Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

It comes to you that events have spiralled far out of everyone’s control; that Georgy Chernoy, and many others, are even now being betrayed.

‘I begged them to take her, Stuart. And I begged her to go. I told her more than I should have done, scared her as much as I could with what’s about to happen here. The coming war. She absolutely ignored me, of course. Refused me. Of course. Any sane person would. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t sick. She was beautiful and happy and in love.’

He meets your eye. ‘In love, Stuart.’

You see what he is doing. You see what this is. What he is trying to pull. ‘No.’

‘I couldn’t have done it without you, Stuart.’

‘No.’

Georgy’s smile is still there, it is still real, and it is absolutely not a smile of victory. ‘Don’t feel bad, Stuart. What’s coming is terrible. I thank God every minute that you turned her away. Don’t feel bad. If you’d offered her a child, she’d have stayed here with you.’

‘Stop it!’

‘Don’t you see? Stuart. My friend. I’m trying to thank you. You saved her life.’

The rest of the day you spend with Stella, trying to persuade her to come back to the West Riding with you.

Ridiculous, that Georgy and Stella should live such proximate lives and not be talking; that two people so in need of mutual comfort should be at hammer and tongs like this; Georgy sitting in an apartment on the eleventh floor of a tower block, missing his daughter, while deep in the basement of the same complex, Stella is slowly losing her mind among the props of her silly TV series, trying to rewind time to the day she was at home, working upstairs while Betty played in the living room and she thought she heard the front door clicking shut, and she paid the sound no mind.

‘I didn’t even hear the car!’ she sobs.

You’ve found her deep in the basement workshops of the Barbican’s theatre, at the heart of the world she has made. She’s even sitting – see? – at the DARE commander’s desk. Beside her, a small TV monitor is tuned to the BBC. Tears are rolling down her face. She has a look of such helplessness, you go down on your knees to hug her. She bends towards you, arms around your shoulders. You feel the tremor under her skin. Of course she is frightened.

Georgy has been no help. ‘He told me it’s a fight we should never have started!’ Stella sobs. ‘Orbital David and Goliath, he calls it. How can he be so callous!’

You don’t want to get caught up in their war of words. Still, it occurs to you that Georgy probably feels entitled to be callous. The Bund has made its next and most dramatic play without him. There’s been some split, some speciation. The confusion’s not just on the TV. It’s real. It’s deep. Georgy told you the Bund means peace, that it acted in self-defence, and saved the crew of the Victory . He probably means it. He probably believes it. At any rate, he wishes it were so. But who does Georgy speak for now? For the Bundists who will be killed along with him in the coming bombardment?

‘The Gurwitsch. Medicine City. All that work. It was supposed to be for everyone.’

‘So what are you saying? That his own people have betrayed him?’

‘Yes. Yes, Stella, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Him and who knows how many thousand others. The people doing this probably don’t even consider it a betrayal. Have you seen them on TV? The Bund’s news anchors now? They’re new. They’re a new thing.’

Stella thinks about it. She sniffs. ‘Typical,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Typical. The impatience. The Bund couldn’t wait. Not even for itself. Who do we suppose is on the Moon now? A bunch of those fishbowl-headed types, I suppose.’

You tell her about Fel. She does not look surprised. ‘She’s Georgy Chernoy’s daughter, Stuart. Think about that. It was a lovely dream you shared together. But she was always going to be among the first if the time came to advance.’

‘She wanted a normal life.’

‘She was barely into her twenties. She wanted out from under her dad. Don’t be disheartened. She’s up there. She’s safe.’ Then, in a much smaller voice, she asks you: ‘Did Georgy say how long we’ve got?’

‘A couple of days, he reckoned, before the rocks rain down. Thirty-six hours.’

‘Can they be called off?’

‘No.’

‘So.’ She stares at her hands. ‘What are we now to the Bund, do you think? People like us. The unaccommodated. Work animals? An invasive species?’

Not even that, is your guess.

Every weapon the Earth wields weighs a ton. On the Moon, you can just lift a rock and hurl it. The Bund can throw rocks down Earth’s gravity well till it run out of rocks. This is not going to be an ordinary war. This will be total. A fight to the finish.

Of course, you say nothing of this to Stella. What would be the point?

You look around the commander’s office. A white desk, a Trimphone, a potted plant, a padded white chair and a large wall-mounted abstract that, come episode seven, turns out to conceal an escape route in the event of alien attack.

‘I think I’ll stay here,’ Stella says. ‘I’m near the Bundist half of the city. Why would they bomb their own buildings? Why would they destroy their own work? You should stay here with me. We’re deep underground here. I can’t imagine many places safer than this one.’

The truth is, the physical basements of the Barbican Centre are not nearly as protective, for Stella, as the psychic protections afforded by DARE , that far more removed world of her own devising. If these are to be her last days, she intends to spend them in a different, better world. A world without the Gurwitsch ray. A world unfractured by runaway speciation. A world of gold cars and skintight uniforms, glamour, secrecy and rigid, simple lines of authority.

Though, for some reason, her world is still – isn’t it? – menaced by aliens. Have you noticed that? It is almost as if aliens are necessary.

She won’t be budged.

But then, neither will you. ‘I have to go back home. Dad has no one. I have to go.’

‘Factories like Bob’s will be their first target!’ Stella protests.

And she’s not wrong. But there is no dissuading you.

She says, ‘You know, war is mostly about lying. I don’t believe the scare stories. I think we’re going to be all right.’

‘I’ll come and find you,’ you tell her.

She smiles a brave little smile, and leans back in her commander’s chair, and reaches into a drawer of her desk, and brings out a paper bag. ‘Have these.’

You take the package from her hand, mystified. ‘What is it?’

‘Sausage rolls.’

‘Sausage… ?’

‘For the journey. They’re fresh today. Go on. I’ve got plenty.’

Why this absurd exchange, at the very last minute, should have such an effect on you, you do not know, but your eyes are filling with tears as you pick your way blindly through the prop shop.

What will Stella do when the rocks start to explode in Earth’s atmosphere and the hydrostatic shock brings London down to rubble? You imagine her dispatching interceptors. You see her in close conference with DARE’s forward stations at exotic beachfront locations across the globe. You hear her delivering inspirational speeches over the Tannoy system to the men and women of her secret subterranean headquarters, hidden under a film studio in Shepperton.

If you are not all right, if the Bund’s threats turn out to be real and the destruction total, then this is how you will choose to remember your Aunt Stella.

Why should there only be one future, anyway?

You weave through the length of the prop shop, past the stuff from which the first season of DARE was made. A single line of workaday fluorescent strips lights this narrow space, robbing items of the solidity they would acquire under properly filtered film lighting. Here are the pilot’s and copilot’s seats for the Moon-based interceptor, itself dismantled into its constituent flats. These have been stacked carefully behind the chroma key-green cockpit hood of a submarine-launched fighter plane.