-*-
At the start of its final battle started G4.A controlled the sector. Ordnance flowed from storage bay to firing rack and spun through the air. A threat warning flashed with information from the control platform high above. G4.A walked towards the target. It strode through rows of crude concrete structures. Abandoned possessions lay scattered in the rubble, water spurted from broken pipes. Bodies of those who refused to flee lay where they fell, crushed. Those remaining then scattered, seeking refuge in what they hoped were safer buildings. G4.A loosed a volley of high explosives into a nearby tower it perceived to be a threatening advantage point; more bodies and rubble. It came upon a clear avenue leading to the target area: a vast shopping mall.
G4.A approached, scanning for the threat. A biometric sweep indicated clusters of humans throughout the levels. A flurry of point missiles shrieked away from the shoulder mount, arcing in a tight parabola to plunge through the glass roof of the shopping center. They exploded above a cluster of life-signs, which vanished. G4.A then fired a batch of thermite grenades. They flew, a salvo of explosive fire which flared hot, and fed on the very structure of the building.
The threat warning remained. G4.A advanced.
It crashed into the building, the walls providing little resistance to its titanium-covered body. Inside there was the same evidence of hasty abandonment as in the rest of the city. A strengthened ramp and walkway wound from a service entrance up through the mall, allowing vehicles access to upper floors. The machine made its way up the structure, constantly sweep-scanning for the threat. Fire continued to spread through the building, consuming abandoned wares and the fabric of the structure.
An explosion ripped the walkway support away. G4.A scrabbled for a hold, but fell five stories, crashing onto rubble in the basement. A missile exploded immediately above G.4A, ripping into its strengthened armature. A second missile followed. This one crashed into the machine before exploding. It ignited ordnance still inside storage bays. G4.A was ripped apart. Legs were reduced to fragments, arms torn away. That the power core and processing matrix survived was a freak occurrence.
Investigating its memory banks in the years that followed G4.A tried to find any explanation of who it was fighting. It knew the battle was for control, but had no knowledge of who the ‘enemy’ was, or why they fought. It hoped this human may help it fill in the missing details.
“Why do you ask of time?” G4.A asked.
“What enemy did you fight?”
“That information is not stored.”
”Who were you fighting for?”
“Cobra Corp.”
“But you do not know who you were fighting against?”
“No knowledge of our enemies was inputted.”
“They were human, though—not machines like you?”
The machine fell silent. Rachna wondered what this meant. An alarm beeped. She glanced at her data-pad. All three balloons had arrived at the aviary safely.
“I have no data of the enemies I fought.”
Rachna looked at the bundle of units and wires. This was history, a definite link to the past. There were people who dedicated their entire lives to studying history. They were discovering what life was like before the empire, before the dark times, in the Days of Gold. But a discovery like this would be on a different scale. A talking machine with memories that could tell them what happened in those times would be a sensation. People would come from all over the empire—from beyond the empire.
She closed her eyes and imagined the influx. The road would become busy with traffic. New roads would be cut, new buildings constructed. She would no longer need to buy in bulk when she went to the city, there would be a store, maybe even a doctor.
Or, they would dig the machine up and take it away. It was a possibility. Still, they would have to create new roads for that task alone. Taking her birds to the city would be easier. It might even open up new direct markets for her.
The skin on Rachna’s neck tightened, her breath shortened. She screwed her eyes shut, trying to remove the vision of a future where her solitude was destroyed. Looking at the tangle of wires she took a deep breath, raised the shovel high above her head and used the extra power in her artificial forearm to drive down. Two, three, four swift strikes, and the vocal unit was disconnected from the tangle.
“Geefourdotalpha?” she called.
Silence.
She called louder.
“Geefourdotalpha?”
Still silence. She nodded to herself, satisfied that there would be no influx to destroy the harmony of her existence. No new roads cutting blindly through valuable nesting sites, no buildings encouraging vermin to flourish.
She dug about and filled her backpack with machine parts, they should bring in a nice price. Touching a nodule on the spade, it folded back down. She clipped it to her pack and headed home, ears attentive to the birdsong.
-*-
G4.A did not feel pain. When buildings fell on it, when rats gnawed it, when lightning struck it, there was no sensation, only an understanding that loss occurred. It reassigned processing power to alternative functions, continued to monitor its environment, and listened for opportunity to make contact.
G4.A did not feel pain. But now it knew despair and the need to scream. A need it could not fulfill.
Clive Tern is a writer of short fiction and poetry living in Cornwall. He was once a stockbroker, but exchanged the fantasy of the real world, for the reality of fantastic worlds.
Sometimes he writes about writing being difficult at clivetern.com.
Beachcomber
Mark Toner
SF Caledonia
Monica Burns
As promised in Issue 3, this book will be another delightful surprise from a well-known Scottish author—someone who is never first associated with science fiction. The author of Gay Hunter, published in 1934, was James Leslie Mitchell (1901-1935). If you don’t recognise this name, you’re more likely to be familiar with his nom-de-plume, Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It may seem odd that the author of the well-loved classic, A Scots Quair (which includes the Scottish school system’s favourite, Sunset Song) wrote science fiction, but Mitchell was actually an avid reader of the genre. The list of his best-loved authors and influences include Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Gay Hunter is one of a few science fiction novels he wrote.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon and his celebrated trilogy, A Scots Quair, enjoy their place in the spotlight, but the unique SF canon, published under his birth name, James Leslie Mitchell, go virtually ignored and unstudied by academics. It’s time we gave Gay Hunter some attention. Having studied Sunset Song to death at school, I was delighted to read a science fiction novel by the same author. It blends a lot of the enjoyable elements of Sunset Song—the strong female protagonist, the coming of age, the experience of first love, the intensely beautiful descriptions of the natural world and its impact on the human spirit—but set in a post-apocalyptic London. There are even some lasers.
So what is it about? Don’t be confused by the title. Gay Hunter is the name of the protagonist: a young American archaeologist, visiting London for an academic conference. At the start of the story, by the roadside, she encounters a very unpleasant Fascist man, Major Ledyard Houghton, and offers him a lift in her car. That evening, Gay despairs to find that they are checked into the same hotel, and they end up being seated together at dinner. After quarrelling over their respective ideologies, and the Earth’s future fate, Gay challenges him to try an experiment taught to her by her father, to peer into the future. This experiment is based on a real life theory of time and the power of the sleeping mind to enable time-travel, by J.W. Dunne in his book An Experiment with Time, published in 1927. Gay and Houghton make a pact to try the experiment that night.
Gay did not expect it to work. She is horrified to find that she has not only glimpsed at the future in her dreams, but has travelled bodily through time. She wakes up, naked and alone in a world given back to nature so completely that it seems like the ancient, primitive past. Gay is alarmed to find herself in an era far into the future, long beyond the aftermath of a nuclear war that tore the world to pieces.
She is not alone in her travels. Shortly after she awakes, she encounters Major Houghton, who had apparently also kept to his promise that he would try the neo-Dunne experiment. But unbeknownst to Gay, Houghton had been on the telephone that night with a Lady Jane Easterling, the spoiled patroness of his Fascist group, and told her about their experiment. She too tries it, and so wakes up in the same time as Gay and Houghton, in the same predicament—naked and completely and utterly lost. It is not long before the unsteady alliance of convenience between Gay and the two Fascists begins to break down, and fundamental ideological tensions begin to seethe. Especially when they encounter the Folk. Human society did survive, but at first sight seems to have regressed to a more primitive state. Nomadic hunter-gatherers travel together with tame wolves in a society very different to the twentieth century. Among them, there are some who speak English, learned from what is known as the Place of the Voices amidst the ruined buildings of their ancient past. This ancient past is still in the future for Gay’s timeline, so she hasn’t a clue what has happened to the world in the interim.
Befriending the Folk, especially a young singer called Rem, she tries to find traces of her lost world, the old London, and what happened to society to destroy it so completely. She also seeks a way home to the twentieth century. As Gay gets to know the hunters and their ways of life, she learns more and more about their society, and about herself. A recurring theme in a lot of Mitchell’s work is the discovery of the ‘essential self’, the wild and deep part of everyone that civilisation stops us from expressing. In his novels, Gay Hunter, The Lost Trumpet and Sunset Song alike, the discovery of this part of the self is unfailingly beautiful, always twinned with sumptuous descriptions of the natural world, and makes for a lot of ruminating long after you’ve finished the book.
Gay, Major Houghton and Lady Jane go their separate ways. Being so detached from nature, their essential selves, and possessing such extreme Fascist views, Lady Jane and Houghton look on the Folk with a very different attitude to Gay, and their influence on the peaceful native society could have disastrous consequences on this golden age.
Gay Hunter is exciting, thrilling, often funny, and has the effortless, insightful beauty of Sunset Song. True to what you’d expect from Lewis Grassic Gibbon, it is absorbingly written, vividly depicted, full of striking commentary on civilisation and the self, and populated with engaging characters you really care for.
James Leslie Mitchell
