Beasts Within by Clive Gilson - HTML preview

Bastille Day

Cold stone walls. To touch them was to recoil. The prisoner opened his eyes and felt

as if he was some strange, wide-eyed, lidless creature lost in a sea of thick black oil.

The darkness was viscous, dripping slowly onto flakes of straw that lay rotting on

the puddled floor. This complete absence of light was the hardest thing to bear. The

stench of wet decay was almost a comfort. The scurrying of sharp little claws on

flagstones was a reminder of life and the slightest feather touch of frayed rags on his

bare legs was a breath of civilisation, a small memento of his humanity. All of these

things, all of these slight, needle tip sensations, were a lullaby for the child afraid of

the dark.

In his head he pieced together the letters of a name over and over again, trying to fit

them together in any one of a thousand combinations, only one of which would form

the shape of a man. By repeating his name, by bouncing the echo of his voice off the

cold stone walls that surrounded him, he somehow found the strength to hold at bay

the constriction, the weight of fear that otherwise would have crushed him. The sheer

mass of stone and brick surrounding him compressed his sight. His awareness of

being was a single point of focus. Curled up in the middle of a bleak and hooded cell

he waited for grains of shadow to float between the bars of a small arrow-slit

window high above him. Deep within the darkest hours the purple shades of a newly

rising day would come and with them the rattle-bag voice that ground out the hours

of his incarceration.

“I, the voice of the people am being smothered, strangled…assassinated!”

And so another day began, timed by the insane mutterings of Citizen Marat, the one

time darling of the revolution now made mechanical and ever vigilant while enemies

of the state lay in foetal balls on freezing flagstones. He drifted on waves of nausea.

Heart-pounding tension washed through the man in the cell, who sat huddled and

buried deep beneath the crumbling vaults of stone that formed the roof of the world.

The pitch of Marat’s voice was sharp and angular, cutting through the thick prison

air like a knife, and when the mechanised grind of his jaws finally ceased, an echo

hung in the still morning air like a noose biting ever deeper into the prisoner’s bare

neck. Wide-eyed, rocking back and forth, curled up into the smallest space that he

could physically make for himself, MacKenzie waited for dawn’s faint lustre to

break on high.

As Citizen Marat settled into another all too brief period of silence MacKenzie

watched the bleeding edges of dawn fall from the sky. Wisps of cloud drifted across

the narrow opening in the arrow-slit high above him, its outline drawn in pitch

against the faintest murmur of a grey-purple softening in the counter glow outside. A

rat, brown and sleek, scratched at scraps and bare bones in the shadows. Beyond the

window MacKenzie heard faint, skeletal bird calls, which caught on the square-cut

edges of the thick cell walls and dissolved the shifting shapes of the man that he had

been trying to form. Bird song called MacKenzie back to the hungry frailty that

made flesh of his present reality. He watched the light break above his head and

stopped whispering the letters of his name.

Beyond sleep, Danton, grizzly Danton, the bear, the motive power behind the

revolution, prowled the corridors of La Force Nouveau. He should have come before

this. MacKenzie had been a friend in a world where true-bloods and the likes of

Danton rarely got close. In Danton’s wake a red capped guard hurried on, head

bowed, taking two pigeon steps for every one that the committee chairman slammed

down onto the unyielding flagstones as they swept past heavy browed doors set in

frames of rough cut, foot square timbers. On every door a faceplate rusted on

wrought iron runners, closed against the light of real wax candles guttering on stone

ledges set into the walls. The sharp retort of metalled boot heels struck out at the

early morning stillness, announcing the arrival of Danton and his scowling, out of

breath companion to every inmate as they bore down on the door at the end of the

corridor like cannon balls, casting their grotesquely elongated shadows across the

floor and up the walls. When they reached the end of the corridor a small man in a

leather jerkin jumped out of the shadows and Danton’s voice boomed out,

smothering the chill of morning in burning impatience.

“Gaoler… If there’s no sleep for me, I’ll be damned if there’s any for you. Look

sharp, man.”

The gaoler, wrapped in high collars and thick furs beneath his jerkin, muttered a

series of barely audible imprecations and stumbled forward into the flickering light

cast by one of the candles. He continued to curse the dog that dared to stalk his halls

this early in the day, but thought better of raising his voice in anger when he saw the

shaggy shape of the bear that marked Citizen Danton out from the usual visitors.

“Take me to MacKenzie...”

“Sir, yes… this way.”

The gaoler fiddled with his keys and unlocked the door at the end of the passage,

pushing it back to reveal a short flight of steps carved out of natural rock. The ceiling

was low and narrow, forcing Danton to move forward with his knees bent, crouched

down beneath the mountain. God alone knew who dreamt up this vision of Hell, he

thought, as he ascended a flight of narrow, pinched steps. Danton and his

companions emerged onto a short landing at the end of which was another heavy

wooden door. The walls, like those in the corridor below, were hewn out of huge

blocks of solid rock and the space was illuminated by the soft glow of candles,

candles that, in this simulacrum of past glories, illuminated the stone in a wash of

yellow and amber. Half way down the landing a recess in the left hand wall glowed

brightly under a spotlight. As he walked Danton straightened himself up, pulling his

shoulder blades back to relieve the tension that he felt tightening at the base of his

neck.

The three of men, Danton, the gaoler and the guard, swept down the landing towards

the far door, their mistimed triumvirate steps clattering out a chaos of irregular

rhythms. Danton stopped abruptly as they approached the recess in the wall.

Dumbfounded, he stared at the object that grinned its rictus smile from a plinth under

the only electric light in the corridor. Perched on a silver spike, trailing leads and

luridly coloured pipe work, Citizen Marat’s head stared back at the committee

chairman with eyes as clear and blue as a bright summer afternoon.

“My God…” was all that Danton could say, taking a step back and nearly squashing

the gaoler against the wall.

“Lovely touch, Sir,” said the gaoler, squeezing out from behind the committee

chairman. ”They brought him here after the funeral. Thought it would be fitting for

the guests. A reminder of their bastard ways”.

Danton looked at the man in horror and as he did so the spiked head’s lips moved

and Citizen Marat’s harsh, piercing tones crawled across Danton’s skin, peeling back

the veneers of liberty that he clothed himself in.

“Atrocious men who every day seek to bury us further in anarchy and who try to

kindle the flames of civil war.”

The severed head’s animated smile faded slowly as the pipes, leads and motors

ceased their moment of work, but the eyes remained fixed on Danton. The man who

had assumed the revolutionary name of Marat was, according to the press and the

revolutionary council, dead and buried. According to the official news wires Marat

had been given a hero’s funeral after his murder by the forces of true-blood reaction,

but here Danton stood, unmoving in the candle glow, staring at his recently departed

co-conspirator’s severed head, which was stuck on a pole of silver metal.

“Very ingenious,” said the gaoler by way of nervous conversation, “just sort of

plugged him in. Of course, he’s not really alive any more, they just fixed up the

pathways and keep his vocal chords working. Sits there all day and quotes away the

quarters. I dust him down now and then… well you do, don’t you.”

Danton turned slowly and walked towards the door at the end of the passage. He said

nothing. His guard leant against the wall and, having struck a match along Citizen

Marat’s noble nose, lit a cheroot while the gaoler fumbled with his keys.

The faceplate in the heavy wooden door flicked back letting candlelight from the

passage beyond slice into the heart of the cell. From the shadows MacKenzie

watched the small square patch of light appear and then fall back into darkness as a

head moved into view. The small window was filled with cubist elements of a face.

Keys rattled on a chain. The faceplate jerked back and he heard a key slide into the

lock and the heavy, ratchet grumble of sliding tumblers. MacKenzie covered his eyes

as the door swung open and a figure walked through the oblong patch of unnerving

brightness. A loud bull voice barked.

“You can leave us alone”

“But Sir, you know…”

“Leave us”

“Sir, I…”

Danton spun round, moving his heavy set limbs with incredible grace, profiling his

broad chest and powerful frame in the light that spilled into the cell from the

corridor. His look was enough to ensure that the gaoler, trying desperately to bury

his confusion and discomfiture in his furs, backed out of the room without another

word being said. The door swung shut again, although this time, MacKenzie noticed,

the lock tumblers remained silent.

Under the shadow of the wall MacKenzie lowered his hand from his eyes and looked

at the man standing before him. He started to speak, but found words hard to form

having spent so many days alone. His existence, such as it was in the bosom of La

Force Nouveau, was bounded by the fragile skeleton of sanity marked out by Citizen

Marat’s regular outbursts. The words that he wanted to conjure up caught at the back

of his throat and his first sound was little more than a muffled cough. He tried again.

“Robert?”

“Yes, it’s me” Danton replied brusquely, “but you can’t use that name here. You’ll

call me Danton now.”

“I…don’t...”

“It’s my revolutionary name, my nomme de guerre, if you will.”

MacKenzie scuttled back against the wall when he heard Danton speak, feeling the

chill of stone on his skin through his rags. His shirt lay limp upon his hunched, bony

shoulders. On his left side a great tear ran along the seam underneath his arm. His

pale white hide, which was soiled and bruised, shone ghost white in the thin reeds of

morning. He tried to remember; revolution, committees and sections, the great

debates and the huge, towering hopes that lead all men down to a straw bed. He

looked at the man standing in the doorway, whose head was illuminated by the slant

of battle grey that steepled down from the high set window. Slowly MacKenzie

recalled the confusion and enlightenment, the long struggle for equality under the

harsh glare of limited kindness within which mankind wrapped despotism.

Danton stood in the middle of the room and looked down at the squat figure by the

wall, finding it extremely hard to deal with the situation. This creature, as broken

down and shattered as it appeared to be, was a living man, a thing of flesh and blood,

just as he was. To look into the eyes of a God and see the flaws, to witness the

failure of resolution and will, to see such frailty, still shocked him.

“Please… stand up”, he said quietly.

MacKenzie clasped his knees tightly, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the

protruding bones in his legs. He shifted his weight slightly, feeling a burr of stone

scratch his emaciated back. He tried to form a sequence of words, to summon the

logic that had been his art in a former life, but those words that had once come to

him with such ease now took flight around him, lifting like dry leaves on the breeze

of his thoughts and floating away before he could catch hold of them.

“I…I’d rather…stay where I am”, MacKenzie whispered.

Danton’s shoulders twitched as he tried to alleviate the tension that he could now

feel biting deeply into the base of his neck. This was going to be harder than he had

imagined it would be. He kicked a gnawed chicken bone out from under his boot.

The bone, full of air bubbles inherited from the creature’s flying ancestors to reduce

weight and density, skittled across the stone floor and came to rest by MacKenzie’s

bare feet. Danton imagined the breaking of this man’s fragile skeleton with every

bounce.

“Life is a brief and ugly thing”, he whispered to himself, grimacing.

MacKenzie, one of the few who deserved life, would have his neck severed because

it served the cause. Danton’s fellow revolutionaries, compressed as they were into

such a small space, gave vent to their frustration and pain in rivers of blood, and he,

the great Danton, could do nothing now that the beast was off its chains but try to

direct the rampaging animal as best he could. He looked down at the shell of the man

he had once known so well and wondered whether he could simply walk out of the

place with him under his arm. From the passageway the digitally enhanced voice of

Citizen Marat burst into life once more, corroding the moment of doubt into a

thousand flakes of brittle rust.

“To pretend to please everyone is mad, but to pretend to please everyone in a time of

revolution is treason.”

MacKenzie rocked back and forth as the voice dragged its fingernail trail across the

blackboard on which he saw his name written, one more name on the list of those

who would die in dedication to the founding of a new order.

“Mac, please get up”, Danton asked again.

Slowly, stiffly, MacKenzie unclasped his hands and pressed them against the wall

behind him. He rose with the pain of stiffened limbs and giddy with the shift of

blood in his veins. He managed to shuffle and drag himself upright, until, bowed and

spindle thin, he finally stood free of the wall. He took half a pace forward, stumbling

a little as the pounding in his temples overwhelmed him and stars swam in front of

his eyes. He felt the oily air pull him down but gradually steadied himself, finding a

reserve of strength and clarity that allowed him to remain standing. He looked into a

familiar face in which a friend’s once warm brown eyes used to dance and in that

face he found that words.

“I know why… why you’re here.”

“Of course you do, Mac. You’re a very bright man. Not bright enough, though. Not

prescient. History is being written all around us but in here no one has a past, not any

more. I have simply come to see what we have made of you, just like you and your

kind made things of us. That...and to say goodbye.”

MacKenzie straightened his shoulders, breathing hard as he spoke. “How did this

happen? It was never meant to happen… it’s not what we ever wanted…you and

I…”

“It had to happen”, replied Danton sharply. “You opened our eyes and once you did

that how could there ever have been anything else than this? You fear the stars. They

are so many and you so few. That’s why you made us. And then, when your

ancestors coded and catalogued us, when they marked us out as a lesser breed, even

then we stood the prejudices and the spite. Artificials just like me worked for nearly

two hundred years as your soldiers and destroyers, as your builders and pilots, as

terra-formers, as engineers and as servants. The catastrophes and failures of

colonisation, the disastrous experiments with star drives, all those terrible bug hunts

on far away worlds, we survived them all and gave the stars to you, and for what?

Thanks? The only thing your masters ever worried about was whether there were

enough conditioned and dedicated Barcs available to do the dirty work.”

MacKenzie raised his head, looking straight into Danton’s eyes. Memories.

Histories. To reach the stars, man made himself into a God. Genetic sequences.

Splicing. Adapting. Man engineered his likeness, and then, with the shape and

sequence in his hand, he learned to fear a new demon, marking his engineered

brothers with bar codes to ensure that all would be ordered and just in the grand folly

of empire in the heavens. The bar codes were an irrelevance, made obsolete by gene

marking and biometrics, but the simple fact of their visibility made them an essential

part of the control.

No one had been quite sure what to call them at first. Clones, Synthetics, Artificial

People, Androids; all of these terms were used and rejected, and, as ever in human

history, when faced with something new or misunderstood, the hopes of creation and

discovery soon drifted into the shorthand slang of exploitation. Barcs. That was what

they were called, genetically mass-produced men and women born of test tubes to

augment man’s thinly veiled hold on the outer edges of the galaxy. Mankind used

these genetically engineered pioneers to carry out so many of the dangerous tasks of

empire building and thanked them with prejudice and anger.

“Not this, we never meant this. Everything I showed you, everything we did

together was meant to prevent this, was meant to make things work!”

Danton stood perfectly still, his hands thrust into his coat pockets, staring straight

ahead. He could see, even in the dim light of the cell, how tired and faded

MacKenzie looked, although, unlike his drawn skin and his hollowed out bones,

MacKenzie’s eyes still flickered with the decaying embers of an old fire.

Danton spoke slowly and clearly, “You tried and failed. You know the story well

enough. Through every single bloody day of your exploitation, we Barcs worked

quietly, asking for recognition as citizens, struggling on in hope. We never wanted

any sort of supremacy, although we numbered thousand of millions. None of this is

for power or wealth. All we ever wanted was the right to live as equals under the

same suns as our brothers. We tried the courts. We tried legislation and now we’re

trying guns. You showed us histories and nothing changes. You taught me that. You

showed me pictures, gave me books to read and I read them. I’m no different to my

ancient namesake. I stand and direct the crowds that surge through the shallows of

our old world on waves of violence. You gave us a terrible hope, impossible dreams,

just like Rousseau gave the Sans Culottes a hope they could never turn into reality.

For a brief moment we believed you, but we can’t have freedom, none of us. There

has to be order, even in chaos. All we can do is create a little chaos out of the old

order so that we can be free in whatever comes next. This is your truth, Mac. This is

your reality born out of the realisation that Rousseau and freedom and brotherhood

are lies. We never wanted the heavens, Mac, we just want to be like you.”

MacKenzie had taken a highly public part in the debates. Naturally born humanity

was split upon the issue. Those who governed sought to maintain a status quo. Order

was required to sustain mankind’s fragile foothold in the galaxy. Order at any cost

was the priority. The simple truth that change was endemic in man’s psyche was

subordinated to the concept of rational purpose and destiny. Those who disagreed

were re-educated. Out of a chaos of nations, creeds and racial threads, the lure of the

stars created unity of a sort.

MacKenzie was a lawyer, a friend of the Barcs, and he defended them, fighting class

actions and helping them to formulate their ideas. He reached back into the cradle of

equality where democratic histories and fables languished, forgotten and ridiculed.

He preached the commonality of life, the brotherhood of all living things and the

community of all men. He introduced Rousseau and Marx and Catalina to the Barcs.

He printed texts and helped them disseminate their manifestos on the networks and

along the highways of the many new worlds. It was a small thing. MacKenzie was

no philosopher, nor was he an intellectual giant. He was just a man who stood up and

said that something was wrong. When the courts and the assemblies failed them,

when words and gestures like his own proved futile, the Barcs finally turned on

friend and foe alike. MacKenzie understood the world differently now. Standing in

front of him was a man he had once known as a brother, a man for whose freedom he

had fought, but who now visited upon him the solitude of imprisonment and Citizen

Marat’s never ending, reedy, mechanical voice.

So”, replied MacKenzie, gesturing at the thick stone walls of his cell, “you built all

this...so much energy, so much strength. I never dreamed you’d recreate Year One.

You can’t win, though. They’ll send armies against you. They’ll shit themselves

doing it but they’ll destroy you, just like they got Bonaparte in the end. The crowds

will be out in force screaming Long Live the King soon enough“.

Danton frowned. “No, they won’t. They’ll come for us and they’ll slaughter us, but

they won’t destroy us. Their blood is too thinly spread. They’ll do their worst in the

name of justice and freedom and then, when they think they’re winning their fear

will change them, but only after you and I are long dead. None of this is for us, you

or me, we’re just the agents of change, the first cells to divide in a long, long

gestation. The only difference between us is the mark on my head. I was marked out

to die. You’re a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’re arbitrary,

peripheral considerations, Mac. It’s what you taught us. The outcome is everything.”

Danton took a step forward and placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder. He smiled

sadly before shouting for the guard. The faceplate in the door slid open and

candlelight spilled into the room. Danton nodded and the door swung open. Revealed

by candle light the gaoler and the guard stood as if watching street theatre, both of

them wearing red, white and blue cockades on the front of their soft red caps.

“The day will come, Mac, when Barcs are history, just like the Sans Culottes. All we

want is an end to it. When the dust settles and the true-bloods realise just how alone

they are they’ll let us be human. When all this is done and the blood letting has been

hushed away, they’ll take away the marks and we’ll be free. Then we’ll have a

future, we’ll be free like you. As for all of this? Even if you’d won your court cases

all you’d have done was mark us out even more clearly as Barcs with rights and

attitude, men to fear and despise because we’re different. No... Violence makes the

change, not the courts of our kind hearted masters”.

Danton bowed his head slightly before whispering, “We were friends once. Because

of that friendship, because you chose us rather than your own kind, I have no option

here. Your death is a sign of our strength. You are a cipher, a martyr on whose

shoulders we will step to freedom. There can be no other consideration. It’s for the

greater good. You must suffer so that we can be free.”

Danton turned to the gaoler and barked out an order. “Take him away”.

The guard grabbed hold of MacKenzie’s frail arm, visibly bruising him as he hauled

him forward into the painful glare of the candles floating on their ledges. As he was

manhandled out of the cell MacKenzie turned to look at Danton and opened his

mouth to speak,