The Humans Read online

  ‘How’s your nose?’ she asked. I caught sight of it in the mirror. A smear of blood around one nostril.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, feeling it. ‘It isn’t broken.’

  Her eyes squinted in pure concentration. ‘This one on your forehead is really bad. And there’s going to be one giant bruise there. He must have really hit you hard. Did you try and restrain him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I did. But he kept on.’

  I could smell her. Clean, human smells. The smells of the creams she used to wash and moisturise her face. The smell of her shampoo. A delicate trace of ammonia barely competing with the heavy scent of antiseptic. She was physically closer to me than she had ever been. I looked at her neck. She had two little dark moles on it, close together, charting unknown binary stars. I thought of Andrew Martin kissing her. This was what humans did. They kissed. Like so many human things, it made no sense. Or maybe, if you tried it, the logic would unfold.

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. He just yelled. It was very primal.’

  ‘I don’t know, between you and him, it never ends.’

  ‘What never ends?’

  ‘The worry.’

  She placed the blood-stained cotton wool in the small bin beside the sink.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For the past and the future.’ An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.

  We went back to bed. She held my hand in the dark. I gently pulled it away.

  ‘We’ve lost him,’ she said. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about Gulliver.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe we just have to accept him as he is, even if he’s different to what we’ve known.’

  ‘I just don’t understand him. You know, he’s our son. And we’ve known him for sixteen years. And yet, I feel like I don’t know him at all.’

  ‘Well, maybe we should try not to understand so much, and accept some more.’

  ‘That’s a very difficult thing. And a very strange thing to come from your mouth, Andrew.’

  ‘So, I suppose the next question is: what about me? Do you understand me?’

  ‘I don’t think you understand yourself, Andrew.’

  I wasn’t Andrew. I knew I wasn’t Andrew. But equally, I was losing myself. I was a wasn’t, that was the problem. I was lying in bed with a human woman I could now almost appreciate as beautiful, wilfully still feeling the sting of antiseptic in my wounds, and thinking of her strange but fascinating skin, and the way she had cared for me. No one in the universe cared for me. (You didn’t did you?) We had technology to care for us now, and we didn’t need emotions. We were alone. We worked together for our preservation but emotionally we needed no one. We just needed the purity of mathematical truth. And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.

  I had so many worries now. So many questions.

  ‘Do you believe humans are ever knowable?’ I asked.

  ‘I wrote a book on Charlemagne. I hope so.’

  ‘But humans, in their natural state, are they good or are they bad, would you say? Can they be trusted? Or is their own real state just violence and greed and cruelty?’

  ‘Well, that’s the oldest question there is.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m tired, Andrew. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes, me too. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Night.’

  ‘Night.’

  I stayed awake for a while as Isobel slipped towards sleep. The trouble was, I still wasn’t used to the night. It may not have been as dark as I first thought it to be. There was moonlight, starlight, airglow, streetlamps, and sunlight backscattered by interplanetary dust, but the humans still spent half their time in deep shadow. This, I was sure, was one of the chief reasons for personal and sexual relationships here. The need to find comfort in the dark. And it was a comfort, being next to her. So I just stayed there, hearing her breath move in and out, sounding like the tide of some exotic sea. At some point my little finger touched hers, in the double-night beneath the duvet, and this time I kept it there and imagined I was really what she thought I was. And that we were connected. Two humans, primitive enough to truly care about each other. It was a comforting thought, and the one which led me down those ever-darkening stairs of the mind towards sleep.

  I may need more time.

  You do not need time.

  I am going to kill who I need to kill, don’t worry about that.

  We are not worried.

  But I am not just here to destroy information. I am here to gather it. That is what you said, wasn’t it? Stuff on mathematical understanding can be read across the universe, I know that. I’m not talking about neuro-flashes. I’m talking about stuff that can only be picked up on from here, on Earth itself. To give us more insight into how the humans live. It has been a long time since anyone was here, at least in human terms.

  Explain why you need more time for this. Complexity demands time, but humans are primitives. They are the most shallow of mysteries.

  No. You are wrong. They exist simultaneously in two worlds – the world of appearances and the world of truth. The connecting strands between these worlds take many forms. When I first arrived here I did not understand certain things. For instance, I did not understand why clothes were so important. Or why a dead cow became beef, or why grass cut a certain way demanded not to be walked upon, or why household pets were so important to them. The humans are scared of nature, and are greatly reassured when they can prove to themselves they have mastery over it. This is why lawns exist, and why wolves evolved into dogs, and why their architecture is based on unnatural shapes. But, really, nature, pure nature is just a symbol to them. A symbol of human nature. They are interchangeable. So what I am saying—

  What are you saying?

  What I am saying is that it takes time to understand humans because they don’t understand themselves. They have been wearing clothes for so long. Metaphorical clothes. That is what I am talking about. That was the price of human civilisation – to create it they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are. But however close they get they are for ever removed. What I am saying, I suppose, is that last night I was about to kill the boy. Gulliver. He was about to fall down the stairs in his sleep but then his true nature came out and he attacked me.

  Attacked you with what?

  With himself. With his arms. His hands. He was still asleep but his eyes were open. He attacked me, or the me he thinks I am. His father. And it was pure rage.

  The humans are violent. That is not news.

  No, I know. I know. But he woke, and he wasn’t violent. That is the battle they have. And I believe if we understand human nature a little more, then we will know better what action to take in the future, when other advances are made. In the future, when another over-population crisis arises there may come a time when Earth becomes a valid option for our species. So, surely as much knowledge as possible on human psychology and society and behaviour is going to help?

  They are defined by greed.

  Not all of them. For instance, there is a mathematician called Grigori Perelman. He turned down money and prizes. He looks after his mother. We have a distorted view. I think it would be useful for all of us if I researched further.

  But you don’t need the two humans for that.

  Oh, I do.

  Why?

  Because they think they know who I am. And I have a true chance of seeing them. The real them. Behind the walls they have built for themselves. And speaking of walls, Gulliver knows nothing now. I
cancelled his knowledge of what his father told him on his last night. While I am here, there is no danger.

  You must act soon. You don’t have for ever.

  I know. Don’t worry. I won’t need for ever.

  They must die.

  Yes.

  Wider than the sky

  ‘It was sleep psychosis,’ Isobel told Gulliver at breakfast the next day. ‘It’s very common. Lots of people have had it. Lots of perfectly normal and sane people. Like that man from R.E.M. He had it, and he was meant to be as nice as rock stars come.’

  She hadn’t seen me. I had just entered the kitchen. But now she noticed my presence and was puzzled by the sight of me. ‘Your face,’ she said. ‘Last night there were cuts and bruises. It’s totally healed.’

  ‘Must have been better than it looked. The night might exaggerate things.’

  ‘Yes, but even so—’

  She glanced at her son, struggling uneasily with his cereal, and decided not to go on.

  ‘You might need the day off school, Gulliver,’ said Isobel.

  I expected him to agree to this, seeing that he preferred an education that involved staring at rail-tracks. But he looked at me, considered for a moment, and concluded, ‘No. No. It’s okay. I feel fine.’

  Later, it was just me and Newton in the house. I was still ‘recovering’, you see. Recover. The most human of words, the implication being that healthy normal life is covering something – the violence that is there underneath, the violence I had seen in Gulliver the night before. To be healthy meant to be covered. Clothed. Literally and metaphorically. Yet I needed to find what lay beneath, something that would satisfy the hosts and justify the delay I was taking in my task. I discovered a pile of paper, tied with an elastic band. It was in Isobel’s wardrobe, hidden among all those essential clothes, yellowing with age. I sniffed the page and guessed at least a decade. The top sheet had the words ‘Wider than the Sky’ on them, along with these ones: ‘A novel by Isobel Martin’. A novel? I read a little bit of it and realised that although the central character’s name was Charlotte, she could just as easily have been called Isobel.

  Charlotte heard herself sigh: a tired old machine, releasing pressure.

  Everything weighed down on her. The small rituals of her daily existence – filling the dishwasher, picking up from school, cooking – had all been performed as if underwater. The mutual energy reserves shared by a mother and her child had now, she conceded, been monopolised by Oliver.

  He had been running wild since she had picked him up from school, firing that blue alien blaster or whatever it was. She didn’t know why her mother had bought it. Actually, she did know. To prove a point.

  ‘Five-year-old boys want to play with guns, Charlotte. It’s only natural. You can’t deprive them of their nature.’

  ‘Die! Die! Die!’

  Charlotte closed the oven door and set the timer.

  She turned around to see Oliver pointing the massive blue gun up at her face.

  ‘No, Oliver,’ she said, too tired to battle the abstract anger clouding his features. ‘Don’t shoot Mummy.’

  He maintained his pose, fired cheap electric fairground sounds a few more times, then ran out of the kitchen, through the hallway, and noisily exterminated invisible aliens as he charged up the stairs. She remembered the quiet echoing babble of university corridors and realised that missing it was a kind of pain. She wanted to return, to teach again, but she worried she may have left it too late. Maternity leave had stretched into permanent leave, and the belief had grown that she could be fulfilled as a wife and mother, a historical archetype, ‘keeping her feet on the ground’, as her mother always advised, while her high-flying husband made sure he didn’t dip beneath the clouds.

  Charlotte shook her head in theatrical exasperation, as if she were being observed by an audience of stern-faced mother-watchers examining her progress and making notes on clipboards. She was often aware of the self-conscious nature of her parenting, the way she had to create a role outside of herself, a part already plotted out for her.

  Don’t shoot Mummy.

  She squatted down and looked through the oven door. The lasagne would be another forty-five minutes and Jonathan still wasn’t back from his conference.

  She raised herself back up and went into the living room. The wobbly glass of the drinks cabinet glinted, shining like a false promise. She turned the old key and opened the door. A mini metropolis of spirit bottles bathed in dark shadow.

  She reached for the Empire State, the Bombay Sapphire, and poured out her evening allowance.

  Jonathan.

  Late last Thursday. Late this Thursday.

  She acknowledged this fact as she slumped down on the settee, but did not get too close to it. Her husband was a mystery she no longer had the energy to unravel. Anyway, it was known to be the first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

  So, families often stayed together. Wives sometimes managed to stay with husbands and put up with whichever misery they felt by writing novels and hiding them at the bottom of their wardrobes. Mothers put up with their children, no matter how difficult those children were, no matter how close to insanity they pushed their parents.

  Anyway, I stopped reading there. I felt it was an intrusion. A bit rich, I know, from someone who was living inside her husband’s identity. I put it back in its place in the wardrobe underneath the clothes.

  Later on, I told her what I had found.

  She gave me an unreadable look, and her cheeks went red. I didn’t know if it was a blush or anger. Maybe it was a little of both.

  ‘That was private. You weren’t ever supposed to see that.’

  ‘I know. That is why I wanted to see it. I want to understand you.’

  ‘Why? There’s no academic glory or million-dollar prize if you solve me, Andrew. You shouldn’t go snooping around.’

  ‘Shouldn’t a husband know a wife?’

  ‘That really is quite rich coming from you.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She sighed. ‘Nothing. Nothing. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘You should say whatever you feel you should say.’

  ‘Good policy. But I think that would mean we’d have divorced around 2002, at a conservative estimate.’

  ‘Well? Maybe you would have been happier if you had divorced him, I mean me, in 2002.’

  ‘Well, we’ll never know.’

  ‘No.’

  And the phone rang. It was someone for me.

  ‘Hello?’

  A man spoke. His voice was casual, familiar, but there was a curiosity there, too. ‘Hey, it’s me. Ari.’

  ‘Oh, hello Ari.’ I knew Ari was supposed to be my closest friend, so I tried to sound friend-like. ‘How are you? How’s your marriage?’

  Isobel looked at me with an emphatic frown, but I don’t think he’d heard properly.

  ‘Well, just got back from that thing in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to pretend I knew what ‘that thing in Edinburgh’ was. ‘Right. Yes. That thing in Edinburgh. Of course. How was that?’

  ‘It was good. Yeah, it was good. Caught up with the St Andrews lot. Listen, mate, I hear it’s been a bit of a week for you.’

  ‘Yes. It has. It has been a lot of a week for me.’

  ‘So I wasn’t sure if you’d still be up for the football?’

  ‘The football?’

  ‘Cambridge–Kettering. We could have a pint of mild and a bit of a chat, about that top secret thing you told me the last time we spoke.’

  ‘Secret?’ Every molecule of me was now alert. ‘What secret?’

  ‘Don’t think I should broadcast it.’

  ‘No. No. You’re right. Don’t say it out loud. In fact, don’t tell anyone.’ Isobel was now in the hallway, looking at me with suspicion. ‘But to answer you, yes, I will go to the football.’

  And I pressed the red button on the phone, weary at the probability that I would
have to switch another human life into non-existence.

  A few seconds of silence over breakfast

  You become something else. A different species. That is the easy bit. That is simple molecular rearrangement. Our inner technology can do that, without a problem, with the correct commands and model to work from. There are no new ingredients in the universe, and humans – however they may look – are made of roughly the same things we are.

  The difficulty, though, is the other stuff. The stuff that happens when you look in the bathroom mirror and see this new you and don’t want to throw up into the sink at the sight of yourself like you have wanted to every other morning. And when you wear clothes, and you realise it is starting to feel like quite a normal thing to do.

  And when you walk downstairs and see the life form that is meant to be your son eating toast, listening to music only he can hear, it takes you a second – or two, three, four seconds – to realise that, actually, this is not your son. He means nothing to you. Not only that: he has to mean nothing to you.

  Also, your wife. Your wife is not your wife. Your wife who loves you but doesn’t really like you, because of something you never did, but which couldn’t be any worse, from her perspective, than the something you’re going to do. She is an alien. She is as alien as they come. A primate whose nearest evolutionary cousins are hairy tree-dwelling knuckle draggers known as chimpanzees. And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar, and you can judge her as humans judge her. You can watch her when she drinks her pink grapefruit juice, and stares at her son with worried, helpless eyes. You can see that for her being a parent is standing on a shore and watching her child in a vulnerable craft, heading out over deeper and deeper water, hoping but not knowing there will be land somewhere ahead.

  And you can see her beauty. If beauty on Earth is the same as elsewhere: ideal in that it is tantalising and unsolvable, creating a delicious kind of confusion.