Unto the fields

The glinting scythe sweeps on precarious forks across the country,
the mutating scape over which it hops a shifting parallax viewed
through the roadway's weeping concrete proscenia. Pinned like
automotive butterflies to the card of the canted flyover, the cars gaze
up at the plywood prophecies into which steel and glass are being
poured like cocktail sticks sprinkled into a jug. The squamate glass
serpents cast their humble slough, and seduce the workforce to
quasi-internment. Presently the corralled cars wonder, do they still
find the kidney-shaped lake, with its faux Japanese island, diverting?
Do they still find anything diverting?
The towers' diffident climaxes reflect the sky, apologising for their
impolite intrusion into the domain of the clouds - towering Inferiority
Complexes displaying vignettes of a Wonderland forest of mammon. Their
eyes on this modernist etiquette ninety storeys above, the cars ignore
the mundane figure shuffling along the beach.

Vallon wended his way down the beach alongside the Stygian channel, a
dazzling tangerine glare strobing across the strabismal contortion of
his face. The Crystal, scattering intense verdant light over the far
bank, persisted in his peripheral vision like a prying guardian,
reminding him of natural symmetry among the glaucous ziggurats, louring
taupe dolmens of concrete and assorted ships, towers, domes, theatres,
and temples that aptly delineated London's mindless folly. He had once
been sceptical that such symmetry was possible on Brobdingnagian scale
and by no civilised hand, but then had recalled the preposterous
theories of extraterrestrial implication that circulated around pubs
and fostered anti- lizard paranoia.

In just four thousand years of civilisation, the tiny, field-flanked
cluster of limestone crevasses and stacks of concrete that had been
discovered by the first humans had evolved into his abode. Once the
haze had disappeared - that is, as the first generations had learned to
scratch and scrawl that momentous occasion on the wall of what looked
like a giant beige-and-green crystal projecting from the bank of the
river - humans had undergone a Pyrrhic learning curve akin to an infant
becoming sentient. From then on, the Crystal had prodigious
significance in the history of mankind - being the place whence humans
could relate their entire history. It became a place of pilgrimage,
where the few people in London who still believed in a great Creator
would leave candles by the tortured barbed wire.
As humans had learned to comprehend and accept nature, they sundered
themselves ever further from it, clearing away most of the jutting
obsidian fingers that crept toward the sky and improvising a rough
civilisation on the scarified, maculated plains. Only the Crystal was
left, glistening in the evening sun as if to remind the humans of their
origin; of the seemingly unguided artistry of nature.

Vallon's hypnotic trudging along the beach set him musing about his
destination. He still bore a childlike fascination with medicinal
progress, following every scientific breakthrough declared in newsprint
and observing with awe heart patients whose organic pulsation had been
replaced by metronomic shocks and clicks. Humans could now do anything,
he reflected - even creation of artificial organs and, ultimately, of
artificial life. It was a juvenile attitude, nurtured by the
claustro-agoraphobia of the measureless matrix that had never delivered
Vallon to the extra-metropolitan world. In this secure womb, little
lasted for longer than a week and invisible, anonymous armies of white
coats toiled in laboratories to research applications of infinite
compounds. How could they let Alva down?

As the sun wontedly forsook its daily attempt to enlighten the city,
London once more assumed a fey, citron monochrome. The Institute rose
obliquely into the gloaming, an enamelled steel container lorry grown
sick of the world that had decided to start a new life as a meteorite.
Next-door, a stentorian mythological allusion addressed this new
intruder - multifaceted and insecure - with all the disdain of a worthy
elder. Meanwhile, the Institute was endeavouring to be so oblique as to
become an unobtrusive slope.
Across the street, Vallon contemplated the two with perfunctory
amusement - it was clear which edifice was the master and which the
stooge. He steeled himself against bad news and finally pushed through
the traffic to the Institute's automated cervix, into the stuffy,
marmoreal lobby.
The receptionist quietly ended her phone call. 'How can I help,
sir?'
'I'm Alva's partner. How is she?'
'She'll be right through.'
Within minutes, Alva padded into the lobby wearing a white robe. Every
irregular surface seemed to throw light onto her pale complexion, and
to Vallon she looked ominously celestial. As she spoke she barely
disturbed the illuminated dust.
'They say I'll live at least another year.'
Vallon smiled, through gritted teeth. 'But you're still going to die?
There's nothing they can do?'
The valetudinarian reflected, then shook her head. 'Actually, there's
something else I want to say.'
'Oh?'
'I'm going to become a mother.'

Bemused, Vallon protested as Alva pushed him toward the automatic
doors, and out of the sterile lobby. Eventually he surrendered and soon
the two were climbing the Crystal's hanging gardens. Looking down over
the hysterical city, Life suddenly made sense and the Crystal and its
spurious idolatry reverted to its lowly former incarnation. The
iconoclasts shared their enlightenment as she enfolded him in her
clinical robe. Eleven storeys below, the cars crawling around the
island hummed their accord.