The Vorrh

reversed or inverted, and that this act was not mischievous or malicious, but simply the process of translation, the negotiation of opposites; not to find compromise, but to ritualise the act of meaningless exchange. It infuriatingly proved that the world was made in at least two different ways. If he were to ever truly know how many different ways, he may have run screaming from his post and returned to the sanctity of the linear cities, even to the common values of the linear trench. He had survived that relentless war, and had been rewarded for it. But this commission on another continent had proved to be a biblical reward: tricky, blind and ultimate.
    The task he was now undertaking was a perfect example of managing the inexplicable, a distasteful confrontation with a set of primitive values. He had been told to use persuasion and guile to achieve the outcome. He preferred force, but it was proven not to work here, and could produce the opposite effect.
    The Possession Wars were evidence of that, and the man outside had been a leader in that bloody uprising. He tried not to think about that, about the dead, the stupidity and the waste and the fact that everything now was just the same. He would have hanged the man outside for treachery and murder, for betraying the position of responsibility given to him, violently selling it out over a mistake, and for arrogantly mixing ignorance with shabby, meaningless superstition and boiling these to outrage. Over three days, a peaceful and obedient community had turned into an inflamed, rampant mob. The church and school burnt down. The resident officers butchered in their astonishment, radio equipment torn to pieces. The airstrip and the cricket pitch had been erased, scrubbed out. Not a single straight line was allowed to exist anywhere.
    By the time he and a heavily armed division had arrived, they found a squalid churn of destruction. Everything that had been achieved with, or given to, the natives had been intentionally eradicated, mangled back into their own stinking, senseless history. Tsungali stood at the centre of the carnage, triumphant and exhilarated, wearing only his tunic jacket and his peak cap, ridiculously turned inside out. Feathers, bones and cartridges were entangled in his hair and his teeth had been re-sharpened.
    When the colonial forces had first appeared, they were mysterious and powerful. Their ignorance of the world was forgiven. The quantity of wonderful goods they brought and the manner of their arrival startled the True People. Cautiousness made their hands hesitate and quiver over the treasures they were offered. There were gifts for everybody. Tsungali and his brothers watched their kindness with distrust and bewilderment, watched the endless flow of impossible things: animal meat in hard, shiny shells without bones, killing irons of great power and accuracy, rainbows of cloth, talking cages and a swarm of other things and powers with no name.
    When the strangers were given permission to cut the trees and shave the ground, nobody could have expected the consequences. Tsungali had seen the first ones in the sky when he was small. They floated belly-side-up like a dead lizard in a pool, streaking the sky with straight white lines. Tsungali asked his grandfather what they were, those dagger birds with long voices. His grandfather saw nothing, heard nothing, the sky was empty, they did not exist. There was no template in his perceptions for such a thing. And, if some did see something, then it must be from another world, and therefore dangerous and best left alone. The magicians said they were the dreams of young fathers still to be born, and that their growing frequency told of a vast future fertility. No one had an explanation when one came down to nest on the shaved strip in the jungle; the strangers simply had great power to be able to catch one so easily. Tsungali walked to the clearing with his grandfather, hand in hand. They stood and stared at the gleaming hard bird. Its shell was the same as the shell around the meat without bones. The old man shivered slightly and saw only the clearing with the strangers hurrying back and forth. He saw them because they were men, or creatures in the shape of men.
    The excited child stepped forward but was yanked into a standstill by the old man’s rigidity. He was rooted to the spot and his tugging grandson would not unbind him. The boy knew better than to argue, and tears of frustration filled his