Tales of the Hidden World Read online

  At first, their families were only too happy to reclaim them, to have their lost parents and children, husbands and wives back again, and take them home. But that didn’t last long. They soon found out you couldn’t talk to the dead. Or you could, but they would never answer. They were just bodies, nobody home. They didn’t know anyone, or remember anything. Didn’t want to say anything, or do anything. And they smelled bad, so bad . . .

  Soon enough, the dead started turning up on the streets again, put out by their horrified and terribly disappointed families, and the Government had to do something. They couldn’t just leave the dead standing around, stinking up the place, getting in everyone’s way. And so they built the dead towns, thrown up quickly, as far away from the rest of us as they could get, and put the dead there. And the world . . . just went on with business as normal.

  I didn’t. I had experience and qualifications and a good attitude; it never even occurred to me I wouldn’t walk right into another job. But it turned out we were in a recession, or a depression, or whatever it is when there just aren’t enough jobs to go around. There was a glut on the market for people with my experience and qualifications, and apparently I was too old and overqualified for what entrance-level jobs there were. And every time I turned up for an interview, my clothes were just that little bit shabbier and my manner was just that little bit too desperate, and after a while no one would see me anymore.

  My savings ran out, I lost my house, my wife went back to live with her parents and took the kids with her, and almost before I knew it, I was living on the streets. With all the other people who’d lost everything. It’s a lesson you should never forget. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, or how much you have; there’s nothing you’ve got that the world can’t take away. The only thing standing between people like you and people like me is one really bad day.

  It’s not so bad, really, living on the streets. It comes as something of a relief, finally, when you realize you can stop struggling, stop fighting. That it’s all over. You don’t have to worry about your job or paying the bills, look after your family or make decisions. No more responsibilities, no more lying awake in the early hours of the morning, worrying about the future. On the streets, everything comes down to what’s right in front of you: finding something to eat and drink, something to keep the warmth in and the rain out, and locating somewhere reasonably safe to sleep. You don’t have to worry about yesterday or tomorrow, because you know they’re going to be exactly like today.

  It’s interesting that you don’t call us homeless anymore. Just street people. Like the street is where we chose to be, that the street is where we belong. You don’t call us homeless, because that might imply that someone should give us a home. If you came across a stray dog in the street, wet and shivering and hungry, you’d take it home with you, wouldn’t you? Give it food and drink, and a blanket in front of the fire. Been many a cold night I’d settle for that. But no, you just walk straight past, ignoring our outstretched hands and handwritten signs, careful not to make eye contact because then you’d have to admit that we are real and that our suffering is real.

  We’re dead to you.

  I don’t know why I left the city. No particular reason. Just started walking one morning and didn’t stop. Walked till I ran out of streets and just kept going. Are you still a street person, if there aren’t any streets? The countryside was pretty, and entirely unforgiving. The elements are just that bit closer, and more pressing, and you miss the company of people. Eventually, I came to a dead town. I stopped to look it over. There aren’t any fences around a dead town: no gates or barbed wire. Nothing to keep the dead in, because they don’t want to go anywhere. They have no purpose, no ambition, no curiosity. They’re dead. They don’t want or care about anything, anymore. Just bodies, called up out of their graves and given a bit of a push to set them going. We put them in dead towns because they had to be somewhere, and that’s where they stay.

  I’d never been inside a dead town, so I went in. Just to see what there was to see.

  The dead took no notice of me, looked right through me as though I wasn’t even there. But I was used to that. Wasn’t much of a town, just blocky houses in straight rows on either side of a dirt street. No lights, no amenities, no comforts. Because the dead don’t need them. They didn’t even walk, just stood around, looking at nothing. A few still stumbled or staggered from one place to another, driven by some vague impulse, some last dying memory of something left undone. Their clothes were rotten and ragged, but most of the bodies persevered. They didn’t acknowledge one another or the world around them. Their brains were dead in their heads, bereft of reason or meaning.

  Their town was a mess and so were they. The dead don’t care about appearances. They didn’t smell that bad, so far from their graves, just a dry, dusty presence, like autumn leaves in the wind. I was used to the stench of people who live on the streets. Life smells worse than death ever will. I walked down the dirt street, picking my way carefully between the dead. Not because I was afraid of them, but because I didn’t want to be noticed. I still half expected someone to come up and tell me to leave, that I didn’t belong there, that I had no place in a dead town. But no one looked at me as I passed or reacted to the sound of my footsteps in the quiet street. The dead had this much in common with the living: they didn’t give a damn that I was there.

  I never saw the dead make much use of the houses they’d been given. Sometimes they might lie down on a bed for a while, though of course they didn’t sleep; as though that was something they remembered doing, even if they no longer knew why. And sometimes they would walk in and out of a door, over and over. Presumably for the same reason. I never really saw them do much of anything. Mostly they just stood around, as though waiting for something. As though they felt there was somewhere they should be, something they should be doing, but no longer knew what, or why.

  I found a bed in a room in a house that was still reasonably intact. I barricaded the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed and got some sleep. Even a damp and dusty bed can be the height of comfort when you’re used to shop doorways and cardboard boxes. The dark didn’t bother me, or the dead outside. In the morning, I went looking for food and drink, but of course there wasn’t any. I walked up and down and back and forth, but there were only the dead and the houses they didn’t need.

  I watched one dead man just fall over, for no obvious reason. None of the other dead noticed. I went over to him and crouched down, a cautious distance away. His face was empty and his eyes saw nothing. He was dead and gone, now. Nobody home. I could tell. His boots looked to be much the same size as mine, and in much better condition, so I took them. Good footwear is important when you do a lot of walking.

  I knew why he’d fallen over, why he’d stopped moving. It meant the last living person who knew or cared about him was gone. Nobody remembered him, so there was no one to hold him here anymore. That is why the dead came back, after all. Because we just couldn’t let them go. Because we all had this selfish need to hang on to our loved ones, even after their time was up. We thought of our friends and family and loved ones as ours, our possessions, and we wanted them back so much we called them back up out of their graves. Unfortunately, the part we cared about, the personalities, or souls, had passed on to wherever personalities or souls go. Beyond our reach. All we could bring back was their bodies.

  I’d seen people try to talk to the dead, speaking earnestly and emotionally to blank faces, trying to reach someone who wasn’t there anymore. Heard people raise their voices, in anger and anguish, trying to force or cajole a reaction of some kind from their returned loved ones. Sometimes the living even hit the dead and screamed abuse at them. For not being what the living wanted them to be. The dead didn’t react. The dead didn’t care.

  I didn’t stay long in dead town. I had some thought of bringing other street people here, to make use of the empty homes. It was a lot safer in the d
ead town than it was in the city. The dead had no reason to attack us, or insult us, or steal from us. But I left, because even as far down as I had fallen, I was still better than the dead. I still had hope, and dreams, and somewhere to go. My life wasn’t over till I said it was.

  I went back to the city, and to the people I knew. Because even if people like you won’t admit we exist, street people still have one another.

  I’ve been watching zombie films, and reading zombie books and zombie comics, for many many years, and I’m pretty much zombied out. So if I was going to write a zombie story, it had to be something different, something new. Less apocalyptic, and more about living through the end of the world. Because every day is the end of the world for someone, when they lose their job, or their wife, or their children. And the connection between how we treat zombies and homeless people was just too clear. . . .

  From Out of the Sun, Endlessly Singing

  This is the story. It is an old, old story, and most of the true details are lost to us. But this is how the story has always been told, down the many years. Of our greatest loss and our greatest triumph, of three who were sent down into Hell forever, that the rest of Humanity might know safety and revenge. This is the story of the Weeping Woman, the Man with the Golden Voice, and the Rogue Mind. If the story upsets you, pretend it never happened. It was a very long time ago, after all.

  This goes back to the days of the Great Up and Out, when we left out mother world to go out into the stars, to explore the Galaxy and take her fertile planets for our own. All those silver ships, dancing through the dark, blazing bright in the jungle of the night. We met no opposition we couldn’t handle, colonized every suitable world we came to and terraformed the rest, remaking them in our image. It was a glorious time, by all accounts, building our glittering cities and proud civilizations, in defiance of all that endless empty Space. We should have known better. We should have sent ahead, to say we were coming. Because it turned out, we were trespassing and not at all welcome.

  They came to us from out of the Deep, from out of the darkest part of Deep Space, from far beyond the realms we knew, or could ever hope to comprehend. Without warning, they came, aliens as big as starships, bigger than anything we had ever built, and far more powerful. Endless numbers of them, a hoard, a swarm, deadly things of horrid shape and terrible intent, blocking out the stars where they passed. They were each of them huge and awful, unknown and unknowable, utterly alien things moving inexorably through open Space on great shimmering wings. They came from where nothing comes from, and they thrived in conditions where nothing should live. Their shapes made no sense to human eyes, to human aesthetics. They were nightmares given shape and form, our darkest fears made flesh. We called them the Medusae, because wherever they looked, things died.

  They destroyed the first colonized planets they came to, without hesitation, without warning. They paused in orbit just long enough to look down on the civilizations we had built there, and just their terrible gaze was enough to kill every thing that lived. We still have recorded images from that time, of the dead worlds. Cities full of corpses, towns where nothing moved. Wildlife lying unmoving, rotting in the open, and fish of all kinds bobbing unseeing on the surfaces of the oceans. The Medusae moved on, from planet to planet, system to system, leaving only dead worlds in their wake.

  We sent the Fleet out to meet them, hundreds and hundreds of our marvelous and mighty Dreadnaughts, armed to the teeth with disrupters and force shields, planet-buster bombs and reality invertors. The Fleet closed with the Medusae, singing our songs of glory, ravening energies flashing across open Space, and all of it was for nothing. We could not touch the Medusae. They passed over the Fleet like a storm in the night and left behind them mile-long starships cracked open from stem to stern, with streams of dead bodies issuing out of cracked hulls, scattering slowly across the dark. Occasionally, some would tumble down through the atmosphere of a dead world, like so many shooting stars with no one to see them.

  The Medusae moved on through the colonized systems, wiping clean every world we’d colonized or changed, as though just our presence on their planets had contaminated them beyond saving. One by one, the planetary comm systems fell silent, voices crying out for help that never came, fading into static ghosts. Some colonists got away, fleeing ahead of the Medusae on desperate, overcrowded ships; most didn’t. There is no number big enough that the human mind can accept, to sum up our losses. All the men, women, and children lost in those long months of silent slaughter. All the proudly named cities, all the wonders and marvels we built out of nothing—gone, all gone. And finally, when they’d run out of planets to cleanse and people to kill, the Medusae came looking for us. All that great swarm, hideous beyond bearing, complex beyond our comprehension, beyond reason or reasoning with . . . they followed the fleeing ships back to us, back to the home of Mankind.

  Back to Old Earth.

  We sent up every ship we had, everything that would fly, loaded with every weapon we had, and we met the Medusae at the very edge of our solar system. And there, we stopped them. The aliens looked upon our worlds but came no closer. And for a while we rejoiced, because we thought we had won a great victory. We should have known better. The Medusae had stopped because they didn’t need to come any closer. Hanging there in open Space, silent and huge and monstrous, out beyond the great gas giant planets, they looked on Old Earth and reached out with their incomprehensible energies to touch our world. They poisoned our planet. Changed her essential nature, so that our world would no longer support human life. They turned our home against Humanity. A fitting punishment, from the Medusae, they terraformed us.

  And that . . . was when we got really angry and contemplated revenge.

  The Lords and Ladies of Old Earth came together in Convocation, for the first time in centuries. They met at Siege Perilous, that wonderful ancient monument to past glories, shaped like a massive hourglass, towering high and high over the bustling starport of New Damascus. Immortal and powerful, relentless and implacable, the Lords and Ladies represented Concepts, not Countries. They spoke for all the various aspects of Humanity, and their word was Law. Made immortal, so that they could take the long view. Denied peace or rest, because they were needed. Cursed with conscience and damned with duty, because that’s how we always reward the best of us.

  Only the Lords and Ladies knew the secret truth of our poisoned estate: that we would have to leave Old Earth and find a new home somewhere else. The continuance of Humanity itself was at threat, but only the Lords and Ladies knew. Because only they could be trusted to know everything. The Lords and Ladies of Old Earth were given dominion to do anything and everything necessary, to serve and preserve Humanity. In an acknowledged Emergency, the Lords and Ladies were authorized and enjoined to call upon any human being, anyone anywhere, for any necessary purpose. Humanity gave them this power and trusted them to use it well and wisely. Because only they could take the truly long view, and because everyone else was just too busy.

  There were checks and balances in place, of course. And truly terrible punishments.

  They came to Convocation in the last hours of evening, their personal ships drifting down like so many falling leaves, settling easily onto the crystal landing pads set out on top of Siege Perilous. And then they made their way down to the single reserved meeting hall: a bare and sparse chamber, isolated from the world. They had no use for seats of state, for the trappings of power or the comforts of privilege. Exactly one hundred Lords and Ladies stood in a great circle, looking openly upon one another, in their traditional peacock robes of vivid colors. Their faces were naked and unmasked, so that everyone could see and be seen. Outside, combat androids programmed with the deposited memories of rabid wolves patrolled the perimeter, ready and eager to kill any living thing they encountered.

  There were other, less noticeable protections in place, of course.

  Lord Ravensguard spoke for War, so he spo
ke first. Tall and grave he was, with cool, thoughtful eyes. He spoke of the horrors the Medusae had committed, of what they had done and might do yet. And then he spoke of possible responses and tactics.

  “There are always the Forbidden Weapons,” he said calmly. “Those ancient and detestable devices locked away for centuries, because they were deemed too terrible for Man to use upon Man. I speak of the Time Hammer and the Despicable Childe. The Nightmare Engines and the Hour from Beyond.”

  “Could we use such things, and still call ourselves human?” said Lord Zodiac, representing Culture. “You cannot defeat evil with evil methods. You cannot stop monsters by becoming monsters.”

  “The enemy we face has no understanding of such concepts,” Lord Ravensguard said firmly. “They do not seek to destroy us because they are Good or Evil. They do not think like us. They see us only as . . . an infestation.”

  “Have we exhausted all means of communicating with them?” said Lady Benefice, who spoke for Communications.

  “We have tried everything, from all the many forms of technology, to the most extreme reaches of psi,” said Lord Ravensguard. “They do not hear us. Or, more likely, they choose not to.”

  “Weapons are not the answer,” said Lady Subtle, who represented Security. Small she was, compact, determined. “We have tried weapons, and they have failed us. We must sink lower than that. We will fight the Medusae with guile and betrayal, and they will not see it coming. Because they would never stoop so low.”

  “You have a plan?” said Lord Ravensguard.

  And everyone smiled, politely. Because Lady Subtle always had a plan. She spoke to them at length of a trap, and a punishment, and Humanity’s final revenge. The Convocation then deliberated. They did not have the luxury of being shocked, or offended. Their duty demanded only: Was this awful plan practical? There was much discussion, which ended when Lord DeMeter, who spoke for the soul of Humanity, raised the only question that mattered.