The Foreigners Read online

  Also by James Lovegrove

  NOVELS

  The Hope

  Escardy Gap (with Peter Crowther)

  Days

  The Foreigners

  Untied Kingdom

  Worldstorm

  Provender Gleed

  Redlaw

  Redlaw: Red Eye

  THE PANTHEON SERIES

  The Age Of Ra • The Age of Zeus • The Age of Odin

  Age of Aztec • Age of Voodoo • Age of Godpunk

  Novellas

  How The Other Half Lives

  Gig

  Dead Brigade

  Age of Anansi • Age of Satan • Age of Gaia

  COLLECTIONS OF SHORT FICTION

  Imagined Slights

  Diversifications

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Web: Computopia

  Wings

  The House of Lazarus

  Ant God

  Cold Keep

  Kill Swap

  Free Runner

  The 5 Lords Of Pain series

  WRITING AS JAY AMORY

  The Clouded World series

  The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson

  Pirates Of The Relentless Desert

  Darkening For A Fall

  Empire Of Chaos

  THE FOREIGNERS

  JAMES LOVEGROVE

  First published 2001

  Electronic book edition by Solaris 2013

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: (epub) 978-1-84997-194-2

  ISBN: (mobi) 978-1-84997-195-9

  Copyright © James Lovegrove 2001, 2013

  Cover Art by Pye Parr

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of he copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  For Lou

  CONTENTS

  Prelude

  Overture

  First Movement

  1. Air

  2. Organ Stop

  3. Study

  4. Crotchet

  5. Notes

  6. Brass

  Interlude

  Second Movement

  7. Flat

  8. Chorus

  9. Suite

  10. Call and Response

  11. Rhapsody

  12. Promenade

  13. Quaver

  14. Reveille

  15. Bridge Passage

  16. Interpretation

  17. Discordance

  18. Furore

  19. Counterpoint

  Interlude

  Third Movement

  20. Recapitulation

  21. Manual

  22. Dialogue

  23. Bar

  24. Fandango

  25. Mixed Voices

  26. Nocturne

  27. Slur

  28. Lament

  29. Resolution

  30. Suspended Cadence

  Interlude

  Fourth Movement

  31. Anticipation

  32. Treble

  33. Chamber

  34. Fret

  35. Incidental

  36. Concert

  37. Indeterminacy

  38. Fourth

  Interlude

  Finale

  39. Attack

  40. Spiritual

  41. Dissonance

  42. Scale

  43. Fingering

  44. Transposition

  45. Snare

  Coda

  An optimist is someone who knows exactly how sad and how challenging a place the world can be, and a pessimist is a man who finds it out anew every morning.

  Peter Ustinov

  So may the outward shows be least themselves –

  The world is still deceiv’d with ornament.

  Bassanio, The Merchant of Venice

  PRELUDE

  SOME BELIEVED THAT they came from another solar system, after hearing the music issuing from the gold-plated disc on the Voyager II space probe; that they were drawn to Earth by the unearthly beauty of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.

  Others claimed that they hailed from a parallel dimension, an alternate universe that existed in concert with our own, its harmonious twin, the treble clef to our bass.

  Still others maintained that they were humans from our farthest-flung future, as evolutionarily advanced from us as we were from the lower primates, and had travelled back in time to safeguard their own existence by ensuring humankind’s survival, or else simply to spectate.

  Others were of the opinion that they were nothing more (or less) than angels, while, according to yet a fifth popularly-held school of thought, they had been present on Earth all along, cohabiting secretly and invisibly with us until the day arrived when they had no choice but to make their presence known – the day the Great Conductor gestured with His baton and brought them in.

  The truth was, there was no general agreement about the origins of the Foreigners. There could be none. In their strangeness, their sheer ineffability, they thwarted every human effort to define or decipher them.

  What was universally acknowledged, however, was that from the moment the Foreigners first appeared – on city streets, inside public buildings, stalking with stiff yet stately grace across parkland and countryside – the world changed for the better. At a stroke, the nations of Earth set aside their disputes. Rapacious squabbles over land and resources subsided. Ethnic and religious differences ceased to be bones of contention. Crime rates plummeted. All the social tensions that had seemed to be pushing humankind ineluctably towards self-destruction were suddenly and miraculously obliterated.

  Why should this have happened? Perhaps it was because there was something about the Foreigners, something about their magnificent extraordinariness and extraordinary magnificence, that awakened in the soul a kind of gnostic joy. Or perhaps it was because humankind was aroused from its nihilism, its idle, solipsistic tendency toward self-destruction, by the sudden appearance of clear, incontrovertible proof that it was no longer alone in the universe. Or perhaps the reason was more mundane, to do with pheromones, something like that.

  In truth, no one could say for sure, and no one wanted to delve too deeply into the matter for fear that questioning such a wonderful mystery might destroy it, like a child crushing a butterfly in his eagerness to capture it. It was enough merely to accept that, on the day the Foreigners came, the day of their Debut, a new age began. A plainer, cleaner, more honest age. An age of reasonableness and responsibility. An age not obsessed with speed or immediacy or short-term gratification. An age of calm heads and mutual trust. An age of mending fences and building bridges. An age when need was put before greed, less ousted excess, ethics replaced economics, parity supplanted poverty. An age of consensus rather than division, entente rather than factionalism, generosity rather than antipathy, benevolence rather than callousness.

  The bad old ways were abandoned. The strong spared the weak. The rich helped the poor. Hope was embraced. The future became something to look forward to, not dread.

  Or at least, so it seemed.

  So everyone said.

  OVERTURE

  THE RIOTING HAD lasted for two days, mob and police locked in a dance of surge and containment, the streets of Centra
l London their ballroom. Back and forth, to and fro, the two groups – the one dark blue and regimented, the other multicoloured and chaotic – had met and clinched, then disengaged and retreated to lick wounds. During the night, an uneasy truce had prevailed. In the glow of impromptu fires stoked with looted newspapers and torn-down tree branches and prised-off car tyres and the wood-and-cardboard placards that betokened the riot’s origins as a demonstration, the two sides had sat and watched each other warily like pugilists between rounds. Their members sleeping in shifts, they had waited, and at dawn the anger had begun again.

  By noon of the second day the police were exhausted, while the mob, fuelled by rage and fear, remained as fresh as ever. The mob’s numbers seemed limitless, drawing upon the reserve of a city of frightened millions. The police had finite resources. Already they were deploying officers who did not belong on the front line: desk sergeants and detectives and older, less agile coppers. If matters were not resolved soon, forces from other regions might have to be asked to help – those regions, that is, that weren’t having civil-unrest problems of their own. The army might even have to be called in.

  All that day there were running battles, scuffles in side-streets, assaults, arrests. A hail of makeshift weapons rained down on the police – bottles, half-bricks, broken paving-stones, sections of uprooted railing, lengths of scaffolding. Every now and then a cloud of CS gas would blossom and rioters would scatter like spurned lovers, covering reddened, tear-streaked faces. Every now and then could be heard the duff detonations of plastic bullets being fired. Every now and then water cannon would emit a cataract roar. Overhead, helicopters clattered, and tinny tannoy voices repeatedly exhorted the rioters to disperse and go back to their homes, leave the area immediately and go back to their homes. But these distant, echoing pleas were constantly drowned out by the babel-howl of the mob, an eerie, senseless concatenation of words without meaning, the cry of the crowd-animal.

  Detective Sergeant Jack Parry of the London Metropolitan Police joined the fray during a lull on that second evening. Stepping down nervously from the back of a van with cage-covered windows, he and a dozen other men and women were directed to join several more groups of recently-arrived reinforcements, all gathered together on Pall Mall. Clad in flame-retardant jumpsuits, Kevlar vests and helmets with shatterproof visors, and wielding batons and transparent shields, they looked less like people and more like large, well-armoured insects – dehumanised, identical, alien.

  After several minutes of milling confusion, the reinforcements were organised into phalanxes by senior officers with megaphones and ordered to march towards Trafalgar Square. They had been told earlier that their presence alone might be enough to quell the rioting. A fresh influx of police looking sufficiently intimidating might just bring the mob to heel. They none of them believed this, however, and they inwardly prepared themselves for violence.

  And not long after they entered Trafalgar Square, violence came. The mob, spotting the reinforcements, extended itself toward them like an amoeba stretching out a hungry pseudopod. Civilians and police mingled. Across road and pavement, in and around the fountains, between Landseer’s lions, law and disorder clashed. Batons and lengths of two-by-four were wielded with equal ferocity. Then, from the direction of Charing Cross Road, a horseback charge of mounted police scissored the two sides apart, and each withdrew to opposite corners of the square to regroup and retrench.

  The summer evening sky was a bruise of fire-smoke and pollution. Parry, dripping with sweat, surveyed the mob as it seethed less than a hundred metres away from him, ready to surge forward again at any moment. He saw wide white eyes and bared white teeth and he heard unintelligible yelling and he loathed these people, loathed them as any terrified combatant loathes the enemy ... yet, somewhere deep down, he felt a kinship with them as well. They were just human beings, after all. Ordinary, scared human beings.

  Then, after an interval that seemed far briefer than it actually was, the mob launched yet another attack. Most of the rioters had long since forgotten what had originally brought them here, the nature of the protest that had been their initial purpose for gathering. They had found a focus for their fury and fear. It was them versus the authorities, simple as that.

  They came baying across the square, weapons brandished, faces fixed in masks of hatred and glee. Their opponents responded instinctively. Shields up, batons raised, they charged to greet them. The two groups converged and commingled. Parry, suddenly in the thick of it, did the only thing he could do and lashed out with his baton, clubbing and cudgelling. Blood sprayed across his shield and spattered in fine droplets across his visor. The baton rose and fell, breaking faces, transforming rage to shock and pain.

  There was a weird, calm dreaminess to it all. Parry could hear nothing except his breathing, hoarse inside the helmet. He could see nothing except people around him whom he instantly bracketed into either of two categories, those who were on his side and those who were not, those he should hit and those he should not. His world had irised down to just those two alternatives: targets and non-targets.

  Then she appeared in front of him. A woman. Not even a woman, really. Still in her teens. A girl. She had a brick in her hand, but she looked as if she had no idea what to do with it. She looked lost, buffeted on all sides, desperate and confused. Her hair was raggedly short. She was wearing jeans and a combat-green vest. Her left shoulder was gashed and bleeding.

  She stumbled towards Parry, not seeing him, colliding with him...

  And the baton came down. Almost of its own accord. His arm felt as if it was operating independently of the rest of his body. He had no control over it. The baton cracked down on the girl’s skull and she fell, raising her hands to protect herself. And Parry knew he should stop there, she was no threat to him, there was no need to hit her again, but he could not help it. The baton continued to batter the girl, relentlessly, coming down, coming down, as she cowered on her knees, hapless and helpless, and she was screaming – he could see her mouth working, even though he could not hear her – and still he kept on bludgeoning her, making her less human and more contemptible with each blow, reducing her to a writhing, shrieking, crimson-streaked thing...

  ...and seventeen years later, on a freezing April afternoon, Captain Jack Parry of the Foreign Policy Police, New Venice division, stood at almost the exact same spot in Trafalgar Square, staring at the ground at his feet and shivering. He was wrapped in several thicknesses of clothing, including a woollen overcoat he had purchased that morning from an Oxford Street department store, but still he shivered. Deep inner trembles radiated out from his solar plexus, racking him through and through.

  What he had done! What he had done!

  It took a greater effort than Parry would ever have believed possible to straighten up, steel himself with a deep intake of breath, come to his senses, return to the present.

  The present:

  A half-dozen gamey-looking pigeons were waddling expectantly around him, their plumage the same shades of grey and white as the quids of turd they squirted out so casually onto the ground, without breaking stride. A similar number of tourists dotted the pedestrianised portions of the square, all of them huddled within rainproofs or overcoats. From a layer of penicillin cloud a slow sleet was falling, each wet flake appearing to melt and vanish before it actually hit the ground. The British Isles had lost the warming embrocation of the Gulf Stream several years ago and now endured a climate appropriate to their location in the same band of latitude as Moscow and Labrador. This was London in spring. Spring in London.

  Welcome home, Jack.

  The memory of the riot still writhed and sparked and spat at the back of Parry’s brain like a downed power cable. He had hoped that a visit to Trafalgar Square would be a pilgrimage of sorts, a chance to make peace with a piece of his past. He had not counted on being rocketed back so vividly and shockingly to the events of that evening, the square itself – little changed in seventeen years – triggering the
recollection, as though stone and brick, like elephants, never forgot, nor ever allowed you to forget. Even now, his mind was fast-forwarding through the rest of his involvement in the riot. The continuing conflict. The onset of night. The sense that the police were gradually gaining control of the situation. The mob starting to flag. The last few vicious pushes into their midst. The rioters finally recognising that the only rewards for their outrage were pain and more pain, and admitting defeat, scuttling away in twos and threes. The mopping-up operations around midnight. The sense of Pyrrhic victory back at the station. The exhausted faces of his colleagues, looking at one another in the hope of absolution but finding only disgust and flinching-eyed shame. It was all there, stored perfectly in his head. If he had thought that coming back here after all this time might somehow lay the unquiet ghost of the riot to rest, or at least show how faint and faded it had become over the years, he had been sorely mistaken.

  With a heavy sigh, Parry squared his shoulders and strode over to examine the circular brass plaque that was set into the plinth of Nelson’s Column. Squinting down, he read the inscription on the plaque, a few short lines commemorating the thirty-two lives lost on or near this site during the Hunger Riots. Thirty-two men and women, police and civilian, but none of them named. The plaque gave only the number – the quantity of the quenched, the total of the totalled.