The Holy Machine

33

When at last I lay down and attempted, without much hope, to get some sleep, I sank for a short time into a dream in which I was travelling by bus to my father’s house, holding in my hand a letter I’d written on pages and pages of lined paper.

The journey was full of obstacles. One bus broke down. Another headed in the wrong direction. Then I lost my money. I had to walk and took a wrong turning which led up onto a wild, bare part of the mountainside.

And then, when I did eventually reach his house, there was no answer when I knocked on the door. I pushed open the letterbox to call to him. As I opened it, it gave a kind of sigh, sucking in the air.

I tried the door. I found that it was unlocked. As soon as the latch was released, the wind flung the door open, dragging me in and pulling the letter out of my hand. The sheets of paper went fluttering away up the stairs. When I chased after them I found there was a laboratory up there. There were computers, cables, sine wave monitors, gravitonic panels… and right in the middle of the room, there was a kind of Gate. It seemed to be responsible for the wind, because the pages of my letter went flying towards it. And through it, there was another world, a bone-white plain as bare and barren as the moon, sucking in the air of Earth. My papers were bowling away across the dusty plain. I rushed in after them. The Gate fell into the distance behind me, along with the small glimpse it afforded of the laboratory and sunlight and Earth.

There were no features in the landscape at all except for scattered stones, of different shapes and sizes, stretching away into the distance. There was something quite dreadful about those stones, which must have lain here like this unseen for hundreds of thousands of years without a single eye to see them – without a single mind, however lowly, to give their existence some kind of purpose.

Then I saw my father ahead of me, lying on his back in a gap between two boulders. He had been there for some time. Poisonous rays had beaten down on him and shrivelled him up. His cheeks were sunken and his chest fluttered precariously, his quivering heart and lungs clinging on by thin strands inside his brown cage of ribs.

But his eyes swivelled round in his skull, his dry mouth whispered my name and I could see he was seeking some sort of reconciliation. I felt that in this final hour he wanted us to become in reality a father and a son. I felt I was expected to stoop and kiss that shrivelled leathery brow.

Reluctantly I took his hand and held it.

But I couldn’t look at him. I looked across the dead world, where the stones, one after another, stretched away into the distance.

Far away I could still just make out one last white sheet of paper, about to disappear over the horizon.