The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, was abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland voices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In the wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all swimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; the stag’s antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky, looking like a skeleton tree. Then we dropped into a covert of birches and emerged on the white glen highway.
Leithen’s story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour ago. It was the hour, as the French say, “between dog and wolf,” when the mind is disposed to marvels. I thought of my stalking on the morrow, and was miserably conscious that I would miss my stag. Those airy forms would get in the way. Confound Leithen and his yarns!
“I want to hear the end of your story,” I told him, as the lights of the Lodge showed half a mile distant.
“The end was a tragedy,” he said slowly. “I don’t much care to talk about it. But how was I to know? I couldn’t see the nerve going. You see I couldn’t believe it was all nonsense. If I could I might have seen. But I still think there was something in it—up to a point. Oh, I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows...
“I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later. But before I started I got a post-card from Hollond, the only word from him. He had printed my name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words—’I know at last—God’s mercy.—H.G.H’ The handwriting was like a sick man of ninety. I knew that things must be pretty bad with my friend.
“I got to Chamonix in time for his funeral. An ordinary climbing accident—you probably read about it in the papers. The Press talked about the toll which the Alps took from intellectuals—the usual rot. There was an inquiry, but the facts were quite simple. The body was only recognised by the clothes. He had fallen several thousand feet.
“It seems that he had climbed for a few days with one of the Kronigs and Dupont, and they had done some hair-raising things on the Aiguilles. Dupont told me that they had found a new route up the Montanvert side of the Charmoz. He said that Hollond climbed like a ‘diable fou’ and if you know Dupont’s standard of madness you will see that the pace must have been pretty hot. ‘But monsieur was sick,’ he added; ‘his eyes were not good. And I and Franz, we were grieved for him and a little afraid. We were glad when he left us.’
“He dismissed the guides two days before his death. The next day he spent in the hotel, getting his affairs straight. He left everything in perfect order, but not a line to a soul, not even to his sister. The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for the Grepon. He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, and then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that he left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de Glace face. Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party going to the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below.
“He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, and there was a lot of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing. But I guessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held his tongue....”
We were now on the gravel of the drive, and I was feeling better. The thought of dinner warmed my heart and drove out the eeriness of the twilight glen. The hour between dog and wolf was passing. After all, there was a gross and jolly earth at hand for wise men who had a mind to comfort.
Leithen, I saw, did not share my mood. He looked glum and puzzled, as if his tale had aroused grim memories. He finished it at the Lodge door.
“... For, of course, he had gone out that day to die. He had seen the something more, the little bit too much, which plucks a man from his moorings. He had gone so far into the land of pure spirit that he must needs go further and shed the fleshly envelope that cumbered him. God send that he found rest! I believe that he chose the steepest cliff in the Alps for a purpose. He wanted to be unrecognisable. He was a brave man and a good citizen. I think he hoped that those who found him might not see the look in his eyes.”
Space was published in The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies, published in 1911. This version of the story was taken from Project Gutenberg.
Reviews
The Annihilation Score
Charles Stross
Orbit
£16.99, hardback, 416pp.
published 2nd July 2014
Review: Noel Chidwick
Bob Howard, the newly anointed Eater of Souls, leaves stage right to pursue bears. Meanwhile, his wife Mo, steps up to the footlights. Under her chin she tucks her possessed killer violin made of human bone, and is ready to take on the latest problem to hit humanity—an exponential increase of the population developing super powers. How will Mo and the Laundry save us?
If what I’ve written so far makes little sense, then do yourself a massive favour and read Charles Stross’ series the Laundry Files. You’ll be thoroughly entertained as Bob takes on the demons released on the world using only his wits and his occult skills nurtured as IT support for an off-line anti-supernatural government body.
Back here, at book 7, we at last get to hear Mo’s story, working with her to save humanity and explore her anxieties. This is also Stross balancing the gender books:
“The invisible man is a Wellsian supervillain, but the invisible women are all around us, anxious and unseen.”
How do you find out what the ultimate Supervillain, Dr Freudstein, is up to? How do you stop him? The Laundry decides to set Mo—Dr Dominique O’Brien—the task of heading up a small department with a management team with their own variations of superpowers. This team includes Mhari the vampire who was once Bob’s girlfriend, Ramone, transitioning to a mermaid who once shared Bob’s mind, and Officer Friendly, the superhero cop whose stone jaw juts out further than the jetty at Lyme Regis. What could go wrong?
They gather field workers with superpowers, including Lollipop Bill, Captain Mahvelous and Busy Bee. After deciding half-heartedly what they should wear—no corsets nor fishnet stockings and eschewing the capes—off they go.
But Mo has plenty of her own inner demons to contend with, including her self-doubts, worrying about her relationship with her husband, and the responsibility of setting up this team. And to complicate things further Lecter, her demon killing violin, seeps into her dreams and her mind, threatening to take control.
Annihilation Score is trademark Stross, mingling the mundane intricacies of modern office life with the ever present fear of damnation and the end of the world. The book would make for an entertaining a “management team for dummies” instruction manual, and perhaps some imaginative management lecturers will offer this as a set text. Stross delights in playing with the absurdities of life acted out in millions of workplaces around the planet: the world will not end with a bang, but an e-mail.
The climax of the story is suitably grandiose to satisfy all fans of the Laundry files, where Stross’ tight plotting and fast-pace action knit together while we cheer and laugh from the safety of behind the sofa.
Annihilation Score is a thrilling journey on our way towards CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and now we look forward to following up on Bob Eater of Souls Howard's exploits in the next book.
No Harm Can Come to a Good Man
James Smyth
The Borough Press,
£7.99, paperback, 374 pp.
Review: Duncan Lunan
Well, a title like that should warn you. Laurence Walker is in line for the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States. He is something of a war hero, having been captured in combat and withstood torture under which others have cracked. He is married with a son and two daughters, appears to have no skeletons in the cupboard, and his campaign is likely to attract major backers.
Everything looks good except that his principal opponent Homme (Everyman?) has beaten him in the race to be first with a computer prediction of success. This is a near-future world in which that counts for a great deal, because most major decisions are taken with reference to a predictive computer system called ClearVista, whose latest market version will even show you a snapshot video of a moment from your future life. Homme’s shows him on a Presidential visit to armed forces in the field; Walker’s, when produced, gives him zero chance of nomination or election, and shows him covering his family with a gun. Protests that ClearVista doesn’t predict what will happen are of no avail: the Party, the media and the public all respond on the basis that if it could happen, that’s enough for them. What follows has the inevitably of Macbeth, with the difference that Walker and his political advisor are trying to prevent the prophecy from being believed, much less coming true, rather than trying to bring about what it predicts.
My life as a reviewer is filled with strange coincidences, and this book has come my way just as my critical notes on the classic Jeff Hawke and Lance McLane comic strips, being published with reprints of the strips by the Jeff Hawke Club, have reached the point where their creator Sydney Jordan became increasingly preoccupied with destiny and foreordination. One of the major issues of philosophy is how (if at all) determinism and causality can be reconciled with free will, and as it happens, I found myself reading No Harm Can Come to a Good Man in parallel with The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose. One of the major themes of that book is how that philosophical debate relates to the practicality of artificial intelligence, and the provocative conclusion was that free will (a) is demonstrable, (b) cannot be simulated by algorithmic processes, so ruling out artifical intelligence in that form, now and for all time. The heavy emphasis in No Harm Can Come... upon the algorithmic nature of ClearVista’s predictions might suggest that Smythe has taken his inspiration from Penrose’s book, and has set out to show us just how far wrong things could go, following Penrose’s logic to its conclusions, should people put their trust in such predictions nevertheless.
This is no abstract philosophical text, though – it follows Walker’s decline and fall in entirely human terms. In that respect it has a lot in common with Susan Barker’s Incarnations, which I reviewed last year for Concatenation: both show a flawed but basically decent man being overwhelmed by predictions about his future, from an apparently all-knowing source, against which he struggles in vain. The title has the same force as that moment in a disaster movie, when someone who should know better assures the other characters that absolutely nothing can go wrong.
