed to a big Victorian mansion, perhaps half
a mile away to the east, just inside the perimeter, illuminated from
below by a cold greenish light.
"Why don't you come back and have something to eat
with me before you go back home?"
He didn't fancy it at all but it seemed cruel to
turn her down. She was so lonely. (I suppose they must all
be lonely, he thought. No one wants to talk to them, do they? No one
wants to meet their eyes. People in the street even tell their kids to
come away from them.)
"Yeah all right,” he said. “Just for a bit."
* * * *
They came to Clarissa's house through a formal
garden, with geometrical beds of rose bushes and stone fountains in the
shape of nymphs and gods, standing in dark, glittering ponds. Pathways
wound through it, from one strange tableau to the next, illuminated by
electric lights set into the ground.
"The statues and the lights are physical,” Clarissa
said, “but we had to get rid of the physical roses and the physical
water. It was all getting too difficult to maintain. So the roses and
the fountains you can see are just consensual. They're part of the
Field. If I switched off my implants, all that I would see here would
be stone statues and ponds with nothing in them but dry mud and the
skeletons of frogs."
She looked at Lemmy and sighed. The lights along the
pathways had a cold greenish edge, like radiant ice.
"And of course you wouldn't be with me anymore,” she
added.
"What do you mean I wouldn't be here? Where else
would I be?"
"Well ... Well, I suppose that to yourself you would
still be here. It's just that I wouldn't be able to tell that
you were here, like the deer couldn't."
He could see she wanted to say something else but
that she thought she shouldn't. And then, in spite of herself, she said
it anyway.
"Well really the deer's eyes didn't deceive it,” she
blurted out, “because really you aren't here, you are..."
"What do you mean I'm not bloody here?” demanded
Lemmy hotly.
She looked at him with a curious expression, both
guilty and triumphant. It was as if she was pleased to have got a
reaction of any sort from him. Like some lonely kid in a school
playground who no one likes, Lemmy thought, winding you up on purpose
just to prove to herself that she exists.
They had come to Clarissa's front door. She turned
to face him.
"Don't take any notice of what I said just now. Of
course you're here, Lemmy. Of course you are. You're young, you're
alive, you're full of curiosity and hope. You're more here than I am,
if the truth be told, far more here than I am."
She pushed open the door and they entered a
cavernous marble hallway.
"Is that you, Clarissa?” came a querulous male voice.
An old man came out of a side room, his face yellowy
and crumpled, his body twisted and stooped, his shapeless jeans and
white shirt seemingly tied round the middle with string—and yet, like
Clarissa, so high-res that he made Lemmy feel almost like a Greytowner.
"You've been out a long time,” the old man grumbled.
“Where on earth have you been?"
"Terence,” she told him, “this is Lemmy."
The old man frowned into the space that she had
indicated.
"Eh?"
"This is Lemmy,” she repeated with that firm
deliberate tone that people use when they are trying to remind others
of things which they should really already know.
"Implants,” she hissed at him when he still
didn't get the hint.
The old man fumbled, muttering, at something behind
his ear.
"Oh God,” he sighed wearily, seeing Lemmy for the
first time and immediately looking away. “Not again, Clarissa.
Not this all over again."
* * * *
Clarissa told Lemmy to go into the lounge.
"Sit down and make yourself comfortable, dear. I'll
be with you in just a moment."
It was a high, long room lined with dark wooden
paneling. On the walls hung big dark paintings of bowls of fruit, and
dead pheasants and stern, unsmiling faces. A fire, almost burnt out,
smoldered under an enormous mantelpiece with a design of intertwining
forest leaves carved heavily into the dead black wood.
Lemmy sat himself awkwardly on a large dark-red sofa
and waited, wishing he'd never agreed to come. Outside in the hallway,
the two old people were having a row.
"Why shouldn't I switch off these damned implants in
my own house? Why shouldn't I live in the real world without electronic
enhancements? I don't ask you to bring these ghosts back with you!"
"Why can't you face the fact that their world is
the real world now, Terence? They're not the ghosts, we are!"
"Oh yes? So how come they would all vanish without
trace if someone were to only unplug the blessed..."
"How come in twenty or thirty years time we'll
all be dead and forgotten, and they'll still be here in their millions,
living and loving, working and playing?"
"That's not the point and you know it. The point is
that..."
"Oh for God's sake leave it, Terence. I'm not having
this argument with you. I'm just not having this argument. I have a
guest to attend to, as it so happens. In fact, we have a guest.
We have a guest and I expect you to treat him as such."
She came into the room to join Lemmy, forcing a
smile over a face that was still agitated and flushed from the fight in
the hallway.
"Why don't you have a chocolate bun?” she cried,
much too brightly, indicating a plate of small cakes.
Lemmy was ravenous and he reached out at once, but
it was no good. He could touch the buns and feel them but he couldn't
move them any more than he could move a truck or a house.
"Oh,” Clarissa said, “I'm sorry, I quite forgot."
Again? thought Lemmy, remembering how she
had “forgotten” earlier that he couldn't see beyond the perimeter.
"Never mind,” she said, leaping up and opening a
cupboard in the corner of the room. “I always keep some of your kind of
food here. I don't often have visitors, but one never knows."
She came back to him with another plate of cakes.
They were luridly colorful and so low-res that it was as if she had
deliberately chosen them to contrast as much as possible with her own
handmade food, but Lemmy was hungry and ate six of them, one after the
other, while she sat and watched and smiled.
"My. You were hungry."
"I came all the way from Dotlands,” Lemmy reminded
her. “I ran quite a bit of it. And that animal didn't go in a straight
line, neither. It was this way and that way and round and round."
She laughed and nodded. Then, as she had done
before, she started to say something, stopped, and then said it anyway.
It seemed to be a pattern of hers. But when you were alone a lot,
perhaps you forgot the trick of holding things in?
"Do you know how that food of yours works?” she
asked Lemmy. “Do you know how it fills you up?"
Lemmy didn't have time to reply.
"Every bite you take,” she told him, “a computer
sends out a signal and far away, a series of signals are sent to your
olfactory centers and a small amount of nutrients are injected into the
bloodstream of your..."
Lemmy frowned.
"Why do you keep doing that?"
"Doing what, dear?” She assumed an expression of
complete innocence, but the pretence was as fragile as fine glass.
"Trying to make me feel bad."
"What do you mean, Lemmy dear? Why on earth do you
think I'm trying to make you..."
Then she broke off, ran her hands over her face as
if to wipe away her falsely sincere expression and for a little while
fell silent, looking into the almost burnt-out fire.
"It's jealousy I suppose,” she said at length. “It's
just plain jealousy. I envy you the bustle and banter of Dotlands. I
envy you the life of the city. All my true friends are dead. There are
only a few hundred of us Outsiders left in London and most of us can't
stand the sight of each other after all this time. We can't have
children you know, that was part of the deal when they let us stay
outside. We had to be sterile. Of course we're all too old now anyway."
She gave the weary sigh of one for whom sorrow
itself has grown tedious like a grey sky that will not lift.
"And out in the streets, well, you know yourself
what it's like ... You were unusual in that you didn't run as soon as
you discovered what I was, or jeer at me, or get all your friends to
come and laugh at me and call me a spook. That was good of you. And
look how this stupid old woman shows her gratitude!"
Suddenly she picked up the plate of real physical
chocolate buns, strode with them to the fire and emptied them into it.
Pale flames—yellow and blue—rose up to devour the greased paper cups.
Then, for a time, they were both silent.
"Do you know that Mr. Howard?” asked Lemmy at
length. “The one who owns all that property down in Grey Town."
"Richard Howard? Know him? I was married to
him for five years!"
"Married? To Mr. Howard? You're kidding!"
"Not kidding at all,” said Clarissa, smiling. “Mind
you, most of us survivors have been married to one another at some
point or another. There are only so many permutations for us to play
with."
"So what's he like?"
"Richard Howard? Well, he never washes, is one thing
about him,” Clarissa said with a grimace. “He smells to high heaven."
"Smells?” said her husband. “Who smells? Who are you
talking about?"
The old man had come into the room while they were
talking and now he began rummaging noisily through a pile of papers on
a dresser behind them, shuffling and snuffling, determined that his
presence should not be overlooked.
"I still don't get where that white animal went,”
Lemmy said, “and why I couldn't follow it."
"White animal?” demanded the old man crossly,
turning from his papers to address his wife. “What white animal was
that?"
"It was a white hart,” she told him, “an albino, I
suppose."
"Oh yes, and how did he get to see it?"
"Well, it must have got in through one of those
holes in the wildlife fence."
"Well, well,” chuckled the old man. “One of those
dratted holes again, eh? The Council is slipping up. All these
great big holes appearing overnight in the fence!"
Puzzled, Lemmy looked at Clarissa and saw her
positively cringing under her husband's scorn. But she refused to be
silenced.
"Yes,” she went on, in an exaggeratedly casual tone,
“and according to Lemmy here it wandered right down as far as Dotlands.
He followed it back up here to try and find out where it came from.
Then it went back over the perimeter and he couldn't follow it any
further. But Lemmy doesn't...” she broke off to try and find a more
tactful form of words, “he doesn't understand where it's got to."
"Well of course not,” the old man grumbled. “They
aren't honest with these people. They don't tell them what they really
are or what's really going on. They..."
"Well, what is really going on?” Lemmy
interrupted him.
"What's really going on?” Terence gave a little
humorless bark of laughter. “Well, I could show him if he wants to see.
I could fetch the camera and show him."
"Terence, I'm not sure that's such a good idea,”
began Clarissa weakly, but her objection was half-hearted and he was
already back at the capacious dresser, rummaging in a drawer.
He produced a video camera and some cables which he
plugged into the back of the TV in the corner. Part of the mantelpiece
appeared on the screen, blurred and greatly magnified. Terence took out
one of those glass disc contraptions that Clarissa had and placed it in
front of his eyes. He made some adjustments. The view zoomed back and
came into focus.
There was nothing remarkable about it. It was just
the room they were sitting in. But when Terence moved the camera,
something appeared on the screen that wasn't visible in the room
itself—a silver sphere, somewhat larger than a football, suspended from
the middle of the ceiling.
"What's that?” Lemmy asked.
"That's a sensor,” the old man said, answering him,
but looking at his wife. “Damn things. We have to have them in every
single room in the house. Legal requirement. Part of the penalty for
living inside the perimeter."
"But what is it? And why can't I see it except on
the TV?"
"He doesn't know what a sensor is?” growled
Terence. “Dear God! What do they teach these people?"
"It's not his fault, dear,” said Clarissa gently.
"Yeah it is, actually,” said Lemmy cheerfully. “I
don't never go to school."
Amused in spite of himself, the old man snorted.
"It's like I was telling you earlier, dear,”
Clarissa said to Lemmy. “Sensors are the things that monitor the
physical world and transmit the information to the consensual field..."
"...which superimposes whatever tawdry rubbish it
wants over it,” grumbled the old man, “like ... like those ridiculous
colored air-cakes."
He meant the low-res cakes that Clarissa had put out
on a table for Lemmy. And now Lemmy discovered a disturbing
discrepancy. Within the room he could see the plate on the table with
three cakes on it still left over from the nine she had brought in for
him. But on the TV screen, though the table and the plate were clearly
visible, the plate was empty and there were no cakes at all.
"Why can't I see the cakes on the TV? Why can't I
see the sensor in the room?"
"The cakes are consensual. The sensor is physical,”
Terence said without looking at him. “A sensor detects everything but
itself, just like the human brain. It feeds the Field with information
about the physical world but it doesn't appear in the Field itself, not
visually, not in tactile form. Nothing."
"Actually they're a nuisance for us, Lemmy,”
Clarissa chattered. “They're an eyesore and we bump our heads on them.
But it's all right for you lot. You can walk right through them and see
right through them. They don't get in your way at all."
She looked at her husband.
"Are you going to ... I mean you're not going to
point the camera at him are you? You're not going to show him himself
?"
She was pretending to warn Terence not to do it,
Lemmy noticed, but really she was making quite sure that he wouldn't
forget.
"Yeah, go on then, show me,” he said wearily,
knowing already what he would see.
The old man swept the camera round the room. On the
TV screen Lemmy saw Clarissa sitting in an armchair. He saw a painting
of dead pheasants. He saw the dying embers of the fire and the corner
of the dark-red sofa where he was sitting. And then, though he really
didn't want to look, he saw the whole sofa.
Of course, just as he had guessed it would be, it
was empty.
"All right then,” Lemmy said in a tight voice. “So
if I'm not really here, then where am I?"
"I can show you that too if you want,” said Terence,
still not looking at him, but addressing him directly for the first
time. “Come upstairs and I'll show you..."
"Oh Terence,” murmured Clarissa. “It's an awful lot
for him to take in. I really think we should...."
Yet she was already eagerly getting to her feet.
* * * *
Lemmy followed them up the wide marble staircase to
the first landing. Progress was slow. The old man was really struggling
and had to pause several times to rest the camera and catch his breath.
"Let me carry it, Terence!” Clarissa said to him
impatiently each time. “You know you don't like the stairs."
"I'm fine,” he wheezed, his face flushed, his eyes
moist and bloodshot. “Don't fuss so."
On the landing there were three glass cases, the
first containing fossil shells, the second geological specimens, the
third a hundred dead hummingbirds arranged on the branches of
artificial trees. Some of the little iridescent birds had fallen from
their perches and were dangling from strands of wire; a few lay at the
bottom of the case. The old man hobbled on to the second set of stairs.
"Here's another sensor,” he said, glancing, just for
a moment, back at Lemmy.
He laid down the camera, stood on tiptoes and,
gasping for breath, reached up to rap at something with his knuckles.
It was a bit like the wind in the trees again. Lemmy could clearly hear
the hollow sound of some hard surface being struck, but all he could see
was Terence's liver-spotted hand rapping at thin air. And when Lemmy
stepped forward himself and reached up into the same space, he could
find nothing solid there at all.
"Terence disconnected this sensor once,” said
Clarissa. “Very naughty of him—we had to pay a big fine—but he
unplugged it and..."
"I'll tell you what, I'll unplug it now,” Terence
said, reaching out. “I'll unplug it now and show this young fellow how
his..."
And suddenly there was no staircase, no Clarissa, no
Terence, just a flickering blankness and a fizzing rush of white noise.
When Lemmy moved his foot there was nothing beneath it. When he reached
out his hand there was no wall. When he tried to speak, no sound came.
It was if the world had not yet been created.
Then a message flashed in front of him in green
letters:
Local sensor error!
...and a soothing female voice spoke inside Lemmy's
head.
"Apologies. There has been a local sensor
malfunction. If not resolved in five seconds you will be relocated to
your home address or to your nominated default location. One ... Two
... Three..."
But then he was back on the stairs again, in
Clarissa's and Terence's decaying mansion.
"Reconnect it now, Terence!” Clarissa was
shouting at her husband. “Now! Do you hear me?"
"Oh do shut up you silly woman. I already have
reconnected it."
"Yeah,” said Lemmy, “I'm back."
"I'm so sorry, Lemmy,” Clarissa said, taking his
arm. “Terence is so cruel. That must have been..."
The old man labored on up the stairs.
On the second landing, there was a case of flint
arrowheads, another of Roman coins, and a third full of pale anatomical
specimens preserved in formaldehyde: deformed embryos, a bisected
snake, a rat with its belly laid open, a strange abysmal fish with
teeth like needles.... Between the last two cases there was a small
doorway with a gothic arch which led to a cramped spiral staircase.
They climbed up it to a room which perched above the house in a
faux-medieval turret.
The turret had windows on three sides. On the fourth
side, next to the door, there was a desk with an antique computer on
it. In the spaces between the windows there were packed bookshelves
from floor to ceiling. Books and papers were stacked untidily on the
desk and across the floor, most of them covered in thick dust.
"Terence's study,” sniffed Clarissa. “He comes up
here to do his world-famous research, though, oddly enough, no one in
the world but him seems to know anything about it."
Terence ignored this. He placed his glass
contraption on his nose and groped awkwardly behind the computer to
find the port for the camera lead, snuffling and muttering all the
while.
"Are you sure you want to see this, Lemmy?” asked
Clarissa. “I mean this must all be a bit of a..."
"There we are,” said the old man with
satisfaction as the monitor came to life.
He carried the camera to the north-facing window,
and propped it on the sill. Lemmy followed him and looked outside. He
could see the garden down below with its ice-green lights and its
fountains and roses. Beyond it was the procession of lights and signs
(one sign for every five lights) that marked the edge of the city.
Beyond that was the spare-channel void, flickering constantly with
random, meaningless pinpricks of light.
"You won't be able to see anything through the
window,” said Terence, glancing straight at Lemmy for a single brief
moment. “You're relying on sensors and they won't show you anything
beyond the Field. But, of course, the room sensor will pick up
whatever's on the monitor for you because that's here in the room."
Lemmy looked round at the monitor. The old man was
fiddling with the camera angle and what Lemmy saw first, jiggling about
on the screen, was the garden immediately below. It was different from
what he had just seen out of the window. The lights were still there,
but there were no roses. The ground was bare concrete and the ponds
were bald, empty holes. Beyond the garden, the lights and warning signs
around the perimeter looked just the same on the screen as they had
looked out of the window, but beyond them there was no longer the
flickering blankness. The tall chainlink wildlife fence was clearly
visible and, beyond that, night and the dark shapes of trees.
The old man stopped moving the camera about and let
it lie on the sill again so that it was pointing straight outwards. And
now Lemmy saw on the screen a large concrete building, some way beyond
the perimeter. Windowless and without the slightest trace of ornament,
it was surrounded by a service road, cold white arc-lights and a high
fence.
"That is where you are, my friend,” said the
old man, leaving the camera and coming over to peer at the screen
through his glass discs. “That is the London Hub, the true location of
all the denizens of the London Consensual Field. You're all in there,
row after row of you, each one of you looking like nothing so much as a
scoop of grey porridge in a goldfish bowl."
"Oh honestly Terence!” objected Clarissa.
"On each of five stories,” Terence went on, “there
are two parallel corridors half a mile long. Along each corridor there
are eight tiers of shelving, and on each shelf, every fifty
centimeters, there is another one of you. And there you sit in your
goldfish bowls, all wired up together, dreaming that you have bodies
and limbs and genitals and pretty faces ...."
"Terence!"
"Every once in a while,” the old man stubbornly
continued, “one of you shrivels up and is duly replaced by a new blob
of porridge, cultured from cells in a vat somewhere, and dropped into
place by a machine. And then two of you are deceived into thinking that
you have conceived a child and given birth, when in fact..."
"Terence! Stop this now!"
The old man broke off with a derisive snort. Lemmy
said nothing, his eyes fixed on the monitor.
"Of course you're wonderful for the environment,”
Terence resumed, after only the briefest of pauses. “That was the
rationale, after all, that was the excuse. As I understand it, two
hundred and fifty of you don't use as much energy or cause as much
pollution as a single manipulative old parasite like my dear Clarissa
here—or a single old fossil like me. But that doesn't alter the fact
that there isn't much more to any of you than there is to one of those
pickled specimens I've got down on the landing there, or that your
lives are an eternal video game in which you are fooled into thinking
you really are the cartoon characters you watch and manipulate
on the screen."
"Why do you do this, Terence?” Clarissa
cried. “Why are you so cruel?"
The old man gave a bark of derision.
"Cruel? Me? You hypocrite, Clarissa. You
utter hypocrite. It's you that keeps bringing them back here, these
pretty boys, these non-existent video-game boys. Why would you do that
to them if you didn't want to confront them with what they really are?"
He laughed.
"Yes, and why keep cutting those holes in the fence?"
Clarissa gasped. Her husband grinned at her.
"If you didn't want me to find out, my dearest, you
should have put the wire cutters back in the shed where you found them.
You cut the holes so that animals will wander down into the city and
lure back more boys for you to bring home. That's right, isn't it?
You're not going to try and deny it?"
Clarissa gave a thin, despairing wail.
"All right Terence, all right. But Lemmy is here
now. Lemmy is here!"
"No he's not! He's not here at all. We've already
established that. He's over there on a shelf in a jar of
formaldehyde—or whatever it is that they pickle them in. He only seems
to be here and we could very easily fix that by the simple act of
turning off our implants. Why don't you turn yours off now if his
presence distresses you? Even better, we could unplug the sensor and
then even he won't think he's here. There'll be only you and
me, up here all alone with our big empty house beneath us."
Clarissa turned to Lemmy.
"Don't pay any attention to him. You're as real as
we are. You just live in a different medium from us, that's all, a more
modern medium, a medium where you can be young and strong and healthy
all your life, and never grow wrinkly and bitter and old like us.
That's the truth of it, but Terence just can't accept it."
But Lemmy didn't answer her. He was watching the
monitor. An enormous articulated truck had pulled up outside the London
Hub and was now passing through a gate which had slid open
automatically to let it in. Oddly, the cabin of the truck had no
windows, so he couldn't tell who or what was driving it.
"Why don't you go over there and join them then,
Clarissa my dear?” sneered Terence, his old eyes gleaming. “Why don't
you get your brains spooned out into a jar and yourself plugged
into the Field?"
Lemmy crept still closer to the screen.
"Hey look! He's out there! That white animal. Way
over there by that big grey place."
"Lemmy, Lemmy,” cried Clarissa, rushing over to him.
“you're so..."
"Oh for goodness’ sake, get a grip, woman!” snapped
the old man.
He dragged a chair into the middle of the room.
"What are you doing?” she cried.
"I'm going to do what you should have done from the
beginning. Send this poor wretch home."
Wobbling dangerously, he climbed onto the chair and
reached up towards an invisible object below the ceiling.
* * * *
"...two ... three ... four ... five."
Lemmy was sitting in the corner chair in the cozy,
cramped little living room that he shared with his parents, Dorothy and
John. John was watching TV. Mouser, their blue cartoon cat, was curled
up on the fluffy rug in front of the fire. (The man at Dotlands market
had claimed he had an organic central nervous system. Who knows?
Perhaps he did. Perhaps at the back of some shelf in the London Hub, he
had a small-sized goldfish bowl and his own small-sized scoop of
porridge.)
In with a flourish came Lemmy's mother wearing a new
dress.
"Ta-da!"
She gave a little twirl and Lemmy's dad (who looked
like a rock'n'roll star from the early days, except that he smiled far
too easily) turned round in his armchair and gave an approving whistle.
"Oh hello Lemmy darling!” said Dorothy. “I didn't
hear you come in!"
"Blimey!” exclaimed his father. “Me neither! You
snuck in quietly, mate. I had no idea you was in the room!"
"So what do you think then, Lemmy?” Dorothy asked.
"Yeah, nice dress mum,” Lemmy said.
"It's not just the dress, sweetheart. Your kind
dad's given me a lovely early birthday present and got me upgraded to
256 colors. Can you see the difference? I think I look great!"
"Here comes the rain,” said Lemmy's dad.
They could tell it was raining from the faint grey
streaks that appeared in the room, like interference on TV. Not that
they minded. The streaks were barely visible and they made it feel more
cozy somehow, being inside in the warm with the TV and the fire going.
It had never occurred to Lemmy or his parents to wonder what caused
them.
But, right at that moment, Lemmy suddenly
understood. The house had no physical roof. It had no physical
ceilings, no physical upstairs floor, nothing to keep out the physical
rain that fell from the physical sky. In the physical world there was
no TV here, no fire, no lights, no fluffy rug, no comfy chairs, no
Mouser or Dorothy or Lemmy or John, just an empty shell of brick, open
to the sky, a ruin among many others, in the midst of an abandoned city.
"I thought your skin looked nice, mum,” he
said. “256 colors, eh? That explains it."
Dorothy laughed and ruffled his hair.
"Liar! You wouldn't have even noticed if I hadn't
told you."
She sat down next to her husband on the settee and
snuggled up against him to watch TV.
Lemmy moved his chair closer to the fire and tried
to watch TV with them, tried to give himself over to it as he'd always
done before, back in the days before Clarissa Fall let the white hart
in from the forest beyond the perimeter.
Copyright (c) 2005 Chris Beckett