Green Men

A story about buildings, books and people.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Philip K Dick

Not long ago, in a city that had fallen under the spell of redevelopment, some people failed to see what was about to happen to them. They worked in a beautiful building, which none of them noticed. They had all retreated from reality, preferring old books, living in the past, collecting things, or worrying about imaginary dangers. Then they were visited by a woman from another place, who helped them understand what really threatened them. But was she really on their side? And could the danger really be averted? Before they could know the answer, the people who worked in the beautiful building would all have to face up to reality.

Chapter 1

Reality

The healing crystal woman was putting a poster up in her window. She was the only trader in Jubilee Wharf to have a window. The others, like Ben, had partitioned stalls with wooden counters. Their goods were laid out in the open, and had to be put away and locked up at the end of each day’s trading. But the healing crystal woman had an enclosed space, a proper shop, with all her crystals and mystical statuettes and runic stones and aromatherapy oils set out neatly on shelves and racks. She could sit there, drinking herbal tea, waiting for customers, just behind the large indoor therapeutic waterfall installation that dominated her display, soothed by its outpouring of negative ions, positive energy, yin, yang, Ch’i, or whatever it was that was supposed to make it work.

There was something vague about her, something that worried Ben. She was pudgy, and wore too much make-up. Her clothes were loose and concealing. She trembled slightly, despite her soothing fountain and relaxing tea, sometimes twitching and fidgeting alarmingly. Her wig-like hair was too dark, and was usually held down by some sort of hat or headscarf. She often wore gloves, even indoors. It was hard to tell how much of her was real. She might have been an alien life form, a giant slime-mould perhaps, a myxomycete-type creature made of jelly-like cells that could disassemble and reform itself into any shape. An organism like that might not be very good at approximating human form, or might, after a prolonged effort, be loosing the ability, reverting to its true shape, if it had one. That would explain the healing crystal woman’s shifting and imprecise resemblance to a human being.

But she behaved like a person, more or less, sitting in her shop, selling the things she sold, instructing customers in how to enhance Mind, Body and Spirit. Her customers were self-obsessed, but the healing crystal woman seemed a loose conglomerate, hardly capable of selfhood.

Was she an Anomaly, a thing that shouldn’t really be there, a thing that proved that reality was more complicated than most people thought it was? Probably not. Not yet, anyway. Ben saw her every day, and she was no stranger than usual. She would not be an Anomaly unless she lost control and revealed her true nature. But she was certainly a mystery. How did she make a living? Her stock of statuettes and crystals never changed. Customers came and went, spent time talking, but left without seeming to buy anything. How did she keep going, unless she was supported by some sort of off-world wealth-source?

While Ben watched, she smoothed a sheet of paper onto her window, sticking it to the glass with tape. Her doughy fingers trembled with the effort, or with some dim cellular emotion akin to resignation. He knew that she had been dithering, reluctant to follow the others and put up one of the Green Men’s posters. Now she had given in, leaving Ben one of the few to hold out.

What was the point of all that environmental stuff? The Green Men were worrying about the wrong problem. Even if they were right, meetings and talks were a waste of time. Protest, if they ever got round to it, was futile. It was like giving health food to a dying man. But the eco-crisis they all went on about wasn’t real. It was like the fake heat-wave in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the one the Proxers created to keep humans under control. Or was it the reegs, in Now Wait for Last Year? You could always find parallels in Philip K Dick’s books. He had anticipated everything.

Having read them all, several times, Ben knew Dick’s books very well. But the plots defied summary, and PKD had a tendency to use and reuse the same ideas, endlessly recombining them to make stories that were new and different, but which resembled each other. The fake heat-wave, for instance. How many books was that in?

PKD knew his stuff. He saw through what other people took for reality, into what lay beneath it. There were layers. Some things were not what they seemed to be. Most things, really. You had to think for yourself. You couldn’t trust anyone else. Not even PKD. Even his reality wasn’t real. He was too clever for that. But you could get something from his stories. Something to go on.

Just to reassure himself, Ben touched the laptop he kept under the counter. He always treated his computer carefully, bearing in mind the possibility that it might turn out to be an organism. Computers were always doing that in the stories of PKD, dissolving into protoplasm, falling apart to reveal creatures inside, showing themselves to be fronts, mouthpieces for aliens or people. And computers that really were computers were often more human than people. Autonomic lifts, fridges and coffee machines were always talking, offering advice on how a character’s dilemma might be resolved, or how the good life ought to be lived, quoting St Augustine or some other wise old man. Sometimes they argued, demanded money, refused to cooperate, even threatened to sue. So it made sense to be kind to your computer, never hitting it or swearing at it when it went wrong, even if it was an old model. You never knew.

Ben gently tapped the touch pad, waking the processor from its sleep-like state, watching while his screensaver blinked on briefly, then vanished, replaced by his homepage. That was the place where he did most of his business, buying, selling, tracking down books. There were no new messages or bids, so he pointed the browser at his current favourite of the many Philip K Dick websites. He watched the background, a retro fifties-style whirling atom, emerge from a blur of pixels. Beneath the stick-joined protons and electrons, and its frieze of aliens and spaceships, they were all there, the novels and stories, science fiction and mainstream, as well as information about the author and his short, sad life.

The stories were all different, but if you put them together you could see patterns. Ideas leapt out. For instance:

• We are all living in a false reality

• Some people are not human

• Some aliens and androids are more human than we are

• You have to build your own reality

It was good point, that last one. Some people didn’t even realise they were doing it. Claire for example. Ben could see her, across the aisle, rearranging a selection of novelty teapots. Her flat was like a time capsule, full of seventies stuff, posters, magazines, toys, lamps, furniture, and vinyl discs in garish cardboard sleeves. Ben had been there once or twice, to help her get big things up the stairs. She was building a womb-world, a fake recreation of the time she had grown up in, a ‘babyland’, like the characters in Now Wait for Last Year.

The stock on Claire’s stall was a real mish-mash. She called it collectibles, but no one seemed to buy any of it. You could see why. It all came from different times and places. There were Art Deco ornaments, Victorian china, fifties ashtrays, novelty teapots, political Toby jugs. Most of it was china, of one sort or other, but apart from that none of it fitted together. And that was the thing about reality. It had to fit together, otherwise it fell apart. Even with ordinary reality, the sort everyone thought was real, there were places where the joins showed, and Claire’s stall was one of them.

Most of Ben’s customers, the ones that came to Jubilee Wharf, didn’t care. They had no idea how important it was to own the right things. Sometimes Ben felt like Robert Childan, the authentic artefact dealer in The Man in the High Castle. Childan sold American treasures to Japanese collectors, grovelling while his native culture was packed up and taken away. But things were not quite that bad yet. Ben was still in control, knew what he had in stock and what he could get for it, and never sold a book he really wanted for himself. He knew, for instance, that he had a paperback of The Man in the High Castle, issued in 1965 and still in good condition, in a box under the counter. He reached for it, hoping for the comfort of touching a familiar object, for the pleasure of contemplating a source of interesting ideas. His hand went to the box, felt dusty spines and dog-eared corners, pulled out a book that seemed the right size. It was not the book by Philip K Dick. It was not even science fiction. It was book he had never seen before. The cover had a picture of a kissing couple on it. The title looked as though it was written in lipstick. The lettering was embossed. A book like that had no business being on his stall. How had it got there? Had he been duped by a seller who had slipped a few of his wife’s books into the batch of SF she was making him get rid of? If so, why hadn’t he noticed? Were there any others? And where was the book he was looking for? Forgetting all about the Green Men and their predictions of global warming, Ben began to search his stock.

Christopher Harris 2010