THE X-MASS (1955)

‘IT CAME FROM THE SKIES – TO SAVE OUR WORLD!’

It starts with a voiceover – male, of course, American, a voice precision-honed by decades of whisky and cigarettes. Solemn, faintly awestruck, its speaks over a still image of a star.

‘Imagine, if you will, a chance encounter. A meeting between a so-called “cosmic ray”, originating from some far-distant star, and a cell of the human body.’

The visuals are changing now, a montage of photographs of stars and the night sky.

‘The X-ray is invisible, silent, intangible. It has passed through the universe for aeons to reach us. It would slide through your skin without giving you the slightest sensation. Yet when it touches this one cell, this microscopic cog in one human machine, it makes a change. A shift, a mutation into something new and unknown.’

The stars fade into images of cells under a microscope.

‘Let us further suppose that this cell is a germ cell, the cradle and crucible of human life. A seed from which a new life might grow. This cell has not yet been awakened – should not have been for many years. Yet now it is touched by the hand of the cosmos.’

More and more cells become visible.

‘See how it begins to multiply and grow, into a shape which that inhuman hand has helped to create. This mass of cells may come to form a life – a life that is itself, perhaps, no longer altogether human.’

* * *

We are in the home of the Elvey family, in Santa Mira, California. The living-room is decorated for Christmas, and a clock and calendar tell us that it is 10 p.m. on December 24th. The Elveys’ twenty-year-old daughter, Virginia, is pleading tearfully with her fiancé George – who, it seems, plans to leave her.

Their conversation is awkward and oblique, but if we are sufficiently attuned to the embarrassments and evasions of the times we will understand that Virginia has discovered that she is pregnant, and that George knows all too well that the baby is not his.

‘Please, George,’ Virginia insists, her face streaked with tears. ‘There’s no-one else. There’s never been anybody else!’ But George won’t be played for a fool. Resisting Virginia’s last-minute attempts to cling to him, he pushes her onto the sofa and leaves. As soon as he’s gone, her parents rush in, demanding to know what’s going on.

As she tells them, though, their faces harden. They are a respectable couple, pillars of their community – Mr Elvey a prominent businessman and city councillor as well as George’s employer, Mrs Elvey the chairwoman of the local bridge club – and they have no room in their family, their lives or their house for a daughter of poor judgement and worse morals.

Before long we see Virginia wandering the streets, disconsolate, eventually arriving at the door of her bohemian schoolfriend Josie and her eccentric menagerie of animals. It’s clear that Virginia is reluctant to turn to Josie, who wears polo-neck sweaters, spends time with unsuitable men and reads inadvisable books – who is, in short, exactly the kind of woman Virginia’s parents fear she has become – but in Virginia’s current state Josie’s the only person who she’s sure will take her in.

* * *

Time passes, represented in the traditional way with pages flying from a calendar. We hear a baby’s cry. Virginia’s son has been born.

In Josie’s basement flat, the baby lies in a crib next to Josie’s well-fed cats. Virginia is singing to him. There is a commotion at the door, and her father arrives with George. It is the first time she has seen either of them since December 24th. She goes to talk to them, leaving the baby with the three cats.

Mr Elvey has come to make Virginia an offer. He and Mrs Elvey are willing to welcome their daughter back, and he has persuaded George, against his better judgement, to reinstate his offer of marriage – but the baby must go. ‘Oh, but you can’t mean that, father. He’s your grandson,’ Virginia reminds him. ‘I’ve called him Alexander, after grandfather. Oh, do come in and meet him.’ But Mr Elvey is implacable: the child must be put up for adoption.

Josie intervenes at this point, coolly observing that Mr Elvey is taking more of an interest in his daughter’s living arrangements now he has announced his candidacy for mayor of Santa Mira. An ugly scene follows as Mr Elvey determines to take the child by force if necessary, and he and George force their way past Josie and Virginia into the living room.

There is no baby there – just an empty crib and four plump cats.

Mr Elvey demands to know where the child has been hidden, but Virginia is as confused as he is. Eventually he leaves, vowing to return, and a frantic Virginia hurries back to look for baby Alexander – only to find him lying in the crib as before, gurgling happily at the three cats Josie actually owns.

* * *

Years pass now, the escalation acknowledged in a montage of shots of juxtaposed seasons, and we find Virginia living in a house on the edge of town, kissing her new husband Frank Eckers hello as he returns from work as Professor of Poetry at UC Santa Mira. Outside, two Labrador dogs bound across the yard, playing riotously together.

Frank has brought home some colleagues for dinner: Dr Casper, a biologist, Dr Millicker, a physicist, and Dr Beltzer, a chemist. As they are greeting Virginia, the dogs in the yard race for the kitchen door and inside – but only one dog enters, accompanied by ten-year-old Xander Elvey. Dr Millicker obverves the transition, and is astounded and disturbed.

(Xander arrives in the kitchen fully clothed, of course: any idea that such a state of affairs is not utterly to be expected would be as alien to this feature presentation as allowing Virginia to stay living with Josie rather than normalising her as definitely heterosexual. Whatever uncanny metamorphic powers the cosmic rays that spawned Xander have granted the cells of his body, they evidently extend to the fabrics he wears and the contents of his pockets.)

‘Hey, Ma!’ Xander cries. ‘Rover showed me a new rabbit-hole he’s found. He wanted to chase the rabbits, but I wouldn’t let him. I went inside and Ma, there are baby rabbits! Gee, it was neat.’

‘That’s great, honey,’ Virginia replies, unfazed.

Dr Millicker insists on quizzing the boy. Virginia is uncomfortable, but Frank points out in an aside to her that his position at work is precarious, partly because of Mayor Elvey’s campaign against certain elements in the town who, according to him, are more than likely sleeper agents for communist Russia. Frank needs the support of Millicker and his other colleagues, which was why he brought them home in the first place.

Meanwhile, Xander has guilelessly demonstrated his abilities for them until all three astounded scientists are convinced no trickery is involved. Frank explains to them that the boy is a sport of nature, and has no father.

Jovial Dr Casper is intrigued. ‘Then I don’t understand why he’s a boy at all,’ he frowns. ‘We know that each cell in the human body has twenty-six chromosomes, of which two determine the person’s sex. A child with an X and a Y chromosome is a male, a child with two X chromosomes is a female. That’s just how nature made us. Now you tell me this boy has no father, yet your wife must herself have two X chromosomes. Which makes me wonder – where did this boy’s Y chromosome come from? It’s incredible enough to imagine a child born without a father, but all biological science tells us that that child should not be a boy, but a girl.’

‘But Dr Casper, I can be a girl,’ Xander replies – and we see that he has indeed transformed himself into a girl, a pretty one with pigtails and a fetching lacy dress.

Dr Millicker is more perturbed than ever by this new transformation, and speculates aloud as to whether Xander is human at all. ‘Yet what if some thing… some unknown, alien mass… gained the ability to mimic humanity, as predators camouflage themselves to creep up on their prey unnoticed? How could we tell that it was not human at all, but an infiltrator intent on subverting our society for its own sinister purposes?’ He denounces Frank and his household as communist spies and saboteurs, and storms out.

Xander wants to know what communists are. ‘Ah kiddo, there aren’t any real communists,’ Frank sighs. ‘Not in America. Your granddad wants to scare people so they’ll keep on electing him, that’s all. It’s just our bad luck he’s decided they should be scared of people like us.’

* * *

Soon afterwards, though, with the connivance of Mayor Elvey, Dr Millicker has Frank dismissed from his position at the university, and Xander insists on probing further into the tensions in the town.  Soon his mother and stepfather have told him all about US-Soviet relations, the Cold War and the Bomb. The boy is appalled by the idea that the world might be plunged into a destructive war at any moment over a question of ideology.

‘Say, though,’ he muses. ‘I bet someone like me could do something about that. If someone could look like all the generals, the scientists, even the President… well, they could find out where all the Bombs are kept, and learn all the secrets of how to stop them working. If neither side had Bombs they could use, and all the new ones they built stopped working too… why, they couldn’t ever go to war at all.’

Dr Millicker is at work on a less peaceful project, however. Correctly deducing that Xander owes his existence to cosmic X-rays, he has hastily invented a machine which can end that existence, by bombarding the subject with a barrage of man-made X-rays. (The logic of this is opaque at best – after all, there would be just as much reason to suppose that the child would thrive on them. But ‘X-rays created this monster, and X-rays will destroy it!’ is all the explanation we’re likely to get.)

Shortly afterwards, on a Christmas shopping trip into town, Virginia loses sight of Xander. By now she is used to his ways, and looks for him among the town’s animal population, before she notices a commotion in front of the town hall. A stranger, a grown man, is denouncing the Mayor and his campaign of fear against the peace-loving people of Santa Mira – in much the same terms as Frank and Virginia used when giving Xander his crash course in politics. The man pauses to wink at Virginia, and she – and we – realise that this man is Xander himself.

‘You’re so busy fearing one another,’ he insists to the townsfolk, ‘– your neighbours, the Russians, invaders from outer space – that you never see that the real enemy is yourselves. Your hatred, your suspicion, your closed minds and your fearful hearts. You can free yourselves from all of these fears.’

Dr Millicker, though, has other ideas. He arrives in the town square with the X-ray beam weapon mounted on a military truck (by this point he has, somehow, enlisted the aid of the United States armed forces against this small boy) and turns it on the impromptu orator. Being an X-ray weapon, it is of course formed in the shape of an X, the diagonal cross picked out in light bulbs which pulse brightly as the X-rays are emitted.

The speaker writhes in pain and his form begins to shimmer and change – reverting first to a terrified ten-year-old boy, and then to a Labrador which tries to escape through the crowd, but is cut off by the soldiers. Virginia struggles to fight her way through the crowd to her son, but Dr Millicker has turned the beam on him once more. He begins to grow, losing human form entirely and eventually becoming a giant, amorphous, pulsating blob which Millicker calls ‘the X-Mass’. Virginia tries again to reach him, but is held back by her ex George, still unmarried and still her father’s loyal henchman, who insists that she will only endanger herself. ‘I still care about you, Virginia,’ he insists creepily.

In the background, the attentive cinemagoer may see a second Labrador fleeing the square.

* * *

The rest of the third act follows a predictable trajectory, with Millicker and the military pursuing the unspeaking, glowing blob through the evacuated town. The Mayor is cornered by the X-Mass, but rather than flow over and smother him it turns back and risks another assault by the X-ray beams. Only Virginia, who has succeeded in escaping the evacuation, witnesses the Mass taking refuge in a shopping  mall, whose schmaltzy Christmas decorations are quickly augmented by electrified wire and landmines.

Virginia tries to reach Xander, but can’t get past the electric fences. She’s there when, called in by the President at Dr Millicker’s urging, USAF planes arrive overhead and drop an ominous payload on the mall.

From the distant vantage point where Millicker and the soldiers are observing the town, we see the Bomb fall, the mushroom cloud rise… and then immediately reverse itself, collapsing back into nothing. The mall is destroyed along with its monstrous occupant – but Virginia, cowering just around the corner across the square, survives.

* * *

Virginia returns through the miraculously fallout-free city to her empty house, where she finds a note waiting for her.

Ma,

They wanted to see me dead, so I gave them what they wanted. I broke off a part of me, and sent it to the mall to die. The rest of me’s left town along with everybody else.

I can’t come back, though – not even for you, not even a bit of me. If they catch me, men like Dr Millicker will study me, and maybe find a way to kill me better next time. A way I can’t come back from.

I’m going away – maybe to Washington, maybe Moscow. Maybe both. You remember my plan, to save the world from the Bomb? Well, it’ll work a whole lot better if I can be lots of people at once. I didn’t know I could do that before, but I can. I can break myself up into lots of bits – maybe lots of people, maybe lots of tiny bits that can get in people’s heads and change the way they think.

If everyone who could launch the Bomb isn’t themselves at all, but me… well then, the Bomb will never fall again.

I love you, Ma. I hope I can save you – and everyone else.

The note is signed, of course, with an X. (An initial? A kiss? A statement of anonymity? Or perhaps simply a cross, to show that Xander has graded the work of the human race and found it disappointing.)

* * *

The final shots are of crowds on a city street – not Santa Mira, though. Maybe New York, maybe Los Angeles, maybe neither. Somewhere anonymous, where hundreds of ordinary people are going about their daily business. The camera lingers on their faces.

The  voiceover artist is back from his whisky and cigarette break:

‘And so a new era in mankind’s history begins. One where any face you see could belong to this new being that walks among us. Your neighbour, your teacher, your doctor, your President – any one of them could belong to this great collective, this new movement of humanity towards a greater goal. Moved by a spirit that, while perhaps inhuman, still has the interests of humanity at heart.

‘The spirit… of the X-Mass.’

Roll credits.

* * *

(The 1958 sequel, Night of the X-Mass, is disappointing. The less said about the 2008 remake, X-Mass: Presence, the better.)

Mummers and Poppers: A Devices Story for Christmas

Another imminent Christmas means another Christmas story, and another all-too-rare update to this all-but-abandoned blog. Except that what I sent out with my Christmas cards last year was a tie-in story to my Devices Trilogy novels, and has already been published on the Snowbooks website. Still, I don't have another one for you, sorry.

This story is set between The Pendragon Protocol and The Locksley Exploit.

MUMMERS AND POPPERS
A Devices story for Christmas

If thee will leave thy tanning trade
and bide in greenwood with me,
my name’s Robin Hood, and I swear by the wood
I will give thee both gold and fee.’
The Kempsford Mummers’ Play

         As Christmases go, this is a weird one. Weirder than normal for the Green Chapel, I mean, because I realise sleeping in draughty tents in a forest, wearing several layers of thermal underwear inside your sleeping-bag and having to break the ice on the communal water-butts before you can have a wash in the morning wouldn’t be most people’s preferred way of spending the festive season.
         It’s all down to the allies – the ‘devices’, as our opposite numbers in the Circle insist on calling them. The living mythic archetypes of Britain have been kicking up a fuss, to say the least of it, ever since open warfare was declared among their human representatives, between the modern avatars of the Knights of the Round Table and Robin Hood’s Merry Men.
         That sort of thing puts the collective psyche of the whole nation under strain, and – though they’re nothing compared with what we’ll be facing later in the year – there’ve been some unusual manifestations emerging. Criminals from armed robbers to drug-dealers have been getting ideas that are strangely similar to stuff in myths, and those of us who live routinely with the influence of legendary figures are getting a bunch of very odd ideas turning up in our heads. The allies don’t dictate anyone’s behaviour, but they can introduce impulses which it’s quite difficult to control.
         So, for example, at the Circle’s Fastness – as Merry Wendiman’s learnt through her remaining contacts there – a bunch of the more credulous Knights are expecting a sign at Christmas, like the sword in the stone appearing on that day in the Morte D’Arthur, which will presage the long-awaited return of the ever-absent Pendragon device. The Seneschal’s doing his best to discourage the rumour, but every Knight who hasn’t been detailed to a quest elsewhere is sticking close to London till the New Year, just in case.
         This gives us a slight respite: recently we’ve been having to decamp and move every week or so, as the Knights come sniffing at our metaphorical door. The current thinking among those who do our decision-making is that the Chapel’s going to have to split up and go to ground – some of us camping, but scattered; others in squats in major cities where that kind of thing goes unnoticed; others kipping on friends’ floors across the country. It’s a long-standing contingency plan, but it’ll be the first time it’s happened in our recent history.
         It’ll be a worrying time for us all… but, thanks to the Knights’ temporary bout of greater-than-usual insanity, probably not until New Year or so.
         In our own ranks too – if ‘ranks’ is the word for the members of an anarchist cell – there’ve been some worrying midwinter manifestations. The other day, two young kids who’d been hiking in the forest and got separated from their parents turned up at our camp, all panicked and tearful. A search of the woods was the last thing we needed, so Zara (the Bosnian ally of Robin Hood’s Saracen pal) and Rev Cantrell (Friar Tuck’s ally and the Chapel’s holy man, for a certain very lax definition of ‘holy’) undertook to reunite them with their family.
         Citing a concern, and on the face of it a perfectly reasonable one, that their descriptions might lead the Circle to us, they insisted on going in disguise. Watching them leading the children away into the woods – Rev, bewigged and compulsively adjusting the generous padding needed to fill out a dress a good many sizes too big for his skinny frame, and Zara, in shirt and trousers with a false moustache, slapping her thigh with a nervous and entirely assumed bonhomie – was our first hint that the pressure of the schism between Chapel and Circle might be forcing the allies to manifest in unaccustomed and frankly disturbing ways.
         The absence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can’t be helping, of course. This is the time of year when those two traditionally slug it out with axes, enacting a mythic ritual thingy of decapitation and rebirth that presumably symbolises the death of the old year, vegetation, sunlight and so forth, and the return of all of the above in the forthcoming spring.
         According to Merry at least, that would have provided some much-needed release for all this pent-up devicial energy – but there is, of course, a problem. The ‘Green Knight’ is what the Robin Hood ally used to be called before there was a Robin Hood, and what the Circle still call it. It’s something the Chapel’s been noticeably missing since the death of Shafiq Rashid a month ago at the Circle’s hands.
          Which brings us to our guest, Jory Taylor – or ‘Dan’, as we’re all still calling him. Shaf’s friend, Merry’s boyfriend and the former bondsman of Sir Gawain among the Knights of the Circle, he’s been moody ever since we rescued him from his own people on his way to their private psychiatric prison, and despite the fact that most of us consider him the heir apparent to the Robin Hood ally – Merry being our own Maid Marian, after all, and someone we trust implicitly to choose well – he’s yet to show much sign of leadership.
         Indeed, with the possible exception of Merry herself when they’re in private, he’s not been saying much to anyone at all.
         It won’t be till later that I’ll realise that Jory, who used to bear the device of Sir Gawain and is now being expected to take on the mantle of the Green Knight, might be experiencing quite a bit of inner conflict around this time of year.

* * *

         This year’s Midwinter Day is bright, crisp and clear – the sunshine actually warming at times, though not enough to make you take off any of your extra layers. A white Christmas is clearly out of the question, but the moss in the shadows under the trees surrounding our communal clearing still bears the night’s frost as late as lunchtime.
         Which is when Ahmed becomes the latest of us to start acting strangely. Without any obvious provocation, the young Somali – the ally of the relatively obscure Merry Man Arthur a’Bland, and normally the sweetest guy in the world – starts insulting Jory, calling him among other things an arrogant, muscle-headed English idiot with unadventurous taste in food. You can tell he doesn’t get much practice being abusive, but he seems in a genuinely belligerent mood about it.
         Jory, who’s been quietly reading next to his and Merry’s tent, looks confused and a little hurt. Merry seems more concerned. While some of us try to tell Ahmed not to be such a prat, Merry unships her laptop and fires up the 4G.
         ‘Relax kid, there’s no need for any of this,’ Rev points out reasonably.
         ‘Aye, Dan’s a big guy,’ grunts Scar, Will Scarlet’s ally and Zara’s girlfriend. ‘You take him on, it isn’t gonna end well.’
         ‘I don’t care. That swine has had it coming,’ Ahmed inexplicably insists, and tries to launch himself in Jory’s direction. Scar and Zara grab an arm each.
         ‘I honestly don’t know what your problem is, Ahmed,’ Jory tells him sincerely, ‘but I don’t want to fight you. Let’s drop it, shall we?’
         ‘Ah, so you’re scared of me, you coward?’ Ahmed sneers. Jory starts to look justifiably irritated.
         ‘Hold on, hold on,’ says Merry, standing up. She’s scanning her laptop screen rapidly. ‘It looks like this is another of those seasonal things. Ahmed, calm down, your ally’s riling you up deliberately. It’s trying to act out the plot of a traditional Christmas mummers’ play. Well, one set of variants anyway. You’re going to end up getting knocked unconscious at the very least.’
         Ahmed doesn’t seem in much of a mood to listen, so Little John’s ally Big Jack Bennett steps in. ‘Listen, pal,’ he says, ‘Dan’s our guest here, aye? He doesn’t need you in his face, acting like a pillock.’
         And at this point, his ally obviously too stoked-up to be held back any longer, Ahmed breaks free of the women and hurls himself, not at Jory but at Jack.
         ‘Bugger,’ mutters Merry. ‘That’s in the script too.’
         I try to skim the text of the play over her shoulder. It does indeed look like a free adaptation of the ballad ‘Robin Hood and the Tanner’, where Arthur a’Bland, the Bold Tanner, turns up and needlessly antagonises Robin Hood, but ends up fighting Little John.
         With reality mimicking drama now, there’s only one way that’s likely to go. Jory may be bigger than Ahmed, but Big Jack must be twice the Somali lad’s body-weight, and has probably been brawling longer than he’s been alive. It doesn’t take an especially epic bout of fisticuffs before the big guy punches Ahmed’s lights out.

* * *

         ‘So what do we do now?’ I ask, as we all gaze down at Ahmed lying, nose bloodied but looking kind of peaceful, on the chilly grass.
         Merry’s frowning. ‘I think, now we’re here, we just let the scenario play itself out,’ she says. She flicks through the script. ‘We’ll need a doctor to cure him.’ (I’ve never looked much into mummers’ plays, but I know that bit isn’t in the ballad.) ‘Preferably a drunken, boastful one. My doctorate’s in psychology, so I’m not sure if…’
         ‘Hey, I’ll give the kid first aid.’ Rev shrugs. ‘No doctorate maybe, but I qualify on those other grounds.’ He lopes off to his tent to get his things.
         ‘Well, I don’t recall this happening before,’ I say, as we wait for him to come back. As the bard of the group, Alan a’Dale’s human ally, I’m supposed to be intimately familiar with the Chapel’s oral history. ‘Anyone else?’
         There’s a general shaking of heads. Even old Brian – the sole survivor of the ’60s version of the Chapel, whose Friar Tuck was a failed guru on the run from creditors in Bradford and whose Marian was a drag queen called ‘Marion Repent’ – says he’s never seen the like.
         Rev hurries back. ‘Hold this a minute,’ he says to Jack, handing him a small glass vial. He bends down to hoick Ahmed into the recovery position.
         Big Jack gingerly unstoppers the bottle and sniffs it. He reels back and stumbles over a guy-rope, sprawling backwards into a tent which immediately collapses. A squeal of protest emerges from its compressed occupant.
         ‘Apparently the doctor’s pretty much the only constant in these plays,’ muses Merry, as Zara tuts and retrieves the vial. ‘Apart from the slapstick,’ she adds as Big Jack sits up groggily and finds himself entangled in a cat’s cradle of guy-ropes. ‘The combatants are more usually St George and either the Dragon or a Turkish knight, but someone always ends up getting brought back to life. I’m guessing the tradition originated as a midwinter death-and-resurrection drama, but so watered down now it’s practically homeopathic.’
         ‘You mean like the Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight story?’ I wonder. Then: ‘Oh, I get it. You reckon this was, what, filling in? Little John and Arthur a’Bland as understudies for the big two?’
         ‘I suppose they were the best alternatives available,’ Merry agrees. ‘We’ve got a Saracen, but no St George.’
         ‘I think you loosen his clothing enough now, Rev,’ Zara observes neutrally, passing Cantrell the vial. ‘What happen next, Merry, in this play?’
          Behind her Big Jack uses another guy rope to pull himself upright. A nearby tent falls over under his weight, disgorging an indignant semi-clad couple.
         ‘Well,’ sighs Merry. ‘The best way of bringing the whole thing to a dignified close would probably be to have Old Father Christmas turn up and suggest everyone has a feast instead. Although I’m not sure how much significance Father Christmas would have for Ahmed.’
         Suddenly Ahmed sits up with a gasp. ‘What was that?’ he asks, grasping Cantrell’s wrist. Rev’s been waving his vial underneath the lad’s nose. ‘What’s in that bottle?’
         ‘Ah… just a little something I had about the place,’ says Rev evasively. ‘Let’s just say it acts as a pick-me up.’
         ‘You just gave Ahmed poppers?’ groans Scar. ‘Jesus, Rev.’
         ‘Amyl nitrite,’ I explain helpfully to Jory, seeing his puzzled look. ‘It’s a gay scene drug. Ahmed will be on a short-lived high right now.’
         ‘Hey, you expect me to have smelling salts lying around?’ Cantrell asks defensively. ‘What am I, the vicar in a Jane Austen novel?’
         I realise we haven’t resolved the Father Christmas issue, but Jory steps in at this point. ‘Hey, Ahmed,’ he cries, ‘You’re feeling better! We need to celebrate! What do you say to a good old Green Chapel party, eh?’
         For a moment Ahmed simply looks confused, then a wide smile spreads across his face. ‘My friend, I like your attitude! Yes! Yes, I’m in a party mood!’
         ‘Someone get some music on, for God’s sake,’ snaps Merry, and there’s a general scurrying to set things up for a shindig. Someone produces some finger-food, someone starts dragging out the homebrew, and someone even finds a box of party poppers – the kind that go bang this time.
         A couple of minutes later – which, from what I gather, is about when one might expect Ahmed to start coming down – everyone’s happily grooving away to Claxton and the Ranters.

* * *

         ‘I didn’t like being cast as Robin Hood,’ Jory confides, half an hour later when a few of us get a chance to chat at the makeshift bar. ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable with that, to be honest. I just can’t see myself as a leader. If I have to be Santa Claus to avoid it, then so be it.’ He grabs a beer and wanders over to where Burn, our street-conjurer-in-residence, is doing tricks for the kids. A girl called Finn is claiming stridently that she saw exactly where that coin went.
         ‘Hell, if I’d known the part of Santa was available, I’d have passed up the doctor,’ Rev tells us. ‘Fat, jolly, holy, drinks far too much sherry? Sounds like my kind of guy.’ Collecting a drink of his own, the scrawny man heads back for the impromptu dance floor, where Ahmed’s cheerfully boogying arm-in-arm with Big Jack.
         That leaves just Merry and me. ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’ I ask her. ‘I saw your expression just then, and earlier too. Dan perking up suddenly like that… that means something.’
         The smile that comes over her face doesn’t quite avoid being smug. ‘I think it does,’ she says. ‘You see, Old Father Christmas… he isn’t Santa. The whole gift-giving thing came much later. The traditional British personification of Christmas is older than St Nicholas.’
         ‘Who is it, then?’ I ask.
         She’s definitely smirking now. ‘Well, he wears green. Holly and ivy leaves, too. He turns up at Midwinter, and invites people to a feast where he plays host. He represents the bounty of spring and of the vegetation, the hope of renewal persisting through the winter. He sounds, you know, an awful lot like…’
         ‘Ah,’ I say, looking over to where Jory’s cheerfully handing round the cheese straws. ‘Yeah, I see.’
         It looks like the Green Knight’s paid us a Midwinter visit after all.

‘Here come I, old Father Christmas.
Christmas comes but once a year,
but when it comes it brings good cheer,
roast beef and plum pudding.
A little money in our pockets, ladies and gentlemen?’
The South Cerney Mummers’ Play

A very merry Christmas to anyone who's still reading.

Tableaux

A Merry Christmas to all those of you reading this.

Every year I send out a story in my Christmas cards, and every year I put the previous year's online. The past ones are all archived on this blog, but 2013's was a touch experimental, being 720 words of prose supplied on seven cards that could be rearranged in different combinations to create 720 different narratives[1].

That isn't something I can really present via Blogger, but the indispensable Dale Smith has kindly translated it into PHP so I can publish it on my website.

I give you my 2013 Christmas 'story', 'Tableaux'. 

2014's story is more linear, and is a direct tie-in with the Devices trilogy, taking place between The Pendragon Protocol and the second book. I'm not sure quite what's going to happen with that one -- it may appear as an extra in the books at some point. (I'll tell you, though, that it's called "Mummers and Poppers: A Devices Story for Christmas".)

A very pleasing festive season to you all.

[1] Note for the mathematically competent: Yes, I know. One of them always comes first.

Jan

It's that time of the year again, when we hang mince pies on the tree and children gleefully stuff themselves with mistletoe. It's also the time when I send out a Christmas story to family and friends in, or in place of, Christmas cards. 

This year's one is a bit odd and experimental, and I'm honestly not sure how to go about presenting it here. That's all right, though, because I always blog these stories a year in arrears, so I have twelve months to think about it.

In the meantime, here (and also here) is last year's story, "Jan". This one has a New Year theme, so you should feel free to come back to it in twelve days' time if you want to.

Interestingly (perhaps), while a lot of my fiction has dealt with gender fluidity one way or another, this is the first time I've written about an ordinary transsexual character in a (mostly) realistic present-day setting. I hope I haven't made a hideous hash of it. 

JAN

     He was waiting in the doorway as I left the club. Acid-washed jeans, blue converse trainers, spotless white T-shirt outlining his abs. The face I saw was young, white, perhaps my age, with a minimalist goatee I assumed was ironic. He loitered in the doorway, looking as much a fixture as if someone had screwed him there.
     For all I knew, someone might have. It was that sort of club.
     ‘Going home?’ he said, his voice smiling in the semi-darkness. He sounded like someone who was used to getting his questions answered.
     ‘What if I am?’ I snapped. It was none of his business. He wasn’t a bouncer – too slight, too well-spoken, wrong clothes altogether – and anyway their job’s to keep people out, not in.
     ‘The night hasn’t even got going yet,’ he said. ‘You’ll miss the festivities.’
     ‘That’s kind of the idea,’ I agreed, hoping to shut him up. I was in the middle of a major flounce-out after splitting up with a boyfriend, and stopping for an awkward conversation at the door wasn’t part of the plan.
     ‘Nearly midnight,’ he said, ‘on New Year’s Eve. And you’ve decided to split.’
     ‘Split?’ I repeated. ‘What, have we gone back to the ’50s? Crazy, daddy-oh.’ I was itching to leave, dreading the scene if Paul tried to come after me – he hadn’t taken it well.
     I could have just walked away, I realise. Lied perhaps, told him I was going to meet friends at the Square. For some reason I didn’t even think of it.
     ‘Would you prefer cleave?’ he asked. ‘That can mean split.’ It occurred to me then to worry that maybe he was some kind of serial killer. ‘Or it can mean cling. If you told me you were going to cleave fast, I wouldn’t know if you mean split quickly or stay firmly where you are.’
     ‘What are you on about?’ I’d asked, realising I could probably have left off the last word. (Was he high? Or was I, and he was actually talking perfect sense? It’s happened before.)
     ‘They’re called antagonyms,’ he said. ‘Words which can mean one thing or its opposite. Are you bound for home, or has talking to me bound you here? If I relax my oversight and let you go, will that be an oversight?’
     ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve had this chat,’ I said. ‘Call it what you want, I’m going home.’
     ‘Go where you like,’ he said. ‘You’ll still be on the threshold.’
     It was an odd thing, but since we’d been standing in that doorway, almost blocking it between us, not only had Paul not come after me, but nobody else had pushed past to get in or out of the club. I wondered where the actual bouncers had gone.
     ‘I know who you are, Jan,’ he said. And that really bothered me, because that wasn’t the name I used at the club. I hadn’t used it anywhere, except at the support group.
     I’d only recently decided it was going to be my real name.
     ‘Obviously you don’t,’ I said in as alpha-male a voice as I could muster while I tried to remember where in my man-bag I kept my rape alarm. ‘Because my name’s Ian. Jan’s a woman’s name. Or a foreign one.’
     ‘Well, quite,’ he said. ‘Two names, two identities. Two faces.’
     ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ I said, angry at him for making me talk about this at all. ‘There’s just one me. I’m being true to myself, that’s all.’
     ‘Cleaving,’ he said again.
     The clocks chimed then, prompting mad cheering from the Square and all the pubs and bars around.

     * * *

     ‘Do you think you’ll ever replace him?’ he called after me as I left the club. I guessed he was talking about Paul, who still – I noticed – wasn’t following me. It still wasn’t any of his damn business.
     I walked to the nightbus stop and rode home with the rest of the city’s least enthusiastic revellers. At home I stripped off Ian’s paint-the-town-gay party outfit and put on the clothes I’d bought for Janet. I phoned Declan, wished him a happy New Year, and arranged to meet him for a drink that Saturday.
     I called it off when I heard about Paul.
     Poor Paul. I’d been living with the knowledge of my hidden self for ages, but he’d had no idea.
     That night I’d told him I wasn’t who he thought I was, that Ian was just a part I’d been playing since I was born, and that the real me was someone Paul wouldn’t be interested in, what with him only fancying men and all.
     I might have tried to soften the blow, a little. In fact I’d suggested that the last thing Jan needed as she embarked on her new life was a gay boyfriend reminding everyone of where she’d come from, what I’d been before.
     Like I say, he took it badly.
     He’d wanted to follow me out of the club, I heard later, but his mates – my ex-mates now, mostly – held him back. Let him go, they’d said, the silly drama queen. Let him screw up his life his own way. Paul wasn’t convinced, but he’d never been in the running for the Most Assertive Homosexual awards, so he let himself be persuaded.
     He wasn’t happy, though. After the party ended, when the others left the club and headed back to Clive’s for more drinkies, Paul said he’d take a taxi home. Instead he wandered the streets – thinking ahead, looking back. New Year’s a time for reflection, after all, and I’d given him plenty to consider.
     I suppose he was thinking about transitions and transformations, the faces we wear inside and outside. The people we are with other people, the people we are on our own. Whether he’d ever see me again, and if so who I’d be.
     They cornered him behind the railway station – a bunch of drunk straight lads turfed out from one of the clubs, poisoned by lager and machismo. The police said it was a mugging, but the CCTV footage showed them beating and kicking him without any preamble, one of them grabbing his wallet just before they ran.
     By the time I heard about it Paul was in hospital, in a coma. They’d kicked him in the head a lot, and he had bleeding on the brain. I tried to visit, but his parents had already heard I’d dumped him, and had come to their own conclusions. That door was closed to me now.
     The one I opened led somewhere different.
     The support group where I’d met Declan was a mixed one, men who were really women getting together with women who were really men to swap advice and experiences. Declan had been born Deborah, Deb rather than Dec, and he was further along the way than me, three months of testosterone injections under his belt and living as a pretty convincing man despite his woman’s body.
     At first, things with Dec were fine. He knew his own mind, which I liked, especially compared with Paul’s diffidence. I liked the way he took charge and made me feel protected. With Paul it had usually been me in the driver’s seat, and no girl – I’d told myself, not really having a clue what most girls wanted – wants that.
     After we moved in together, things began to go downhill. Dec started wanting to know where I was when I was out, who I’d been seeing, who I’d been talking to, especially about him. When I said I was allowed some privacy he’d get shouty, sometimes aggressive. He’d always apologise afterwards, blaming it on the hormones.
     How much of it was really the testosterone, how much was acting out his newfound manhood, and how much was just Declan being Declan, I don’t know. My own hormone regime was making me weepy and moody, and living as Janet I was getting depressingly familiar with the kinds of perils that wait for a woman out in the world on her own – stuff which had never impacted me when I walked and talked and dressed like a man. All in all, I was inclined to forgive Dec and preserve the status quo.
     That was until I discovered he’d been cheating on me. An impressive feat, you’d think, under the circumstances, but obviously there are methods. We had a stand-up, knock-down row which ended with me telling him I was leaving. That was when he hit me – for the first, and I’m pleased to say the only time. Luckily his body was still mostly a woman’s, and mine still mostly a man’s, so I was able to get away from him with little more than a black eye.
     The local women’s shelter wouldn’t have me – people like me are always a bit of an embarrassment in those sort of places – and I spent a tense few weeks with my brother and his wife, who ‘understand my lifestyle choices’ but won’t trust me near their kids, before I could get a flat of my own.
     By then, Paul was dead, without ever coming out of his coma. They’d caught the bastards who’d done it from the CCTV images, and put them away for a few years – that’s roughly what a gay man’s life’s worth, apparently – but it hadn’t helped him. He’d hovered on the threshold between death and life for six months, before eventually his parents took the plunge and pulled the plug.
     I was devastated. I told myself it was the thugs who’d killed him, not me, but it was still my fault he’d been in their line of sight that night. I wondered how much more could go wrong in one year.
     I was still transitioning, of course – no-one could take that away from me, at least – but I couldn’t go to the support group any more. I’d tried for a while, but it hadn’t worked out, not with Dec there. My one-to-one counsellor worked out that I was depressed – not a very strenuous way to earn her paycheque – and flagged up a concern that the hormone treatment was having an adverse effect on me.
     And so there I was, that next New Year, having lost not one but two boyfriends to horrific male misbehaviour, with no friends, no likelihood of any new boyfriend any time soon, and the threat that the one source of hope in my life might soon be taken away from me.
     A couple of Paul’s friends – my former friends – had kept in touch with me for his sake, though fewer and fewer during the year, and after his death only the ones who’d liked me more than him in the first place. A couple of them – Ryan and Geoff, specifically – invited me along to their New Year’s bash. Come on, they said, everyone’s going to be there. Nobody will think anything of it. There’ll be all sorts.
     It was idiotic of me to take them up on it, really – but honestly, where else was I going to go?

     * * *

     As I passed through the lobby of the intimidatingly expensive apartment block where Geoff and Ryan had their flat, someone was waiting for me. Converse trainers, tight white T-shirt, acid-washed jeans – the styles a year advanced, the goatee even more microscopic and self-aware.
     This wasn’t him, though. This was a black guy, with the same self-assured air. ‘Leaving already, Jan?’ he asked.
     The voice was different too. I mean, obviously – it was a different guy. But he had the same amused drawl.
     ‘Um, yes,’ I said, a bit nonplussed. ‘Do I know you?’ I hadn’t seen him at the party, but I’d been hideously distracted for most of the time.
     ‘You met my other half,’ he said. ‘This time last year.’
     ‘Ah,’ I said, and paused. He didn’t volunteer a name. ‘So is this a hobby, or do you both loiter professionally?’
     I was just passing the time. The evening had gone badly – very badly, excruciatingly badly – and I was off home to watch Jools Holland on the TV and drink about a pint of vodka. Either that or throw myself quietly off a bridge somewhere – not at the stroke of midnight though, because that would have been tacky. I hadn’t quite decided.
     I suppose I was on what you’d call a threshold.
     ‘You could stay too,’ he said, ‘if you want. Of all Ryan and Geoff’s friends, they’ll be saying later, only Jan’s left.’
     I remembered his boyfriend’s obsession with ambiguous words and phrases. At some point in the year, when I’d been bored, I’d looked antagonyms up on Wikipedia. Janus words, they’re called, after some ancient god with two faces. I tried one of my own. ‘So are you going to sanction me for leaving, or are you going to sanction it?’
     He looked at me calmly. ‘You haven’t had a good year, have you?’
     ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You guys are perceptive as well as weird and creepy.’ I never had worked out how his boyfriend had known that I was Jan.
     He smiled. ‘Wait here with me,’ he said. ‘It’s not long till midnight.’ He was right, I hadn’t made it out in time to get home for the chimes. Too many people had wanted to talk to me about Paul.
     ‘With you?’ I said. ‘Why would I want to do that?’
     ‘It may help,’ he said. ‘You ran out on us last year, and that didn’t work out too well, did it?’
     I shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve got much else to look forward to.’ He was the first man who’d seemed interested in my company for quite a while, and it wasn’t long to wait, in any case.
     I stayed with him till midnight sounded and all the roars of welcome for the New Year rose up from half the flats in the building. As the clock tolled on the church down the road, he said, ‘New Year’s a time for reflection, after all.’
     The way he said it, it sounded like the sort of thing people say in church.

     * * *

     We stayed together a little longer, chatting some more before I went back inside.
     I caught up with some old friends, made up with a few I’d fallen out with. By the time I went home to change, a few short hours before the sun returned, I felt – not happy, certainly, but not as bleak, and certainly with no immediate thoughts of suicide.
     Over the following weeks, I learned that my counsellor had cancelled her note of concern, predicting that my spirits would soon be improving. I started going to the support group again, despite Dec’s presence. It helped a little.
     After a while, I sold my place and went to stay with my brother and sister-in-law. When I slowly developed a black eye, I took this as a signal to move in with Dec.
     Our first hours together were stormy, violent even, but when he healed the pain in my eye I forgave him. I even forgot about his infidelities. Over the coming months I watched as he became less domineering and controlling, at times even sweet and affectionate as the testosterone left his body.
     My oestrogen levels were decreasing too, the hormone drawn out steadily into the doctors’ needles and packaged away. I found myself becoming more irritable and angry. It wasn’t something I liked about myself, but it seemed a tiny price to pay for all the other ways in which the world was getting better.
     Halfway through the year, at the flick of a switch, Paul returned, suspended between death and life. His parents waited anxiously at his bedside for the first signs of his consciousness returning.
     By the time Declan and I parted company, we respected each other as equals. We’d go on seeing each other at the support groups, of course, but by then I was too excited about Paul’s imminent recovery to go on worrying about him. In anticipation I stopped wearing women’s clothes, and started dressing myself as Ian again.
     They’d searched the prison system diligently for men who could redeem themselves by curing Paul. They’d brought them together in a courtroom so that they could be given their mission. Eventually, as New Year approached, the hospital put him in an ambulance and shipped him, still unconscious, to the back alley where these good samaritans would do their healing work. A crowd of well-wishers had gathered, and one by one they left him lying there, calmly waiting for these men and their merciful ministrations. One of the ex-convicts had even found his wallet, and was looking after it for him.
     A little later, Paul was restored to full and vibrant life. By the time I reached the club, he was waiting only for me to make him complete.
     ‘Do you think you’ll ever replace him?’ someone asked me as I stepped up to the doorway, and I knew that I never would.
     A great roar went up all around us, as midnight chimed.

     * * *

     ...Thinking ahead, looking back. New Year’s a time for reflection, after all...

     * * *

      ‘Do you think you’ll ever replace him?’ the white guy with the acid-washed jeans and minimalist goatee called after me as I left the club. I guessed he was talking about Paul, who still – I noticed – wasn’t following me.
     I started to walk toward he nightbus stop, planning to ride home with the rest of the city’s least enthusiastic revellers, worrying slightly that the weird word-obsessed stranger would follow me, half-hoping that Paul might.
     Suddenly I stopped, and turned round. I’d realised that those last words were another of the man’s weird equivocations. It might well be true that I’d never find another boyfriend to fit the space that Paul had taken up in my life... but I could easily put him back where he belonged. I’d taken him out, but I could still replace him. It wasn’t too late.
     I stared at the stranger, who was looking after me with a sly smile.
     So what if I was a woman inside? Paul loved me, I knew that. He wasn’t a shallow person – less so than me, in fact, if I really thought his presence would hamper me in my new life as Jan. If I could adjust to being a woman, perhaps Paul could adjust to loving one. It should be his choice, in any case, not mine.
     The alternative... well, I didn’t know what the alternative was. Declan, I supposed. But that was all unknown territory, and I wasn’t looking forward to exploring it.
     I hurried back. Paul couldn’t have left the club yet.
     As I approached, the stranger stepped aside, moving across the doorway in front of me. He slumped there, forehead to the wall, hands folded behind his back. His other face smiled ironically at me: a skinny black guy leaning comfortably back against the doorjamb, the beard this side of his head even tinier and more self-restrained.
     ‘Tell your other half Happy New Year,’ I said.
     His smile didn’t waver – I didn’t even see his lips move – as he replied, ‘You’re welcome.’
     I stepped back across the threshold.

© Philip Purser-Hallard 2012

A merry Christmas -- and, vitally, a happy New Year -- to all. 

Mission to the Stars

I may not have updated this blog for the last two months; it may be true that nearly every update for the last two years has been plugging a book; there may be 20 or so updates I've promised in the past to put up, easily that many books I've read without reviewing, and any number of interesting thoughts I've been wanting to blog about before ending up simply not having the time... but never let it be said that I don't post a Christmas story here every damn year.

Until I run out of ideas, of course.  You can let it be said then.  

This is the one I sent out with my Christmas cards last year... as ever, there's a new one this year, but unless you're on my Christmas card list you won't be reading it until 2013. This one features Imogen Tantry, the 27th-century Jesuit and pope-in-waiting who appears in Predating the Predators and "De Umbris Idearum".

Past stories, including this one, are archived on my website.

MISSION TO THE STARS

I

     On top of the massive conical tree, a five-pointed star glistens and winks.
     As the priests approach, it opens all its eyes in alarm and takes fright. It launches itself away through the branches, chittering as it swings from arm to arm to arm to arm to arm. Centuries ago, the first human naturalists to land on Brising were astonished to find the descendants of starfish living in trees.
     To any Brisingi animal, of course, the Earthman and woman now traversing the forest floor look strange and ugly, their four-limbed frame and bilateral symmetry as unnatural as those of the crosses they wear. So far their companion, a cleric of native Brisingi stock, has refrained from commenting on this.
     ‘This is an out-of-the-way place,’ observes Father Soranzo, one of the human pair. It is not clear whether he means the town or the planet. The clerical party has come directly from Forest Town, the planet’s centre of human settlement and de facto capital, where the buildings merely look like trees. Elsewhere, across most of Brising’s wooded landmass, the towns are distinguished only by how densely populated the trees are.
     ‘Miracles tend to happen in obscure places,’ observes his female colleague, ‘when they happen at all.’
     ‘Indeed.’ Soranzo latches onto the back end of the sentence. As an investigator for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints his job is to strive energetically to disprove miracles, and he loves his work. ‘We have no proof that there’s been any miracle here. Even if we confirm the facts of the case, I’m still far from convinced there’s no scientific explanation.’
     Their hermaphrodite companion makes a fluting sigh of exasperation. ‘For the last time Father Soranzo, my people are complex organisms. We can’t regrow our limbs without divine aid, any more than you can.’
     To human eyes, the Right Reverend Hgnull, the Bishop of Forest Town and the senior Roman Catholic on Brising, looks very little like his-her ancient marine ancestors – themselves, of course, not true starfish but merely a close native analogue to the Earth echinoderm.
     If anything, the Bishop resembles an assemblage of different species of starfish grafted together, around a stocky central column. Nine sturdy legs carry this torso, while nine slender limbs branch from its top, each tipped with a circular, nine-fingered hand at whose centre is an eye. Brisingi are generally happy to do without clothes, but Hgnull affects a cloak-and-collar arrangement which approximates to the stole and clerical collar his-her human equivalent might wear. The bishop’s mottled skin is, as it happens, rather close to an episcopal purple.
     ‘Your Grace, I know.’ Soranzo holds up his hands placatingly. ‘Still, perhaps some kind of genetic throwback...’
     ‘That’s absurd, Father,’ snaps the woman who accompanies them. ‘If I laid an egg you’d consider it miraculous enough.’
     The Bishop giggles. Since his-her harmonious voice is produced by carefully modulating air flow through papullae, it’s a calculated noise rather than a spontaneous one. ‘Thank you, Monsignora,’ Hgnull says.
     ‘Nevertheless,’ Soranzo persists, ‘in some species of Earth starfish...’
     Monsignora Imogen Tantry tunes them out as best she can.

II

     Somehow, without asking for the honour and indeed rather to her dismay, Imogen Tantry has become the Pope’s go-to cleric for xenotheological issues – even when, as in this instance, they seem entirely routine apart from the involvement of alien believers.
     True, the appointment comes with its own (rather meaningless) courtesy title – and when the Holy Father (even a liberal reformer like Cosmas IX) commands, it is not for a mere priest to refuse her mission. Still, in all honesty the former Reverend Doctor (or, if one insisted, Mother) Tantry would prefer to have been left alone to her studies.
     Most recently, these have revolved around the simple but fundamental theological question: was Jesus’ the only Incarnation? If so (and this has certainly been the assumption of, well, all previous Catholic thought), then the question of why humanity, of all the species in the universe, was favoured with the sole manifestation of God in mortal form remains a baffling one.
     Through a combination of library research, fieldwork and buttonholing alien academics at conferences, Imogen has drawn up a list of 23 non-human religions whose fundamental principles are remarkably similar to those of Christianity and whose founders – living anywhere from a few centuries to three million years ago – were born or hatched or otherwise brought into existence in circumstances approximately analogous to those of the Christian Gospel narratives.
     The more unusual the alien biology, of course, the stranger the analogy becomes. Imogen’s favourite illustration of this is the Tripiktit legend of the male and female who, lacking as they did a spouse, were visited by an angelic thremale and conceived a holy larva. Certainly a virgin birth would mean little to the Brisingi, whose population centres are constantly awash with airborne male gametes and who regularly conceive with no thought whatsoever as to the providers’ identities.
     Not that the Brisingi have a Nativity-equivalent narrative – relatively few species do. This also irritates Imogen, as it effectively replicates the previous problem: why would God particularly favour these 24 sentient species above His other creations? If Tripiktit, why not Brisingi?
     One possibility, of course, is that every sentient species experiences an Incarnation event, but that only a minority result in organised religions. To Imogen, a loyal daughter of the Church, this thought is potentially troubling.
     Unfortunately, it has little connection with the matter in hand. Catholicism is by no means the dominant religion on Brising – there are few worlds where it is these days, certainly not Earth – but the planet has a well-established, majority-alien Catholic diocese. It was founded by the missionary Order of St Kloxoth, shortly after the planet came under the spreading hegemony of humanity, and has governed itself with humdrum banality ever since.
     The reports of Mhiskir’s visions, and the subsequent miraculous healings, are unprecedented on Brising but hardly elsewhere. There are standard routines for investigating them. Imogen feels, in point of fact, that the Holy Father is getting himself terribly worked up over nothing.

III

     Given how male germ cells saturate the air of Brisingi settlements, it is fortunate for human visitors that their smell is rather pleasant, somewhat like cloves. The intensity of the odour is the only real way to tell from ground level whether one is wandering through one of Brising’s cities or its countryside.
     The place the priests have come to visit is on a rising gradient of scent, the outskirts of a town whose surrounding trees are used as pasture for herds of food animals. The five-point treestar the party saw earlier was an outlier from such a herd.
     The Bishop scurries expertly up one particular tree, with a sudden turn of speed which forcibly reminds Imogen how ill-suited the Brisingi species is to ground-dwelling. A moment later, a platform is lowered on ropes, which she and Soranzo climb onto, to be raised up into the forest canopy.
     The clerics convene on a wide wooden deck slung between branches – the nearest thing to a building usually found in this kind of traditional settlement. At one end are an altar and a cross, flanked with conventional statues of Christ and the Blessed Virgin. A Brisingi priest greets them, along with a handful of his-her congregants. They vary widely in colour, as do all the species, but nearly all of them display the crouching, submissive posture which Imogen has come to associate with the Barren.
     Like most humans, most Brisingi retain their original sex throughout their life. Unlike humans, around a quarter of the population are male, biologically speaking, and a quarter female, with the remaining half being hermaphrodite. Tradition makes a different distinction, however.
     Before Brisingi scientists came to examine their own biology in detail, fertilisation was seen as a phenomenon without agency, as impersonal as the fog or rain. Nobody questioned the origins of the clovey scent surrounding their settlements, and the only difference they observed between the sexes was that three-quarters of the population – the females and hermaphrodites – regularly gave birth to young, whereas the remaining quarter did not.
     Even today, the pronouns in most Brisingi languages equate to ‘she’ for the ‘fertile’ three-quarters, and ‘it’ for the remaining males. In English, for the sake of politeness and (relative) accuracy, these are generally rendered as ‘he-she’ and ‘he’.
     Although it is now generally understood that the so-called ‘Barren’ contribute with the hermaphrodites to the common aerial genetic pool, nonetheless the planet’s less enlightened cultures continue to treat them as an underclass, untouchable lest their reproductive uselessness rub off on more fertile members of society. The worst regimes, with self-perpetuating idiocy, sterilise them.
     Often they are used as cheap labour, trafficked and indentured, ill-treated and abused. As in the past, in the Roman Empire and Imogen Tantry’s native India, it is largely to this caste that Christianity on Brising appeals.
     In this region, most of the Barren work as treestar-herds for rich farmers. Their employers harshly punish such crimes as laziness, theft or disrespect, wherever (and however inaccurately) they perceive them. This explains one especially noticeable thing about this small congregation, which is how many of its members are missing one or more arms.
     In an eighteen-limbed species this is of course a less drastic punishment than it would be among humans, but to Imogen’s eyes it still appears barbaric.
     This despite the fact that all the arms which have been thus removed are now quite visibly growing back.

IV

     The Bishop ushers forward one of the Barren, a ruddy, stippled individual whose smaller stature betrays his relative youth. His missing arm has now grown back to nearly two-thirds of its original length, its end already circled with stubby fingers.
     ‘This,’ Hgnull tells the humans, ‘is Mhiskir. He was brought here half a year ago, from the other side of the continent, then indentured as a treestar-herd.’
     It was Mhiskir whose vision started the current spate of miraculous healings in this outcast community. It was (if the Order of St Kloxoth, who still take an interest in the planet, can be believed) a vision of the Blessed Mhust, the first Brisingi to convert to Catholicism and a hot contender for sainthood. The Kloxothans, whose patron was also of the extraterrestrial persuasion, precipitated the priests’ current mission on Brising.
     It soon becomes clear, however, that the account which reached the Order was deficient in certain vital respects.
     ‘Was it the Blessed Mhust you saw, Mhiskir?’ Father Soranzo asks, getting straight to the point.
     ‘I suppose,’ Mhiskir says. The lad is shy, and speaks no English. The local priest acts as his interpreter. ‘It was a Brisingi, all shining with light. I suppose it must have been.’
     ‘Who did you tell about it first?’ Soranzo asks.
     ‘I went straight to the treestar pens and told my boss,’ Mhiskir says. ‘But he-she said I was wicked and arrogant to say such things. Then he-she chopped off my arm.’
     Imogen winces. Then, intrigued, she asks, ‘Why wicked? Is your boss a Catholic, Mhiskir?’
     ‘Not him-her,’ the Brisingi says. ‘No way. He-she didn’t like what the shining Brisingi said to me.’
     ‘Which was?’ asks Soranzo. A look of some significance passes between Mhiskir, the native priest and the bishop. Then one of the parishioners scampers away in search of something, and Hgnull turns his-her eyes towards Imogen.

V

     ‘They didn’t know what to do at first,’ the Bishop says. ‘When the story of the healings got out, the priest confided in me, and I contacted His Holiness directly. I requested that he send you specifically, Monsignora.’
     The human clerics look at him-her in bafflement. Then Soranzo repeats, ‘What did it say? What did the vision say to you, Mhiskir?’
     The local priest translates again. ‘That I would have a child,’ Mhiskir says simply, and all along Imogen’s arms the hairs stand on end.
     Mhiskir continues. ‘I asked, “How can I? Surely you know I’m Barren.” “But God will find a way,” the figure said.’
     The parishioner returns with great care, supporting a basket in three arms. Mhiskir takes it and rocks it, making gentle shushing noises, before showing it to the humans.
     ‘It’s not the Blessed Mhust who’s been healing people,’ Mhiskir tells them. ‘It’s him.’
     Nestled in cushioned fabric lies an arm. A Brisingi limb, the same dappled red as Mhiskir’s own. At one end fingers flex, and the hand’s central eye regards them solemnly.
     At the other – the plane where it was sliced from Mhiskir’s shoulder – a new torso is growing. Already the columnar form of a Brisingi, with nine legs and eight other, tiny, fragile waving arms, is present in miniature.
     ‘Oh my,’ says Imogen.
     This child was born – not that that can really be the word – in animal pens, after his father had made a long journey. His birth came with its own stigma of implausibility – the child of a male, a virgin birth on a world with no concept of virginity. It is impossible, surely, for this creature to exist.
     No, not impossible. Miraculous.
     Imogen looks at her two companions: Hgnull, quivering now with this revelation of the great secret, Soranzo looking simply dumbfounded.
     Far above their heads, a treestar chitters. It is almost as if the three of them followed it here.
     ‘I’m very sorry,’ Imogen says politely. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t brought a thing to give him.’

© Philip Purser-Hallard 2011

Merry Christmas, one and all.

Snippet

Looking through old documents recovered from my previous computer, I found this, which I have absolutely no memory of.

Titled "Website vague idea thing.doc", it appears to be my early stab at a bonus story for my website, bringing elements from "Nursery Politics" and "The Ruins of Time" at the same point in Of the City of the Saved... that I eventually used for another website bonus story, "Unification Theory". It's incomplete, obviously, but you may, as I did, find it briefly diverting.

     ‘Ma’am,’ says one of the more heavily-armoured of the security personnel, ‘sir. May I see your invitations, please?’

     The left-hand member of the black-upholstered duo (the man, though the bodily divergence between the two is hardly striking) pulls a white card from the inner pocket of his frock-coat, as from a shoulder-holster. ‘Mr Smits,’ he says, then nodding to his right, ‘Ms Lefèvre. We’re with one of the research institutes,’ he asserts blandly.

     Naked of mask, his smoke-glassed eyes reflect the parsecs-distant skyline.

     The security man runs the invitation through a handheld scanner, then inclines a plated head. ‘Very good, sir. Sorry to have bothered you.’ He trundles away.

     When he is out of earshot, the woman called Lefèvre by the man calling himself Smits mutters, ‘I told you we were too conspicuous. We should have dressed to blend in.’

     ‘That’s not our way,’ says Smits. ‘The Director never approved of undercover work. We’re here to watch the Houseworlder. It doesn’t matter if he knows we’re here.’

     The colleagues stare for some time at the dark-skinned, white-djellabaed figure of Professor Handramit, sharing a quiet cigarette at the parapet with one of his hosts. His human shape unnerves the agents, even more than the collateral security man’s contaminated biodata.

     ‘At least we know who this one is,’ Lefèvre says at length. ‘Not like that herm they found in Tormance.’

     Smits shifts uneasily. ‘That’s just a rumour.’

     ‘Whatever,’ his colleague says. ‘I believe Mr Sideras.’

     It is a rumour which none of the Institute’s personnel likes to think about. Supposedly, the alien whom Mr Sideras found in Tormance District had been passing for some years as a normal working hermaphrodite: making wooden furniture to sell, socialising at the colour bars, on amicable terms with customers and neighbours. Had it not been for the exquisitely-honed paranoia of Sideras’s colleague Ms Gowan, the carpenter’s dried skin-secretions on a recently-built kneelchair and a portable biodata-analysis kit, the interloper might have gone undetected for many more years.

     If correct, the story of the hermaphrodite would suggest quite inescapably that somebody is resurrecting humanoid aliens – people, to use the word in its loosest sense, who appear human, yet are the heirs to no human ancestry whatsoever – and sending them to act as spies among the honest panhuman populations of the City.

     Unnervingly, this specimen remains at large. The attempt at arrest did not favour Sideras and Gowan, and the latter has since entered seclusion. The rumour runs that she is, somehow, paralysed: not harmed, of course (that being categorically impossible) but preserved, intact and perfect, in a condition of stasis, as if for her the passage of time has been indefinitely suspended.

     Within the City this, too, should be a categorical impossibility, although the fact is less well known.

Dyschronismus Carol

It's time for the now-traditional web release of the story I sent out last year in my Christmas cards. 2010's offering was a science-fiction reworking of a traditional Christmas story.

DYSCHRONISMUS CAROL
by Philip Purser-Hallard


     Marley was dead, to begin with. Luckily we could fix that.

     Protean Pete visited him on his deathbed – 24/12/1836, seven years pastward of our scheduled intercession – and made him the offer. We’d take a working CC of his mind at point of death (generations before the process was perfected, so Marley was a winner there) and timecap him back with us to our own century, once we’d wrapped up business in his.

     The boss could find him work – probably market-trend analysis, given his talents. He’d fit right in with the other post-mortal employees in TC:Corp’s central storage coil.

     Immortality came with a condition, natch. Marley had to use his intimate knowledge of our subject to give him a specially tailored spookshow.

     Jacob Marley hadn’t been a ruthlessly successful player in the C19 money-markets without knowing a sweet deal when he saw one. Even before Pete gave him our reasons, helping haunt his best friend didn’t give Jacob a moment’s qualm. Once he was convinced Pete himself wasn’t a delirium phantom, we had him on-team.

     Turned out he was quite the creative collaborator, too. His custom facetop burrowed right into our subject’s psyche and cracked it open along the faultlines.

     Jacob’s overlay of local fiscal imagery over Judaeo-Christian folk-eschatology would have scared the living oxytocin out of any Victorian capitalist. As Marley’s ghastly holophantasm groaned and wailed and ghouled it up in his chains of ledger-books and cash-boxes, our timecap’s psychometers all told us we were getting through to Ebenezer Scrooge.

* * *

     Big Ish, Protean Pete and me are the frequent flyers on TC:Corp’s emergency intercession squad. We spend so much time in the past we joke about settling down there. I’m certain Ish has a second wife in Medici Florence.

     Pete’s a premature post-mortal, a carbon-copy still active long after his original started renting six-by-two cellar-space. During fieldwork he resides in the timecap’s minicoil – luckily there’s enough storage for Marley to join him without getting too cosy.

     Ish is our musclebrain – not the insult it sounds. Germ-work and soma-drugs have boosted Ish’s brain and his muscles, till he can think as speedily and nimbly as he can... well, throw a small horse. He’s eight feet tall, built like a structural pillar which happens also to be a chess grandmaster.

     Then there’s me. I deal with the crude mechanics of intercession – where to point the timecap, which bits to push when, and the effect that has on the whole assemblage. Time itself is a mechanism, and some of us were just made to tinker.

     They call me the Mechanic, obviously. We intercessors pride ourselves on technical skill, not imagination.

     The Responsive Intercession Department’s been part of TC’s corporate responsibility wing since the boss introduced the Model A Time Capsules – back in ’47, our time. The engineers build in multiplural redundancies and safeties, natch, so users won’t impinge on the history they visit... but there’s always someone determined to crush the butterflies.

     Some of them have agendas. However well-intentioned, they’re liable to crumple history into a scrunched-up moebius strip of causality. Our single least popular assignment’s the Hitler bodyguard unit.

     This impingement seemed targeted, and at the origins of TC:Corp itself, no less. Stopping the inventors of time-travel using their own product? You’re looking at a major dyschronismus – a grandfather paradox of the kill-the-ancestors variety.

     Those never end well. Some of them never end at all.

     The boss (and I mean the boss, Mr TC:Corp himself) dispatched us as soon as the alarms started pulsing. He knew he had a limited window open before causality started caving in on top of him.

     If our intercession here in 1843 didn’t come out right, chances were we no longer had a future to call our own.

     It seemed the miserable hermit existence our subject was leading wasn’t what history demanded of Ebenezer Scrooge. Never one of the C19’s big noises, he was still part of the soundscape – a background hum which had suddenly changed its pitch.

     Whatever it was our rogue timecappers had altered (and there were plenty of possibilities in Ebenezer’s new biog, from his ma’s early death to the awkward breakup with his one-time best girl) it had changed him from a legendary philanthropist, his name a byword for generosity and bonhomie, into a crabby, embittered old man.

     Unless we could reboot his outlook on the world, Scrooge would die without giving away an ounce of love or money to another person ever again. And the consequences of that could – would – be catastrophic.

     A miserly, misanthropic Scrooge was a danger to history. Our job was to enrich his soul, awaken his long-suppressed childlike wonder, and generally act as agents of redemption in his withered, dried-up gourd of a heart.

     Well, it was more life-affirming than most jobs. It certainly beat working the Hitler detail.

* * *

     Stakes aside, it was a standard intercession. Jacob’s phantasmodrama was the warm-up, what we call in intercessor jargon stave 1. Pete took stave 2, the life-flashes-before-your-eyes session. Ish was on stave 3, AKA it’s-a-wonderful-life-and-you’re-not-living-it, and I was stave 4, the near-death-experience. As usual.

     Staves 2-4 use the timecap’s look-don’t-touch settings to let the subject walk around his own past and future, helping the process along with airborne psychoactives to unlock subconscious imagery. From Scrooge’s POV, stave 2 showed him characters from storybooks wandering round his childhood memories.

     Where most PM-CCs use some idealised version of their old body for their holographic interface, Protean Pete flickers between forms like reflections in a boating-lake. For stave 2, he uses this wrinkled-child facetop which, I tell you frankly, creeps me out. Fact is, I can’t remember what Pete looked like when he was alive, and my memory’s better than most.

     Big Ish gave stave 3 his full holly-green-giant act, a pagan god of edible dead things. He’d calibrated the timecap to show Scrooge what the rest of Victorian society – and especially his employees and family – were doing on Christmas Day 1843. His ho-ho-ho, sit-on-my-knee-old-man routine was meant to point the subject towards his own inner Santa.

     Then it was my turn. I’m no actor, but for an NDE you don’t need to be – a black cloak and an ominous silence pretty much cover it. Most people find the way I move disquieting, too, and that helps – though what really scares the oxies out of most subjects is being shown the circumstances of their own deaths.

     In the timeframe we’d gotten locked into, Scrooge died alone, unhappy and unmourned, his minimalist funeral attended only by his scant relatives and hangers-on hoping for a free meal. His gravestone was just about the bleakest thing I’d ever seen.

     By the time I left him, he was begging to be allowed to change the future.

* * *

     Of course it was never really about Scrooge. I tried to tell Marley that while we waited for the boss to see us.

     Stave 5 – dipping into the subject’s future life, checking its new course – had been textbook. We found Scrooge making his money ethically (which alone would have marked him out from his fellow Victorian financiers) then distributing it among... oh, you know. Dogs’ homes, starving families, orphans in dire need of outings to the seaside. That style of thing.

     Then it was back home to ’57, and routine decontamination in the Responsive Intercession Dept at TC:Corp central. The usual diagnostic ticklist of random historical events checked out against the secure records held in the timecap’s coil – dyschronismus averted.

     Then they told us the boss had asked to see all four of us.

     I don’t know what those rogue timecappers had against the boss, but we all understood that in sabotaging Scrooge’s biog, they’d been targeting him. Now he was safe, so were TC:Corp, and us, and history.

     The boss isn’t your usual post-mortal. He’s one of the earliest, for starters – 40 years dead, following an 80-year mortal span. He’s not one to haunt the coils, staring through a facetop at the outside world. He’s had a dedicated microcoil implanted in a mechanical frame – quite like mine, in the same way a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud’s ‘quite like’ a Morris Minor.

     The boss is also the richest man in the world, natch.

     ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr Marley,’ he said as we entered his office, Pete and Marley projecting from a portacoil on Ish’s wrist. ‘My friends were always speaking of you during my childhood. I was born after you died, of course – although I suppose I must now say that you apparently died.’

     ‘You have me at a disadvantage, sir.’ Jacob’s holophantasm – appearing now as a handsome young Regency beau – bowed. ‘Doubly so, as I must thank you most humbly for your employees’ goodness in saving my life. Pray tell me, how should I address you, and who were our mutual friends to whom you allude?’

     The boss smiled. That expensive face of his can do that.

     ‘You knew my father,’ he said. ‘He was the clerk at Scrooge and Marley’s. I’m Timothy Cratchit, Bob Cratchit’s youngest son.’

* * *

     Cratchit Senior was the clerk we’d focussed on during the intercession, staves 3 and 4 particularly. Our subject took a special interest in his family, and ‘Tiny Tim’ in particular, which had continued well into stave 5.

     That, too, was history the way it should have been. As a kid, the boss was Ebenezer Scrooge’s protégé. He suffered from one of those stereotypically grim Victorian wasting diseases, and without our subject’s influence (and especially his affluence), he’d have died in childhood.

     Scrooge’s own nephew predeceased him, and it was Timothy Cratchit – already a financial genius at 16, thanks to the old man’s tutelage – who inherited his monetary empire, and put it towards alleviating those diseases of poverty which he and so many others had suffered.

     Now what was once Scrooge and Marley’s is TC:Corp – and the boss had to explain quite firmly to Jacob that no, having willed it away on his deathbed, he wasn’t entitled to a slice of the pie.

     The research Timothy Cratchit funds has led to cures and therapies, drugs and prosthetics: more recently, to biological technologies including germ-work and soma-drugs, and cybernetics like the mind-machine interface and the coils. Without the boss, mechanical men like me couldn’t exist. Nor could custom-builds like Ish, or PM-CCs like Pete and Marley.

     The timecaps were a tangential by-product, beginning in the study of human time-perception. It would be tempting to guess that it was Scrooge’s tales of seeing past and future that prompted Cratchit to pursue that like of research. But that would be the other kind of grandfather paradox, the become-your-ancestor type, and those can be just as chronoclysmic. So let’s hope that that isn’t how it happened.

     In any case, TC:Corp marketed its first Time Capsules in 1947. Ten years ago, our time.

     Without Cratchit – without Scrooge – who knows how long it would have taken the human race to get so advanced? It could have been another century or more before we had this kind of technology.

* * *

     So there we were – Big Ish, Protean Pete and me – politely trying not to look too bored while Cratchit and Marley caught up on old times, remembering life in C19 London and their joint best friend, Ebenezer Scrooge. It wasn’t long, though, before the boss was off on his favourite topic – himself, and his life’s work.

     ‘I might well have died, Mr Marley, as a child,’ he said. ‘Had it not been for dear Mr Scrooge – well, I dare not speculate. In any case, it is my firm conviction that God has spared me for this work.’

     This kind of talk makes us uncomfortable, natch, but C19 Christianity was Jacob’s native culture.

     ‘Should I understand, Mr Cratchit,’ he asked, ‘that you see yourself as a collaborator with the Almighty? One whom He has tasked with the perfection of His creation?’

     ‘Precisely, sir,’ Cratchit said sententiously. ‘With His help, I believe that I am to deliver all of humankind from the scourge of death.’

     Thing is, he may be right. Thanks to Scrooge – thanks, ultimately, to us three frequent fliers and Marley – ‘Tiny Tim’ did NOT die. Ever.

     And thanks to him... well, it’s just possible that no-one else will have to either.

     ‘God has already blessed you and me, Mr Marley, but we must not be the last. It is my dearest wish to ensure that God blesses everyone.’

     He’s always saying that.

© 2010 Philip Purser-Hallard

Past years' stories can be found here:

• Sol Invictus (2006): A troubled couple experience some midwinter reality slippage.
  
• Polarity (2007): Have you ever wondered who lives at the South Pole?
  
• Blitzenkrieg (2008): An arms manufacturer develops a seasonal delivery system.
  
• Stella Maris (2009): Three wise women attend an inauspicious birth.

They seem to be getting longer, slightly worryingly. You'll have to wait until next year for 2011's, which features a character from The Vampire Curse.

Merry Christmas, one and all.