Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

You feel a weight shift in your coat, a tug at its lapel as Jim climbs onto your shoulder and perches there, unremarked.

He whispers in your ear: ‘They’re rocks. Big ones. Great hunks of regolith. Rail-gunned out of lunar orbit, set on course to hit the Earth. We knew of this in Woomera. Defences, the Bund told us. A last resort. A weapon to end war! The old story. I’m sorry, Stu. We weren’t quick enough to stop it. We weren’t strong enough. Hell, who am I kidding? We weren’t clever enough.’

Gently, you pluck Jim off your shoulder and tuck him into your trouser pocket where he won’t get away again and cause any more trouble. You blink to clear your eyes. You ease slowly through the crowd towards the Barbican.

This was the flat Fel used when she wanted to be alone. This was the place she came when she wanted to think about her time with you. This was where she stayed when she wanted to remember.

She came here when she was trying to get pregnant. You know that from the testing wand you found in the bin. What you didn’t know, what you didn’t guess, until Jim spotted the date on that appointment slip, was what her pregnancy was for.

You open the door. There’s someone moving about in the bedroom and you think it might be her. There are heavy footsteps. Is she still pregnant? Are you in time? If you are, if she’s still pregnant, if she’s yet to go through with it, then maybe there’s still hope. Maybe the Chernoy Process can be reversed. There may still be a way to save her.

The door comes open and you start to speak and into the hall steps Georgy Chernoy, stark naked, his eyes gummed with sleep, one hand in his chest hair, the other scratching his balls. He stares at you.

You want to be sick.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he says.

You can’t speak.

‘This is my flat,’ he says.

This, in all fairness, is true.

‘Wait there,’ he says. He goes back into the bedroom.

You lean against the wall, your hands over your face, and let gravity carry you down the wall to a sitting position. Something sharp stabs you in the thigh. Have you been stung? You stagger up, flicking at your trousers, and there is a dot of blood soaking through the khaki. Good God, you have been stung! Above the dot of blood there’s a great bulge of stuff, jammed in your trouser pocket. The lining’s got all twisted around. You dig your hand in to sort out your pocket and you prick your finger. You suck a bead of blood away and, shambling about the hall, you use both hands, tugging this way and that, to untangle the unholy mess stuffing your pocket.

Construction-kit Jim has vanished. Rule-bending sprite that he was. And it’s a job of work, I can tell you, to bend your mind away from him. Jim, I don’t mind saying, has been one of my finer creations. But what’s happening here and now is more important. You need to concentrate. So, bit by bit, I scrub your plastic brother out of your head. He was only a bit of fun, after all. A bit of comfort, and you don’t need him any more. In his place I’ve slipped the usual fetishes: an old straw doll and a picture of Jim in a pocket frame – only the glass has finally cracked and broken, and your pocket is full of shards.

Carefully you turn the mess out into your hand: shreds of stalk, ribbon and glass. Jim’s picture looks okay. You palpate your thigh through the material of your chinos and wince: a splinter has lodged in the cut. You’re taking your trousers down when Georgy reappears at the bedroom door, in slippers and dressing gown. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he says.

You are sitting on the balcony, watching a daytime Moon set behind the blocks of the Barbican. The Moon’s corona has evaporated, at least for daytime viewers. The rocks are separating, spreading out, each one individually targeted. And yet, with the corona evaporating, it is still possible to believe, in those few seconds of its setting, that the Moon now is as it always was, and that the shape of an ordinary, unaccommodated man is still imprinted on its surface.

Georgy brings out a tray with coffee and cups and a big plate of pastries and sets it on the green metal garden table you and Fel picked out one day, furnishing your first and only home. You hold the table steady for him as he presses the plunger of the cafetière. He sets out the cups and pours. You drink. You eat.

Georgy is a blowhard but he’s not stupid. He knows why you are here. He knows the sort of explanation he owes you. He says: ‘I come here often now. To this flat. To be among her things, you see. To remember her.’

‘You put her through the Process.’

He does not look at you. He nods. ‘Yes.’

‘She wasn’t ill. She wasn’t old. Why?’

Georgy wipes the grease off his hands against the fabric of his dressing gown. ‘I know what you think of me, Stuart.’

‘Do you.’

‘It’s written all over your face. You think I’m prideful. A crackpot inventor only too happy to grandstand, and use my own daughter to do so.’

So now you know. ‘She’s on the Moon.’

Georgy smiles. ‘Very good.’

‘Is she alone?’

‘No.’ Georgy pours more coffee for you both. ‘But she was the first.’

A sound comes out of your mouth. You’re not sure whether it’s a laugh or what. ‘She beat my brother to the Moon.’

Georgy waits for you to calm a little. He says, ‘You may think I have some sort of inside track on everything that’s happening. Stuart, I don’t. Most of what I know I get from the TV, same as you. But for what it’s worth – and I can’t promise – but for what it’s worth, I think Jim is alive.’

A tricky moment for me, I can tell you, as suddenly your memory fills with the heavy solvent tang of modelling cement and enamel paint. You’re on the very brink of remembering the toy I gave you, and that would not do at all . Scrub! Wipe! Delete! Erase! Fuck , but I’m cutting this fine…

‘Alive.’

‘Saved. Stored.’ Georgy is in earnest: ‘There was a genuine effort to save the Victory ’s crew, Stuart. Give us a chance. This is a new world for us, too.’

A new world. Now there’s a thought to conjure with. ‘A second jar.’

‘What?’

You push the plate away from you. ‘At what time is the jar half-full? You told this story at Windsor Castle. The exponential function.’

‘I did?’

‘I was there. Stella was there. That was the evening I met Fel. You told us how long it takes a steadily growing thing to double in volume. At one minute to midnight, the jar is just half-full. The future looks rosy. At midnight, you realise you’re going to need another jar.’

‘Nicely put.’

‘The Moon’s your other jar.’

‘A rather small jar.’

‘And at one minute past midnight – what then? You’re going to need two more jars. Then four. Then eight.’

Georgy watches you. He’s trying to decide how much you’ve understood.

‘But that first jar. It’s consumed. It’s done.’

‘Not necessarily,’ he says.

‘Yes, necessarily. It’s used up. It’s done. And that’s why you’re cleaning it.’

‘Cleaning it?’

‘Bombing it.’

Georgy makes little brushing motions with his hands. ‘No, Stuart. No, that’s too much. The Bund is simply trying to defend itself—’

‘I saw the corona around the Moon, George. I saw it even in daylight. You’re trying to wipe us all out.’

Georgy’s smile is, for once, not a mask. It is also, quite possibly, the saddest smile you have ever seen. ‘And yet.’ He fools with his empty cup. ‘I’m still here. Aren’t I? No room for an old man on the Moon. And what about all the others living here? These Bundists you’re so afraid of, all of a sudden: do you see them leaving on spaceships?’