The Silent Multitude

by D.G. Compton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In the near future, the super-modern city of Gloucester has been transformed - completely redesigned and rebuilt to the principles of 'scientific city planning'. This gleaming city is threatened with extinction by a mysterious spore from space that brings mankind's proud structures crashing to the ground . . .

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 190

Sample

A LONG time ago it used to be said that on Christmas Eve at midnight all the cats in Gloucester could speak. That they would cross the rooftops, jumping the narrow cobbled alleyways, printing the frosty tiles with neat cold feet, and gather to tell each other of the past year and of the year to come. With the moon high the people of Gloucester would for once be untroubled by anger or passion. The silence of midnight would wait patiently for the peal of the bells in the silver Cathedral.

Inevitably the city and its ways changed. Somewhere down the years this talent of the cats was lost. In the new Gloucester, a fine conurbation of point blocks and skyscrapers, there were few cat roofs left. Only flat wind-scoured areas of asphalt with covered play spaces and complex webs of clothes lines and the occasional helicopter landing pad. And express lifts, dazzling and undesirable to cats, ten seconds from subbasement to the sixty-third. Between them lay paved piazzas and raised pedestrian concourses, precious trees in grave-like rectangles, and moon-colored lights that burned all night and hurt even the adjustable eyes of the cats.

The day before Christmas the street lights had been turned off, and the lights in the shops, the galleries, the offices and thousand jangling Christmas trees. With the people leaving the lights wouldn’t be needed anymore. The grid supplying them was cut to one-tenth the usual load, sentimentally giving just enough to keep the city’s deep freezes ticking.

Among the many cats of Gloucester Tug was a rare specimen of male. He was still a tom-cat, tight fur spermaries still tucked confidently under his tail. In a world become population conscious unspayed mates for him were as rare as he. Night times he had grown accustomed to traveling. On Christmas Eve he came, a little bewildered, out into the strangely unlighted concourse. The moon was not yet up and he hesitated, turning his head, seeing both with his eyes and with the whispering hollows of his ears. Open space around him. No people. In darkness it was safe to cross the middle instead of creeping among the big concrete flower pots and the pillars of the arcading around three of the four sides. He went out. Near the middle he panicked and froze, caught in the sudden intensity of the starlight. Only the tip of his tail hunted silently on the pale terrazzo. He gazed upward, his eye following round the tops of the dead blacknesses that towered against the sky. Glass in one of them caught a star and angled it down at him. He listened to the silence. High in one of the buildings, behind doors and along sound-proofed corridors, a dog was whining. And deep under the ground there was the sound of the rats, the rats who had not yet discovered that things were changed.

Tug stayed in the one position for so long that his limbs became fixed and it was a pain to move them. He lizarded across the rest of the concourse in one swift streak. Close against the glass of a chemist–he knew it from the way it smelled–he stopped, feeling how under that square of starlight he was the only thing alive, moving, blinking its eyes. He turned left through a passageway and out into the Grand Piazza that bordered Old Westgate Street. The fountains were no longer playing, and he slipped across to look at the goldfish. The water under the black sky was too dark even for his eyes, returning nothing but a black reflection of his own lean black muzzle. The unstopped Cathedral clock chimed timelessly. It was Christmas Eve, a quarter to midnight.

On impulse Tug changed his intended direction. Before he came out he had eaten what had been left for him so that his stomach was full. But the Cathedral clock reminded him of clumsy pigeons that roosted on ledges and even down on the backs of the green seats in the Cathedral Close, and the memory drew him aside. In the dark they died so easily, their blood so hot, their breasts so plump and soft on sandwiches. Also there were old sloping houses around the Close, and roofs on which a cat could be nearer to the moon when it rose. So he would take a pigeon first, and leave till later—three miles away in the southwestern areas of the city—the fierce joys of copulation. He skimmed across the Grand Piazza and between the buildings that lined Old Southgate Street. The road itself was straight and empty and black in either direction. Above it hung extinguished Christmas decorations, pale and moving slightly in the wind funneled between the vast heights. Their wires creaked, and a sheet of newspaper, a page of headlines, tilted one corner and rose terrifyingly, swaying down the road away from where Tug stood. He crossed on the tips of his paws, half remembering the night-long hiss of the traffic.

In the Cathedral Close the pigeons were fidgety. All the previous day hardly a soul had come to feed them. The grass was closed under a week of frost, and probably most of the birds would scarce have known what a worm or a beetle looked like. They were the Cathedral pigeons, bred for generations on ham and pastry and the special mixed grain sold to tourists. A day’s hunger had made them restless, and for Tug the hunting was bad.

By the massive west front there was an unlighted Christmas tree, sparrows roosting in it. At Tug’s first touch on the tree trunk they sidled and began twittering. His jaw trembled with rage and he mewed as he stared up into the confused branches above him, full of fat electric light bulbs and fat imitation parcels and fat sparrows. Then he turned away, aware of his dignity, The air was sharp as needles and his recent meal now only a distant memory. At that moment, close as he was to the Cathedral building, he caught a sound from inside it, a single clap like a dropped book echoing up into the contained vastness of the nave. Tug had known birds to get into the building. They fluttered and became confused, and once or twice he had gone in after them. There was another sound from within the Cathedral, a gentle rustling.

Tug had no difficulty getting in. There was a door with a small glass panel broken near the bottom, the sort of thing the maintenance men were always going to get around to.

It was light inside the Cathedral. The light came from candle flames and moved very slowly on the hollowed stones. It fanned between the pillars, spreading and contracting, eating a little into their stiff black shapes. Tug crept in the shadows, watching, curious. The candles were at the farthest end of the building, beyond the screen and the choir stalls and the crimson carpet up to the High Altar. From his place in the center aisle of the nave, reached by darts from chair to chair along the rigid rows of empty seats, Tug looked unwinking up an incredible perspective of stone paving and foot-worn steps, the bottoms of wrought iron gates and the ends of black carved pews to the distant mouse-high figure of the Cathedral Dean. His white Christmas alb was as clear as a jewel; the blue and gold and scarlet embroidery shone in the candlelight as he moved.

The cat walked up the tunnel of candlelight. He listened to the vaulting invisibly high above him. The click of his eyes blinking was thrown back at him from the pillars as he passed. He climbed three shallow steps and squeezed under a gilded iron gate.

The Dean of Gloucester was old and silver and suitable. He held his head high and a little pursed, as if perpetually waiting to sneeze. The Cathedral was his life. To him his service to the Cathedral was his appointed service to God, so that to desert one would be to desert the other. He had held the Offices in the Cathedral that day as every other day. He would hold them alone, or in company, as long as he and the Cathedral lived. The echoes Were filled with the breath of God, with the awe of His vast presence. As seldom before the Dean had felt himself reduced to a mote of dust, afraid and joyful. Through each service nobody had come, each final blessing shrinking from its usual calm assurance to a small half-frightened whisper. A way to sustain his task would be through pride. The height at which he walked was proud, and he knew its dangers.

He was holding now the first Communion of Christmas. Although canonical law forbade in the absence of any congregation the consecration of the bread and wine, or the progress of the service beyond the prayer for the Church militant, yet the Dean had the bread and the wine prepared, and as he turned from the altar to the body of the Cathedral he searched the dim seats once again. His eyes moved along the rows while his mouth and most of his mind prayed for the whole state of Christ’s Church, militant here on earth.

“… Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all Bishops and Curates, that they may both by their life and doctrine set forth Thy true and lively Word …”

A needle of spite regarding his own Bishop fleeing to the safety of the fields pricked his soul. His soul winced–the Bishop’s place was with his people, just as his was here in the Cathedral.

“… And to all Thy people give Thy heavenly grace; and especially to this congregation here present; that, with meek heart and due reverence, they may …”

His eyes gave up their quest. The Cathedral was unpeopled, as was the city outside, even by shadows. He was the only one who had stayed, and he performed the Offices to the unknowing ears of mice and spiders.

“… And we most humbly beseech thee of Thy goodness, O Lord, to comfort and succor all of them, who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity …”

And before the unknowing eyes of a cat. He paused in his prayer where in his forty ordained years he had never paused before, and watched the cat come across the marble squares between the choir stalls toward him. Up the three steps and silently past the armored recumbent figure of Rupert, Duke of Normandy. A muscular cat with long muzzle and ragged ears. The Dean felt less alone (unworthily), and moved not a finger.

“… And we also bless Thy holy Name for all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and fear; beseeching Thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that …”

Tug tested the border of the crimson carpet with one paw. The carpet that the Dean had saved and fought and cajoled to bring from Venice. It smelled of dust and incense, and of frosty grass that must have been on the Dean’s shoes. He had passed the first pair of candles, the second pair on the altar high above him. He was at the light’s center, infinitely vulnerable yet still curious. He advanced across the carpet tenderly, ears flattened.

“… Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.”

It crossed the Dean’s mind that perhaps here down on the steps in front of him was the congregation he needed. It was an unsuitable thought and he dismissed it. Slowly, so as not to frighten the cat, he turned back to the altar, crossed himself, kneeled, and prayed silently. Prayed for the life, for the future of the Cathedral. Tug approached, sniffed the upturned soles of the Dean’s shoes. There was grass on them. And polish from the floors of the Deanery. Tug rubbed the corner of his mouth on the sharp edge of the Dean’s heel. Absorbed in his prayer, the Dean felt nothing.

The hangings of the altar were white, rich with gold thread and iridescent blue. There was nothing for a cat to chase or eat or lust after or warm himself at or find beautiful. If he had any reason for coming other than a cat’s curiosity, it was the presence of the man. Yet it was hard to see what need he had either physical or spiritual for the presence of any man. Unaware that there was a problem, Tug sat on the carpet close to the man’s shoes and turned his head to watch one of the candle flames. A flea tickled and he scratched the itchy place.

The Dean heard the hard dry sound and brought his prayer to a close. His vestments swirled as he stood up. Tug was unafraid. The area of candlelight about the High Altar had become his. He observed the Dean step backward down the steps and bow. Under his vestments the Dean was wearing his overcoat. The Cathedral clock began to strike midnight.

The Dean stooped.

“Puss, puss, puss …”

Tug’s green stare didn’t flicker.

“Left you behind, have they?” Considering. “I must say it doesn’t seem to be worrying you.”

To sit so completely assured was a great gift. The conversational inflections of the Dean’s voice were trivial against the pressing silence and troubled him. He was making no progress with the cat, and the Cathedral clock would soon have finished its measured procession into the morning of Christmas. He groped inside his robes for his electric torch, found it, and hurried away down the aisle. He turned back at the screen and crossed himself again. Then he was gone, the iron gates squeaking faintly behind him. In the robing room he removed his alb with difficulty. He was used to receiving assistance.

The four candle flames burned almost without movement. The clock finished striking and Tug became bored. He was about to give up and go away when the Dean’s footsteps returned, pattering backward and forward from wall to wall of the Cathedral. The Dean paused at the opening in the screen to bow and cross himself. He and the cat gazed at each other briefly. Then he turned the beam of his torch down to the paving stones and was gone. The weight of the huge organ above lay heavily on the opening where he had been. His footsteps faded, a door opened and closed, and there was silence. Somewhere in the walls his footsteps continued, beyond the hearing even of a cat.

The human activity was over. As significant to himself as he had always been, Tug wandering around under the thousand-ton sky of vaulting, sniffing at hassocks and pissing in odd angles when he felt aggressive. Then he left the Cathedral by the same broken pane as he had entered. He traveled fast through streets of fish-tiled maisonettes and shopping complexes with decorations that creaked in the wind. From the Cathedral a single bell was p. . .