The Man Read online

  The Man

  Paul J. McAuley

  Jackaroo series

  First published in Arc 1.2: Post Human Conditions, edited 2012 by Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury.

  This copy derived from Aliens: Recent Encounters, edited June 2013 by Alex Dally MacFarlane.

  He came to Cho Ziyi at night, in the middle of a flux storm.

  It was as dark as it ever got in the sunset zone. Low, fast-moving clouds closed off the sky. Howling winds drove waves onshore and blew horizontal streamers of snow into the forest, where the vanes of spin trees madly clattered and coronal discharges jumped and crackled. Ziyi was hunkered down in her cabin, watching an ancient movie about a gangster romance in Hong Kong’s fabled Chungking Mansions. A fire breathed in the stone hearth and her huskies, Jung and Cheung, sprawled in a careless tangle on the borometz-hide rug. The dogs suddenly lifting their heads, the youngest, Cheung, scrambling to his feet and barking, something striking the door. Once, twice.

  Ziyi froze the movie and sat still, listening. A slight, severe woman in her late sixties, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, white hair scraped back in a long ponytail, jumping just a little when there was another thump. It wouldn’t be the first time that an indricothere or some other big dumb beast had trampled down a section of fence and blundered into the compound. She crossed to the window and unbolted the shutter. Pressed her cheek against the cold glass, squinted sideways, saw a dim pale figure on the raised porch. A naked man, arm raised, striking the door with the flat of his hand.

  The two dogs stood behind her, alert and as anxious. Cheung whined when she looked at him.

  “It’s only a man,” Ziyi said. “Be quiet and let me think.”

  He was in some kind of trouble, no question. A lost traveller, an accident on the road. But who would travel through a storm like this, and where were his clothes? She remembered the bandits who’d hit a road train a couple of years ago. Perhaps they’d come back. He had managed to escape, but he couldn’t have gone far, not like that, not in weather like this. They might be here any minute. Or perhaps they were already out there, waiting for her to open the door. But she knew she couldn’t leave him to die.

  She fetched a blanket and lifted her short-barrelled shotgun from its wall pegs, unbolted the door, cracked it open. Snow skirled in. The naked man stared at her, dull-eyed. He was tall, pale-skinned. Snow was crusted in his shock of black hair. He didn’t seem to notice the cold. Staring blankly at her, as if being confronted by an old woman armed with a shotgun was no surprise at all.

  Ziyi told him to move off the porch, repeating the request in each of her half dozen languages. He seemed to understand English, and took a step backwards. Snow whirled around him and snow blew across the compound, out of darkness and back into darkness. Fat sparks snapped high in a stand of spike trees, like the apparatus in that old Frankenstein movie. Ziyi saw the gate in the fence was open, saw footprints crossing the deep snow, a single set.

  “Are you hurt? What happened to you?”

  His face was as blank as a mask.

  She lofted the blanket towards him. It struck his chest and fell to his feet. He looked at it, looked at her. She was reminded of the cow her grandmother had kept, in the smallholding that had been swallowed by one of Shanghai’s new satellite towns in the last gasp of frantic expansion before the Spasm.

  “Go around the side of the cabin,” she told him. “To your left. There’s a shed. The door is unlocked. You can stay there. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  The man picked up the blanket and plodded off around the corner of cabin. Ziyi bolted the door and opened the shutters at each of the cabin’s four small windows and looked out and saw only blowing snow.

  She sat by the fire for a long time, wondering who he was, what had happened to him. Wondering—because no ordinary man could have survived the storm for very long—if he was a thing of the Jackaroo. A kind of avatar that no one had seen before. Or perhaps he was some species of alien creature as yet undiscovered, that by an accident of evolution resembled a man. One of the Old Ones, one of the various species which had occupied Yanos before it had been gifted to the human race, woken from a sleep of a thousand centuries. Only the Jackaroo knew what the Old Ones had looked like. They had all died out or disappeared long ago. They could have looked like anything, so why not like a man? A man who spoke, or at least understood, English…

  At last she pulled on her parka and took her shotgun and, accompanied by Jung and Cheung, went outside. The storm was beginning to blow itself out. The snow came in gusts now and the dark was no longer uniform. To the south-east, Sauron’s dull coal glimmered at the horizon.

  Snow was banked up on one side of the little plastic utility shed, almost to the roof. Inside, the man lay asleep between stacks of logs and drums of diesel oil, wrapped in the blanket so that only his head showed. He did not stir when Cheung barked and nipped at the hem of Ziyi’s parka, trying to drag her away.

  She closed the door of the shed and went back to her cabin, and slept.

  When she woke, the sky was clear of cloud and Sauron’s orange light tangled long shadows across the snow. A spin tree had fallen down just outside the fence; the vanes of all the others, thousands upon thousands, spun in wind that was now no more than the usual wind, blowing from sunside to darkside. Soon, the snow would melt and she would go down to the beach and see what had been cast up. But first she had to see to her strange guest.

  She took him a canister of pork hash. He was awake, sitting with the blanket fallen to his waist. After Ziyi mimed what he should do, he ate a couple of mouthfuls, although he used his fingers rather than the spoon. His feet were badly cut and there was a deep gash in his shin. Smaller cuts on his face and hands, like old knife wounds. All of them clean and pale, like little mouths. No sign of blood. She thought of him stumbling through the storm, through the lashing forest…

  He looked up at her. Sharp blue eyes, with something odd about the pupils—they weren’t round, she realised with a clear cold shock, but were edged with small triangular indentations, like cogs.

  He couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions.

  “Did the Jackaroo do this to you? Are you one of them? Did they make you?”

  It was no good.

  She brought him clothes. A sweater, jeans, an old pair of wellington boots with the toes and heels slit so they would fit his feet. He followed her about the compound as she cleared up trash that had blown in, and the two huskies followed both of them at a wary distance. When she went down to the beach, he came too.

  Snow lay in long rakes on the black sand and meltwater ran in a thousand braided channels to the edge of the sea. Sea foam floated on the wind-blown waves, trembled amongst rocks. Flecks of colour flashed here and there: flotsam from the factory.

  The man walked down to the water’s edge. He seemed fascinated by the half-drowned ruins that stretched towards the horizon, hectares of spires and broken walls washed by waves, silhouetted against Sauron’s fat disc, which sat where it always sat, just above the sea’s level horizon.

  Like all the worlds gifted by the Jackaroo, Yanos orbited close to the hearthfire of its M-class red dwarf sun; unlike the others, it had never been spun up. Like Earth’s moon, it was tidally locked. One face warm and lighted, with a vast and permanent rainstorm at the equator, where Sauron hung directly overhead; the other a starlit icecap, and perpetual winds blowing from warm and light to cold and dark. Human settlements were scattered through the forests of the twilight belt where the weather was less extreme.

  As the man stared out at the ruins, hair tangling in warm wind blowing off the sea, maybe listening, maybe not, Ziyi explained that people called it the factory, although they didn’t really know what it was, or who had built it.

  “Stuff comes from it, washes up here. Especially after a storm. I collect it, take it into town, sell it. Mostly base plastics, but sometimes you find nice things that are worth more. You help me, okay? You earn your keep.”

  But he stayed where he was, staring out at the factory ruins, while she walked along the driftline, picking up shards and fragments. While she worked, she wondered what he might be worth, and who she could sell him to. Not to Sergey Polzin, that was for damn sure. She’d have to contact one of the brokers in the capital… This man, he was a once-in-a-lifetime find. But how could she make any kind of deal without being cheated?

  Ziyi kept checking on him, showed him the various finds. After a little while, straightening with one hand in the small of her aching back, she saw that he had taken off his clothes and stood with his arms stretched out, his skin warmly tinted in the level sunlight.

  She filled her fat-tyred cart and told him it was time to put on his clothes and go. She mimed what she wanted him to do until he got the idea and dressed and helped her pull the cart back to the cabin. He watched her unload her harvest into one of the storage bins she’d built from the trimmed trunks of spike trees. She’d almost finished when he scooped up a handful of bright fragments and threw them in and looked at her as if for approval.

  Ziyi remembered her little girl, in a sunlit kitchen on a faraway world. Even after all these years, the memory still pricked her heart.

  “You’re a quick learner,” she said.

  He smiled. Apart from those strange starry pupils and his pale, poreless skin, he looked entirely human.

  “Come into the cabin,” she said, weightless with daring. “We’ll eat.”

  He didn’t touch the food she offered; but sipped a little water, holding the tumbler in both hands
. As far as she knew, he hadn’t used the composting toilet. When she’d shown it to him and explained how it worked, he’d shrugged the way a small child would dismiss as unimportant something she couldn’t understand.

  They watched a movie together, and the two dogs watched them from a corner of the room. When it had finished, Ziyi gave the man an extra blanket and a rug and locked him in the shed for the night.

  So it went the next day, and the days after that.

  The man didn’t eat. Sometimes he drank a little water. Once, on the beach, she found him nibbling at a shard of plastic. Shocked, she’d dashed it from his hand and he’d flinched away, clearly frightened.

  Ziyi took a breath. Told herself that he was not really a man, took out a strip of dried borometz meat and took a bite and chewed and smiled and rubbed her stomach. Picked up the shard of plastic and held it out to him. “This is your food? This is what you are made of?”

  He shrugged.

  She talked to him, as they worked. Pointed to a flock of windskimmers skating along far out to sea, told him they were made by the factory. “Maybe like you, yes?” Named the various small shelly ticktock things that scuttled along the margins of the waves, likewise made by the factory. She told him the names of the trees that stood up beyond the tumble of boulders along the top of the beach. Told him how spin trees generated sugars from air and water and electricity. Warned him to avoid the bubbleweed that sent long scarlet runners across the black sand, told him that it was factory stuff and its tendrils moved towards him because they were heat-seeking.

  “Let them touch, they stick little fibres like glass into your skin. Very bad.”

  He had a child’s innocent curiosity, scrutinising ticktocks and scraps of plastic with the same frank intensity, watching with rapt attention a group of borometz grazing on rafts of waterweed cast up by the storm.

  “The world is dangerous,” Ziyi said. “Those borometz look very cute, harmless balls of fur, but they carry ticks that have poisonous bites. And there are worse things in the forest. Wargs, sasquatch. Worst of all are people. You stay away from them.”

  She told herself that she was keeping her find safe from people like Sergey Polzin, who would most likely try to vivisect him to find out how he worked, or keep him alive while selling him off finger by finger, limb by limb. She no longer planned to sell him to a broker, had vague plans about contacting the university in the capital. They wouldn’t pay much, but they probably wouldn’t cut him up, either…

  She told him about her life. Growing up in Hong Kong. Her father the surgeon, her mother the biochemist. The big apartment, the servants, the trips abroad. Her studies in Vancouver University, her work in a biomedical company in Shanghai. Skipping over her marriage and her daughter, that terrible day when the global crisis had finally peaked in the Spasm. Seoul had been vapourised by a North Korean atomic missile; Shanghai had been hit by an Indian missile; two dozen cities around the world had been likewise devastated. Ziyi had been on a flight to Seoul; the plane had made an emergency landing at a military airbase and she’d made her way back to Shanghai by train, by truck, on foot. And discovered that her home was gone; the entire neighbourhood had been levelled. She’d spent a year working in a hospital in a refugee camp, trying and failing to find her husband and her daughter and her parents… It was too painful to talk about that; instead, she told the man about the day the Jackaroo made themselves known, the big ship suddenly appearing over the ruins of Shanghai, big ships appearing above all the major cities.

  “The Jackaroo gave us the possibility of a new start. New worlds. Many argued against this, to begin with. Saying that we needed to fix everything on Earth. Not just the Spasm, but global warming, famines, all the rest. But many others disagreed. They won the lottery or bought tickets off winners and went up and out. Me, I went to work for the UN, the United Nations, as a translator,” Ziyi said.

  Thirty years, in Cape Town, in Berlin, in Brasilia. Translating for delegates at meetings and committees on the treaties and deals with the Jackaroo. She’d married again, lost her husband to cancer.

  “I earned a lottery ticket because of my work, and I left the Earth and came here. I thought I could make a new start. And I ended up here, an old woman picking up alien scrap on an alien beach thousands of light years from home. Sometimes I think that I am dead. That my family survived the Spasm but I died, and all this is a dream of my last second of life. What does that make you, if it’s true?”

  The man listened to her, but gave no sign that he understood.

  One day, she found a precious scrap of superconducting plastic. It wasn’t much bigger than her thumbnail, transparent, shot through with silvery threads.

  “This is worth more than ten cartloads of base plastic,” she told the man. “Electronics companies use it in their smartphones and slates. No one knows how to make it, so they pay big money. We live off this for two, three weeks.”

  She didn’t think he’d understand, but he walked up and down the tideline all that day and found two more slivers of superconductor, and the next day found five. Amazing. Like the other prospectors who mined the beach and the ruins in the forests, she’d tried and failed to train her dogs to sniff out the good stuff, but the man was like a trufflehound. Single-minded, sharp-eyed, eager to please.

  “You did good,” she told him. “I think I might keep you.”

  She tried to teach him tai chi exercises, moving him into different poses. His smooth cool skin. No heartbeat that she could find. She liked to watch him trawl along the beach, the dogs trotting alongside him. She’d sit on the spur of a tree trunk and watch until the man and the dogs disappeared from sight, watch as they came back. He’d come to her with his hands cupped in front, shyly showing her the treasures he’d found.

  After ten days, the snow had melted and the muddy roads were more or less passable again, and Ziyi drove into town in her battered Suzuki jeep. She’d locked the man in the shed and left Jung and Cheung roaming the compound to guard him.

  In town, she sold her load of plastic at the recycling plant, saving the trove of superconducting plastic until last. Unfolding a square of black cloth to show the little heap of silvery stuff to the plant’s manager, a gruff Ukrainian with radiation scars welting the left side of his face.

  “You got lucky,” he said.

  “I work hard,” she said. “How much?”

  They settled on a price that was more than the rest of her earnings that year. The manager had to phone Sergey Polzin to authorise it.

  Ziyi asked the manager if he’d heard of any trouble, after the storm. A missing prospector, a bandit attack, anything like that.

  “Road got washed out twenty klicks to the east is all I know.”

  “No one is missing?”

  “Sergey might know, I guess. What are you going to do with all that cash, Ziyi?”

  “Maybe I buy this place one day. I’m getting old. Can’t spend all my life trawling for junk on the beach.”

  Ziyi visited the hardware store, exchanged scraps of gossip with the store owner and a couple of women who were mining the ruins out in the forest. None of them had heard anything about a bandit attack, or an accident on the coast road. In the internet café, she bought a mug of green tea and an hour on one of the computers. Searched the local news for a bandit attack, some prospector caught in the storm, a plane crash, found nothing. No recent reports of anyone missing or vehicles found abandoned.

  She sat back, thinking. So much for her theory that the man was some kind of Jackaroo spy who’d been travelling incognito and had got into trouble when the storm hit. She widened her search. Here was a child who had wandered into the forest. Here was a family, their farm discovered deserted, doors smashed down, probably by sasquatch. Here was the road train that had been attacked by bandits, two years ago. Here was a photograph of the man.

  Ziyi felt cold, then hot. Looked around at the café’s crowded tables. Clicked on the photo to enlarge it.

  It was him. It was the man.

  His name was Tony Michaels. Twenty-eight years old, a petrochemist. One of three people missing, presumed taken by the bandits after they killed everyone else. Leaving behind a wife and two children, in the capital.