Brian Aldiss - The Monster Trilogy

‘I’ll get you bastards if it’s the last thing I do,’ he said.

The little Brazilian-made plane, a vintage Bandierante, winged high above the eroded Utah landscape, and released its passenger from a rear door, like some hypothetical bird of prey launching an embryo into the wind.

Mina floated away from the plane, arms outstretched, knees bent, riding the invisible steed of air, controlling it with her pubic bone, steering it with the muscles of her thighs. This was her element, here was her power, to soar above the mist-stricken earth.

No sell-by dates existed up here. It was neutral territory. Even her snug green cover-all she chose to regard as her skin, making her an alien visitor to the planet.

And if there were aliens on other planets in the galaxy, let them stride their own skies. Let them not discover Earth; let them not, she thought, disclose themselves to the peoples of Earth. It was difficult enough to find meaning to life in a non-religious age; how much more difficult if you knew that there were a myriad other planets choked with living creatures like humans, facing the same day-to-day struggles to survive – to what end?

The image came back to her, as it often did when she steered her way through the atmosphere by her pubis, of herself as a small straggly girl, oldest daughter of a poor family in Montana, when she had gone out at her mother’s behest to hang freshly washed sheets on a clothes line. The wind blew, the sheets tugged, she struggled. At a sudden freak gust, a still wet sheet curled itself round her thin body and carried her, half-sailing, down the hill. Was that when she had first yearned for an accidental freedom?

For her, the zing of high altitude could wash away even memories, including more recent ones. The hollowness she felt encroaching on her life could not reach her here. Nor could thoughts of how things were with Joe.

Now the sheets of the wind were snug about her again. She knew no harm. But Utah was coming closer, tan, intricate, neat. There was no putting off for long the demands of gravity, the human condition.

As he laid Clift’s body down in the cab, Bodenland felt utterly detached from his own body. The conscious part of him floated, as a goldfish might watch from its bowl the activities in the room to which it was confined, while his body went about setting his dead friend out straight, pretending that comfort was a matter of reverent attention to a corpse. The death, the apparition which had attacked him, not to mention the horrific novelty of the vehicle in which he was trapped, had brought about the detachment. The shock of fear had temporarily disembodied him.

He straightened in slow motion and turned towards the driver. The driver stood tense against a wall, hands by his side. His riven face, grey and dusty, trained itself watchfully on Bodenland. He made no attempt to attack or escape. Only his eyes were other than passive. Molten zinc , thought Bodenland, a part of his mind reverting to laboratory experiments.

‘You know me? You recognize me?’

‘No, no.’ The man spoke without moving his head. His jaw hung open after uttering the two syllables, revealing long canines in his upper jaw and a white-coated tongue.

‘You said I was the man with the bomb. What did you mean by that?’

‘No, nothing. Please …’

Bodenland saw his right hand come up and grab the man by his throat. When the hand began to shake him, the driver almost rattled. He put his hands up feebly to protect himself. His skin appeared made of some frowsty old material, as if he were a cunningly stitched rag doll.

‘Tell me what this train is we’re on. Where are we? Who are you?’

When he let go of the creature, the driver sank to his knees. Bodenland had done him more damage than he intended.

‘The Undead – the Undead, sir. I won’t harm you …’

‘You sure won’t.’ He bent over the driver, catching a whiff of his carrion breath as the man panted. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was an airline pilot in life,’ said the driver faintly. ‘You will become like us. You are travelling on the train of the Undead and our Lord will get you sure enough.’

‘We’ll see about that. Get up and stop this train.’ He wrenched the man to his feet, thrusting him towards the controls. The driver merely stood wretchedly, head bowed.

‘Stop the train. Move, you rat. Where are we? When are we?’

The driver moved. He pulled open his tunic, ripped his shirt in two with sudden strength and turned to face Bodenland.

He pointed to his naked chest. So extreme was its emaciation that rib bones stuck out white as if frosted from their cyanotic covering of skin.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Get an eyeful of this, you fool. Do you see any heartbeat here?’

In disgust, Bodenland stared at the dead barrel of chest. He caught the man a blow across the side of his face, sending him reeling.

‘You can still feel pain? Fear? You’re human in that, at least. I will break open your chest and wrench out that dead heart unless you stop this train.’

Holding his face, the driver said, ‘The next programmed stop is in what you call 2599 AD, the Silent Empire. I’m unable to alter the programming.’

‘You slowed in Utah.’

‘Utah? Oh, Point 656, yes … That’s a sacred site to the Undead. We had to let agents off the train.’

‘Okay, you can let me off there. That’s where I need to be. How many time trains are there?’

‘One, sir, just this one.’

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘There’s just one.’ He spoke without emphasis, leaning lightly against the control panels, holding his face, letting the faint illumination turn his body into a seemingly abandoned carcass. ‘This train shuttles back and forth on scheduled time routes. All programmed. I’m not much more than a supervisor. It’s not like piloting an airliner.’

‘There must be other trains.’

‘There’s just the one. To ride time quanta you gobble vast amounts of energy. Solar energy. Very extravagant. Reverse relativism. Trains can’t be seen by the outside world – not unless we’re slowing to let agents off.’

The driver smiled, showing the canines more fully. No humour warmed the smile. The lips simply peeled back in memory of something that might once have amused.

‘The sheep asks the wolf what it does …’

The detached part of Bodenland watched as he attacked the driver and fell to the floor with him. In their struggle, they kicked Clift’s body, making it roll on to its face.

And Bodenland was demanding who had invented this cursed train. The answer was that, as far as the driver knew, the train was the invention of the Fleet Ones.

‘The Fleet Ones, sir, are the Undead – the vampires – who rule the world in its last days. This is their train, sir, you’ve ventured on.’

‘I’m borrowing it, and it’s going to get me back home to 1999. You’re going to show me how.’

The detached viewpoint saw how the creature made to bite Bodenland in the upper arm. But Bodenland took a firm grip of his throat and dragged him to the controls.

‘Start explaining,’ he said.

‘Ummmm ummmm ummmmmmmm. Moon and Mercury, Moon and Mercury, Romance and Remedy … Ummmm.’

The madman Renfield rocked himself in a tight bundle and hummed as if he were full of bluebottles.

The ginger man squatted stolidly in his corner by the cell door, watching, nodding in time with the humming, alert to the fact that Renfield was rocking himself closer. Above them, against the square of window showing blue sky, a spider hung by a thread, well out of the madman’s way.

‘Ummmm, you’re one of us, kind sir, she said, one of the fallen. May I ask, do you believe in God?’