Fantastic Metropolis

He reached beyond the carpet to run his gloved hand through the ash. It was fine as talc. You could powder a baby with it. “We’re defined by our appetites and how we control them We’ve made greed a virtue. What on earth possesses us?” He tasted and returned the glittering cup.

Folding his slender old fingers around the bowl’s delicate ornament, Sheikh Faid savoured his tea. He considered it. He scented at it.

Jerry wondered about watching a video.

After a while, Sheikh Faid began to giggle softly to himself. Behind him the endless grey desert rose and fell like an ocean. The wind cut it into complex arabesques, a constantly changing geometry. Sometimes it revealed the bones of the old mosque and the tourist centre, but covered them again rapidly, as if disturbed by memories of a more comfortable past.

Soon Sheikh Faid was heaving with laughter. “There is no mystery to how those Teutons survive or why we fear them. It is a natural imperative. They migrate. They proliferate. Like any successful disease. It’s taken them so little time. First they conquered Scandinavia, then Northern Europe and then the world. And they wonder why we fear them. That language! It reminds me of Zulu. It buzzes with aggressive intelligence. It cannot fail to conquer. What a weapon! Blood will out, it seems. Ah, me. It costs so much blood. The conquest of space.”

As if remembering a question, he reached to touch Jerry’s yielding knee. Signalling for more tea, he pointed to the blooming horizon.

“It is their manifest destiny.”

 

THE END

 

Author’s Note: Philip Wylie (1902-1971) wrote Gladiator (1930), the direct inspiration for the Superman comic strip. As well as the co-author of When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide (1933 and 1934) he wrote a number of imaginative and visionary stories including The Disappearance (1951). His non-fiction, such as Generation of Vipers, is relevant today. His essay Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis was published in 1953. His work was in the Wellsian rather than the US pulp tradition and remains very lively. He scripted The Island of Lost Souls (Dr. Moreau) (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). Other books included Finnley Wren, Corpses At Indian Stones and Night Unto Night. Much of his work was a continuing polemic concerned with his own nation, for whom he invented the term ‘momism’ to explain how sentimentality and over-simplification would be the ruin of American democracy.

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This short story first appeared in Interzone.