Ness Page 2
The Armourer says:
Do we intend to detonate in shallow coastal waters in depths up to but not exceeding forty metres, or do we intend to detonate in deep oceanic waters at depths below forty metres?
Chorally they reply: ‘In shallow coastal waters.’
The Armourer says:
Then we must regretfully restrict ourselves to the 0.5-kilotonne yield.
And have we in all ways, to the best of our specialisms and to the full extent of our expertise, given the dynamism of the situation, optimized both yield and kill probability?
Chorally: ‘We have.’
Then let us begin the detonation sequence. First we will arm the round.
The Engineer steps eagerly forwards, uses one of the white plastic plugs to open the arming panel, and then – peering through his changed eyes – fits the barrel key and turns it clockwise by 180 degrees. He seems surprised and a little disappointed by the ease of this action. The Armourer looks pleased.
The Armourer says:
Let us sing ‘The Firing Song’.
They begin to sing again, but the words do not take form in air entirely as they have been intended:
‘Oh happy band of pilgrims, drift upward to the skies
Where such a murmuration shall win so great a prize!
Song of the bomb, the drifting song, the firing song.
Shingle shelters bunker, bunker shelters blast,
Dark drifts down, night flies fast.
Song of the wren, the devil-bird’s song, the firing song.
This half-life landscape fading to grey.
The king’s in his cradle, the bomb’s in its bay.’
The Physicist looks up into the vaultings of the Green Chapel. In the green light that is now both without and within his body – but that does not seem to pass through his skin or any other surface, rather to exist in separate domains on either side of a horizon, as if coming from two distinct sources – there are quick sharp shadows flickering faster and faster, on banking turns and orbits, shadows that are scythe-like and that, as he watches, cut towards him through the greenness and then pass into his body as if the greenness has somehow given them free entry or made him translucent, and he watches these shadows move within and through him at dazzling speeds, painless and graceful.
She
She nears Ness. Her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi & she breathes spores. Spores spread as she breathes out, sucked back into her gills with each deep breath in, gusted ahead with each deep breath out.
She is wired into the world. There are miles of her in a pinch of soil. Trees speak through her. As she passes houses, passes trees, passes cars, she leaves herself behind. Moss clump on roof tile, wall edge; lichen tag on road sign, fungus glowing on tree bark. Here & there she marks certain children as they sleep: a fingertip-touch on the inside of a wrist, the back of a knee, a place where green can enter & grow, making over time a child of moss, a child of ash, a child of beech, a child of lichen. She was one of them once & her skin now greenly seethes.
She is not green but she makes green. Colour is not a possessed property. You cannot see her if you look straight at her. Like the pigmentless fur of certain moles which turns light gold, though they have no life of light & no need of gold; like the feather-stream on a kingfisher’s back which bends light through its barbs & splits it into blue water & blue jewels, she makes green & green fills the air around her & warps hard into objects within her radiance. She is not colour but a mixture of brightness & movement. If pressed, in certain company, she describes herself not as a subjective experience but as a relative object.
She is green above ground & she is white below, for she is moss & lichen but she is also fungi & hyphae, slipping through earth as easily as she steps through air & rising up in a riot after rain. She is committed to redefining decay as a form of verdancy, individuality as a biological aberration & gender as a parallax error or species anomaly. If she had to become another kind of organism or organisms, she would choose to be a siphonophore for its explosion of conventional notions of community. If you left her on a rock, given time, she would crack it with her acids.
In the Green Chapel
IV
The Armourer says:
Recite the detonation sequence, taking care to emphasize its causal beauty and irreversibility once commenced.
The Engineer answers mechanically, staring blindly towards The Armourer through his iron eye (left) and his drifting eye (right), through light that is now as green as underwater, within which still move at impossible speeds the blade-shadows:
‘Following release over the kill zone the drogue parachute will deploy by means of explosive charge and ejection gun. Four main parachutes will then deploy by means of cutter charges. Hydrostatic fuses will then deploy. The gas-motor-triggered clockwork timer is present as back-up in the event of failure of the radar-triggered airburst fuses. Saltwater sensors in the nose cone will confirm water entry and track descent rate and depth, before pressure sensors trigger the firing unit at a depth of around thirty-five metres.’
The Armourer says:
And then?
‘Then the six-tile implosion device within its welded beryllium capsule within its stainless-steel cladding will implode.’
The Armourer says:
And then?
‘Then the fission fuel begins its fission and the temperature consequently rises such that the fissile material enters a supercritical state, and thermonuclear fusion commences. Large numbers of neutrons are produced, striking other fissile nuclei, in turn releasing a much larger number of secondary neutrons, which in turn strike other fissile nuclei, and … so on and so on. You get the idea.’
The Armourer says:
I get the idea. In fact, I sometimes like to think that I helped invent the idea. And then?
‘Then the neutron shield reflects fleeing neutrons back into the physics package, intensifying the reaction. Fusion boosting using the hyper-energetic deuterium-tritium neutrons increases the rate and thus the yield of the thermonuclear reaction. There will be some escape losses and scattering, of course, but the fusion boosting will ensure a second generation of chain reaction.’
The Armourer says:
And then?
‘Then the core explosively disassembles. Recognition life extinct.’
The Armourer says:
Not before time.
‘Actually, we might reasonably say “before time”, because the ultra-high velocity of the fusion neutrons leads to what is called “time magnification”.’
The Armourer says:
Time magnification? Oh – I like the sound of that. Now for the last time, let us sing ‘The Firing Song’.
The men sing with all that is left of their hearts:
‘Oh happy band of pilgrims, drift upward to the skies
Where such a murmuration shall win so great a prize!
Song of the bomb, the drifting song, the firing song.
Shingle shelters bunker, bunker shelters blast,
Dark drifts down, night flies fast.
Song of the wren, the devil-bird’s song, the firing song.
A lichenous landscape mossing to green.
The king’s in his cradle, the bomb’s in its bay.
Song of the spores, the drifting song, the firing song.
Colour-band tightens from blue down to grey,
The final declension of world and of day.
Song of the bomb, the arming song, the firing song.’
The Bryologist watches The Ornithologist’s open mouth as he sings these words that are not the intended words. A bee that is, but cannot be, made of some kind of supple metal crawls out of one corner of The Ornithologist’s mouth, and up his cheek to his forehead, where it crosses his hairline and then disappears wholly, as if entering a burrow. Another follows the same course, then another. It occurs to The Bryologist that they must be miner bees because their abdomens are red and because they are mining.
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Moths are clustering and flocking softly in vast numbers around the bomb, settling on it first as snow might fall on land then as coccolithophores might rock to ocean floor, building up in depth, thorax to thorax and wing to wing, leaving tiny glittering squares of wing powder, until they reach such vibrant density that it seems to those in the Green Chapel that they might contain anything, block out any source of light, soften any blow.
The Bryologist looks at The Physicist’s neck as he sings. From his lower jaws down to his collar The Physicist’s skin is scaled with a bright orange lichen. The Bryologist by reflex identifies the species as Xanthoria parietina, a lichen that thrives in polluted air. He looks at The Physicist’s hands and sees that they have become intricate with map-lichens, finely black-bordered cartographies of close-bound countries lacking any access to the sea, and he looks at his eyes and sees that there are fine branching white lines growing across his eyes, just below the surface.
‘Armourer,’ says The Physicist – though his words are hard to make out because they are spoken softly but with force, pushing through the emerald-green sphagnum moss that is now blooming plushly in his mouth – ‘something is very wrong here.’
They
They are stone-deaf & sea-eyed & their calm is the deep calm of deep time, the cold calm of cold time, & their closeness is old as rock & ocean & their motion as ancient as wave & shore & their rhythm is that of growth & erosion & you could not say of them that they are several or single & they have flint in their being & they send stones through time to foretell their seeing & their speech is shingle.
& they have the patience of granite & the ardour of lava & the speed of starlight.
& they are the white band that rings a blue-grey chertstone held in the hand for a minute & for longer in the heart.
& they are the utter shattered matter at the outer limit of all that the mind’s gravity can hold in shape.
& they can recite the colour phases of ice as it ages & deepens from white flake to black star, though not in words that we would understand.
& if they can be said to think it might be figured as the strange process of attraction whereby flint forms, the slow silicate grammar-gather of flecks of entity, creeping together over millennia.
& they have no need of watches for they keep time with tree-rings, with pollen grains, with the unvarying decay-rates of carbon-14 & uranium-235.
& time to them is not deep, not deep at all, for time is only ever overlapping tumbling versions of the now.
In the Green Chapel
V
The Armourer says, but uncertainly now in the rich green light:
It is surely time to fire.
The Engineer replies with a hollowed and hardened voice and he gazes at The Armourer through two eyes that are now hagstones. His speech has both the deep notes of bedrock and the bullety ting of flint flung on flint. The light in the Chapel is now a deep green, a moss green, the green where shadow meets leaf.
‘Armourer, can you not see that we are being buried from the day?
We are down now past the plastic, the sea-coal, the flip-flops, down through the flints, the quartzites, the hags, and down to the imprint-taking, relic-yielding clay.
We are among bracelet clasps, spindle-whorls, a whalebone table. We are among fossils: the mammoths, the turtles, the sharks, the nautilus, the wing bone of the albatross, the ear bone of the eagle ray.’
He pauses.
‘Armourer, we are deep in matter, and this far down it is hard to transmit.
Messages can’t make it, signals shatter.
Detonation is impossible.
Thought is, language is, turning to shingle.’
He pauses.
‘Armourer,’ says The Engineer – his lips are now chert, the slate blue of a peregrine’s back and the sea’s black before a storm, and his tongue is agate, all the profuse, unearthly colours of agate – ‘I am petrified.’
The Armourer says, bringing at once a jollity and a fury to his voice:
Nevertheless, we have ‘The Firing Song’ to finish, and all are required to sing who are still fit for purpose.
‘Oh happy band of pilgrims, drift upward to the skies
Where such a murmuration shall win so great a prize!
Song of the bomb, the drifting song, the firing song.
Shingle shelters bunker, bunker shelters blast,
Dark drifts down, night flies fast.
Song of the wren, the devil-bird’s song, the firing song.
A lichenous landscape mossing to green.
The king’s in his cradle, the bomb’s in its bay.
Song of the spores, the drifting song, the firing song.
Bedrock tightens from blue down to grey,
The final declension of world and of day.
Song of the hag, the sea-coal song, the firing song.
The ebb tide grades shingle finer then fine,
The fall-out settles soft to the pine.
Song of the bomb, the arming song, the firing song.’
As
As is as thin as mist.
As is as fast as gale & as slow as tar.
As moves as owls do, hushing through the air.
As moves as hyphae do, slipping through the soil.
As is as light as ash & as bright as foil.
As is as heavy as mercury.
As is as scant as goodness in conditions of scarcity.
As is as massive as dark matter.
As is as asymptote.
As is as nothingness.
As nears Ness.
As is hopelessness.
As is forgiveness.
As is Ness.
In the Green Chapel
VI
The Armourer says, against his better judgement, peering into the green gloom that is all around and within him:
It is as if there is no one there.
The Bryologist and The Physicist and The Engineer and The Ornithologist can no longer be seen in the green, and all that remains visible to The Armourer, who was once so sure of his vision, are the crosses, ten tall thin crosses on the west wall, and ten on the east, five on the north – and the south wall open to all that has now come through it.
The Armourer’s hair is bracken, his innards are thickening peat, his back is clattered into a row of stones, his prick is soft and gilled as the Death Cap, foxes snarl in his blood, his tendons are all turned to high breaking-strain monofilament, all tuned to the wind-blown note of D flat, swifts scream through him on their hooligan tours, each of his ten nails is amber, his borders shift and re-form in each storm and he is Ness.
He sings a little to himself, though the voice is in no way any longer his:
‘Song of Ness, the drifting song, the final song …’
The bomb is buried beneath more layers of moss, more layers of moths.
The ferro-concrete is experiencing uncontrolled ruination.
Willow flourishes as forest, elder jungles each dip, each hollowness.
The falcon is bearing the day away.
The foreshore is moving as if it were alive, because it is alive.
Afternoon moonrise. Long light. Low sun. Slow dusk.
Shingle hush from distal to Ness.
it, he, she, they, as
It was all sea once, in a long unbroken line.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published by Quive-Smith Editions 2018
First published by Hamish Hamilton 2019
Copyright © Robert Macfarlane, 2018
Illustrations copyright © Stanley Donwood, 2018
The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted
Cover artwork by Stanley Donwood
ISBN: 978-0-241-39657-5
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