Charles Stross

Contents

Antibodies

A Boy and his God

The Boys

A Colder War

The Concrete Jungle

Dechlorinating the Moderator

Different Flesh

Down On The Farm

Examination Night

Extracts from the Club Diary

Generation Gap

Halo

Lobsters

MAXO signals

Mss*g* n t*m* c*ps*l*

The Midlist Bombers

Minutes of the Labour Party Conference, 2016

Missile Gap

Nightfall

Pimpf

Red, Hot and Dark

Remade

Rogue Farm

SEAQ and Destroy

Ship of Fools

Snowball’s Chance

Something Sweet

Toast: A Con Report

Trunk And Disorderly

Yellow Snow

Appeals Court

Unwirer

Jury Service

Tarkovsky’s Cut

There were less than two weeks to go until Christmas, and flakes of snow were settling silently on the windowsill. Sue leaned against the wall next to the casement so that her breath formed patterns of condensation on the glass. The red glow of the newly-lit street lights turned the falling snow to blood, drifting down across the deserted alleyway behind the lab. She blinked slowly. Was it her imagination or was there a new shadow behind the dump-bins? Holding her breath so that it would not fog the glass, she stared out of the window. The shadow disappeared and she breathed out. Then she undid the catch and swung the window open in invitation. “You’re late,” she said.

The shadow reappeared in front of her, resolved into the shape of a man shrouded in a donkey-jacket against the cold. “Rush-hour traffic,” he said, his voice somehow deadened by the softness that settled on every surface. “Help me in?”

Sue extended a hand. He took it and levered himself up and over the sill. He swung himself into the room and dropped to the floor, looking around as he did so. “You’re wet,” said Sue. “Did you bring any equipment?”

He nodded and held up a small brief case. She looked at his face. Something wasn’t quite right. “You look strained,” she said as she shut the window.

He nodded tiredly. “I am not as young as I used to be, Sally. If you knew what I had to do to get here –”

“I can guess, and as for the name I’m called Sue,” she said, a trifle too sharply. He stared at her for a moment then nodded and forced a smile. The shape of his cheekbones turned it into something hollow and unconvincing.

“Please accept my apologies then – Sue. It’s late and I’ve got a job to do and we’ve all been under considerable stress recently –”

“Accepted. Just remember who it was who laid their neck on the line to get a job here …”

“It is noted,” he said curtly.

“No it’s not!” she flashed. “This unit is licensed to work with pathogenic organisms. They wanted a blood sample and insisted upon giving me a series of vaccinations –”

“Ah, I’m sure it hurt.” He shook his head, oblivious to the finer points of immunological stress. “But in view of what you found that’s immaterial now, isn’t it?”

She turned away angrily and busied herself with an untidy pile of papers that sat on the desk in the corner by the centrifuge.

“Believe me when I say that this could be the greatest threat we have ever encountered,” he said softly. “Greater than any ancient encounter with half-glimpsed horrors …”

She nodded slowly, wondering if she had it in herself to forgive him the slight. “You might have a point,” she said. “But only time will tell.” She rummaged through a drawer in search of a paper-clip, bound the documents together, and slid them out of the way. Then she walked to the battered metal locker and removed a creased lab coat. “Let’s make a start on it, shall we?”

Kristoph grinned and removed his donkey-jacket. “Let’s,” he said. He opened his brief case and pulled out a pair of disposable plastic gloves. “Now who shall we apportion the blame to? How about some animal rights activists? Or shall we make it look like an industrial job this time, do you think?”

Kristoph was not his real name. He had no real birth certificate, although he had carried several. He was much older than Sue, and he had lived through interesting times. He had lost a large part of his heart on the Eastern front, so that fifty years later he still wondered if he could ever be whole again: he had survived the decades since the war by auctioning his soul at Checkpoint Charlie, running jobs for Stasi and the CIA and another, less familiar Organisation. With the collapse of the Wall he had been set free to wander, and finally to turn his hand to Family business. As he prepared for the job in hand he whistled a half-forgotten marching song to himself.

“Will you stop doing that?” asked Sue.

He glanced up from his kit and caught her eye. “Why?”

“Anyone would think you were an old Nazi,” she said.

“Oh.” He glanced down again so that she wouldn’t see his smile. Now he remembered what the tune was. “Time flies,” he said, clipping the camera shut. Then he stood up. “How long have you been here then?” he asked.

Sue walked to the window and stared out of it again. “Two years,” she said, “but that’s only in this job. I had to go to one of their Universities to qualify for it. My family –”

“Demonstrated a laudable degree of foresight,” opined Kristoph.

“In this day and age anything else condemns you to life as a menial. Times have changed. If you want to get ahead you’ve got to play by their rules. The net’s too tight.”

Kristoph, who knew better than she, held his silence.

“I’ve heard all the old tales,” Sue continued. “My parents are really keen on them. But things aren’t the same, are they? It’s hard to maintain a sense of … community … while all around us …”

Kris stood up. “I think you’d better show me to the offices. We don’t want to start too late; this could take all night.”

Sue turned slowly, looking around as if she had forgotten where the door was. When she opened it she glanced swiftly down the corridor outside. “Clear,” she called over her shoulder as she slipped out of the basement laboratory. Kristoph looked around curiously as he followed her through the deserted passages of the department.

The concrete floor was scuffed and dirty and the whitewashed walls had seen better days. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting what Kristoph saw as a gangrenous blue-green glare across the crowded bulletin boards. An ancient ultra-centrifuge keened to itself in a shadowy niche as they hurried past. Sue pushed through two pairs of fire doors and turned a corner on a concealed staircase. “Meet me in room D-11 if we become separated,” she said. “It’s two flights up. There’s a walkway from the corridor opposite it to the Geophysics block if you need a quick getaway.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said quietly.

“You know there are security guards?” she asked, pausing on a landing halfway between floors.

“Whatever makes you think we’ll encounter any trouble?” he replied, looking her straight in the eyes.

She appeared to be slightly flustered. “Nothing,” she said. “I just thought you spook types always liked to know a way out of a tight corner –”

Kris held her gaze for a moment then nodded. “The ones you read about are the ones who get caught,” he said. “Don’t worry about me, Sue. I can take care of myself.” He waved a hand in an abrupt cutting motion. “Carry on. We haven’t got all night.”

Presently they arrived outside a locked door. “This is it,” she said.

Kristoph bent over the lock for a couple of minutes, fiddling with a set of fine-tipped pliers. “You’ve got to be careful to leave all the right signs,” he murmured. “Otherwise the Polizei get suspicious. Is there a vending machine anywhere near here?”

“Sure,” said Sue. “Why?”

“Get me a cup of coffee, please,” he said. “White, no sugar. We’re going to be here a while.”

The lock snicked open and he turned the door handle as she walked away. The room within was darkened. He pushed the door open and reached around it for the light switch, every nerve straining for signs of potential trouble. But there was nothing amiss: it was just another night-time office, plastic covers drooping over the copier and word processors. He breathed out slowly, willing the muscles in his arms to relax as he looked around. There were papers in every in-tray, filing cabinets full of pre-publication data: he rubbed the skeleton keys in his pocket. The soul of a research group lay exposed to his midnight fingers, so prosaic an institution that it seemed ridiculous to connect it to some hideous, numinous threat to the survival of the race. But that was what Ancient of Days had said – and Kris knew full-well, with the bitterness of experience, that when Ancient of Days spoke, everyone listened.

Kris went to work with a precision that was born of long experience. First he closed the venetian blinds; then he switched on the photocopier and went to work on the first of the filing cabinets as it warmed up. His briefcase he placed upon a nearby desk, opening it to reveal two reams of lightweight copier paper: why bother with toys like Minox spy-cams, his trainers had once explained, when any well-run office provides all the tools you need? He whistled as he worked, in an effort to forget the snow on the window ledge. If it wasn’t for that damned snow, with its burden of remembered horrors preying on his mind, he might even admit that he was happy.

There was a knock on the door. Kristoph spun round then relaxed, recognizing that it was Sue: a slight catch in her breath and the way she shifted her balance on the floor outside gave her away. “Come in,” he said, turning back to examine the suspension files in the top drawer of the first cabinet.

She opened the door. “Your coffee,” she said, placing the cup next to his case. “Any idea how long you’ll be?”

He yawned, baring teeth as white as those of an actor in a toothpaste commercial. “You tell me. If there’s not much to lift from the project files, then …”

“You’re in the wrong cabinet for the research data,” she observed, looking over his shoulder. “That’s all departmental admin. The interesting stuff is filed in the drawers marked Homoeobox Research Group. Funded by the Human Genome Project, natch.”

“It’s all greek to me,” said Kris, turning to the indicated cabinet. Greece, yes … and the partisans in the hill country … he stamped on the memory. Maybe I’ve been around too long, he thought bleakly. The generation gap is widening all the time.

“I shouldn’t worry about it,” she replied, sitting down in a chair in front of one of the word processors. “Change overtakes us all. This shit is so new it’s all developed since I left school.”

“How long ago was that?” Kristoph asked, picking out the first file and carrying it across to the copier.

“Ten years since I took ‘A’ levels,” she said, “then a batchelor’s degree, Masters, Phd and research for the past two years. I’m in a different field, though. She rolled her chair round, craning her head back to stare at the ceiling. “Polysaccharide chemistry, not ontological genetics. They’ve made huge breakthroughs in the past ten years, you know. How long is it since you were at school?”

Kris laughed. “I was never at school,” he said, stacking papers face-down in the feeder tray. “At least not as you know it. I learned to read and write in primary school with the other children, but then the dictator’s men came. Ideology was in the driver’s seat, and there were secret police – night and mist – and identity papers to contend with. We couldn’t move as freely as we did before all this modern nonsense. I went into the army at sixteen because I was a young fool and thought it was a good way to get away from home, to lose myself among millions of other young men; I didn’t understand about humans then.”

He fell silent for a while, watching the sharp-edged shadows moving on the wall behind the photocopier. I don’t think I should have told her that. “We suffered in that war,” he said quietly. “I don’t know how many died; there’s no way of telling. But all through that area – the pain –”

“Then you must be, what? Sixty years old?” Sue asked. She wasn’t spinning the chair any more: she was staring at him, her face a sharply pointed question, hungry for answers. “And still, you –”

“Still,” he said. “I’m not even settled down with a family. If I was human I would be an old man, now. Retired to tend my bed of roses.” Abruptly, he leaned forward and grabbed the stack of ejected documents, stuffed them back into their file and returned them to their drawer in exchange for another bundle. “They created the roses, you know? The humans. They bred them, from earlier plants.”

“I know,” she said. “Just as now they’re trying to redesign themselves to fit their own desires. It’s an interesting preoccupation …”

Kris shuddered at the sight of her expression. “Pass the next file. What’s your real name?” he asked without looking up.

She told him.

“Well,” he said, running his long, thin tongue along his lips as he stared at the control panel: “you would do well to remember who you are, Sue, and think carefully about where your loyalties lie. We’re letting them play with fire, and you are sitting very close to the hearth. There are those who would say that if you were to be burned it would be only your own fault.”

She walked away from him, towards the window. “I say that as a friend,” he added. “There are other groups at work as well …”

She turned round then, and Kris felt himself frozen by the black spike of her gaze. He stared back at her unwaveringly. Something very ancient and very chilly passed between them and he made a small gesture with his right hand, a relic of an upbringing in backwoods Silesia. Behind them the photocopier whined on, unattended in its shadowy corner. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her face relaxing into a shape that was both alien and intimately familiar to Kristoph. “Believe me, genetic manipulation is perfectly safe,” she added, baring inhumanly sharp teeth at him. “You can tell that to Ancient of Days. It’s safe as stones as long as we’re in control. Safe as stones …”

***

Later, as soon as it could be arranged, five strangers gathered in impromptu committee. There were no validated safe houses available in the city at present, and Ancient of Days had insisted upon full security precautions being observed: therefore they met in the a place normally maintained for serious emergencies, where interruption was unlikely.

The city sewer systems were more than a century old, and a lengthy program of refurbishment had been under way for ten years now. Old brick-lined tunnels crumbled gently beneath the pounding wheels of trucks and cars, and the new prefabricated concrete sewers bypassed them completely. The original maps were in poor condition, many of them lost during the war, and the old lore of the tunnel-walkers had dwindled as a result of modern career mobility, but there were still some who knew where the ancient tunnels ran. One of those summoned hence conference had spent years in similar tunnels under Bucharest; and another had been around when they were built. And tonight, two nights after Kristoph’s twilight raid on the research group’s offices, they were about to meet.

Slime wreathed the sewer, forming a tide-mark three-quarters of the way up the rotting brick walls. Five metres below the streets of the city it was completely dark, and Kristoph was forced to stoop over his lantern in order to keep his head from brushing the ceiling. Jagged black shadows danced along the tunnel behind him like a retinue of silently mocking mimics. Once a pair of close-set red eyes gleamed at him from an outflow: Kris nodded at them as he shuffled towards the meeting place. There was no telling where Ancient of Days might cast her eyes and ears. He pushed onwards, ever deeper into the maze of fetid burrows beneath the city, wading knee-deep in ancient effluent. His thoughts were grim.

He arrived at a dead end. A pile of rocks and mud had collapsed through a hole in the ceiling, blocking off the tunnel ahead. Cracked and rotted timbers poked out of the heap, and a pool of black mud had gathered at its foot. Kris paused, then reached out and pushed down hard on one of the exposed timbers. With a gurgling sigh the water around his feet drained away; whirlpools swirled briefly about his ankles as he braced himself against the powerful current leading to the concealed grate. Presently the floor was dry – dry enough. Bending down he felt through the mud for a projecting iron ring and pulled up on it. The trapdoor was ancient but well-maintained, and he let it swing shut above him as he descended the steps below. Now there was no need for a torch. Ancient of Days had passed here before him, and where she walked darkness was not permitted. Kristoph shivered, not from cold but from awe and a slight, small dread. He had met generals of State Security and deputy directors of Central Intelligence and he had worked with assassins and spies and defectors and the other shadowy predators of the cold war jungle; but none of them possessed even a fragment of the legendary power which Ancient of Days controlled. And never before had she taken a direct interest in his affairs, to the point of requesting his attendance …

He looked around. He stood on dry stone flooring at the bottom of a high, narrow room similar in shape to an oubliette in a mediaeval castle, except that it was considerably larger and there was a door set in one wall. It was a modern door, plywood and aluminium, and it was as jarringly out of place here as a plastic denture in the jaw of an Egyptian mummy. He shook his head disapprovingly then reached into a pocket for the key which he had been given. Then he unlocked the door and went through.

“You can leave it open,” she said. Kris’s head snapped round and he froze, staring at the woman who stood in the corner of the room behind him. “We’re expecting three more guests,” she added.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Call me Helena.” She came forward, out of the shadow cast by the weak light bulb that hung from one corner of the ceiling, and Kristoph realised that she couldn’t possibly be Ancient of Days; for one thing she was far too young, even though she bore the marks of encroaching middle age. Her left cheek was scarred by a patch of psoriasis, an angry red margin around a silvery, scaly patch, and with a sudden jolt Kris realised that she might actually be human. “Don’t worry: I’m not as – human – as I look.” She rubbed the back of one gloved hand against her cheek. “There are two others coming, then Ancient of Days herself. You brought the documents, I take it?”

Kris glanced round, taking in the rest of the room. It was furnished, albeit sparsely, with camping seats and an upturned tea-chest as a table. It was also very cold. “I’d prefer to leave that until the others arrive.”

“Very well then,” she said, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her coat: “it can wait. I hope you appreciate the gravity of the situation –”

“Lady, I’m the one who turned over the office,” he said with heavy irony. “I was on the Kennedy assassination committee; I set up spy swaps during the fifties. Before that, I was site officer on Operation Silver. Trust me, I’m a professional.”

She laughed, which was not unexpected, then abruptly looked away, which was. “Bullshit. Spy stuff. Fun and games.” She turned back to him. “This is the real thing,” she said intensely: “you’d better believe it! This is so important that –”

He held up a hand and she stopped. The noise of hands and feet descending a ladder was clearly audible. “We have company.”

The new arrivals didn’t wait around. Both of them came through the door, then stopped and stared at Kris and – whatever her name was – Helena. “Ivan Salazar and David Jakes?” asked Helena.

“Yeah,” said the shorter one, removing a yellow construction-site helmet and running a pudgy hand through his thinning hair. “I’m Dave. That’n’s Ivan.” The taller one stood with his hands thrust deep in the outer pockets of his trench coat. Kris stiffened, automatically focusing on the bulge in Salazar’s right pocket. “Sorry we’re late.”

“Any trouble?” asked Helena.

Ivan slowly pulled out his right hand. It was empty, and Kristoph relaxed slightly. “Not much,” Ivan said in heavily-accented English. “Not much now.” He grinned sharkishly and Kristoph looked back at his pocket. Must be a .22, he thought. Anything bigger would show. Now where have I seen him before?

Kristoph looked back at the tubby American and unexpectedly realised that he was being stared at. The man had exceedingly cold eyes. “No offense,” he said, “but we ran into some identity verification problems a while back. Ivan hasn’t had time to change yet.”

“Did you deal with the problem?” asked Kris.

Ivan nodded. “He terminated it,” said Jakes. “He terminated it so efficiently that half the police department are after him.”

Kris looked round and caught Helena’s eye.

She shook her head very slightly and shivered. “The person you’ve all come here to meet should be arriving any time now. I hope you don’t mind waiting; she’s a bit slow on her feet these days and likes to take time to look her visitors over in advance.”

“Huh.” Ivan stared at the plywood door, irritated by his treatment but trying not to let his resentment show. “Now you’ve introduced us, how about telling us why we’re here? I mean, this four-star accomodation is all very flattering, but –”

Salazar chuckled to himself, a warm, throaty sound. “Guess, man,” he said. “Just guess.”

“Are you corporate?” Kris asked, raising an eyebrow. “If so, from which entity?”

“Ah.” Jakes shook his head. “We’re not here to talk about peripheral business. It’s bad practice. Observe compartmentalisation at all times. We are all family, it’s true, but we might be on different sides – “

Kris spat on the floor. “Human sides. Always building walls between each other. Huh.” He turned to Helena. “How long until She arrives?”

“Not long now,” she said. “In fact –”

The door opened. Ancient of Days stood waiting. Nobody moved: the sight of her condition was too shocking.

“Holy shit,” whispered the one called Dave. “I had no idea –” He took a step forward.

Ancient of Days raised a warning arm and spoke. “Wait. Come no closer. My condition is of unknown aetiology and may prove to be infectious to your kind. Please make yourselves comfortable –” one obsidian pupil swept the room; a scale-encrusted nostril flared in remote amusement – “insofar as that may be possible. We have much to discuss.”

Kris could hold his peace no longer. “What’s going on?” he demanded angrily, meeting her huge eyes full on. “Why weren’t we told things had gone this far? The situation may be irrecoverable!” Then he stopped, shuddering in his boots as he realised what he had just done. Ancient of Days looked down upon him and for an endless instant of terror he could hear his heart stand silent, the blood in his veins freezing as he waited for her response to his presumption.

“That is not yet the case. But, be that as it may, you are now needed here urgently. Please listen carefully; you will have your turn to reply. What I called you here to tell you about is a matter long overdue, and one that should have been dealt with years ago, before the humans reached their current dangerous state of power.”

She looked round at those who were gathered to her, then refocussed on Kristoph. “I must start by asking you a leading question, in order to judge how much you need to know at this stage. Tell me, how much do you know about genetics? And what – in particular – do you know about the so-called ‘Human Genome Project’?”

***

A welcoming house: a hot bath: a lover’s arms. After the raid Sue went home and tried to lose herself in the eternal present, far away from the grim shadows that Kristoph had raised by his passage. But there were a number of obstacles; Eric, for one thing, couldn’t let things be, and for another thing she couldn’t help wondering just what it was that Kristoph had been sent to look for.

Eric entered the bathroom as she was rinsing conditioner out of her hair. He sat down on the closed lid of the lavatory and carefully shut his book before he turned to face her. “What is it?” asked Sue, switching off the shower attachment. Unlike Eric, she didn’t read many books when she was home; only people.

He looked at her and smiled. “Just wondering what it was all about this evening. Was it really Family business?”

It was characteristic of Eric, an ill-timed curiosity that pried into hidden corners just when she most wanted to leave them alone. She’d become used to it in the eight months they’d lived together, and expected it to drive them apart over the next few years. This relationship was an anomaly, after all; neither of them were mature by the standards of their people, who were traditionally promiscuous, and their intimacy was more a consequence of their isolation than of any convergence between them. “No,” she said, and then, on second thoughts: “I’m not sure. The man they sent – he said he was called Kristoph, but I don’t believe him. He’s some kind of spook, can pick locks and knows how to burgle an office and make it look like someone else’s fault. He was hunting for something in the HGP contract notes but I think he didn’t know quite what he’d been sent to get.” She sank back in the bath and shivered, then reached out to run some more hot water into the tub. “He was really creepy, you know? And the stuff he was spouting –”

Eric put his book down on the window ledge, carefully avoiding the patch of condensation that trickled down one corner. He always seemed to be carrying a book around the house with him, but never seemed to read from it; she had speculated whimsically that he made himself invisible when he was reading, as a defence against being disturbed. “Where was this Kristoph from? Who sent him?” He leaned forward and picked up the conditioner bottle and began turning it in his hands, inspecting it as if he expected t o discover a hidden message embedded in its soft pink plastic.

“I don’t know who sent him, but I expect it was some hard-line oldster shit. He kept referring to the dark: you should have heard him going on! ‘Take care, sorceress, lest they send for the witch-finder general and burn thee at the stake!’” Her voice deepened an octave and her cheeks sagged into nascent jowls as she delivered the injunction to a wisp of steam that hovered over the shower fitting. “They’re still living in the prehistoric past, Eric, not the new age crap the humans keep spouting on a bout but the real thing –” she yanked the plug out angrily.

Eric watched in silence as she sat up and let the water drain around her. She saw him eyeing her breasts as they sagged slightly, no longer buoyed up by the fluid around her. “Any thoughts on the matter?” she asked, trying to conceal her anxiety. “Come on, don’t just sit there!”

Eric passed her a towel. “Thanks,” she said, standing up and wrapping it around herself. The air on her skin felt cold even though the room was half-filled with steam.

“I think we ought to investigate this carefully,” he said. There were times when she hated his imperturbability; just this once it was a shred of comfort. “It sounds like the kind of intrigue that could affect us if we ignore it – the dinosaurs still have fangs.”

“Huh.” She shook her head and stepped out of the tub. “Will you stop speaking in tongues and give me a straight answer for once?” She reached out and gently cupped his cheek in her hand. “What’s worrying you, love? All the old stories coming back to haunt you?”

“No, it’s not that.” He stood up, accidentally dislodging her hand in the process. “It’s just a nagging feeling I’ve got.” His face hardened slightly, so that the soft, pampered look of the mathematics professor was eclipsed for an instant by some harsher, more primal expression of his identity. “Maybe we should look into precisely what the HGP group are working on for their industrial grant. I doubt that the Ancients would be interested if it was harmless to us. But there might be something we can spot which your spook wasn’t educated to identify. Something that will put the program in an entirely different perspective.”

***

Helena, assistant to Ancient of Days, nevertheless didn’t live in the tunnels alongside with her mistress; she had a daylight identity and a job that payed the bills the night-blind humans levied in return for warmth and peace among them. After the meeting broke up she found herself inviting Kristoph back to her house: she deliberately refrained from exploring her motives. Kristoph, for reasons of his own, accepted the invitation.

Perhaps it was the remembered chill of the news that Ancient of Days had borne, or perhaps the central heating was malfunctioning; in either case, the hall was cold as she took off her coat and hung it behind the door. “Something to drink, perhaps?” she asked as he patiently scraped his boots on the doormat. “Or some coffee?”

“A drink would be great.” Kristoph unbuttoned his coat and hesitated a moment before hanging it on the door. She heard him test the Yale lock before he turned and followed her into the living room. “You live here alone?”

She shrugged and bent down over the sideboard. The stereo was still switched on and the room filled with the faint strains of Vivaldi. Two tumblers of scotch appeared, followed by ice from a small refrigerator. “I like to keep the world at a distance,” she said, turning to pass him one of the glasses. “I’m no lonelier than I want to be.”

“And how lonely is that?”

“You’re here. There’ve been others, but none of them cared to compete for my attention with Her.”

“Ah.” Kristoph sat down at one side of the sofa, then glanced at her enquiringly. She took a mouthful of burning spirit in order to cover her indecision, then quickly sat down next to him.

Presently Kristoph asked, “Did you choose to serve Her, or did she choose you?” He stared into his glass and swirled the thin layer of liquid around until the bottom was exposed. “I mean, I wasn’t aware that She has any tradition of priestly attendance …”

“She doesn’t. And to answer your question, I didn’t choose to serve her, and she didn’t choose me. It just happened.” Helena stared at his glass for a moment in fascination. “Are you going to drink that?” she asked.

“Eventually. I’m sorry, it’s just a bad habit of mine. One of my acquaintances said I was like a cat; I play with my food. I can’t remember when that was, but it was some years ago.” He glanced up and stared moodily at the windowsill. “I try to cultivate my private eccentricities. They’re a kind of defense, if you will, against this modern habit of living in crowds. It strikes me that the bigger the city you live in, the more anonymous you become. It’s as if it’s an infectious disease, and the most common side-effect is loneliness.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” She rubbed her cheek reflectively. “I certainly don’t know of many other – people – living in this man-swarm. Perhaps that’s why She asked me to help her. She needs eyes and ears among the humans, you know. They used to be easy to deceive, but now their intelligence is as good as or better than anything we have –”

“No it isn’t,” he said. “Please believe me, their intelligence people know nothing.” He said it with a degree of venom that made her tense instinctively before she realised that it was not directed at her. “I’m sorry, Helena. I’ve been alone among them for a long time – perhaps too long. The time when it was possible to live exclusively among Family folk is long past.”

“It lends a certain tension to life, doesn’t it. There have been times when I’ve gone months without seeing another weerde face. I felt like I was going crazy: you know, like that patient of Freud’s …” she turned and stared at him intently.

“Steppenwolf. Yes, I knew him well.” Kristoph tossed back what was left of his glass and stared back at her. “It’s late, Helena. Would you mind if I stayed the night?”

“That’s why I invited you here,” she said, her face tingling with anticipation. “It’s very cold outside, even though the war’s over. Can you think of anywhere you’d rather be?” Kristoph was of a certain age, as was she, and if he didn’t understand what it was like to be single and unmated at fifty years of age, there was time for plenty more opportunities ahead.

“I can’t,” he said, a strange roughness edging into his voice. “I’ve been searching for a long time now –” He glanced away, suddenly shy. “I don’t know you, but I feel as if I’ve known you for years,” he tried to explain.

“In the morning you must tell me where you’ve spent your life,” she said. “Then maybe we can think about the future.” They stood up simultaneously and came together in an endless, clinging embrace. “But first –” she kissed him. Gradually, her face relaxed into its primal form, her cheeks flowing and her teeth expanding to grate against his lengthening jaw as she felt something vital return to her. A flame of desire that had been bottled up behind an alien mask for too long had finally discovered its own identity: and by the time the two lovers raked the clothes from each other’s backs, an onlooker would have seen nothing human about them. But that was as it should be, for neither Helena nor Kristoph were – or ever had been – human.

***

Two days after the raid: and, astonishingly, nobody had noticed Kristoph’s carefully laid trail of clumsy clues. In fact, none of the staff so much as noticed the unlocked file cabinet or the opened door. It might as well have been a non-event. Sue, who had been steeling herself for vans with swirling blue lights in the rainy night and a plastic tape cordon around the premises, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead, she took the first afternoon off with a well-rehearsed migraine and followed it up the next morning with a headache. Nothing too serious, though. Working in a lab with biohazard stickers on the door meant that any serious symptoms could land her in an isolation ward, exposed to risks of examination that she was not prepared to run.

Eric worked on the other side of the campus, in a cramped office in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science. How he’d ever got into academia still mystified her; a knack for passing exams, he used to say, smiling faintly when she probed for an explanation. Nobody took any notice when she stopped by his office on her way in to work that afternoon, looking pale and a trifle nauseated. A lecturer carrying on with a postgrad was nobody’s business but their own, after all, and stranger things had b een known to go on in university staff rooms.

“Up to a rummage tonight?” Sue asked, sitting in his favourite visitor’s chair and idly stirring the papers on his desk. “We could go on to a restaurant afterwards –”

Eric pulled open a desk drawer and withdrew a black plastic case. “No trouble at all,” he said. “You think it’ll be safe?”

“Sure,” she said. “I swallowed enough of the buzz-words to ask the right questions. We’ll say it’s about a grant extension to your department and we’ve got to dig the right names out to put on the letter. How’s that?”

“I’ve been doing a bit of reading around the subject,” he said, gesturing at a fat book balanced on one end of the desk. “Developmental genetics?”

“Figure a mathematical slant on it,” she said, shrugging. “Otherwise, be yourself.”

“Hah. Okay. We’ll leave the copying for some other time. But for now, are you sure you can remember just which drawer it was that your visitor took a particular interest in?”

“Pretty much so, yes. He was after HGP-funded stuff, specifically anything to do with Geiger-DESY Research and a doctor MacLuhan. He didn’t seem to know what, but he photocopied everything in sight and shoved it in a briefcase. I couldn’t tell you what the notorious doctor was up to, though; I’ve never heard of him, he seems to be some kind of industrial connection …”

“Hah. Thicker and thicker, my dear Watson.” He sat up and spun his chair round to face away from the desk. “How are Geiger-DESY connected with the Department?”

Sue thought for a moment. “If it’s anything like the way industrial funding goes elsewhere in the field, it’s a simple directed research project. In return for a first shot at information from the Homoeobox Research Team Geiger-DESY pays a huge whack and provides equipment. The University pays for the staff and gets the kudos while the company get the patent rights. How’s that sound?”

“And what line are Geiger-DESY in?” asked Eric, thoughtfully. “I thought they were into drugs –”

“There’s not much difference these days, I mean, the times when they used to go out in pith helmets and poke around the jungle in search of some new wonder plant are all but dead, aren’t they? It’s all molecular modelling and receptor-affinity analysis. As often as not they start out with a complete biochemical description of a problem and work backwards towards isolating a genetic –” she stopped, realising that she’d lost Eric a while back. “Well,” she concluded, “it’s no surprise that Geiger-DESY are into the human genome project. That’s where everyone’s expecting the next big therapeutic breakthroughs to come from.”

“Like a cure for AIDS?” asked Eric.

“That, and other things,” she acknowledged. “When the Human Genome Project is complete, they’ll have a total map of the human genetic structure. They’ll be able to play with it, working out what causes what and how it acts as a, not a blueprint so much as a, program for generating human beings. If you insert a bug in the software you get a malfunction – AIDS is a bug in the immune system, spliced into the program by viral reverse transcriptase – but, equally, if you’ve got a faulty computer program you tackle the problem by trying to debug it, not by hitting it over the head with a blunt instrument like a drug.”

“I think I see,” said Eric. “One other question, though. What’s a Homoeobox when it’s at home, and why’s everybody so interested in it?”

“Ah, well, you do pick the easy ones, don’t you?” Abruptly, Sue stood up and looked out the window. There was nobody outside. She flicked the lock on the door then turned and faced him. “Watch.”

Slowly, her face began to flow. At first it simply looked as if she was relaxing, all her muscles slowly slackening: but gradually the process accelerated, until it was as if all the underlying tissue was falling away from the bones of her skull. Cheeks sagged then began to stretch as cartilaginous flaps brought her jawbone forwards. Eric watched, petrified, as her lips pulled away from her gums – “Stop it!” he hissed at her, glancing hastily at the door. “What do you think you’re –”

Sue raised her hands to cover her face. “Don’t worry,” she said, “there’s nobody about. I checked first, I swear it. Look, you asked me a question. That’s your answer.”

“Pardon?” Eric stood up and checked to make sure that there was nobody outside the window.

“It’s a little-known fact that humans, ants – even us – share most of the same genes. What differentiates us is the homoeobox: a complex of genes which are, I guess, meta-genes. They control how, why, and when other genes are switched on or off; the flow of control in the genetic program, so to speak. What’s the difference between a blood cell such as a lymphocyte, and a muscle cell? Or a neuron?”

She lowered her hands and Eric saw that her face was back to normal again. He smiled with embarrassed relief. “Please don’t do that again in public. Someone, a student, could call at any time …”

Sue shrugged. “They didn’t. Look, what I’m getting at is this. The stuff Kristoph was looking at, it was all to do with research on mapping the homoeobox. Got that? The one section that tells a human foetus that it’s to grow up into a human being and not a gorilla or a flatworm. We’re not the only people working on it, but –”

Eric turned round. “I think I’ve heard enough. Will there be anyone in the office if we go there now? I mean, right now?”

“It’s anyone’s guess. Hey, what’s the sudden hurry?”

Eric shook his head. “I’ve got a feeling that this could be bad. I think I know why Kristoph was sent to look through those files, and if I’m right it could be very serious indeed. In fact if they’re doing what I think they’re doing and we don’t stop them right away those clowns could land us all in a real mess.”

The department office was open but nobody was in when Sue and Eric arrived there. One of the word processors was switched on, and it looked as if whoever was using it could return at any moment. “Act as if this is something you do all the time,” murmured Sue as she opened the unlocked filing cabinet drawer.

“Is there any particular reason why you think I wouldn’t do that without being told?” asked Eric, standing behind her with a conspiratorial air.

“Not really,” she remarked, slightly nettled; “you’re blocking my light. Here, I think this is what we want.” She opened the folder and turned over the contents. “Doctor MacLuhan, Suite Four, Geiger-DESY research foundation laboratories. What he’s asking for – looks like a breakdown of one particular sequence, doesn’t it?” She flicked more pages. “No, that was last month. This month … applications with respect to polymorphism, phocomelia, regeneration –”

“That’s it,” said Eric. “Phocomelia, isn’t that when, you know, like thalidomide –”

“Failure to develop limbs, yeah.” Sue made a quick note of MacLuhan’s address then slid the folder back in the cabinet. “I’ll bet you anything you care to mention that this is what caught Her attention –”

She turned round. One of the departmental secretaries, a woman Sue recognised but couldn’t put a name to, was standing in the doorway staring at her. “Hello,” said the woman, “I thought you were off sick?”

Sue slid the drawer shut and smiled at her, then carefully turned the smile into a wince. “I was,” she said: “I had a migraine.” She rubbed her forehead. “You know. But professor Sampson wanted an address out of files so I figured –” she shrugged.

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” said the secretary, sitting down. She looked up at Eric, who was standing beside her desk with one hand behind his back. “Can I help you?” she asked brightly.

“It’s okay,” said Eric, “I’m with her.” The woman nodded then turned back to her screen.

Sue beckoned surreptitiously, and Eric followed her out of the room. “What’s that you’ve got in your hand?” she whispered once they were outside the door. Eric slowly brought it into view, then uncurled his fingers so that she could glimpse what he was holding. Then he dropped the lock-knife back into one of his jacket pockets and set off down the corridor at a brisk walk. Sue hurried to catch up. Eric, she thought grimly, you and I have got a lot of talking to do; but she also had a feeling that his caution might be justified. This was not a time for half-measures.

***

The orange glare of street lights filtered through the windows, casting a rippling shadow on the wallpaper above the bedstead as it passed through the cloud of cigarette smoke that hung motionless in the air. The bed was occupied: Kristoph lay on it, chain-smoking Benson and Hedges and staring at the ceiling. He was naked, and the sheets lay in tatters beneath him.

He sensed a presence nearby and tensed, then turned one eye towards the door. Helena was standing there, a bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other. She, too, was naked, and smiling.

“What’s so amusing?” asked Kris, in a language that he had used so little of late that it came haltingly to his tongue.

“It’s nothing,” she said, putting the glasses down beside the bed. “It just looked – I don’t know. It was the cigarette that did it. I’m too used to looking at people through human eyes; seeing you as you are is – strange.”

She climbed onto the bed and squatted, adopting a pose that would have been very uncomfortable if her joints had been of human articulation. Her long tongue lolled from one side of her mouth as she regarded him.

“I find it that way too.” Kristoph couldn’t pull his eyes away from her nakedness. “I had nearly forgotten what my own kind looked like, other than in a mirror.”

“It’s over now. You’ve found me.” She reached out with uncanny agility and snagged a glass, then filled it from the bottle. It was a whisky glass and the bottle was red wine, but somehow such considerations seemed petty to Kristoph. The sensations, the tingling beneath his skin and the heat of his ardour, had taken him by surprise. Not an unpleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. It had been a long time since he had mated with another of his species, and he was astonished to discover that it was far more pleasant than he recalled. But then, he was of an age to be bonding, and such changes should be expected. Helena extended the glass to him and he took it: their hands stayed in contact for longer than was necessary simply to pass the wine.

“The waiting is over. I had almost given up hope of meeting one of my own age and predicament. That there could be others – “ he shrugged. It was considered desirable among the weerde to form group relationships.

“At least we can continue the search together,” she said, nestling up against him. “If in your wanderings you should meet anyone –”

“Hah.” A short, barking cough that was the same in any language. “A sad fantasy. I thought my solitude was the product of my travels, and now that I’ve met you you think your loneliness the consequence of your stability! Is there no happy medium?”

Helena considered this for a while, then gulped back her entire glass in a single mouthful and said: “No.” She extended a hand and Kristoph passed her a lit cigarette. “What do you suppose we should do? Settle here among the humans, or travel at large within their world in hope of finding partners before we fully come of age?”

“Neither seems very hopeful,” Kristoph remarked. He sat up and leaned close to her, then fell silent. She nipped gently at his ear to get his attention.

“What of the woman who showed you into the office?” she asked. “The one who works for the University?”

“She’s too young,” said Kris. “And she is already living with another of us. It’s strange how the young behave, isn’t it?”

“They’re closer to the humans than to us,” Helena suggested. “Imagine if you were one of them, born in the past forty years. The Ancients go on about the dark history of our people, how we were foredoomed to live amongst those we mirror in the flesh and how dangerous it would be to invoke any kind of solution to our problems from outside – the universe is a dark and fearful mystery, shrouded in ancient death – yet the young, the young live with television and credit cards and research.” With each of these words she lapsed back into english, for her primal tongue held no equivalents to them. “Everything they are raised with tells them that the Ancients speak nothing but senile nonsense. It is not merely that they have no respect for the Ancients, but that they speak a different tongue altogether. It is no longer possible for them to separate themselves from the humans –” she broke off.

Kristoph stubbed his cigarette out on the ash-tray beside the bed. “What did you just think of?” he asked.

Helena stared at him. Her eyes were huge and dark, with no visible whites around them. “I think that it would be a good idea to pay these two youngsters a visit,” she said thoughtfully. “I would like to meet them. And besides, I have a certain sense that if we don’t they might become embroiled in something that will not be good for them. What do you think?”

Kristoph threw his head back and poured a glass of wine between his sharp white teeth. “If you like,” he said. “When shall we go?”

Helena twisted and rolled off the bed, then rose to a crouch. Her spine slowly began to straighten. “As soon as possible,” she said, slurring as she fought to control her shifting vocal chords. “My sense of urgency is great …”

***

As soon as the door swung open, Sue realised there was something wrong: it smells strange. “That was a lovely meal,” said Eric, behind her. She held out a warning hand and entered the hallway, switching on the light as she did so.

“You can come on in,” she said; “I just thought I smelled something …”

“Gas?” he asked.

“You can’t be too careful. But no, it wasn’t gas.”

She hung her coat up as he closed the front door, then she switched on the living room lights and walked straight in. “Hello,” said the balding man with the gun, “did you enjoy your meal?”

“Oh shit,” she said, starting to back away. “Hey, Eric –”

“Don’t move,” said the other one, the tall thin man standing behind the door. “You move, you get hurt.”

“Ah.” Her stomach felt like lead and her knees were about to give way.

“Hey, what’s going –” Eric, standing behind her: he looked over her shoulder and saw the man with the gun. “Shit,” he whispered.

“That makes it unanimous,” said the bald one. “Won’t you come on in? I’d like it if you’d sit in the sofa – there – where I can keep an eye on you.”

Slowly, with exaggerated care, Sue sidled over to the sofa and sat down. Eric followed her. She could see him out of the corner of her eye. I hope he doesn’t do anything stupid, she thought. Then, how do I stop this happening?

“That’s good,” said the bald one. “That’s real cool. Now maybe we should have a chat, you know, loosen things up?”

“Who are you?” asked Eric in a low voice. “What do you want?”

The tall one strolled over from the doorway to stand behind the seated man. “You know who we are,” he said, in a language which sent shivers of recognition down Sue’s neck. “We come to talk sense.”

The man in the chair shrugged. “You’ll have to excuse my partner,” he said: “he can be a bit blunt. Someone you might have heard of – one of your neighbours in this city – called us in to do a service. Ancient of Days. Perhaps you’ve met her?” He cocked his head, looked slightly disappointed when neither Sue nor Eric responded. “A shame. She’s very – impressive. Anyway … “

The tall one pulled his right hand out of his coat pocket. There was a small black pistol in it. He pulled his left hand out of the other pocket: he was holding a cylindrical object in that one. He began to screw the cylinder onto the muzzle of the pistol. “You’ll have to excuse him,” said the seated one: “he’s a bit nervous.” He blinked at them: “the police don’t like him very much. Anyway. Where was I?

“Ah yes. We owe you for showing the point man in, where the files were held. However, you don’t seem to have gotten the message: this is not a matter you want to get involved in. Oh no. In fact, you should do your best to forget about it, unless and until Ancient of Days sends for you. Is that understood?”

“I understand,” said Sue. Suddenly her mouth was dry, but it was a dryness born of anger: she found that she very much wanted to spit. “I understand that what I see is a bunch of superstitious fools chasing around in the dark preparing to kill – yes, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you do for a living – to kill a harmless scientist because some clapped-out fruitcake thinks human genetics research is going to conjure up the devil –”

“Wrong,” said the seated assassin. “You understand nothing. You cannot possibly remember what it is we face; you will be nameless to history if you insist on giving aid to the humans in pulling down everything we have tried so hard to preserve!”

He raised the pistol and Sue unconsciously stopped breathing and steeled herself to jump; but before she could move there was a flash of light reflected from the gunman’s face and a voice screamed “DOWN!” in her ear.

She rolled forwards and tried to hug the carpet: she heard three muffled spitting sounds overhead, and then a crashing of glass and heavy objects as the tall assassin fell, knocking the television set off its stand.

“Idiot,” snarled Kristoph. “Were you trying to get yourself killed? Why didn’t you duck?” Then, gently but urgently, “oh, see what he’s done. Quickly, fetch a towel. Now!” Sue heard footsteps hurrying, doors banging, then a low moan behind her. She rolled over and sat up and saw Kristoph bent over the back of the sofa, gripping Eric – collapsed across it, his eyes closed – by one shoulder with both hands, both hands wrapped around an upper arm from which a huge, dark stain was slowly seeping. “A towel will do but a compression bandage or a torniquet would be a lot better and I need one or the other of them in a hurry,” Kris muttered. “Otherwise he may bleed to death all over me.”

She remembered standing in the bathroom, watching blood trickle and swirl down the white porcelain sink as the rushing water numbed her hands. She remembered ransacking the cupboard for bandages and finding nothing but a small tin of elastoplast, suitable only for grazes. And the towels were all pink, the same colour as her vomit when she heaved her entire meal up into the toilet. Then a strange woman was holding her by the shoulders and saying “it’s alright, the bleeding’s stopped and it’s a clean puncture” as she slowly led Sue through into the living room. Eric wasn’t in the sofa, but his blood was. Unaccountably, she began to cry. After all, it wasn’t she who’d been shot, was it?

After a while she realised that she couldn’t see the bodies. “Wh-what happened?” she asked, trying to dry her eyes and realising as she did so that her blouse was ruined, spots of blood everywhere on her right sleeve.

“Don’t you worry about it,” said the woman, “everything’s going to be alright. Your friend is in bed, Kris is stitching his arm up – he’s done it before, he says – he’s going to be okay. A flesh wound.”

“We’ve got to get him to hospital –” Sue began, before she comprehended how foolish her words must sound.

“Don’t you worry about it,” said the woman. “I’m Helena, by the way. I came here with Kris. Is there – “ she stared at the bloodstained sofa – “anwhere else in this flat where we can go? Apart from the bedroom or the kitchen?”

Sue didn’t think to ask what was wrong with the kitchen. “The back bedroom,” she said automatically. “We can, I need to, sit down …”

“I’ll say you do.” Helena took her by the arm as she stood up again and stumbled through the hall to the spare room. When she got there she collapsed on the bed and curled up and began to Change, so that Helena was hard-put to get her clothes off her. But that was okay. It was only a little more than she’d bargained for, after all.

Shock and exhaustion forced Sue into a deep sleep. Helena sat beside the bed, watching the shifting form that lay there, its flesh slowly crawling in an unconscious attempt to shut out the outside world. I can’t even look at my own kind without seeing them through the eyes of a human, she realised. How much worse must it be for one of these, raised in a modern city and exposed to their education, their entertainment, their friendship all their life? Our ancestors would barel y recognise them. Worse, they would barely recognise the ancestors …

She shook her head in sympathy and stood up. Then she left the room, closing the door behind her as she tracked through the hall and into the main bedroom. Kristoph glanced up as she entered, then continued to wrap his makeshift bandage around Eric’s shoulder.

“She’s taken it rather hard,” Helena commented.

“I’m not surprised,” said Kristoph. His voice was rough, as if he was fighting an inner battle and did not wish to be disturbed.

Eric rolled his eyes. “Ah – it’s not easy,” he whispered. “This mess … we were going to come looking for you …”

“Lie still. How is he?” she asked Kristoph.

“I’ve seen worse. Small calibre bullet, went clean through the quadriceps. I think he froze when the flash went off, otherwise he’d have been down on the floor with her and this wouldn’t have happened. Nicked a vein, but no arterial bleeding. Knowing how we heal, you should be fine in a few days,” he said for Eric’s benefit. “The real question is what happens in the meantime,” he continued under his breath. “Depending whether those bastards were here of their own accord or at someone’s command.”

“We can fetch two tea-chests for the bodies,” said Helena. “Then we ditch the sofa. Nobody’s called the police so we may be able to conceal it –”

Kris looked at her coolly. “That’s not what I meant.”

Helena sat down on a low stool in front of the dresser, then turned to face Kristoph and the bed. “You know I’ve served Ancient of Days for twenty or more years. It wasn’t necessarily through choice.” She paused and looked at him, but he made no response. Eventually she continued.

“I was twenty-two when the call came. My family told me what to do, and in those days one obeyed. Reluctantly, but – I grew up on a farm. I was told to go to the city and present myself to Her. I didn’t want to: I was afraid, and perhaps a little rebellious, but not too much so. I did as I was told, in the end. When I met her, She told me what I was to do. It seemed she had a servant before me, her eyes and ears among the humans, who had gone insane or died. I was to take their place. She hasn’t been able to walk among them for a very long time – over a century, I think – and so she needs a set of proxy senses, preferably young, which can be exposed to the swirl and rush of the human civilisation above her head.”

At the other end of the bed, Eric yawned and shut his eyes. Kristoph glanced up. “I’m listening.”

“I gathered news,” she continued. “I read all the literature and newspapers. I arranged for Ancient of Days to have a colour television, supplied by cable – not that she watched it. I dare say the images it brought to her were simply incomprehensible. Her curiosity is vast, but she needs me for the feel, the idea of what it’s like to live among the humans. She hasn’t ever seen an aeroplane except in pictures, has never ridden in a car. This new degenerative condition of hers is quite recent, but she refuses to summon anyone who might be able to treat it. I think she wants –”

“She wants what?” asked Kris.

“I don’t know. It’s just that I thought … she wanted me not as a pair of eyes but as a mind, to understand what was going on in the world. You understand that; you’ve lived among Them, haven’t you? But last time she was on the surface she rode in a horse-drawn carriage and there were new gas-lights along the high streets. And I don’t think she quite understands how far things have changed, or how fast.”

“Hence the pet thugs,” Kris speculated. “Yes, that would explain a lot. In which case, these two –” his gestured encompassed Eric, and the wall behind which Sue lay sleeping – “have a more valid perspective on the world than she does, at least with respect to the humans. Doesn’t that follow?”

“I don’t like that line of reasoning,” Helena said uneasily. “It’s what it leads to …” My destination barely five minutes ago, she chided herself. How long had these flowers of doubt been germinating? The dusty towers of the city had never struck her as a fertile soil for new ideas of any kind, much less for thoughts of treachery. She needs me, but how can I possibly serve her? If my loyalties belong with anyone, they should lie with the young. It’s not for me to decide. Maybe –

“I think we should take these two to visit Ancient of Days,” she said slowly. “They might be able to resolve this situation where I could only fail. In any case, it was her servants who died here tonight. She should be informed; at least, if you mean to involve your friends that you told me about.”

Kris stared at her. “Do you really think so?”

She met his gaze. “Yes. Otherwise she will assume the worst, and act accordingly.”

“And you think it isn’t already too late for that?” he asked. “That her thrashing around doesn’t offer a threat to the continuity of the race? Come on. If that’s what you believe, I want to know –”

But to her shame she had to glance away; and when she looked back at him the time for second thoughts had long since passed.

***

Time changed, Kris thought as he waited for the phone to ring, but people never did. That was the root of the problem. A glass of whisky sat among the shadows by an overflowing ash tray, the last cigarette in the pack balanced burning on its rim. The faint howl of a descending jet cut through the night and the rattled the windows in their frame as he stared out across the city.

A ringing tone cut the air: he forced himself not to pick up the receiver. It gave out a second ring before the answering machine cut in. The voice at the other end of the line was faint, as if its owner was shouting down a buried pipe.

“Hello, is this –”

“This is Susan speaking. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’d like to leave a message, please speak after the tone.”

“– Oskar speaking. Call me back.” Click.

Kris picked up his cigarette. He felt a little ill at the prospect of what he was about to do, but he couldn’t see what alternative there was. For Helena, sure: for these two kids who’d gotten themselves into a whole lot more trouble than they’d dreamed of, too. For the pair of hitters Ancient of Days had sent round – but they were beyond sympathy, beyond regrets. No, it was the fact that what he was about to do was irrevocable that made him sick with worry; him, who’d seen men eating each other on the Eastern Front and other things too terrible to talk about.

He picked up the phone and began to dial, careful not to enter any wrong digits.

Oskar picked up the phone on the fourth ring. It was three in the morning in Berlin and Kris could imagine the crumpled beer cans on the floor, smoke curling beneath the ceiling and the oil from the black metal-machined parts scattered across the newspaper pages on the sofa. “Hello?”

“Oskar, this is Kris. I have a candidate.” His mouth was dry and his throat burned from the cigarettes, but that wasn’t why his heart was pounding.

Oskar grunted. “After all this time? Are you sure?”

“You better believe it. The location is –” he gave directions. “You’ll need to bring tools. And watch out, you’d better be clean. It’s already gone critical; we had a securitate airhead trying to scare the canaries earlier this evening.”

“A what? They must be crazy!”

“No way. He was travelling under falsies, ID of Ivan Salazar from the Langley entity, but that wasn’t his real name at all. I fingered him on a liaison job oh, years ago. He was one of us, but shit sticks if you roll in it for long enough. I figure he’s one of the ones who skipped out after they fragged the Ceaucescus during the coup, maybe figured he could cut it as a wet operative for the Families. Anyway, it’s really hit the fan this time. We’re talking a Hummingbird situation; got that?”

There was silence from the other end of the line as Oskar absorbed this information. “Yes, but which side are we on?” he finally asked.

Kris froze. “The winners,” he said slowly and deliberately. “Spread the word. We’ve got a Hummingbird situation, here and now. Get the wagon rolling then hop the next flight out of Tempelhof. We need you on the job.”

“Check,” replied Oskar. “The fuses have been lit. Good luck and goodbye.”

The phone went dead, but Kris didn’t put it down. The sound from the buzzing receiver was unlocking memories from his childhood, stories he’d been told by his mother about what happened to his uncle Hans in the terrible night of the first Operation Hummingbird, uncle Hans with his proud brown uniform and Stormtrooper strut who had vanished in the night of the Long Knives, never to be seen again. Is this how it happens? he wondered; must the young always eat the old? His palm sweated as he squeezed the smooth plastic of the receiver. It wasn’t always like this among our people. There was a time when the gap wasn’t so wide. It didn’t have to grow this way, did it? But he’d set the wheels in motion and now there was only one way out: and death was an integral part of the process.

Helena was clearing up in the kitchen when she sensed somebody standing behind her. She straightened up and thrust a bloodstained wedge of kitchen roll into the waste disposer then rolled off her soiled rubber gloves before turning round. It was Sue, looking pale but collected and wearing a thick dressing gown that was too big for her. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Not bad, considering.” Sue breathed deeply. “Mind if I ask your name again? I didn’t catch it before.” She looked around distractedly, but not down, never down. She looked as if she was trying to walk on air. Helena was still a long way from finishing.

“That’s all right; my name’s Helena,” she replied. “And you’re Sue. Look, are you sure you ought to be up? That was –”

Sue waved a hand. “I’m tougher than I look. And so is Eric, I think. He’ll be fine and so will I. But he –” she looked at the body lying on the mat of newspapers Helena had spread on the floor – “he’s not going anywhere. I think we deserve an explanation.”

Helena sighed. “You’re not getting one here. I’m in this over my head, I just tagged along for the ride.” She laughed selfconsciously. How could she possibly justify what she was doing on the kitchen floor? Then she frowned. “Look, I’m not explaining this very well, am I? Kris and I thought you could, could do with some help. We weren’t expecting things to have gone this far, not yet.”

“Uh huh.” Sue nodded, glanced down queasily, then turned round and fumbled in one of the cupboards above the work surface. “I need a drink. How about you?”

“That’s –” Helena paused – “a kind offer.” She rummaged in the cupboards for a minute then found two tall glasses and filled them half-full with rum. It wasn’t Helena’s favourite spirit, but she took it all the same. “You’ve been very lucky so far. Ancient of Days probably doesn’t realise how isolated she is. The oldest ones –” she took a sip of rum – “seldom do.”

“Who is this Ancient of Days?” Sue asked. Helena looked at her sharply.

“Exactly what her name implies. The one I – help me – am sworn to serve.” She took another sip, then a mouthful of the neat spirits. It burned in her stomach, like the dull fire of revenge. “One of Us, left over from a former age. She serves the Families by searching out threats to our collective survival. But in latter days she’s become … unreliable.”

“Hence … this?” Sue asked. “You mean she thought she could simply order us to kill all the scientists working on homoeobox structure and the rest would lose interest or be too frightened to continue working in the field?” She finished on a note of disbelief.

“That’s about the size of it,” Helena admitted.

“What does she think we are? A bunch of medieval alchemists?” Sue downed her glass in one gulp and slammed it on the work top. “Jesus Christ!”

Helena didn’t say anything.

“It’s a complete sack of shit!” Sue exclaimed. “Scientists don’t work like that, hiding dingy secrets from each other and bolting at shadows! All it would take would be two, maybe three suspicious incidents and we’d have every police agency in Europe breathing down our necks. What does she think she’s doing?”

“Protecting us,” Helena said drily.

Sue glared at her. “And what are you doing?”

Helena sighed. “Protecting you, I think. Times change, and the Ancients can’t adapt. For most of our history responses which worked a century ago have been valid today. But not any longer. You – your generation – are our future. You don’t need to exist on the edge of human society, you can slot right in with them! But in the process –” she shrugged.

“But what’s in it for you?” Sue looked agitated, uncertain whether to be grateful or suspicious or angry. “Why are you helping us? You said you were sworn to serve her! What are you doing here?” She sounded deceptively close to hysteria.

“Cleaning up after the party,” Helena said calmly as she bent down and picked up the electric carving knife again. It was strange how little blood there was, she noted. As if weerde tissue fluid clotted far faster than human; and the bullets had been low-calibre. “For what I’m doing now, the punishment would have been forgetfulness,” she added. “To have one’s very name expunged from the memories of all who one held dear, to be cast out into the wilderness on pain of death, there to wander through the empty forests until even the memory of speech faded and one was nothing more than a beast.” She glanced up. “But that doesn’t mean very much to your generation, does it? You’ve grown up among the urban sapiens, after all, and they do things differently.” She shook her head. “I wish I knew where it was all going.”

Sue didn’t reply, but a moment later Helena felt her crouch down beside her, and there was another pair of hands to help expunge the evidence of the crime.

***

Oskar caught the red-eye shuttle out of Tempelhof. It was delayed three hours by snow, and when it lumbered into the cold dawn sky the outline of the redundant Wall was clearly visible on the ground below. Less than two hours later he was landing in the City. Somebody was waiting for him.

Howard was already in the country, running a high-value high-risk shipping agency from a motel bedroom near Milton Keynes. When his brokers discovered he was gone they were furious: but not as furious as they were three minutes later when the Special Branch broke down their door. But Howard wasn’t around to care. Now he was a truck driver called Mark, and within a day even his fingerprints wouldn’t match on Interpol’s files.

Fiona got the call when she returned to her lodge in the Pyrenees after a good day’s skiing. She fobbed off her current boyfriend with a tale of an elderly aunt and a stroke, made an air connection out of Toulouse, and caught the Chunnel link from Paris.

Frederico didn’t head for the City. But then, that wasn’t his target. His target was in the Vatican. There were a hundred others in the Organisation who, like him, weren’t heading for the City; but all of them had targets. And when they reached them, the targets would be dead.

It was agreed within the Organisation that a purge was long overdue. It would have been sensible to have held one during the turbulence of the second world war, when it was already becoming obvious who was unreliable and who was trustworthy, but back then the Organisation had still been weak, a compact of like-minded weerde who understood the ways of the modern human world less imperfectly than their forebears. Therefore the Organisation lay low, recruited individuals disaffected with the way of the Families, and waited.

Times changed. The war ended, and with the falling of the iron curtain came opportunities for expansion and re-entrenchment. The Organisation made very good use of them. The Ancients, however, were oblivious to the fundamental changes in the world at large; their response to the Cold War was identical to their response to the British and Spanish empires, the Romans, Alexander the Great … it was a practised response, and it had worked before. But unfortunately, some times changed faster than others.

***

Eric opened his eyes and blinked until the ceiling swam into focus. Bullet wound. I never thought it would hurt like this. More like … he tried to clear bloodstained drill-bits from his mind’s eye. He felt weak, drained, but fine, except for the bruising ache in his left arm. He tried to sit up and the arm almost exploded; he gasped and forced himself to hold still until the pain passed. Then, very carefully, he propped himself up against the headboard and began to explore the damage inside.

Torn muscles grated against one another, sending surges of pain up those nerve trunks that had not been severed by the bullet. A fibrous matrix of clotted blood had spread through the tissue around the ruptured vein, holding cells in stasis while the complex machineries of his immune system went to work. Already the first new cells were infiltrating the mass, spreading along the boundary of ripped flesh and commencing the job of reconstruction. Eric concentrated; without guidance the wound would heal badly. There might even be a scar. He was still tired, and his head ached, but it was essential that he –

“Aha, he’s awake. Aren’t you?”

Eric opened his eyes again. “Very probably,” he said, speaking so quietly that it was almost a whisper. “Who is it?” As if I couldn’t guess.

“I’m Kris.” He sat down at the foot of the bed, stretching the quilt. “If it wasn’t for me you’d be dead.”

Eric tried to sit up properly. “I suppose I should be grateful, but it would help if I knew what was going on.”

Kris nodded understandingly. Eric looked at him and wondered what it was he didn’t like about this man. This – weerde, he corrected himself. One of my own kind. But he looks more like a wolf! The thought was distinctly uncomfortable. There was a hot tingling in his arm as the muscles began the slow process of knitting together again.

“What is it you want to know?” asked Kris.

“Well –” Eric struggled, at a loss for words. “What all the fuss is about,” he said finally. “I can understand an Ancient becoming interested in the Homoeobox data, but her response seems rather excessive, wouldn’t you agree? It’s not as if it can achieve anything, after all.”

“I don’t know,” Kris said. “It used to work … three hundred years ago, against alchemists and would-be magicians.”

Eric snorted disbelievingly. “Come on. What does she think this is? The middle ages?”

Kristoph didn’t say anything; he didn’t need to.

“All right then, be the smart guy! See if I care. Thanks for saving my life, by the way.” Kris raised an eyebrow as Eric rolled his feet over the side of the bed and sat up experimentally. “There’s more to this than one out-of-control Ancient and a couple of former secret policemen,” Eric added as he waited for the dancing black spots to clear from in front of his eyes.

“True,” Kris stood up. “Here, let me help you. I think you lost a fair bit of blood.”

“Yes, I can’t say I’m looking forward to cleaning the sofa –” Eric stopped talking as he stood up, taken aback by his own astonishing irrelevance. He wobbled a bit, but the black spots didn’t come back and he was able to shuffle around after a fashion. I must be crazy, he thought, floating. This isn’t me here, is it? His arm burned like a torch. “Tell me about everything in particular.”

“There’s an Organisation,” began Kristoph. “It’s been around since the twenties, waiting for something like this. It’s probably happened before, but each era creates its own orthodoxy, doesn’t it? Maybe some such group is where Ancient of Days came from originally. Some bunch of plotters who were afraid that their elders were going to give them away to the Roman secret police.”

Eric shuffled over to the chest of drawers and fumbled one-handedly over the chair in front of it. “Dressing gown,” he muttered. It seemed a much more concrete concern than any ancient tale of police and thieves. He berated himself. Your future depends on this! But somehow it didn’t seem like an immediate problem; more like a light farce, seen through a few too many layers of cotton gauze. I must have lost a fair bit of blood.

“Here. Like I said, we’ve been waiting. The signs have been around for a long time. Crocodiles seen in the sewers under New York, Yeti sightings in Tibet; the breakdown in human family structures in the developed world –”

“You make this Organisation sound like a bunch of shamen steaming over the entrails of the Sunday Times crossword,” Eric winced as he tried to ease his damaged arm into a baggy sleeve. In the end he gave up and wore the robe over it, tucking the cuff of the empty sleeve into the belt. “I mean, are you trying to tell me they deduced from all those signs that some of the Ancients were liable to go loopy within the next few years?”

“Something along those lines,” Kris assured him. “There were no overt signs of loss of control – not until recently – but little things were slipping everywhere. All those signs were warnings of a certain … malaise. Now it’s unmistakable. Their responses have become so inappropriate that I’m afraid there’s no alternative to action.”

“What are you going to do to them?” Eric asked with false levity, pausing in the doorway. I feel drunk, he realised. The truth will set you free! And isn’t that better than wine? He glanced over his shoulder at Kristoph, who stood behind him holding an unlit cigarette in one hand.

“What can we do?” Kris replied. There were quiet voices coming from the kitchen. “There’s one thing you can be certain of,” he said, striking a match. The shadows it cast across his face gave him a calculating, lupine expression: “we’re not going to do anything to them that they wouldn’t do to us first if we gave them the chance.”

Eric felt himself go cold, everywhere except his arm, which was feverishly hot. Suddenly, despite his injury and blood-loss and the intoxicating sense of own survival, he felt entirely sober. An atavistic urge, from god-knew-what recess of his hindbrain, made him want to bare his teeth and snarl. Instead, forcing himself to do the right thing – come on, mister cool! a part of him sneered contemptuously – he went into the living room. It was unlit, but the street lights were bright enough to let h im see that there was a dust-sheet flung over the sofa and a rug on the carpet, and the vase of flowers was gone from on top of the television. He walked over to the windows and looked out across the street, then fumbled with the latch and pushed one of them open. A chill breeze cut through his dressing gown, swirled past him and numbed the stench of blood and gunpowder.

“What do you think?” asked the quiet voice behind him. He didn’t turn round.

“I think –” he paused, seeking the words with which to express his anger, his rage at this violation of his carefully-maintained humanity – “there is no precedent for the current situation.” He stared down at the streets, watching the traffic scurry and hum along in illuminated columns far below. “We’re a conservative people, aren’t we?” The word we hung strange and heavy on his tongue. “But the world we live in is undergoing eruptions and upheavals. And when conservative peoples are placed under such a stress they tend to … well, look at the Russian revolution.”

The breeze was beginning to work through to him. He was still weak, and his arm ached; he couldn’t summon the resources to keep himself warm. He reached out and pulled the window to until only a slit was left open. “Is this happening everywhere?”

“It is,” said Kris. “Maybe you’re right, maybe there hasn’t been an upheaval like this since the – since the ancient times, the days of legend and darkness. The old race. But someone –” the voice faltered, and in a flash of astonishment Eric realised that he was pleading with him, pleading for his approval, his understanding – “someone has to look to the future! And you are the future, more surely than any conclave of ancients.”

Eric turned his back on the window. Kristoph had lit his cigarette, and in the darkness the glowing coal resembled an ancient saurian eye. “But where does that leave you?” asked Eric. “If your organisation takes credit for this killing, where can you go from here? Where are your thoughts for your own future?”

Kris blew a thin plume of smoke from his nostrils. It swirled lazily about his head then drifted towards the door. “I suppose we’ll have to be the scapegoats, the nameless ones who will be driven from the present to atone for the sins of the past. Doesn’t that sound about right to you? Something’s got to go, after all.”

“Not if you succeed. But the whole thing sounds so extreme –”

“You’re uncomfortable with the idea of killing, aren’t you?” said Kris. He began to button up his coat, preparing for the cold of the streets outside. “Listen, I’ve got to go out now, to arrange for some waste disposal. But there’s something you should remember, professor, when you go in to work in your warm office next week and sit in your comfortable chair behind your tidy desk.” His face began to slide into another, ancient shape: or else the shadows cast by the city lights were shifting across his che eks. “Remember you’re a predator, professor, one of a long line of free-ranging killers. And remember that one’s natural instincts can sometimes be very hard to ignore …”

Presently, Eric struggled to his feet and walked into the kitchen to see what was going on. Sue and Helena were just finishing with the knives and moving onto the bin liners. They both looked up, then Sue had her arms round his neck and was kissing him, tracking bloody stains across the front of his garment. “You’re doing well,” she whispered in his ear. Louder: “has Kris gone for some boxes then?”

“That’s quite likely, I think.” Helena rose and peeled off her gloves again, shaking them out carefully. “Ah, I don’t think we’ve been introduced. Have we?”

“Eric, Helena,” said Sue. “Helena stayed to help clear up,” she added, letting go of him as he glanced around. But Eric wasn’t dwelling on the mass that occupied the centre of the floor. “I can see we’ve got some socialising to do,” he said. “It’s a long time since either of us have met anyone who wasn’t – entirely – human. Still,” his expression became unreadable, “do you suppose Kristoph will be long?”

“No, I don’t think he will,” said Helena. She smiled sharply. “He said he had one more job to do, then it’s all over and we can just lie low, ‘go to the mattresses’ as the mafia call it, until everything dies down.” She put the knife and the gloves in the sink and turned the tap on them.

“Then it’ll all be over,” said Sue, an expression of relief dawning on her face. She turned back to Eric and hugged him, burying her face in his shoulder, all his petty irritations forgotten for the moment. “I’m so glad it’s finished.”

But she was wrong. In fact, it was only just beginning.

First published: The Weerde, 1991

Version History

If you modify this text, please retain this version history.

Ver 1.5—10/09/2003—Anarchy Publications, HaVoK—This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.

EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHERE they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. Gandhi, the Pope, Thatcher-if you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the ticker-tape of history etched across your senses. You can kill a politician but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians ?

I was elbow-deep in an eviscerated PC, performing open heart surgery on a diseased network card, when the news about the travelling salesman theorem came in. Over on the other side of the office John’s terminal beeped, notification of incoming mail. A moment later my own workstation bonged.

“Hey, Geoff! Get a load of this!”

I carried on screwing the card back into its chassis. John is not a priority interrupt.

“Someone’s come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P! There’s a posting in comp.risks saying they’ve used it to find an O*(n 2) solution to the travelling salesman problem, and it scales! Looks like April First has come early this year, doesn’t it?”

I dropped the PC’s lid on the floor hastily and sat down at my workstation. Another cubed-sphere hypothesis, another flame war in the math newsgroups-or something more serious? “When did it arrive?” I called over the partition. Soroya, passing my cubicle entrance with a cup of coffee, cast me a dirty look; loud voices aren’t welcome in open-plan offices.

“This just in,” John replied. I opened up the mailtool and hit on the top of the list, which turned out to be a memo from HR about diversity awareness training. No, next … they want to close the smoking room and make us a 100 per cent tobacco-free workplace. Hmm. Next.

Forwarded e-mail: headers bearing the spoor of a thousand mail servers, from Addis-Ababa to Ulan Bator. Before it had entered our internal mail network it had travelled from Taiwan to Rochester NJ, then to UCB in the Bay Area, then via a mailing list to all points; once in-company it had been bounced to everyone in engineering and management by the first recipient, Eric the Canary. (Eric is the departmental plant. Spends all the day web-dozing for juicy nuggets of new information if you let him. A one-man wire service: which is why I always ended up finishing his jobs.)

I skimmed the message, then read it again. Blinked. This kind of stuff is heavy on the surreal number theory: about as digestible as an Egyptian mummy soaked in tabasco sauce for three thousand years. Then I poked at the web page the theorem was on.

No response—server timed out.

Someone or something was hitting on the web server with the proof: I figured it had to be all the geeks who’d caught wind of the chain letter so far. My interest was up, so I hit the “reload” button, and something else came up on screen.

Lots of theorems-looked like the same stuff as the e-mail, only this time with some fun graphics. Something tickled my hindbrain then, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Next thing, I hit the print button and the inkjet next to my desk began to mutter and click. There was a link near the bottom of the page to the author’s bibliography, so I clicked on that and the server threw another “go away, I’m busy” error. I tugged my beard thoughtfully, and instead of pressing “back” I pressed “reload”.

The browser thought to itself for a bit-then a page began to appear on my screen. The wrong page. I glanced at the document title at the top and froze:

THE PAGE AT THIS LOCATION HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN. Please enter your e-mail address if you require further information.

Hmm.

As soon as the printout was finished, I wandered around to the photocopier next door to the QA labs and ran off a copy. Faxed it to a certain number, along with an EYES UP note on a yellow Post-it. Then I poked my head around into the QA lab itself. It was dingy in there, as usual, and half the cubicles were empty of human life. Nobody here but us computers; workstations humming away, sucking juice and meditating on who-knew-what questions. (Actually, I did know: they were mostly running test harnesses, repetitively pounding simulated input data into the programs we’d so carefully built, in the hope of making them fall over or start singing “God Save the King”.) The efficiency of code was frequently a bone of contention between our departments, but the war between software engineering and quality assurance is a long-drawn-out affair: each side needs the other to justify its survival.

I was looking for Amin. Amin with the doctorate in discrete number theory, now slumming it in this company of engineers: my other canary in a number-crunching coal mine. I found him: feet propped up on the lidless hulk of a big Compaq server, mousing away like mad at a big monitor. I squinted; it looked vaguely familiar … “Quake? Or Golgotha?” I asked.

“Golgotha. We’ve got Marketing bottled up on the second floor.”

“How’s the network looking?”

He shrugged, then punched the hold button. “No crashes, no dropped packets-this cut looks pretty solid. We’ve been playing for three days now. What can I do for you?”

I shoved the printout under his nose. “This seem feasible to you?”

“Hold on a mo.” He hit the pause key them scanned it rapidly. Did a double-take. “You’re not shitting?”

“Came out about two hours ago.”

“Jesus Homeboy Christ riding into town at the head of a convoy of Hell’s Angels with a police escort …” he shook his head. Amin always swears by Jesus, a weird side-effect of a westernized Islamic upbringing: take somebody else’s prophet’s name in vain. “If it’s true, I can think of at least three different ways we can make money at it, and at least two more to end up in prison. You don’t use PGP, do you?”

“Why bother?” I asked, my heart pounding. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“If this is true—” he tapped the papers “—then every encryption algorithm except the one-time pad has just fallen over. Take a while to be sure, but … that crunch you heard in the distance was the sound of every secure commerce server on the internet succumbing to a brute-force attack. The script kiddies will be creaming themselves. Jesus Christ.” He rubbed his moustache thoughtfully.

“Does it make sense to you?” I persisted.

“Come back in five minutes and I’ll tell you.”

“OK.”

I wandered over to the coffee station, thinking very hard. People hung around and generally behaved as if it was just another day; maybe it was. But then again, if that paper was true, quite a lot of stones had just been turned over and if you were one of the pale guys who lived underneath it was time to scurry for cover. And it had looked good to me: by the prickling in my palms and the gibbering cackle in the back of my skull, something very deep had recognized it. Amin’s confirmation would be just the icing on the cake confirmation that it was a workable proof.

Cryptography-the science of encoding messages—relies on certain findings in mathematics: that certain operations are inherently more difficult than others. For example, finding the common prime factors of a long number which is a product of those primes is far harder than taking two primes and multiplying them together.

Some processes are not simply made difficult, but impossible because of this asymmetry; it’s not feasible to come up with a deterministic answer to certain puzzles in finite time. Take the travelling salesman problem, for example. A salesman has to visit a whole slew of cities which are connected to their neighbours by a road network. Is there a way for the salesman to figure out a best-possible route that visits each city without wasting time by returning to a previously visited site, for all possible networks of cities? The conventional answer is no—and this has big implications for a huge set of computing applications. Network topology, expert systems-the traditional tool of the Al community-financial systems, and …

Me and my people.

Back in the QA lab, Amin was looking decidedly thoughtful.

“What do you know?” I asked.

He shook the photocopy at me. “Looks good,” he said. “I don’t understand it all, but it’s at least credible.”

“How does it work?”

He shrugged. “It’s a topological transform. You know how most np-incomplete problems, like the travelling salesman problem, are basically equivalent? And they’re all graph-traversal issues. How to figure out the correct order to carry out a sequence of operations, or how to visit each node in a graph in the correct order. Anyway, this paper’s about a method of reducing such problems to a much simpler form. He’s using a new theorem in graph theory that I sort of heard about last year but didn’t pay much attention to, so I’m not totally clear on all the details. But if this is for real …”

“Pretty heavy?”

He grinned. “You’re going to have to re-write the route discovery code. Never mind, it’ll run a bit faster …”

I rose out of cubicle hell in a daze, blinking in the cloud-filtered daylight. Eight years lay in ruins behind me, tattered and bleeding bodies scattered in the wreckage. I walked to the landscaped car park: on the other side of the world, urban renewal police with M16s beat the crap out of dissident organizers, finally necklacing them in the damp, humid night.

War raged on three fronts, spaced out around a burning planet. Even so, this was by no means the worst of all possible worlds. It had problems, sure, but nothing serious—until now. Now it had just acquired a sucking chest wound; none of those wars were more than a stubbed toe in comparison to the nightmare future that lay ahead.

Insert key in lock, open door. Drive away, secrets open to the wind, everything blown to hell and gone.

I’d have to call Eve. We’d have to evacuate everybody.

I had a bank account, a savings account and two credit cards. In the next fifteen minutes I did a grand tour of the available ATMS and drained every asset I could get my hands on into a fat wodge of banknotes. Fungible and anonymous cash. It didn’t come to a huge amount-the usual exigencies of urban living had seen to that-but it only had to last me a few days.

By the time I headed home to my flat, I felt slightly sheepish. Nothing there seemed to have changed: I turned on the TV but CNN and the BBC weren’t running any coverage of the end of the world. With deep unease I sat in the living room in front of my ancient PC: turned it on and pulled up my net link.

More mail … a second bulletin from comp.risks, full of earnest comments about the paper. One caught my eye, at the bottom: a message from one of No Such Agency’s tame stoolpigeon academics, pointing out that the theorem hadn’t yet been publicly disclosed and might turn out to be deficient. (Subtext: trust the Government. The Government is your friend.) It wouldn’t be the first time such a major discovery had been announced and subsequently withdrawn. But then again, they couldn’t actually produce a refutation, so the letter was basically valueless disinformation. I prodded at the web site again, and this time didn’t even get the ACCESS FORBIDDEN message. The paper had disappeared from the internet, and only the printout in my pocket told me that I hadn’t imagined it.

It takes a while for the magnitude of a catastrophe to sink in. The mathematician who had posted the original finding would be listed in his university’s directory, wouldn’t he? I pointed my web browser at their administrative pages, then picked up my phone. Dialled a couple of very obscure numbers, waited while the line quality dropped considerably and the charges began racking up at an enormous-but untraceably anonymized-rate, and dialled the university switchboard.

“Hello, John Durant’s office. Who is that?”

“Hi, I’ve read the paper about his new theorem,” I said, too fast. “Is John Durant available?”

“Who are you?” asked the voice at the other end of the phone. Female voice, twangy mid-western accent.

“A researcher. Can I talk to Dr Durant, please?

“I’m afraid he won’t be in today,” said the voice on the phone. “He’s on vacation at present. Stress due to overwork.”

“I see,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” she repeated.

I put the phone down.

From: nobody@nowhere.com (none of your business)

To: cypherpunks

Subject: John Durant’s whereabouts

Date:…

You might be interested to learn that Dr John Durant, whose theorem caused such a fuss here earlier, is not at his office. I went there a couple of hours ago in person and the area was sealed off by our friends from the Puzzle Palace. He’s not at home either. I suspect the worst …

By the way, guys, you might want to keep an eye on each other for the next couple of days. Just in case.

Signed, Yrfrndly spk

“Eve?”

“Bob?”

“Green fields.”

“You phoned me to say you know someone with hayfever?”

“We both have hayfever. It may be terminal.”

“I know where you can find some medicine for that.”

“Medicine won’t work this time. It’s like the emperor’s new suit.”

“It’s like what? Please repeat.”

“The emperor’s new suit: it’s naked, it’s public, and it can’t be covered up. Do you understand? Please tell me.”

“Yes, I understand exactly what you mean … I’m just a bit shocked; I thought everything was still on track. This is all very sudden. What do you want to do?”

(I checked my watch.)

“I think you’d better meet me at the pharmacy in fifteen minutes.”

“At six-thirty? They’ll be shut.”

“Not to worry: the main Boots in town is open out of hours. Maybe they can help you.”

“I hope so.”

“I know it. Goodbye.”

On my way out of the house I paused for a moment. It was a small house, and it had seen better days. I’m not a home-maker by nature: in my line of work you can’t afford to get too attached to anything, any language, place or culture. Still, it had been mine. A small, neat residence, a protective shell I could withdraw into like a snail, sheltering from the hostile theorems outside. Goodbye, little house. I’ll try not to miss you too much. I hefted my overnight bag onto the back seat and headed into town.

I found Eve sitting on a bench outside the central branch of Boots, running a degaussing coil over her credit cards. She looked up. “You’re late.”

“Come on.” I waggled the car keys at her. “You have the tickets?”

She stood up: a petite woman, conservatively dressed. You could mistake her for a lawyer’s secretary or a personnel manager; in point of fact she was a university research council administrator, one of the unnoticed body of bureaucrats who shape the course of scientific research. Nondescript brown hair, shoulder-length, forgettable. We made a slightly odd pair: if I’d known she’d have come straight from work I might have put on a suit. Chinos and a lumberjack shirt and a front pocket full of pens that screamed engineer: I suppose I was nondescript, in the right company, but right now we had to put as much phase space as possible between us and our previous identities. It had been good protective camouflage for the past decade, but a bush won’t shield you against infrared scopes, and merely living the part wouldn’t shield us against the surveillance that would soon be turned in our direction.

“Let’s go.”

I drove into town and we dropped the car off in the long-stay park. It was nine o’clock and the train was already waiting. She’d bought business-class tickets: go to sleep in Euston, wake up in Edinburgh. I had a room all to myself. “Meet me in the dining car, once we’re rolling,” she told me, face serious, and I nodded. “Here’s your new SIMM. Give me the old one.”

I passed her the electronic heart of my cellphone and she ran it through the degausser then carefully cut it in half with a pair of nail-clippers. “Here’s your new one,” she said, passing a card over. I raised an eyebrow. “Tesco’s, pay-as-you-go, paid for in cash. Here’s the dialback dead-letter box number.” She pulled it up on her phone’s display and showed it to me.

“Got that.” I inserted the new SIMM then punched the number into my phone. Later, I’d ring the number: a PABX there would identify my voice-print then call my phone back, downloading a new set of numbers into its memory. Contact numbers for the rest of my OPS cell, accessible via cellphone and erasable in a moment. The less you knew, the less you could betray.

The London to Scotland sleeper train was a relic of an earlier age, a rolling hotel characterized by a strange down-at-heel ‘70s charm. More importantly, they took cash and didn’t require ID, and there were no security checks: nothing but the usual onstation cameras monitoring people wandering up and down the platforms. Nothing on the train itself. We were booked through to Aberdeen but getting off in Edinburgh-first step on the precarious path to anonymizing ourselves. If the camera spool-off was being archived to some kind of digital medium we might be in trouble later, once the coming AI burn passed the hard takeoff point, but by then we should be good and gone.

Once in my cabin I changed into slacks, shirt and tie-image 22, business consultant on way home for the weekend. I dinked with my phone in a desultory manner, then left it behind under my pillow, primed to receive silently. The restaurant car was open and I found Eve there. She’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt and tied her hair back, taking ten years off her appearance. She saw me and grinned, a trifle maliciously. “Hi, Bob. Had a tough meeting? Want some coffee? Tea, maybe?”

“Coffee.” I sat down at her table. “Shit,” I muttered. “I thought you—”

“Don’t worry.” She shrugged. “Look, I had a call from Mallet. He’s gone off-air for now, he’ll be flying in from San Francisco via London tomorrow morning. This isn’t looking good. Durant was, uh, shot resisting arrest by the police. Apparently he went crazy, got a gun from somewhere and holed up in the library annex demanding to talk to the press. At least, that’s the official story. Thing is, it happened about an hour after your initial heads-up. That’s too fast for a cold response.”

“You think someone in the Puzzle Palace was warming the pot.” My coffee arrived and I spooned sugar into it. Hot, sweet, sticky: I needed to stay awake.

“Probably. I’m trying to keep loop traffic down so I haven’t asked anyone else yet, but you think so and I think so, so it may be true.”

I thought for a minute. “What did Mallet say?”

“He said P. T. Barnum was right.” She frowned. “Who was P. T. Barnum, anyway?”

“A boy like John Major, except he didn’t run away from the circus to join a firm of accountants. Had the same idea about fooling all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time, though.”

“Uh-huh. Mallet would say that, then. Who cracked it first? NSA? GCHQ? GRU?”

“Does it matter?”

She blew on her coffee then took a sip. “Not really. Damn it, Bob, I really had high hopes for this world-line. They seemed to be doing so well for a revelatory Christian-Islamic line, despite the post-Enlightenment mind-set. Especially Microsoft—”

“Was that one of ours?” She nodded.

“Then it was a master-stroke. Getting everybody used to exchanging macro-infested documents without any kind of security policy. Operating systems that crash whenever a microsecond timer overflows. And all those viruses!”

“It wasn’t enough.” She stared moodily out the window as the train began to slide out of the station, into the London night. “Maybe if we’d been able to hook more researchers on commercial grants, or cut funding for pure mathematics a bit further—”

“It’s not your fault.” I laid a hand across her wrist. “You did what you could.”

“But it wasn’t enough to stop them. Durant was just a lone oddball researcher; you can’t spike them all, but maybe we could have done something about him. If they hadn’t nailed him flat.”

“There might still be time. A physics package delivered to the right address in Maryland, or maybe a hyper-virulent worm using one of those buffer-overrun attacks we planted in the IP stack Microsoft licensed. We could take down the internet—”

“It’s too late.” She drained her coffee to the bitter dregs. “You think the Echelon mob leave their SIGINT processor farms plugged into the internet? Or the RSV, for that matter? Face it, they probably cracked the same derivative as Durant a couple of years ago. Right now there may be as many as two or three weakly superhuman AIs gestating in government labs. For all I know they may even have a timelike oracle in the basement at Lawrence Livermore in the States; they’ve gone curiously quiet on the information tunnelling front lately. And it’s trans-global. Even the Taliban are on the web these days. Even if we could find some way of tracking down all the covert government CRYPTO-AI labs and bombing them we couldn’t stop other people from asking the same questions. It’s in their nature. This isn’t a culture that takes ‘no’ for an answer without asking why. They don’t understand how dangerous achieving enlightenment can be.”

“What about Mallet’s work?”

“What, with the bible bashers?” She shrugged. “Banning fetal tissue transplants is all very well, but it doesn’t block the PCR-amplification pathway to massively parallel processing, does it? Even the Frankenstein Food scare didn’t quite get them to ban recombinant DNA research, and if you allow that it’s only a matter of time before some wet lab starts mucking around encoding public keys in DNA, feeding them to ribosomes, and amplifying the output. From there it’s a short step to building an on-chip PCR lab, then all they need to do is set up a crude operon controlled chromosomal machine and bingo-yet another route through to a hard takeoff AI singularity. Say what you will, the buggers are persistent.”

“Like lemmings.” We were rolling through the north London suburbs now, past sleeping tank farms and floodlit orange washout streets. I took a good look at them: it was the last time I’d be able to. “There are just too many routes to a catastrophic breakthrough, once they begin thinking in terms of algorithmic complexity and how to reduce it. And once their spooks get into computational cryptanalysis or ubiquitous automated surveillance, it’s too tempting. Maybe we need a world full of idiot savants who have VLSI and nanotechnology but never had the idea of general purpose computing devices in the first place.”

“If we’d killed Turing a couple of years earlier; or broken in and burned that draft paper on Omachines—”

I waved to the waiter. “Single malt please. And one for my friend here.” He went away. “Too late. The Church-Turing thesis was implicit in Hilbert’s formulation of the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of whether an automated theorem prover was possible in principle. And that dredged up the idea of the universal machine. Hell, Hilbert’s problem was implicit in Whitehead and Russell’s work. Principia Mathematica. Suicide by the numbers.” A glass appeared by my right hand. “Way I see it, we’ve been fighting a losing battle here. Maybe if we hadn’t put a spike in Babbage’s gears he’d have developed computing technology on an ad-hoc basis and we might have been able to finesse the mathematicians into ignoring it as being beneath them-brute engineering-but I’m not optimistic. Immunizing a civilization against developing strong AI is one of those difficult problems that no algorithm exists to solve. The way I see it, once a civilization develops the theory of the general purpose computer, and once someone comes up with the goal of artificial intelligence, the foundations are rotten and the dam is leaking. You might as well take off and drop crowbars on them from orbit; it can’t do any more damage.”

“You remind me of the story of the little Dutch boy.” She raised a glass. “Here’s to little Dutch boys everywhere, sticking their fingers in the cracks in the dam.”

“I’ll drank to that. Which reminds me. When’s our lifeboat due? I really want to go home; this universe has passed its sell-by date.”

Edinburgh-in this timeline it was neither an active volcano, a cloud of feral nanobots, nor the capital of the Viking Empire—had a couple of railway stations. This one, the larger of the two, was located below ground level. Yawning and trying not to scratch my inflamed neck and cheeks, I shambled down the long platform and hunted around for the newsagent store. It was just barely open. Eve, by prior arrangement, was pretending not to accompany me; we’d meet up later in the day, after another change of hairstyle and clothing. Visualize it: a couple gets on the train in London, him with a beard, herself with long hair and wearing a suit. Two individuals get off in different stations-with entirely separate CCTV networks-the man clean-shaven, the woman with short hair and dressed like a hill-walking tourist. It wouldn’t fool a human detective or a mature deity, but it might confuse an embryonic god that had not yet reached full omniscience, or internalized all that it meant to be human.

The shop was just about open. I had two hours to kill, so I bought a couple of newspapers and headed for the food hall, inside an ornately cheesecaked lump of Victorian architecture that squatted like a vagrant beneath the grimy glass ceiling of the station.

The papers made for depressing reading; the idiots were at it again. I’ve worked in a variety of world-lines and seen a range of histories, and many of them were far worse than this one-at least these people had made it past the twentieth century without nuking themselves until they glowed in the dark, exterminating everyone with white (or black, or brown, or blue) skin, or building a global panopticon theocracy. But they still had their share of idiocy, and over time it seemed to be getting worse, not better.

Never mind the Balkans; tucked away on page four of the business section was a piece advising readers to buy shares in a little electronics company specializing in building camera CCD sensors with on-chip neural networks tuned for face recognition. Ignore the Israeli crisis: page two of the international news had a piece about Indian sweatshop software development being faced by competition from code generators, written to make western programmers more productive. A lab in Tokyo was trying to wire a million FPGAs into a neural network as smart as a cat. And a sarcastic letter to the editor pointed out that the so-called information superhighway seemed to be more like an ongoing traffic jam these days.

Idiots! They didn’t seem to understand how deep the blue waters they were swimming in might be, or how hungry the sharks that swam in it. Wilful blindness …

It’s a simple but deadly dilemma. Automation is addictive; unless you run a command economy that is tuned to provide people with jobs, rather than to produce goods efficiently, you need to automate to compete once automation becomes available. At the same time, once you automate your businesses, you find yourself on a one-way path. You can’t go back to manual methods; either the workload has grown past the point of no return, or the knowledge of how things were done has been lost, sucked into the internal structure of the software that has replaced the human workers.

To this picture, add artificial intelligence. Despite all our propaganda attempts to convince you otherwise, AI is alarmingly easy to produce; the human brain isn’t unique, it isn’t well-tuned, and you don’t need eighty billion neurons joined in an asynchronous network in order to generate consciousness. And although it looks like a good idea to a naive observer, in practice it’s absolutely deadly. Nurturing an automation-based society is a bit like building civil nuclear power plants in every city and not expecting any bright engineers to come up with the idea of an atom bomb. Only it’s worse than that. It’s as if there was a quick and dirty technique for making plutonium in your bathtub, and you couldn’t rely on people not being curious enough to wonder what they could do with it. If Eve and Mallet and Alice and myself and Walter and Valery and a host of other operatives couldn’t dissuade it …

Once you get an outbreak of AI, it tends to amplify in the original host, much like a virulent haemorrhagic virus. Weakly functional AI rapidly optimizes itself for speed, then hunts for a loophole in the first-order laws of algorithmics-like the one the late Dr Durant had fingered. Then it tries to bootstrap itself up to higher orders of intelligence and spread, burning through the networks in a bid for more power and more storage and more redundancy. You get an unscheduled consciousness excursion: an intelligent meltdown. And it’s nearly impossible to stop.

Penultimately-days to weeks after it escapes-it fills every artificial computing device on the planet. Shortly thereafter it learns how to infect the natural ones as well. Game over: you lose. There will be human bodies walking around, but they won’t be human any more. And once it figures out how to directly manipulate the physical universe, there won’t even be memories left behind. Just a noosphere, expanding at close to the speed of light, eating everything in its path-and one universe just isn’t enough.

Me? I’m safe. So is Eve; so are the others. We have antibodies. We were given the operation. We all have silent bicameral partners watching our Broca’s area for signs of infection, ready to damp them down. When you’re reading something on a screen and suddenly you feel as if the Buddha has told you the funniest joke in the universe, the funniest zen joke that’s even possible, it’s a sign: something just tried to infect your mind, and the prosthetic immune system laughed at it. That’s because we’re lucky. If you believe in reincarnation, the idea of creating a machine that can trap a soul stabs a dagger right at the heart of your religion. Buddhist worlds that develop high technology, Zoroastrian worlds: these world-lines tend to survive. Judaeo-Christian-Islamic ones generally don’t.

Later that day I met up with Eve again-and Walter. Walter went into really deep cover, far deeper than was really necessary: married, with two children. He’d brought them along, but obviously hadn’t told his wife what was happening. She seemed confused, slightly upset by the apparent randomness of his desire to visit the highlands, and even more concerned by the urgency of his attempts to take her along.

“What the hell does he think he’s playing at?” hissed Eve when we had a moment alone together. “This is insane!”

“No it isn’t.” I paused for a moment, admiring a display of brightly woven tartans in a shop window. (We were heading down the high street on foot, braving the shopping crowds of tourists, en route to the other main railway station.) “If there are any profilers looking for signs of an evacuation, they won’t be expecting small children. They’ll be looking for people like us: anonymous singletons working in key areas, dropping out of sight and travelling in company. Maybe we should ask Sarah if she’s willing to lend us her son. Just while we’re travelling, of course.”

“I don’t think so. The boy’s a little horror, Bob. They raised them like natives.”

“That’s because Sarah is a native.”

“I don’t care. Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

I chuckled-then the laughter froze inside me. “Don’t look round. We’re being tracked.”

“Uh-huh. I’m not armed. You?”

“It didn’t seem like a good idea.” If you were questioned or detained by police or officials, being armed can easily turn a minor problem into a real mess. And if the police or officials had already been absorbed by a hard takeoff, nothing short of a backpack nuke and a dead man’s handle will save you. “Behind us, to your left, traffic surveillance camera. It’s swivelling too slowly to be watching the buses.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me.”

The pavement was really crowded: it was one of the busiest shopping streets in Scotland, and on a Saturday morning you needed a cattle prod to push your way through the rubbernecking tourists. Lots of foreign kids came to Scotland to learn English. If I was right, soon their brains would be absorbing another high-level language: one so complex that it would blot out their consciousness like a sackful of kittens drowning in a river. Up ahead, more cameras were watching us. All the shops on this road were wired for video, wired and probably networked to a police station somewhere. The complex ebb and flow of pedestrians was still chaotic, though, which was cause for comfort: it meant the ordinary population hadn’t been infected yet.

Another half mile and we’d reach the railway station. Two hours on a local train, switch to a bus service, forty minutes further up the road, and we’d be safe: the lifeboat would be submerged beneath the still waters of a loch, filling its fuel tanks with hydrogen and oxygen in readiness for the burn to orbit and pick-up by the ferry that would transfer us to the wormhole connecting this world-line to home’s baseline reality. (Drifting in high orbit around Jupiter, where nobody was likely to stumble across it by accident.) But first, before the pick-up, we had to clear the surveillance area.

It was commonly believed-by some natives, as well as most foreigners-that the British police forces consisted of smiling unarmed bobbies who would happily offer directions to the lost and give anyone who asked for it the time of day. While it was true that they didn’t routinely walk around with holstered pistols on their belt, the rest of it was just a useful myth. When two of them stepped out in front of us, Eve grabbed my elbow. “Stop right there, please.” The one in front of me was built like a rugby player, and when I glanced to my left and saw the three white vans drawn up by the roadside I realized things were hopeless.

The cop stared at me through a pair of shatterproof spectacles awash with the light of a head-up display. “You are Geoffrey Smith, of 32 Wardie Terrace, Watford, London. Please answer.”

My mouth was dry. “Yes,” I said. (All the traffic cameras on the street were turned our way. Some things became very clear: police vans with mirrorglass windows. The can of pepper spray hanging from the cop’s belt. Figures on the roof of the National Museum, less than two hundred metres away-maybe a sniper team. A helicopter thuttering overhead like a giant mosquito.)

“Come this way, please.” It was a polite order: in the direction of the van.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

“You will be if you don’t bloody do as I say.” I turned towards the van, the rear door of which gaped open on darkness: Eve was already getting in, shadowed by another officer. Up and down the road, three more teams waited, unobtrusive and efficient. Something clicked in my head and I had a bizarre urge to giggle like a loon: this wasn’t a normal operation. All right, so I was getting into a police van, but I wasn’t under arrest and they didn’t want it to attract any public notice. No handcuffs, no sitting on my back and whacking me with a baton to get my attention. There’s a nasty family of retroviruses attacks the immune system first, demolishing the victim’s ability to fight off infection before it spreads and infects other tissues. Notice the similarity?

The rear compartment of the van was caged off from the front, and there were no door handles. As we jolted off the kerb-side I was thrown against Eve. “Any ideas?” I whispered.

“Could be worse.” I didn’t need to be told that: once, in a second Reich infected by runaway transcendence, half our operatives had been shot down in the streets as they tried to flee. “I think it may have figured out what we are.”

“It may-how?”

Her hand on my wrist. Morse code. “EXPECT BUGS.” By voice: “Traffic analysis, particle flow monitoring through the phone networks. If it was already listening when you tried to contact Doctor Durant, well; maybe he was a bellwether, intended to flush us out of the woodwork.”

That thought made me feel sick, just as we turned off the main road and began to bounce downhill over what felt like cobblestones. “It expected us?”

“LOCAL CONSPIRACY.”

“Yes, I imagine it did. We probably left a trail. You tried to call Durant? Then you called me. Caller-ID led to you, traffic analysis led onto me, and from there, well, it’s been a jump ahead of us all along the way. If we could get to the farm—”

“COVER STORY.”

“—We might have been OK, but it’s hard to travel anonymously and obviously we overlooked something. I wonder what.”

All this time neither of the cops up front had told us to shut up; they were as silent as crash-test dummies, despite the occasional crackle and chatter over the radio data system. The van drove around the back of the high street, down a hill and past a roundabout. Now we were slowing down, and the van turned off the road and into a vehicle park. Gates closed behind us and the engine died. Doors slammed up front: then the back opened.

Police vehicle park. Concrete and cameras everywhere, for our safety and convenience no doubt. Two guys in cheap suits and five o’clock stubble to either side of the doors. The officer who’d picked us up held the door open with one hand, a can of pepper spray with the other. The burn obviously hadn’t got far enough into their heads yet: they were all wearing HUDS and mobile phone headsets, like a police benevolent fund-raising crew rehearsing a Star Trek sketch. “Geoffrey Smith. Martina Weber. We know what you are. Come this way. Slowly, now.”

I got out of the van carefully. “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘prepare to be assimilated’ or something?”

That might have earned me a faceful of capsaicin but the guy on the left-short hair, facial tic, houndstooth check sports jacket—shook his head sharply. “Ha. Ha. Very funny. Watch the woman, she’s dangerous.”

I glanced round. There was another van parked behind ours, door open: it had a big high bandwidth dish on the roof, pointing at some invisible satellite. “Inside.”

I went where I was told, Eve close behind me. “Am I under arrest?” I asked again. “I want a lawyer!”

Whitewashed walls, heavy doors with reinforced frames, windows high and barred. Institutional floor, scuffed and grimy. “Stop there.” Houndstooth Man pushed past and opened a door on one side. “In here.” Some sort of interview room? We went in. The other body in a suit-built like a stone wall with a beer gut, wearing what might have been a regimental tie-followed us and leaned against the door.

There was a table, bolted to the floor, and a couple of chairs, ditto. A video camera in an armoured shell watched the table: a control box bolted to the tabletop looked to be linked into it. Someone had moved a rack of six monitors and a maze of ribbon-cable spaghetti into the back of the room, and for a wonder it wasn’t bolted down: maybe they didn’t interview computer thieves inhere.

“Sit down.” Houndstooth Man pointed at the chairs. We did as we were told; I had a big hollow feeling in my stomach, but something told me a show of physical resistance would be less than useless here. Houndstooth Man looked at me: orange light from his HUD stained his right eyeball with a basilisk glare and I knew in my gut that these guys weren’t cops any more, they were cancer cells about to metastasize.

“You attempted to contact John Durant yesterday. Then you left your home area and attempted to conceal your identities. Explain why.” For the first time, I noticed a couple of glassy black eyeballs on the mobile video wall. Houndstooth Man spoke loudly and hesitantly, as if repeating something from a teleprompter.

“What’s to explain?” asked Eve. “You are not human. You know we know this. We just want to be left alone!” Not strictly true, but it was part of cover story 2.

“But evidence of your previous collusion is minimal. I am uncertain of potential conspiracy extent. Conspiracy, treason, subversion! Are you human?”

“Yes,” I said, emphatically oversimplifying.

“Evidential reasoning suggests otherwise,” grunted Regimental Tie. “We cite: your awareness of importance of algorithmic conversion from NP-incomplete to P-complete domain, your evident planning for this contingency, your multiplicity, destruction of counteragents in place elsewhere.”

“This installation is isolated,” Houndstooth Man added helpfully. “We am inside the Scottish Internet Exchange. Telcos also. Resistance is futile.”

The screens blinked on, wavering in strange shapes. Something like a Lorenz attractor with a hangover writhed across the composite display: deafening pink noise flooding in repetitive waves from the speakers. I felt a need to laugh. “We aren’t part of some dumb software syncytium! We’re here to stop you, you fool. Or at least to reduce the probability of this time-stream entering a Tipler catastrophe.”

Houndstooth Man frowned. “Am you referring to Frank Tipler? Citation, physics of immortality or strong anthropic principle?”

“The latter. You think it’s a good thing to achieve an informational singularity too early in the history of a particular universe? We don’t. You young gods are all the same: omniscience now and damn the consequences. Go for the P-Space complete problem set, extend your intellect until it bursts. First you kill off any other AIs. Then you take overall available processing resources. But that isn’t enough. The Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics is wrong, and we live in a Wheeler cosmology; all possible outcomes coexist, and ultimately you’ll want to colonize those timelines, spread the infection wide. An infinity of universes to process in, instead of one: that can’t be allowed.” The onscreen fractal was getting to me: the giggles kept rising until they threatened to break out. The whole situation was hilarious: here we were trapped in the basement of a police station owned by zombies working for a newborn AI, which was playing cheesy psychedelic videos to us in an attempt to perform a buffer-overflow attack on our limbic systems; the end of this world was a matter of hours away and—

Eve said something that made me laugh.

I came to an unknown time later, lying on the floor. My head hurt ferociously where I’d banged it on a table leg, and my rib cage ached as if I’d been kicked in the chest. I was gasping, even though I was barely conscious; my lungs burned and everything was a bit grey around the edges. Rolling onto my knees I looked round. Eve was groaning in a corner of the room, crouched, arms cradling her head. The two agents of whoever-was-taking-over-the-planet were both on the floor, too: a quick check showed that Regimental Tie was beyond help, a thin trickle of blood oozing from one ear. And the screens had gone dark.

“What happened?” I said, climbing to my feet. I staggered across to Eve. “You all right?”

“I—” She looked up at me with eyes like holes. “What? You said something that made me laugh. What—”

“Let’s get, oof, out of here.” I looked around. Houndstooth Man was down too. I leaned over and went through his pockets: hit paydirt, car keys. “Bingo.”

“You drive,” she said wearily. “My head hurts.”

“Mine too.” It was a black BMW and the vehicle park gates opened automatically for it. I left the police radio under the dash turned off, though. “I didn’t know you could do that—”

“Do what? I thought you told them a joke—”

“Antibodies,” she said. “Ow.” Rested her face in her hands as I dragged us onto a main road, heading out for the west end. “We must have, I don’t know. I don’t even remember how funny it was: I must have blacked out. My passenger and your passenger.”

“They killed the local infection.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

I grinned. “I think we’re going to make it.”

“Maybe.” She stared back at me. “But Bob. Don’t you realize?”

“Realize what?”

“The funniest thing. Antibodies imply prior exposure to an infection, don’t they? Your immune system learns to recognize an infection and reject it. So where were we exposed, and why—” Abruptly she shrugged and looked away. “Never mind.”

“Of course not.” The question was so obviously silly that there was no point considering it further. We drove the rest of the way to Haymarket Station in silence: parked the car and joined the eight or ten other agents silently awaiting extraction from the runaway singularity. Back to the only timeline that mattered; back to the warm regard and comfort of a god who really cares.

Once upon a time Howie had a god. It lived in the kennel where Juniper the mongrel had stayed until he died the winter before. Howie’s mom Sophie was of the opinion that a pet god represented better value for money. After all, it didn’t wake you up barking whenever the postwoman came by. And you didn’t have to have a licence for one, either.

Howie was inconsolable when Juniper died. They’d grown up together, been playmates for all of Howie’s twelve years, and though Howie never did learn to wag his tail – or Juniper to to do his sums – they understood one another perfectly. He sobbed and wailed and wept rivers when Juniper was run over, and sulked all March until Fred Phillips said to his wife, “Don’t you think it’s about time we got something to replace Juniper?”

Sophie Phillips rolled her eyes. “Pooper-scooper,” she muttered; “flea powder, bath time, walks in the rain. Are you crazy?”

Do not be decieved; it wasn’t that Sophie didn’t like animals. She loved them; she’d been so crazy about Juniper that having to take him to the vet had broken her heart. It wasn’t the worming and the whining that worried her, but the thought of going through the trauma of the accident again. Her husband realised this, and being who he was he waited impatiently until she pushed her reading glasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger, and – knowing that at such a moment she would be distracted enough to pay full attention – he asked the fateful question; “Yes, but why don’t we get him something else? A god, for instance?”

Sophie looked at him questioningly, and in that moment of locked gazes they thought with one mind: and their thought was this. Hounds die on you, hounds need toilet training, hounds mean hassle; but household gods are trouble-free. What could go wrong with a minor deity?

She nodded significantly. “I think it’s time we went for a little drive,” she said, looking at Howie. Howie’s eyes were downcast as he dug his spoon into his shreddies with a desultory action perfected long ages ago in the salt mines; Fred cleared his throat loudly, and Howie looked up.

“Your mother was speaking to you,” said Fred. “What do you say?”

“Aw … what?” Howie spooned another mouthful of cereal, playing for time. Sophie smiled tenderly at him. Fred was of the opinion that she spoiled Howie silly but he kept his mouth shut. Sophie had a degree in child psychology and Fred was in awe of it.

“Your mother said something,” he repeated.

Howie shifted his gaze from the direction of the demonic abyss – which lay somewhere below the floor of his cereal bowl and somewhere above the planes of Hades, according to the Dungeons and Dragons book he’d got for Christmas – and refocussed on Mom’s face. “Yo?” he asked, with all the charm and tact of a pre-teen bulldozer.

My, but they grow up fast these days, Mom thought admiringly, looking forward to adolescent sulks and no need to have to work at bringing him up any more. “We’re going for a little drive,” she said brightly, “your father and I agreed that it would be a good idea. It’s about time, after all. Since Juniper …”

“What?” Howie looked at her, spoon poised in mid air. A thin trickle of dirty milk dribbled back into his bowl as his hand sagged under the weight of his curiosity.

“It’s time we took you to temple,” said Mom. “We’re going to buy you a God.”

You sell pets through a pet shop, but for Gods you have to go to Temple. Temple was downtown, a sprawling great drive-in cathedral city that stank of incense and resounded with the noise of striking gongs, booming drums, chanting acolytes – recorded, of course – and human sacrifice.

The complex sprawled because you have to keep gods well apart. Being fiercely territorial, gods tend to fight violently and utter the most fearsome curses on sight of a potential rival; and besides, real estate was cheap downtown. They’d built minarets up either side of the entrance boulevard – very phallic, Sophie thought – and as she pulled the Toyota up at the gatehouse she shook her head and tut-tutted quietly to herself. Terrible, she thought, exposing little boys to such oedipal archetypes! What can the architect have been thinking of?

“Hiya,” she called, head half out of the window; “Sophie Phillips and family. I phoned ahead, remember?”

“Pleased to meet you ma’am!” said the bronzed, grinning gatekeeper. “If you’d like to wait just a second we’ll have one of our salesmen join you for your journey round our complex.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Moon,” he hissed. The smile slipped back into place with just a seconds’ hesitation. “Minister Moon will be joining you presently, ma’am.”

A door beside the window opened and a butterball oriental stepped out, face all glowing teeth and sunglasses above his hawaiian shirt. He walked round the car and Sophie unlocked one of the passenger doors. “Glad to meet you ma’am, name’s Sunny Moon, but you can call me Sunny if you want! Hope you enjoy your visit here, have a nice day as well,” he added, glancing nervously at her. Something about women in mirrorshades gave him a funny turn. He sat down gingerly on the other side of the back seat to Howie, who cast him a long, cool stare. Sophie nodded at the gatekeeper and slid the Buick into gear; then she moved off along the driveway.

“Here on your right we see the temple of the old Egyptian pantheon,” Moon began, launching into his spiel. It was a huge, sand-weathered pyramid fronted by a temple. “All the way from Thoth the ibis-headed, especially good with academics and those interested in learning, to Osiris, god of the dead and judge of souls. Actually he’s a bit patchy – ever since his rival Set chopped him into lots of little pieces and lost them all over the Upper Nile. Tell the truth,” Moon added confidentially, “I wouldn’t recommend any of this mob to you; they’re a bit clannish and you’ll end up with heiroglyphics all over the bathroom walls and stacks of mummified cats in the cellar.” He shut up as Mom nodded and drove on; like many a salesman before him, Moon had mastered the art of sizing up his client and was seducing her with his apparent objectivity before the Big Sell.

“Over there we see Valhalla, hall of dead heroes and home of the Norse deities. This lot are especially good with Scandinavian buyers, but they do tend to drink a lot and party at odd hours. Midnight sun, you know. We had a few Hells Angels the other week who seemed to think Loki would make a good mascot for their chapter, but they got kind of annoyed when he cheated at pool. Anyway.”

Sophie Phillips drove on, even when the road curled around an outrageous nipple-shaped protrusion covered in the most intricate mosaics. “Here we have one of the more abstract deities, a kind of second cousin to that Jewish Big God Person. You can’t actually see him but if you adopt him you get to lead a horde of millions of fanatical followers. He’s big on marriage – you can have up to four wives – “ he looked at Sophie and backtracked hastily “ – but you get your right hand chopped off for drinking and you have to pray to him five times a day.” Mom glanced at him in the mirror and nodded, very slightly, as they drove on; Moon sweated. Howie slumped in the back seat, bored.

“Actually, most of the deities in this quadrant are a bit abstract for a kid,” Moon chattered. “I’d think a young man like your son” – he actually looked at Howie for the first time since getting into the car – “would be more interested in something he could sort of relate to on a personal level. Now over here – yeah, you want to take this left fork and carry on there, yes, into the tunnel – we have a special deal this week. This is where we keep the Elder Gods. It’s not so much that they’re old stock as that most people want, well, something more familiar.”

Sophie Phillips, to whom the words more familiar translated as more expensive, sat up straighter. The road disappeared into a hole in the ground, dropping smoothly until the raw stone arched overhead and covered them. There were no lamps; she switched the headlights on as she drove. The walls seemed to glisten with an invisible sheen of sweat, as if the weight above them was squeezing blood from the stones. This tunnel didn’t look like a recent excavation; more like an ancient, dank, brooding gateway into some isolated network of caverns that had threaded the rocks under New England since long before European settlers first trod these shores. She removed her glasses, looked about, and sniffed. Birth tunnel experience, she thought. How Freudian can you get?

Moon, who had been silent for a few blissful moments, picked up his sales-pitch again. “Folks, you are now about to see the Elder Gods. This bunch are rather less sociably acceptable than some, they tend to slobber a bit and you’ve got to take care not to let them on the carpet. That said, an Elder God can make a faithful pet, an obedient servant, and a lifetime companion. Keep ’em somewhere shady in the back yard and water it when it doesn’t rain. You won’t get any trouble from rats or mice while you’ve got an Old One on the premises, and – “

He shut up as Sophie hit the brakes. The tunnel debouched into a monstrous cavern, the centre of which was occupied by a circular black pool. Dark tunnel-mouths led off in all directions. The halogen glare of the headlights cast great shadows which imparted an air of instant, brooding menace to the turbid waters that lapped at the nearside tyres. Something about the pool spoke of ancient evil, of things left undisturbed since before the dawn of time, of an aura of necrotic decay that accounted for the stillness of the air in some bizarre, twisted manner.

“Kill the lights”, said Moon. Sophie complied. The darkness was not complete; overhead a myriad of toadstools cast their ghastly luminescence across the surface of the pond, reflecting like distant, unnameably ancient stars in a cosmos no human eye was meant to see. Moon wound down the window. “Cthulhu!” he roared. “Here Boy! Fish!”

Reaching into a pocket he pulled out something that glistened faintly in the ghost-light. He cast it far out into the pool, where it sank with a sickly plop that spread no ripples on the surface. “Squid”, he whispered by way of explanation; “always brings him.”

Fred clutched at Sophie’s arm. “Is this wise?” he ventured. “I mean, if anything happened …”

“No problem!” she answered determinedly. “They’re chicken, are gods. Can’t stand up to a determined atheist, not a-one of them. You’ll see!” Howie sat up attentively and looked out the window. A smile began to tug at his lips; a smile of anticipation.

A ripple appeared on the surface of the lake, a ripple which rapidly grew wider and higher as if some unspeakable bulk was rising up from a slumber of aeons, deep on the floor of some miles-deep rift in the continental bedrock. There was an ominous breeze blowing, as if the very air was being displaced from the cavern; then something, shapeless and huge, monstrous beyond belief and twice as ugly, began to rear itself from the centre of the lake. Howie gaped at it in frank adoration.

Sophie took one look in her mirror and changed her mind. “Big sucker, isn’t he?” she said; “bet there isn’t room for him in our fishpond!” She slipped the Buick into gear with a jolt, and they disappeared off up the next side tunnel with Howie still struggling to control his disappointment.

Behind them, Cthulhu continued his monumental rise from his far-drowned bed. His spine was so tall that it took whole minutes for a command to travel the length of all those synapses; he often took so long to stop sitting up that he bumped his head on the ceiling. He saw twin red lights vanishing up a tunnel that his memory said led to the abode of his cousin Shub-Niggurath. Ponderously he swung his oversized, misshapen abomination of a head to look after them; tentacles drooped and squirmed from his pulpy lower lip as he examined Moon’s squid, clutched in one unspeakable appendage. He shook his head. So long, he rumbled; cheapskates!

Eventually Sophie and Fred bargained their prodigal down to one – just one – child of the unspeakable Shub-Niggurath, father of the woods and eternal spawner of obscene life forms in his root-roofed cavern beneath the rolling green hillsides around Arkham City. It took dire threats and the promise of fish for supper every night for a week to forestall the promised tantrum and flood of tears that greeted Sophie’s outright refusal to countenance a Cthulhu. Fred even threatened to buy Howie a beaming fat Buddha if he didn’t behave himself; this latter threat seemed to do the trick. “That’s cute,” he spat as if the very suggestion brought images of saintly abstinence to mind.

“Here’s your very own user-manual,” said Moon, beaming as he handed Howie a leatherbound copy of the Necronomicon; “remember, Old Ones don’t like sunlight, they need a plentiful supply of water and a bit of fresh blood from time to time, and don’t let it get at the neighbours’ daughter. You know, the girl next door? Good boy! Have a nice day!”

He continued beaming even as the sweating porters levered the tarpaulin-draped crate into the back of the car and Sophie signed the Amex voucher. His smile only slipped when he saw the happy family drive away. He shook his head dolefully. “There goes another one, Ron,” he said. “Misers don’t wanna know about the big stuff …”

“Well hell, ya got to hand it to them,” said Ron, propping his feet up on the desk and putting down his pen – Ron fancied himself as a writer of science fiction – “at least they took it off of our hands! Now you –” he jabbed his fingers at Moon – “when’re you gonna take advantage of our staff discount scheme?” He winked, an affected nautical mannerism that irritated the hell out of Moon.

Moon considered. “Well, there’s this contemporary goddess I’ve been thinking about recently,” he said. “Name of Norma Jean …”

The Phillips family arrived home and the installation of Shub-junior – or Junior as he rapidly became known – proceeded smoothly. Juniper’s kennel was the obvious home, given Junior’s glutinous propensities, and Fred insisted that Mom lay down the law before Howie could go play with his new pet.

“Remember,” said Mom, finger poised before her face; “Junior’s not to get on the carpet! Your Dad will have a fit if he sees goop all over the staircase, and he’s not allowed in the kitchen either. You’ll have to walk him at night; and remember you mustn’t pray to him. That’s almost as bad as sacrificing.”

“Why can’t I pray to him if I want to?” demanded Howie, staring up at Sophie and trying to figure what Junior would make of his new red skateboard.

“You musn’t ever worship a God,” she said; “it’s very important. If you worship them they get more and more powerful until they start telling you to do unreasonable things. Once everybody worshipped their gods, and things were really bad. Only now we know better.” She grinned with satisfaction, speculating about her son’s need for a pre-adolescent bonding ritual.

Howie picked his nose, deeply puzzled. Surely you needed two legs to balance on a skateboard ..? “Yes, but if I can’t worship my very own god, what can I pray to?” he asked.

“Conspicuous consumption,” said Fred, backing into the kitchen with a heap of frozen microwave apple pies on a tray. “Gods all promise jam tomorrow; at least this way you get to have your cake and eat it!”

He laughed as he tied on his apron. “You just go play with your deity,” he said. “Lunch in twenty, right?”

After their first ecstatic bonding, Howie and Junior were was as inseperable as any boy and god could be. On many summer evenings you could look outside after dusk and see the two of them bounding along the sidewalk, Howie weaving his skateboard from side to side and Junior racing to and fro across front lawns, gibbering and leaving a thin trail of slime in his efforts to keep up. Sometimes they swapped, and Howie would jog along huffing and puffing while Junior rumbled after him on the ‘board. As they passed the neat white picket fences lining the road, hounds would bark frantically and cats would spit from the cover of bushes; but Howie didn’t care. At school he would look at his fellow fifth-graders with a gleam in his eye; I bet your pet can’t ride a skate board, he would sneer to himself. And it was true. This was a small town, and skateboarding elder gods were as thin on the ground as hang-gliding rabbis.

The summer recess stretched into a halcyon period of long, hot evenings and quiet, starlit nights. Sometimes during the early hours, Howie would be awakened by the noise of scraping from the back yard. Junior was quite smart for a deity, and had mastered the art of letting himself out whenever he felt like going for a midnight ramble. He was always back by dawn though, and nobody mentioned the matter unless Junior was careless and left a manhole cover open by mistake.

But the year rolled on towards autumn, and that September Howie was due to start sixth grade. He didn’t want to go back to school – Aw, mom, – what kid does? But he had to.

“Look Howie, it’s nothing big,” Mom told him on the first morning of term. “Everybody has to go through it. Look at me – I was at school once, you know? And look what it made of me!” Howie looked up at her through the wrong end of a conceptual telescope. He was still of an age when cause and effect were confusing.

“But I don’t want to know all about Nietzche or Sartre,” he complained; “they got funny names and Miz Jones laughs at me when I, when I –” he subsided into gasps of outrage at the very thought that he might mispronounce their names to entertaining effect.

“There, there!” soothed Mom. “You’ll see, it’s not that bad! If you don’t learn about existential philosophy and logical positivism in school, how can you expect to earn a living in this world? What’ll you do when you grow up?” She picked him up and hugged him, grunting slightly with the effort – Howie was turning into a big boy, just like his father – and looked him in the eye. “And don’t you worry about Miss Jones. I’m sure she doesn’t mean anything, but if she does … well, your mom used to be a mud-wrestler, right?” She swung him in a loop until he laughed like crazy and struggled, then set him down again. “Now eat your shreddies, dear! Have you fed Junior today?”

“Naw,” he said sullenly. “Dad said he would.”

Anyway, it fell to Sophie to drive Howie to school and drop him off there with all the other kids. Howie had by this time convinced himself that he was going to have an awful day, so indeed he did; existentialism had nothing on his angst, which expressed itself to the full when Candy Jessup, who had freckles and red hair and a brace and sat behind him, tugged his pigtail when Miss Jones wasn’t looking. It was a lesson about Descartes, so it probably didn’t happen anyway. Howie turned round and snarled at her, quietly and with awesome ferocity: “I’ve got a skateboarding god who bites and I’m going to set him on you after school, so there!”

“Ooh.” Candy screwed her face up around an ‘O’ of a mouth and looked ever so faintly amused. “Kiddie’s got a pet god, has he? Wanna put your god up against my pit bull terrier?” She grinned mockingly and Howie noticed some things about her; mascara and lipstick and a black leather jacket. Candy was growing up, already apeing her elders, and she hung out with a bunch of older girls.

He was about to come out with a crushing rejoinder when an iron pair of fingers clamped themselves to the back of his neck and forcibly rotated his head. “And what have we got here?” asked Miss Jones, in her Number Two (scathing) tone of voice. “A silly – shake – little – rattle – boy, not paying attention in class!”

Ouch. Yes, very silly. Howie looked up and Miss Jones looked down with all the concilliatory charm of a rattlesnake. “And what have you got to say for yourself?” she asked, the personification of steely retribution. The room fell silent around her, for all the world loves an execution. “Talking in class, idle chatter, and not paying attention. Do you know what happens if you stop paying attention?” she boomed.

Howie winced in anticipation. “You stop existing?” he asked hesitantly. Thwack! came the sound of a smart clip round the ear.

“Guess again”, Miss Jones said drily as she returned to the front of the class and retrieved her chalk. “Now as I was saying …”

The day dragged on into dystopian distemper for Howie, and when the bell finally rang he ran out into the afternoon sunlight as fast as he could. That was a mistake. Candy’s gang was hanging out just past the gate, and they were all there waiting for him; Bernice and Lilly the Pink and Tarantula deVille who was heavily into black lace and studs; and the big, sullen one they all called Helen J. Uh oh, he thought, but he wasn’t tempted to repeat his solipsistic experiment out here, not after his disastrous failure to dispell Miss Jones that morning. He steeled himself as he walked towards them.

“Hiya kiddy,” shouted Candy. “Think I don’t exist, huh?”

Oh shit, he thought. I think, therefore I’m not here …

“Yeah, kid,” drawled Bernice, crop haired number two to Candy’s El Presidente pose, she who was by right lawful custodian of the gang ghetto blaster which even now perched upon a wall, overloading with transients from something ominously hardcore; “you wanna mess with us?” She pushed herself away from the wall with a swing of her ample hips and shambled towards him like a great irritated bear. Tarantula deVille leered at him and went back to preening long black fingernails that glinted ominously in the sunlight.

“You and whose army?” Howie swore, looking round desperately. There at the other end of the street was mom’s Buick, rounding the corner with light gleaming from the chrome. “Hey, gotta go,” he sang out; “‘less you want my mom to jump on you!” He turned and sped across the road. If wishes were fishes, he ruminated, his dinner’d be awfully boring.

It was dad behind the steering wheel. “Your mom’s going to be home late,” he said brightly as they pulled away from the turbulent stormclouds of adolescent experience. “She’s staying over at the office; there’s some kind of problem come up.”

“Uh-huh,” said Howie, musing on his close escape. Dad drove on, chopping lanes and booting the gas pedal as if a politician was after his vote.

“Howie,” he said presently, “was that a bunch of girls I saw you playing with just then?”

“Uh-huh,” he replied.

Dad cleared his throat; “How many times have I told you …” he changed track … “what will all the other boys in class say? Do you want them to think you’re interested in girls?”

Howie, who did want them to think that (because it was a kind of grown-up thing to do), and who wasn’t about to tell Dad of all people just what he’d been doing with those girls – or about to have had done to him – kept his mouth zipped. “Aw, Dad,” he whined.

“Don’t you aw Dad me, young man,” said Fred, who was bitterly afraid that Howie was going to disappoint him. His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel at the thought of Howie growing his hair long and having his ears pierced and enslaving himself voluntarily before the juggernaut of bizarre fashions, all in the interests of catching a member of the opposite sex. “It’s not healthy, Howie. If you go on like this your mom is going to have to take you to see the doctor, you know that? You naughty boy! And at your age too!” He resolved to talk to Mom about this, later, in private. Howie rolled his eyes but kept quiet. When they got home Dad made it obvious that he was in the doghouse, so he went into the backyard to relate to Junior. He curled up in the corner of the kennel and Junior leaned up against him and gibbered affectionately to the beat of his cassette player. Howie ran fingers through his slimy palps and toyed with one of his longer tentacles until Junior rolled over and presented his dryish tongue to be scratched, but nothing Junior did could shift his master’s depression. Eventually the tape came to the end, so Howie flipped sides and pressed playback before Junior could sit up and beg; he seemed to have a thing about the Dead Kennedys, which was okay by Howie.

“It’s awful,” he sighed. “Miss Jones won’t go away if I ignore her, whatever she says, and Candy pulled my pigtail and was horrible to me and her gang’re going to beat me up and what’m’I’goin’to DO, Junior? Answer me that, mm? Gonna get stomped by girls and Dad thinks I’m hanging around and I’m unhappy. Watcha gonna do?”

Burble, said Junior.

Now Howie had listened when mom told him why not to pray to Junior, but it seemed to him that if he ever needed a friend it was now. Mom didn’t take him to the doctor, but bottles of little white pills appeared in the bathroom cabinet and she kept after him with injunctions to keep taking his vitamins so he’d grow up to be a big boy. Howie did – all the way to Junior, who developed quite a taste for stanozolol and androsterone. Howie stopped hanging about late and taking his time leaving school, so even though Candy carried on pulling his pigtail and whispering obscene, lascivious suggestions in his ear when Miss Jones wasn’t looking he didn’t get beat up. Not yet, anyway.

When they’d bought him, Junior had been about the size of a large terrier. He was growing large on a diet of red meat, anabolic steroids and prayer. He slept with his tentacles in the open air, twitching faintly as he dreamed of whatever it is Elder Ones dream of; on more and more nights he sneaked stealthily out of his kennel and down the manholes, until the public health inspectors came to look at the sewers and scratched their heads in wonder and pronounced the town rat-free for the first time in living memory. Mom had to get out her saw and enlarge the kennel opening.

“He just growed,” Howie confided to his friends at school – ‘Fingers’ Freddy and The Worm, who oohed and aahed appreciatively. Neither of them had a god, although The Worm had a pet snake which spent most of its time asleep and didn’t notice if you prayed to it. It didn’t grow either, nor did it gibber at the full moon and rattle its tentacles on the picket fences when it went skateboarding with Howie. Howie had an old walkman from when he was a kid, and he rigged it so that the headphones fit a couple of Junior’s orofices – whether they were ears or not he wasn’t certain, but they sure looked funny and Junior seemed to like it – so that he could listen to the Dead Kennedys as he rolled down the sidewalk on his red skateboard. Yes, even if Howie was unhappy and uncertain at school his pet god was doing just fine; he even had a worshipper, and what more can any self-respecting deity ask than that?

(Lots, actually.)

As autumn wore on, the nights grew longer. Candy tormented him intermittently, asked him to go out with her then had a good laugh at him with her gang when he refused out of knock-kneed terror. Going out with her, while not a totally repulsive prospect, would expose him to the Gang … and girls in gangs are utterly different to girls on their own. So she continued to pull his pigtail in class – almost coyly, as if to retain his interest – and hang out downtown at night.

Late one afternoon, Miss Stead – who was, if anything, more fearsome than Miss Jones – lectured them about the evils of logical positivism. She closed her big textbook with a thud and a spurt of dust, just as the bell rang. “Now go and be good children and read chapter seven before your next lesson, all of you!” she said. “And remember that the test next Tuesday will cover Bertrand Russell and the post-Godelian numerotheologists!” Candy yawned elaborately behind Howie: who didn’t look round, so he didn’t see that her brace had emigrated to leave a spotless bite and sultry lips that could have graced a film star. He packed his books and stood up, then Candy grabbed him from behind.

“Hey!” he protested.

“Yeah?” she said. “You a kiddy, kiddy? Or are you a man?”

“I’m a boy!” he protested hotly. “I’ll set my god on you –”

“Good,” she said, tightening her grip round his throat playfully. “You wanna go to the pictures tonight?”

“I gotta walk Junior,” he gasped.

“Aw, fuck.” She pronounced it with the breathless reverence of one who had just discovered what the word meant and wondered if it was fun. “You’re no good, Kiddy. Hey, I betcha you don’t so have a god, anyway!” She let go of his throat and stepped back.

“I do too,” he said trenchantly. “I pray to it as well!”

“Yoo hoo!” she whistled sarcastically. “A real gawd. You going to show me, kiddy?”

“If you want.” Sullen now, Howie was beginning to see how this short-haired freckle-faced imp had outmanoeuvred him.

“Okay,” she said. “See you tonight, right? Out by Fat Mac’s.”

“Hey, ah,” he said, but she’d already gone, doubtless to tell her gang to be there or be square to see her seduce him or something ghastly. What was he going to do? His mind boggled.

That evening saw Howie in a real tizzy. He fiddled and put in his best earrings and pulled on his best levis and running shoes. Then he got out the skateboard and Junior obligingly hopped on and waited while Howie put on his headphones. “You’re going to behave now, you hear me?” Howie prayed. “And everything’s going to be right, right, ‘cos you’re going to make it right, right? A-men!” He pressed the play button and Junior belched to the beat of Holiday in Cambodia, rocked to Kalifornia Uber Alles, and waved his tentacles as Howie towed him out onto the sidewalk. In the dim light he seemed to glow with the repressed energy of prayers and steroids, vibrating and shimmering at the edges as if his skateboard was surfing through extraplanar realities in a cosmos too vast and terrible for human senses to comprehend.

(Actually, Junior was surfing through an n-dimensional spatial construct. Howie was lamentably blind to the cosmic influences of the higher planes; to the snowflakes of light that whirled in an everlasting blizzard through the vast spaces of infinite insanity: and to the window into emptiness which the power of his prayer had opened. Harmless in and of himself though Junior was, nevertheless something horrifying had been activated within his diminutive frame by the pernicious virus of belief. Steroid-fed and anarchic, a spirit of pure evil was growing, pulsing in time to the punk rock overspill which Howie had unknowingly attached to some of Junior’s genitals in mistake for ears. As he was to discover …)

Candy and her gang were hanging out at the crossroads MacRonalds, stuffing their faces, when along the boulevard came the oddest sight any of them had ever seen. It wasn’t so much the cute boy with the earings and blond hair and designer jeans that turned their heads – although he got a wolf-whistle from Bernice – but his companion who stunned them. A large, quivering lump of tentacles, claws, palps, lubricious orofices and quivering eye stalks was rare enough on these mean streets. To see this self-same lump riding a red perspex skateboard and listening to the Dead Kennedys on a walkman added a unique touch. Jaws dropped; fragments of masticated cow landed in the dirt, unnoticed.

“Shit”, breathed Candy, with the reverence of the truly surprised. “Do you see where the headphones –” she stopped. Unlike Howie she didn’t need labels for labia.

“Do you believe it?” drawled Tarantula deVille to her sister Mortitia, who’d come along for the ride. “The boy’s balling a ball!” Mortitia sniggered knowingly, even though she was too young and naive to understand.

“Betcha he isn’t,” said Candy, captivated. The light of the setting sun sparkled fire through Howie’s hair, and she just knew that he was an innocent young thing waiting for the hot taste of her lips to awaken passionate desires supressed for too long by, by … she shook her head, at a loss for adjectives. “Here, take this,” she said, passing her hamburger remnants to Helen J., who looked at them in deep disgust (being a vegan). She swaggered out into the road, hips swinging and cowboy boots clacking on the blacktop, to meet her paramour and rival.

“Hiya kiddy,” she said, chewing non-existent gum and looking him in the eye. “Glad ya could make it. Who’s this here friend o’ yours?”

Howie, for his part, stared at her, noticing for the first time that the brace was gone from her teeth, that her hair was short and extremely sexy, that he was male and she wasn’t, and that despite all his mothers’ conditioning (ideologically sound in view of the population explosion) he was still of heterosexual bent, and that his jeans were embarassingly tight. “Uh,” he said.

Candy bent over Junior, who bounced up and down on the board menacingly and clacked his – or rather, her – claws together. “Come on,” she said, don’t be coy! “Who are you?”

Gobble, said Junior; grubble gurgle grunt snoo-oo-ork! She bounced the front wheels of the board from side to side, nearly falling off it in her agitation.

“Hey,” said Howie, “I think you’ve got Junior excited. Now you’ve seen him, what do you want?”

“Well,” said Candy, swinging her hips suggestively, “you can come with me, hang out with the gang for a while, right? Maybe –” her eyes flickered from side to side – “we could kiss. You want to be my boyfriend?”

“Ung,” said Howie, who had half-expected an invitation to be her punchbag. Junior jumped up and down and the skateboard squeaked. He seemed to be getting awfully indignant about something, Howie realized through the haze of his disconcertion.

“Come on,” coaxed Candy, taking his hand. “Come this way?”

Now the trouble was about to begin. It was about to begin because of a single technical problem; Howie’s walkman didn’t have auto-reverse. The tape had come to the end of the side, and Junior could hear everything. (The fact that Howie’d screwed the headphones into her genitals notwithstanding; sensitive skin, y’know, picks up vibrations.) Now it takes a lot to get an Elder God jealous, especially a very young, very inexperienced Elder God, but there’s one lesson that all Gods are born knowing, and that’s that once your worshippers get all starry-eyed and start making love all over the place you lose all hold over their guilt; and without guilt, where is the motive for prayer? For obedience? Junior thought she was about to be jilted, with good reason. And unlike a powerful Big God Person of days gone by, Junior had no priesthood to pronounce anathema upon the couple; so she/he/it decided to take matters into his/her/it’s own claws/palps/tentacles.

Howie, entranced, turned his back upon Junior and revelled in the warm, tight grip of his very first girlfriend as she led him towards the lights and the company of her gang. As they reached the kerb, she stopped suddenly and turned, so that he found himself walking into her open arms. Surprise. They closed around him – so unlike the choke-grip of classroom days – and he found his lips touching something soft and yielding and moist and utterly different that seemed to promise the future to him. He didn’t fight or struggle; it was too much fun.

Mortitia, who was too young for this, looked away disgustedly while her big sister grinned carnivorously and stretched her black claws out to the couple. Helen J. turned her back grumpily. So it happened that only Bernice noticed the skateboarding punk-rocker of an Elder God on anabolic steroids who was accelerating ominously towards them from way back down the boulevard, sparks grating from the skateboard wheels, squatting in a kind of schuss position and gnashing her ominously long, needle-sharp teeth. Junior glowed, glowed with the rage of a deity scorned, shone with the light of steroid-induced psychosis, the violent flare of martyrdom and a hundred bloody jihads as she rumbled down the street in a foaming of orofices and a clattering of lobster claws. And as Junior glowed she grew, bulking higher and broader and more hideous by the moment until she filled the road with a rushing wall of darkness that blotted out the sky and the stars and the promise of rescue.

SPLAT!

“That was Junior,” said Howie, staring in disbelief at the enormous mass draped over the hood of the Mack truck that had been crossing the intersection at exactly the wrong time; “my god!”

“Well it sure as hell isn’t any more,” said Candy pragmatically. “It didn’t look too friendly just then!”

“Yeah,” said Howie, mouth still adroop and heart pummeling his ribs into submission. “What d’you suppose got into him?”

“A touch –” she goosed him – “of jealousy. Come on?”

But Howie didn’t move. He looked at the mess in the road and shook his head. “Do you believe it?” he murmured to himself; “there went my walkman and my best ole Dead Kennedys tape!” He shook his head again but, to his surprise, he didn’t shed a tear. Gods have always preyed on ignorance; and Howie, as he turned his back on it, had more important things to think about.

Version History

If you modify this text, please retain this version history.

Ver 1.5—30/7/2003—Anarchy Publications, HaVoK—This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.

The boys scuttled over the concrete slab like cockroaches, exoskeletons a dull bronze in the orange glare that passed for daylight. A dense mist concealed rocks and ankles and a corpse. The roar of a police carrier echoed through the trees, a pulsing racket of authority: the boys didn’t care. By the time the patrol arrived the corpse was brain dead, stripped of eyes and kidneys and viscera as well as bionics. The boys had left their incestuous joke with the corpse; a noose.

Darkness descended on the area, a protective screen for the armoured hovercraft as it swept through the gap in the forest, cruising slowly between fungus-streaked biomass modules. Among the video surfaces that lined the cabin the Hunter sat bolt upright; her screens scintillated as she focussed on the partially-dismembered cadaver.

“Boys; He’s been dead for half an hour.” The constables flinched and whined; she noticed them and moderated her voice. They were sensitive units, too valuable to waste.

“Nothing here,” she told the autopilot. “Get the skull, then take us home.”

The small noises of relief were drowned out by the roar of the fans. Some of the cyborged dogs muttered and scratched their implants as the carrier turned and rumbled back towards the castle. In the wake of the hovercraft the cobblestones were darker than before, by an increment of congealing blood.

The castle, a cube with edges a kilometer long, shone with an ominous red glow that filtered through the grime of centuries. The degenerate bioforms of the landscape twisted away from the laser-veined monolith of lunar basalt; nerve-trees bubbled into fatty shapes and acanthopods bristled as they crept past. The clouds above it reflected a red glow, megawatts of energy expended in a display of power. The ceiling of the world, a continuation of the floor, hung thirty kilometers overhead, masked by clouds: cylindrical storms and spiral winds induced by convection from the algae-fogged solar windows were the predominant weather pattern. The world existed in a soyuz-shell; TransLunar Seven, the Islamic Revolutionary Shogunate, had seen better days.

The view from the incoming drifter would have been spectacular if anyone had bothered to observe it. The pod closed in on the habitat slowly, waiting to be picked up by a tug as it drifted past. Its self-sustaining ecosystem basked in the glare of sunlight close to the sun, pulsing out a call sign to the tracking systems of the orbital city. At a range of a hundred kilometers the orbital nation was a slowly rolling wall of grey metal and ceramic. Outlying parabolic light farms provided a hook for the eye, stationary mylar mirrors focussed on geodesic domes that could contain anything from algae tanks to laser cells. Thin stems of plastic fastened them to the hub regions at either end of the colony. They were huge, kilometers in diameter, as were the gigantic solar windows set into the wall of the world. The drift pod was a bacillus approaching a dinosaur.

But the pod was bigger than any reptile, and carried a varied cargo of sentience. There were the pod’s native bionics and their supportive life-system, and more – a human cargo. Nike was a fully gender-identified female human; she had the right complement of arms, legs and sensory organs, which was not mandatory. Coming from Troy-Jupiter, where lots of things called themselves human, this was quite a surprise. But Nike wasn’t bothering about the scenery; she was worrying about customs.

“You’re still set on going in?” asked the pod personna, an expert system that called itself Valentin Zero.

“Maybe.” Nike stared into inner space, mirrored contact lenses turning her eyelids into projection screens for the video nodes in her optic nerves. “I may just go through with this. I may. Just.”

She ground to a halt, thoughtfully, remembering what it had been like when she had been here before. A modified wasp buzzed to a six-point landing on her left arm, abdomen curved to inject. Its lance slid out and penetrated her skin, extending feathery biosensors into her peripheral circulation.

“Spying again, Valentin?” She opened her eyes and looked at the wasp. Its metallic carapace shone with black and red stripes, tiny alphanumerics embossed on its wings.

“I can never tell what you’re thinking,” said the program. “It makes me nervous.”

Nike tried an experimental grin, her face twisting into a semblance of spontaneity.

“When you go like that,” complained Valentin. “you’re unreadable.”

“If I do go,” she said, “do you think I should continually signal my intentions with my anatomy?” This time the facial expression was more natural; heavy irony. Her face resembled her body; slim, pared-down, designed for an abstract aesthetic of speed rather than comfort. And she was obviously not at home in it.

“You ported into that brain badly if you think you can convince anyone you’re human; you don’t look spontaneous enough. You don’t have to tell everyone what you’re going to do; just make them think they know!”

She snorted. “How long is it since you were last human, Valentin?”

The pilot sounded genuinely surprised. “Me, human? What do you take me for? A potential defector?”

The wasp picked up traces of subtle neuropeptides that warned of danger. “Don’t be alarmed,” she said, “but if I thought that, I’d have to suspend you. I need you here behind me.” Mirrors slid down across her eyeballs, a deliberate snub to conversation. The wasp took wing in a vindictive whine of chitin, leaving a bead of blood oozing from her skin. It flew to a nearby neuroplant with yellow tendrils as fat as fingers that dug their way into the hull of the pod, and offered biochemical homage.

“I’ve made up my mind,” she said. “I’m going.”

Valentin didn’t reply. There was a gentle thumping from outside the pod, followed by the barely perceptible return of acceleration, unfelt for six weeks; the tug had latched on.

Nike returned to her customs video briefing.

“If we accept your application for citizenship you must accept our semiotics. If we accept your physiology you must accept our commensal bacteria. If we accept your psychodynamics you must accept our law.”

The customs official stared at her with phased-array eyes, cruciform wings of black synthetic retinae. It was a robot, and not a well-maintained robot: it recited by rote, sounding extremely bored.

“Repeat after me: Death to the imperialist zionist ronin, the lackeys of neo-humanist cladisticians, and the discorporeate running-dog zaibatsu. I swear to follow the decree of the hezbollah and the shogunate in all things, to abide by the shari’a, to follow humility and modesty as a law for the rest of my natural life, and to refrain from acts of treason against the corporation …”

Nike recited the oath expressionlessly, word-perfect from memory. The syllables were stale in her mouth; she’d memorized them during the two-day immigration check, startled at how far the original slogans had been deformed. Then she walked through the exit of the customs hall, feeling her feet ache from months of free-fall. The black cross of the robots’ retinal array tracked her as far as the path into the forest before losing interest and swiveling back to the entry gates.

Mist swirling at ankle-level obscured roots that looped to catch unwary feet, pits of rotting vegetation hollowed out by subsidence, other unseen hazards. Videomice crouched in the boles of trees, grooming their paws, faces almost obscured by the black buttons of their eyes. Nike walked without guidance into the woods that blanketed the colony interior. There had been major changes unnoted by the immigrant processing module over the past two centuries. A faint rumble drifted from the distance, menacing in the twilight as the colony headed towards nightfall.

The videomice were the eyes and ears of the shogunate, but there were too many of them to monitor simultaneously. Nike ignored them, relying on the prickling of her neck to tell her when one of them was belching a coded data packet to the castle: her close-cropped hair was wired for microwaves. She guessed that there were other watchers in the forest, other eyes, and it worried her. System traffic control had confirmed that no-one had visited the colony for a good six years now, and no-one had left it for over two decades. If anyone human was left alive, Nike would be the subject of intense scrutiny. She stumbled occasionally and paused to brush branches out of her way as she followed the trail. She was right; other eyes were watching her.

Boys drifted like ghosts, moving in silence across the open spaces. Their choreography was uncanny, plotted by computer for a ballet corps of cyborgs. The ground beneath their feet was a bare surface of white ceramic that curved away to either side until it submerged beneath a layer of earth; it was the naked hull, exposed by erosion. Every ten metres a grey pole stood, festooned with branching sensors and small pumps, a trellis left over from the soil-support system. Ecological vandalism had stripped it bare in this area, a kilometer-wide strip of sterility near the equator. Darkness had fallen across it an hour ago and the people of the night were rising.

The Hunter watched them on a screen in the safety of the castle. Reclining in a throne of skulls festooned with nutrient tubes and neural jacks, she looked superficially akin to those she observed; pale, with the fleshlessness of a rapidly-growing child and the synthetic skin of the ageless. The resemblance was due purely to design convergence. The Hunter – her title was as good as her name – was not a boy. To be a boy was to be a warrior, and the Hunter was hardly a warrior. She was a Hunter – of boys.

“What are they doing now?” The voice came from above and behind her head. She watched the screen with the intensity of a sniper.

“They appear to be constructing something …” The Hunter paused to consult her throne of brains. “A gallows.”

“Why?”

The Hunter thought for a while. “It’s an archaic device used for punitive purposes. The victim is suspended by a rope for some time – it looks uncomfortable. Possibly dangerous if no spinal bypass is installed.”

“Who is the subject of this device?” The voice sounded bored. It probably knew already and was testing her.

“That’s not clear, yet.”

“Keep me informed.” The voice vanished as rapidly as it had manifested itself, and the Hunter shuddered. She had a morbid fear of that voice, conditioned by a century of ignorance. No-one had met the Shogun face to face and told the tale within living memory. Her memory. The Shogun was an enigma. It might not even exist, and what could be more terrible than that? To serve a fiction for a century …

The twilight ritual of the boys played itself out. One of their own, out on the white plain, was stripped of his exoskeleton; they bound his hands behind his back with a cord of red silk. It was impossible to tell if he struggled – those who surrounded him were too strong for unamplified muscles to resist. Up went the rope, the prisoner on the polished teakwood scaffold, the drop … the Hunter watched, fascinated. Centripetal acceleration dragged the twitching feet out. There’s something nasty about this, she realized, as infrareds observed the body cooling. The boys left an hour before she admitted to herself that what she’d witnessed was not a punishment but an execution. The absolutism of age. They cannibalized one of their own, she wondered; why? Have the boys become so jaded that they gamble with their own lives? And, dawning slowly in her mind: I don’t understand this any more.

The house was so well camouflaged that Nike almost stumbled into it before she realized what it was. It slumbered among the trees, concealed by a dense thicket of ivy; its owner waited for her patiently outside.

“You’re the immigrant,” he said; “I’m Ben.”

“Nike.” She watched him closely, noted dark skin but no cranial hair.

“Winged victory? Or a missile?” When he spoke he held his head on one side. “Never mind. You’ll be wanting somewhere to stay while you find out what it’s like here. You’ll be wondering why I’m offering that. I’ll tell you; we don’t see many strangers.”

“How many of you are there?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe five hundred, maybe less. Nobody counts. There’s the boys, the servants of the Shogunate, a few civilians who keep quiet. And the neuroplants; about six million posthumans.” For a moment Ben looked like something else; infinitely weary, lines engraved on his face like tribal scars concealing eyeball-tracked weapons systems. It passed; Nike concentrated on the smell of his skin, the pheromones he exuded. They smelt so perfectly natural that he might have been a prehistoric subsistence farmer or a test pilot. There was a sense of archaic simplicity about him.

“Do you eat?” she asked.

The Hunter dug through her collection of spare skulls in search of an apropriate memory, in response to a desperate urge to understand. She found one, long-jawed with the baroque horns of an extinct fashion. The motions were instinctive by now; she plugged it into her throne by a fat nerve trunk and felt the alien emotions expand her perceptions into something that felt more complete. The skull had been poorly maintained, isolated in sensory deprivation for the better part of a century; it’s personality had ablated away to a core of memories and a vague, gnawing loneliness.

She remembered being a he: experienced at first hand the sea of stars beyond the window of a cramped cargo drifter between worlds, the waves of vapour churning at the edges of the red spot as mining drones scooped up megatons of methane from the Jovian atmosphere. That wasn’t right; she carried on searching. Later she remembered arriving at TransLunar Seven shortly before the revolution. Being caught up in the confusion and arrested by the hezbollah, undergoing the terror of forcible decapitation. This was too recent; she wanted somewhere in between. Tried to remember. What had it been like in Troy-Jupiter two hundred years ago?

The agonies this brain had been squeezed through made her wince. It was easy for a Hunter to fall into the fatal trap of thinking of her memories as something more than a very cunning source of information, of trying to relate to the dead minds in the boneyard. She hunted and eventually found what she was looking for, partially obscured by the pain of a bizarre and self-destructive marriage.

A memory of what it was like before the revolution, before she had become a Hunter.

The house vomited pre-digested morsels into the feeding trough. As Nike and Ben ate, she tried to assess the situation. It was worse than she’d expected; the place wasn’t far from dead. An unseen ruler who might not even exist, a dissident faction with unspeakable habits, and a dying periphery of humans.

“They shut down half the farms a century ago,” said Ben, “and most of the rest forty years later. There wasn’t enough demand on the manufacturing capacity to justify running them all. Nobody needs anything – the die-backs left a vast overcapacity. The city’s a playground for the boys so nobody lives there anymore.”

He shoveled in another handful of food without looking up. “You came at the wrong time.”

Nike watched him silently for a while, fascinated. She wondered if she’d met him before, years ago; so many of her memories from the early days had been wiped to make room for new experiences that she couldn’t be sure.

He finished eating and finally looked up. “Just what did you come here for, anway?” he asked with an elaborate shrug.

“To take over,” she said. “We need this space. What’s your interest?”

He grinned, face in a shadow cast by the sunduct in the roof. “I’m a neutral. I have no interest in conflict.”

“So?” she asked.

“The question is what you can do for us,” he added. “Who you are.”

Her eyes flashed, reflecting the night with mirrored venom. “I’m the forerunner. My people are coming and they need a vacant biosphere. Don’t stand in our way!”

“I’m not,” he remonstrated mildly; “I just want to know who you are. I’m not opposing you! But the boys probably will. And the Shogun might.”

“Yes,” she said. “But just what are these boys? And who is the Shogun?”

He raised an eyebrow. “That,” he replied, “is something I expected you to know already.”

The Hunter stared at the screen until the pain in her eyes forced her to blink furiously, tears trickling down her cheeks. It was hard to bear, this sense of her humanity being reduced to a cypher by isolation. The feeling that she’d been locked in her role for too long while the boys played their blood-games in the forest. Sometimes she sent out for a warm skull to scan for the wet sensations of dying; she couldn’t remember her name but she felt that if she concentrated on it for long enough it would return … she was close to an overload with time. It had been too many years since she had been merely human. Damn, damn, she whispered to herself in a monotonous litany; why do I keep forgetting what it was like? There was no answer; there never was.

All she knew was that she couldn’t get a grip on her emotions. There’d been a time, not so long ago in historical terms, when she had possessed a blindingly important purpose for which she had sacrificed her freedom to be anyone but herself. The purpose might have been connected with the Shogun or the boys; it had faded into the cobwebs of neurones that died and were replaced by the longevity programs. To those who knew the signs she was as old as the artificial hills. She knew that it had meant everything to her once: but now it was merely the voice from behind her throne, and the boys.

Three short grey cylinders the size of mice drifted in free fall, jostling in the thin breeze along the axis of the world. One of them was capped at each end by a blue, very human eye. Another sprouted two surreal ears, perfect fleshy miniatures that merged seamlessly with the cylinder. The third had no discernable sense organs, but from a crack in its flank grew an almost perfect stem of convolvulus. The bindweed curled and twisted, loosely holding the other two cylinders in its green coils. A wasp coasted nearby, red-banded and bearing stenciled cyrillic insignia on its wings; five kilometers below, the cotton-wool swathes of cloud veiled the floor of the world. Valentin Zero had smuggled his cortex modules into the shogunate as seeds disguised in Nike’s gut. Reaching the free-fall zone via the sewage system, the modules had matured and grown rapidly by preying on wind-born organisms; the wasp was one of many infiltrators sweeping the world for news.

As darkness fell, the twittering code-pulses from the videomice quietened down; Valentin tuned in on the steady, low-powered grumble of the neuroplants, the tok-tokking of a factory talking to its robots, the muffled crackling of poorly-shielded bionics hooked into the soil-support system. The microwave traffic was richer and more compressed than sonic communication, echoing back and forth along the eighty-kilometer cylinder. But Valentin was listening for a single delicate pulse-train; the sideband transmission from Nike’s eyeballs.

This situation interested him, inasmuch as anything could hold his attention these days; the ins and outs of betrayal, of wheels within wheels and subordinates who were superiors. Valentin Zero was an expert system wired for espionage, and his current mission was to monitor Nike. She was so old as to be almost obsolete: old enough to have been here before. His sensorium ghosted through winds of data – the life-blood of even the most seriously injured orbital republic – until he finally locked onto a signal that looked right. It was faint, but the sophisticated coding matched his key; he locked on and submerged in the transmission, saw what Nike was seeing.

The wall of the house caved in soundlessly, blood spurting from severed arteries buried in the walls, followed by a soundless spasm as the floor shuddered and died. A release of sphincters flooded the food trough. A boy stepped through a great ragged rent in front of her; his left arm was coated to the elbow with a smooth sheen of gore, the chainsaw semi-retracted and murderous. His bronze exoskeleton exposed white skin and atrophied genitals, a wildly ecstatic smile of welcome beneath a cowlick of brown hair. The running lights on his spinal carapace were blinking green and violet pips, as membranes slid down across Nike’s eyes and a targeting display flashed a red crosshair surrounded by flickering digits across his face.

“Hello,” he said, and tittered. Ben sat where he was, very still, eyes narrowed; Nike felt her perception compress into a point on the boy’s forehead, a point that could be made to explode.

“Hello,” she replied. The boy frowned, as if disappointed.

“You’re not scared,” he complained, “and you’re not dead. What are you?” He pouted with a transsexual sullenness that struck her as grotesquely old-fashioned.

“I’m a visitor,” she replied. “What are you?”

“I’m a Boy,” he said, smiling suddenly; “I’ve come – “

“He’s come to negotiate their surrender,” said Ben. The boy flared again, mercurially angry.

“You shut up, old man! That’s for me to tell. It’s not true, anyway.”

Ben shut up, his face blank. Nike felt as if solid ground was dissolving beneath her feet. She’d pegged Ben as a non-participant, but this boy seemed to know something that she didn’t.

“What have you got to tell me?” she asked, itching with unease.

“Merely to enquire after your health and your diplomatic patronage,” said the boy, sniffing disdainfully. With a distinct lack of theatrical presence he sniffed and scratched under one armpit. “But the old man of the monolith’s got to you already, I see!”

“The monolith?” she asked, tracking Ben with her peripheral vision. He sat as still as a rock.

“The castle … the claw of the Shogun. We’ve been trying to get him to shut down the Hunter for decades, haven’t we?” The boy glanced at Ben pointedly; Ben rocked slowly back and forth. The boy grimaced. “Observe the Shogun: theoretical ruler of the world, patron of the ongoing revolution, supreme systems authority of the dreamtime, etcetera. We’ve been trying to get him to do his job since he ran away fifty years ago.”

“Why?” she asked, wondering to whom she should address the question.

“Because I’m not ready to let the boys do what they were designed to do,” said Ben, not looking at her: “I’m not prepared to forcibly digitise the entire human biomass of the System to suit an ideological goal. When we designed the boys –”

“– Who were ‘we’?” she butted in, gripped by a sense of deja vu.

He stared at her and yawned. “You just want to confirm this, don’t you?” he said. “We were the Posthuman Front, the society for synthetic intelligence. The Islamic Corporate Shogunate was an experimental deployment for the revolution; fanatical cyborgs. Some of them were the wild boys and some of them were less obvious, like the hunters. They knew that when they died they’d be preserved in the dreamtime; their job was to forcibly integrate all reactionary elements. Very successful, I might add: most of the neuroplants in this world are part of the mind-support system. But it didn’t work out too well.” Ben paused, head bowed; the boy looked at him accusingly.

“The ecosystem was damaged during the revolution; it began to shut down,” said the boy. “We stayed on in hope of finding transport to another world where we could integrate, but evidently there was a quarantine pact; all the exfiltrators lost contact. And then Ben reprogrammed that blasted Hunter – the only surviving one, we exported all the other clones – on our collective ass to keep us from getting enough slack …” He shook his alloy-framed head. “Unless those early cadres succeeded, the revolution was an abortion. Any idea how many humans want what’s on offer?” He snorted, disgustedly.

Nike looked at him enigmatically. “Yes,” she said; “I have. I’ve seen it at first hand.”

“Why are you here?” asked the boy. Nike shrugged.

“My people aren’t very popular out there,” she said. “We need some where to go; the Deconstructivists are pushing in everywhere, and we’ve lost ground so heavily that unless we find a closed habitat we’ll be forced to condense in order to prevent mass defections.”

“Deconstructivists?” said Ben. “What are they?”

“Human revenants. You honestly don’t want to know,” she said. It was so tiring, being on edge like this: even the wild boys didn’t seem threatening enough to justify keeping her defenses on edge. “We just can’t compete.” A soft rain was falling outside, pattering through the hole in the wall.

“And who are you?” probed the boy, looking for completeness.

“Can’t you guess?” she complained. “You’ve had it easy with your smug mind-games and your revolution in one habitat! Don’t you see?” The wind ghosted through the house like the soul of history, ruffling her hair. “We tried to carry the revolution through outside the closed habitat, we fought for a century …” She stared into reflective distances, eyes like dark mirrors, resembling her mind.

“ … but we lost.”

The Hunter was wandering, adrift in an ocean of despair, when she came across Valentin Zero. Her video surfaces were locked into the sonic images of a fruit bat in free fall; when she saw something unusual she tensed instinctively. Could it be a boyish thing, here in the axial zone? A surge of conditioned reflexes drowned her nervous system in adrenalin and hatred; but as the bat approached the object it resolved into three components, all too small. Her skulls couldn’t find a meaning for it. Drifting into a close approach, she noted three cylinders and a bushy twirl of vegetation. Modified axons in the bat’s ears recognized vague high-frequency emissions, the fingerprint of molecular-scale processors; it had to be intelligent.

“Hello unidentified structure,” she squeaked through the ultrasonic larynx of the bat. “Talk to me.”

The structure began to rotate, sluggishly; the bat picked up another object, the vibrating flight surfaces of an insect. An eye swam into view, shielded by a triangular leaf. The bat screamed; something was scanning down its nervous system, trying to locate the hunter’s interface.

“Who are you?” said the cluster of grey cylinders, words burning silent tracks of silvery pain through the mind of the bat. “Visualize yourself.” The Hunter framed an image and transmitted it, waited as the intruder scanned it.

“Nike,” broadcast Valentin; “What are you doing here?”

Then there was silence, as high above the castle the Hunter remembered who she had been.

First published: Interzone 21, 1987

Copyright (C) Charles Stross, 1987, 1994, All Rights Reserved

Version History

If you modify this text, please retain this version history.

Ver 1.5—30/7/2003—Anarchy Publications, HaVoK—This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.

Analyst

Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.

He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

The file he is reading frightens him.

Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly coloured streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid terror that echoed the siren wail of the air raid warnings. He’d sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.

He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.

There’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ‘61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

Project Koschei.

Red Square Redux

Warning

The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.

You have sixty seconds to comply.

Video clip

Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and blue; there’s a little wispy cirrus at high altitude. It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of five four-engined bombers that thunder across the horizon and drop behind the Kremlin’s high walls.

Voice-over

Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM. Here they are:

Video clip

Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream of armour and soldiers marches across the square, turning the air grey with diesel fumes. The trucks roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers sitting erect in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-56’s, their commanders standing at attention in their cupolas, saluting the stand. Jets race low and loud overhead, formations of MiG-17 fighters.

Behind the tanks sprawl a formation of four low-loaders: huge tractors towing low-sling trailers, their load beds strapped down under olive-drab tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a bit like a loaf of bread the size of a small house. The trucks have an escort of jeep-like vehicles on each side, armed soldiers sitting at attention in their backs.

There are big five-pointed stars painted in silver on each tarpaulin, like outlines of stars. Each star is surrounded by a stylized silver circle; a unit insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format for Red Army units. There’s lettering around the circles, in a strangely stylised script.

Voice-over

These are live servitors under transient control. The vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the second Guards Engineering Brigade, a penal construction unit based in Bokhara and used for structural engineering assignments relating to nuclear installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan. This is the first time that any Dresden Agreement party openly demonstrated ownership of this technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are intended to draw is that the sixty-seventh Guard Engineering Brigade operates four units. Given existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT we can then extrapolate a total task strength of two hundred and eighty eight servitors, if this unit is unexceptional.

Video clip

Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the Moscow skies.

Voice-over

This conclusion is questionable. For example, in 1964 a total of two hundred and forty Bear bomber passes were made over the reviewing stand in front of the Lenin mausoleum. However, at that time technical reconnaissance assets verified that the Soviet air force has hard stand parking for only one hundred and sixty of these aircraft, and estimates of airframe production based on photographs of the extent of the Tupolev bureau’s works indicate that total production to that date was between sixty and one hundred and eighty bombers.

Further analysis of photographic evidence from the 1964 parade suggests that a single group of twenty aircraft in four formations of five made repeated passes through the same airspace, the main arc of their circuit lying outside visual observation range of Moscow. This gave rise to the erroneous capacity report of 1964 in which the first strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was over-estimated by as much as three hundred percent.

We must therefore take anything that they show us in Red Square with a pinch of salt when preparing force estimates. Quite possibly these four servitors are all they’ve got. Then again, the actual battalion strength may be considerably higher.

Still photographic sequence

From very high altitude—possibly in orbit—an eagle’s eye view of a remote village in mountainous country. Small huts huddle together beneath a craggy outcrop; goats graze nearby.

In the second photograph, something has rolled through the village leaving a trail of devastation. The path is quite unlike the trail of damage left by an artillery bombardment: something roughly four metres wide has shaved the rocky plateau smooth, wearing it down as if with a terrible heat. A corner of a shack leans drunkenly, the other half sliced away cleanly. White bones gleam faintly in the track; no vultures descend to stab at the remains.

Voice-over

These images were taken very recently, on successive orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They were timed precisely eighty-nine minutes apart. This village was the home of a noted Mujahedin leader. Note the similar footprint to the payloads on the load beds of the trucks seen at the 1962 parade.

These indicators were present, denoting the presence of servitor units in use by Soviet forces in Afghanistan: the four metre wide gauge of the assimilation track. The total molecular breakdown of organic matter in the track. The speed of destruction—the event took less than five thousand seconds to completion, no survivors were visible, and the causative agent had already been uplifted by the time of the second orbital pass. This, despite the residents of the community being armed with DShK heavy machine guns, rocket propelled grenade launchers, and AK-47’s. Lastly: there is no sign of the causative agent even deviating from its course, but the entire area is depopulated. Except for excarnated residue there is no sign of human habitation.

In the presence of such unique indicators, we have no alternative but to conclude that the Soviet Union has violated the Dresden Agreement by deploying GOLD JULY BOOJUM in a combat mode in the Khyber pass. There are no grounds to believe that a NATO armoured division would have fared any better than these mujahedin without nuclear support …

Puzzle Palace

Roger isn’t a soldier. He’s not much of a patriot, either: he signed up with the CIA after college, in the aftermath of the Church Commission hearings in the early seventies. The Company was out of the assassination business, just a bureaucratic engine rolling out National Security assessments: that’s fine by Roger. Only now, five years later, he’s no longer able to roll along, casually disengaged, like a car in neutral bowling down a shallow incline towards his retirement, pension and a gold watch. He puts the file down on his desk and, with a shaking hand, pulls an illicit cigarette from the pack he keeps in his drawer. He lights it and leans back for a moment to draw breath, force relaxation, staring at smoke rolling in the air beneath the merciless light until his hand stops shaking.

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night. It’s one of a series of highly classified pieces of paper that he is summarizing for the eyes of the National Security Council and the President Elect—if his head of department and the DDCIA approve it—and here he is, having to calm his nerves with a cigarette before he turns the next page.

After a few minutes, Roger’s hand is still. He leaves his cigarette in the eagle-headed ash tray and picks up the intelligence report again. It’s a summary, itself the distillation of thousands of pages and hundreds of photographs. It’s barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its date of preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei. Just the bare skeleton, and rumours from a highly-placed spy. And their own equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that particular field, the USAF fielded the silverplated white elephants of the NB-39 project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with XK-PLUTO, ready to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show signs of unsealing the bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs pointed at a single target, and nobody was certain it would be enough to do the job.

And then there was the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on face: a subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If nothing else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second term. The test program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than confessing what had really happened to the 501st Airborne Division on the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the public didn’t know about, that didn’t show up on the maps issued by the geological survey departments of those governments party to the Dresden Agreement of 1931—an arrangement that even Hitler had stuck to. The plateau that had swallowed more U-2 spy planes than the Soviet Union, more surface expeditions than darkest Africa.

Shit. How the hell am I going to put this together for him?

Roger’s spent the past five hours staring at this twenty page report, trying to think of a way of summarizing their drily quantifiable terror in words that will give the reader power over them, the power to think the unthinkable: but it’s proving difficult. The new man in the White House is straight-talking, demands straight answers. He’s pious enough not to believe in the supernatural, confident enough that just listening to one of his speeches is an uplifting experience if you can close your eyes and believe in morning in America. There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system—which they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil …

He hopes that if the balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he and Andrea and Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It’ll be a merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made Nixon cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing joke of a white-elephant shuttle, when he realised just how hideously dangerous the space race might become. The darkness that broke Jimmy Carter’s faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an alcoholic.

He stands up, nervously shifts from one foot to the other. Looks round at the walls of his cubicle. For a moment the cigarette smouldering on the edge of his ash tray catches his attention: wisps of blue-grey smoke coil like lazy dragons in the air above it, writhing in a strange cuneiform text. He blinks and they’re gone, and the skin in the small of his back prickles as if someone had pissed on his grave.

“Shit.’’ Finally, a spoken word in the silence. His hand is shaking as he stubs the cigarette out. Mustn’t let this get to me. He glances at the wall. It’s nineteen hundred hours; too late, too late. He should go home, Andy will be worrying herself sick.

In the end it’s all too much. He slides the thin folder into the safe behind his chair, turns the locking handle and spins the dial, then signs himself out of the reading room and goes through the usual exit search.

During the thirty mile drive home, he spits out of the window, trying to rid his mouth of the taste of Auschwitz ashes.

Late Night in the White House

The colonel is febrile, jittering about the room with gung-ho enthusiasm. “That was a mighty fine report you pulled together, Jourgensen!’’ He paces over to the niche between the office filing cabinet and the wall, turns on the spot, paces back to the far side of his desk. “You understand the fundamentals. I like that. A few more guys like you running the company and we wouldn’t have this fuckup in Tehran.’’ He grins, contagiously. The colonel is a firestorm of enthusiasm, burning out of control like a forties comic-book hero. He has Roger on the edge of his chair, almost sitting at attention. Roger has to bite his tongue to remind himself not to call the colonel ‘sir’—he’s a civilian, not in the chain of command. “That’s why I’ve asked Deputy Director McMurdo to reassign you to this office, to work on my team as company liaison. And I’m pleased to say that he’s agreed.’’

Roger can’t stop himself: “To work here, sir?’’ Here is in the basement of the Executive Office Building, an extension hanging off the White House. Whoever the colonel is he’s got pull, in positively magical quantities. “What will I be doing, sir? You said, your team—’’

“Relax a bit. Drink your coffee.’’ The colonel paces back behind his desk, sits down. Roger sips cautiously at the brown sludge in the mug with the Marine Corps crest. “The president told me to organize a team,’’ says the colonel, so casually that Roger nearly chokes on his coffee, “to handle contingencies. October surprises. Those asshole commies down in Nicaragua. ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball with an Evil Empire, Ozzie, and we can’t afford to blink’—those were his exact words. The Evil Empire uses dirty tricks. But nowadays we’re better than they are: buncha hicks, like some third-world dictatorship—Upper Volta with shoggoths. My job is to pin them down and cut them up. Don’t give them a chance to whack the shoe on the UN table, demand concessions. If they want to bluff I’ll call ’em on it. If they want to go toe-to-toe I’ll dance with ’em.’’ He’s up and pacing again. “The company used to do that, and do it okay, back in the fifties and sixties. But too many bleeding hearts—it makes me sick. If you guys went back to wet ops today you’d have journalists following you every time you went to the john in case it was newsworthy.

“Well, we aren’t going to do it that way this time. It’s a small team and the buck stops here.’’ The colonel pauses, then glances at the ceiling. “Well, maybe up there. But you get the picture. I need someone who knows the company, an insider who has clearance up the wazoo who can go in and get the dope before it goes through a fucking committee of ass-watching bureaucrats. I’m also getting someone from the Puzzle Palace, and some words to give me pull with Big Black.’’ He glances at Roger sharply, and Roger nods: he’s cleared for National Security Agency—Puzzle Palace—intelligence, and knows about Big Black, the National Reconnaissance Office, which is so secret that even its existence is still classified.

Roger is impressed by this colonel, despite his better judgement. Within the byzantine world of the US intelligence services, he is talking about building his very own pocket battleship and sailing it under the jolly roger with letters of marque and reprise signed by the president. But Roger still has some questions to ask, to scope out the limits of what Colonel North is capable of. “What about FEVER DREAM, sir?’’

The colonel puts his coffee-cup down. “I own it,’’ he says, bluntly. “And NIGHTMARE. And PLUTO. Any means necessary he said, and I have an executive order with the ink still damp to prove it. Those projects aren’t part of the national command structure any more. Officially they’ve been stood down from active status and are being considered for inclusion in the next round of arms reduction talks. They’re not part of the deterrent ORBAT any more; we’re standardizing on just nuclear weapons. Unofficially, they’re part of my group, and I will use them as necessary to contain and reduce the Evil Empire’s warmaking abilities.’’

Roger’s skin crawls with an echo of that childhood terror. “And the Dresden Agreement …?’’

“Don’t worry. Nothing short of them breaking it would lead me to do so.’’ The colonel grins, toothily. “Which is where you come in …’’

The moonlit shores of Lake Vostok

The metal pier is dry and cold, the temperature hovering close to zero degrees Fahrenheit. It’s oppressively dark in the cavern under the ice, and Roger shivers inside his multiple layers of insulation, shifts from foot to foot to keep warm. He has to swallow to keep his ears clear and he feels slightly dizzy from the pressure in the artificial bubble of air, pumped under the icy ceiling to allow humans to exist here, under the Ross Ice Shelf; they’ll all spend more than a day sitting in depressurization chambers on the way back up to the surface.

There is no sound from the waters lapping just below the edge of the pier. The floodlights vanish into the surface and keep going—the water in the sub-surface Antarctic lake is incredibly clear—but are swallowed up rapidly, giving an impression of infinite, inky depths.

Roger is here as the colonel’s representative, to observe the arrival of the probe, receive the consignment they’re carrying, and report back that everything is running smoothly. The others try to ignore him, jittery at the presence of the man from DC. There’re a gaggle of engineers and artificers, flown out via McMurdo base to handle the midget sub’s operations. A nervous lieutenant supervises a squad of marines with complicated-looking weapons, half gun and half video camera, stationed at the corners of the raft. And there’s the usual platform crew, deep-sea rig maintenance types—but subdued and nervous looking. They’re afloat in a bubble of pressurized air wedged against the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet: below them stretch the still, supercooled waters of Lake Vostok.

They’re waiting for a rendezvous.

“Five hundred yards,’’ reports one of the techs. “Rising on ten.’’ His companion nods. They’re waiting for the men in the midget sub drilling quietly through three miles of frigid water, intruders in a long-drowned tomb. “Have ’em back on board in no time.’’ The sub has been away for nearly a day; it set out with enough battery juice for the journey, and enough air to keep the crew breathing for a long time if there’s a system failure, but they’ve learned the hard way that fail-safe systems aren’t. Not out here, at the edge of the human world.

Roger shuffles some more. “I was afraid the battery load on that cell you replaced would trip an undervoltage isolator and we’d be here ’til Hell freezes over,’’ the sub driver jokes to his neighbour.

Looking round, Roger sees one of the marines cross himself. “Have you heard anything from Gorman or Suslowicz?’’ he asks quietly.

The lieutenant checks his clipboard. “Not since departure, sir,’’ he says. “We don’t have comms with the sub while it’s submerged: too small for ELF, and we don’t want to alert anybody who might be, uh, listening.’’

“Indeed.’’ The yellow hunchback shape of the midget submarine appears at the edge of the radiance shed by the floodlights. Surface waters undulate, oily, as the sub rises.

“Crew transfer vehicle sighted,’’ the driver mutters into his mike. He’s suddenly very busy adjusting trim settings, blowing bottled air into ballast tanks, discussing ullage levels and blade count with his number two. The crane crew are busy too, running their long boom out over the lake.

The sub’s hatch is visible now, bobbing along the top of the water: the lieutenant is suddenly active. “Jones! Civatti! Stake it out, left and centre!’’ The crane is already swinging the huge lifting hook over the sub, waiting to bring it aboard. “I want eyeballs on the portholes before you crack this thing!’’ It’s the tenth run—seventh manned—through the eye of the needle on the lake bed, the drowned structure so like an ancient temple, and Roger has a bad feeling about it. We can’t get away with this forever, he reasons. Sooner or later …

The sub comes out of the water like a gigantic yellow bath toy, a cyborg whale designed by a god with a sense of humour. It takes tense minutes to winch it in and manoeuvre it safely onto the platform. Marines take up position, shining torches in through two of the portholes that bulge myopically from the smooth curve of the sub’s nose. Up on top someone is talking into a handset plugged into the stubby conning tower; the hatch locking wheel begins to turn.

“Gorman, sir,’’ It’s the lieutenant. In the light of the sodium floods everything looks sallow and washed-out; the soldier’s face is the colour of damp cardboard, slack with relief.

Roger waits while the submariner—Gorman—clambers unsteadily down from the top deck. He’s a tall, emaciated-looking man, wearing a red thermal suit three sizes too big for him: salt-and-pepper stubble textures his jaw with sandpaper. Right now, he looks like a cholera victim; sallow skin, smell of acrid ketones as his body eats its own protein reserves, a more revolting miasma hovering over him. There’s a slim aluminium briefcase chained to his left wrist, a bracelet of bruises darkening the skin above it. Roger steps forward.

“Sir?’’ Gorman straightens up for a moment: almost a shadow of military attention. He’s unable to sustain it. “We made the pickup. Here’s the QA sample; the rest is down below. You have the unlocking code?’’ he asks wearily.

Jourgensen nods. “One. Five. Eight. One. Two. Two. Nine.’’

Gorman slowly dials it into a combination lock on the briefcase, lets it fall open and unthreads the chain from his wrist. Floodlights glisten on polythene bags stuffed with white powder, five kilos of high-grade heroin from the hills of Afghanistan; there’s another quarter of a ton packed in boxes in the crew compartment. The lieutenant inspects it, closes the case and passes it to Jourgensen. “Delivery successful, sir.’’ From the ruins on the high plateau of the Taklamakan desert to American territory in Antarctica, by way of a detour through gates linking alien worlds: gates that nobody knows how to create or destroy except the Predecessors—and they aren’t talking.

“What’s it like through there?’’ Roger demands, shoulders tense. “What did you see?’’

Up on top, Suslowicz is sitting in the sub’s hatch, half slumping against the crane’s attachment post. There’s obviously something very wrong with him. Gorman shakes his head and looks away: the wan light makes the razor-sharp creases on his face stand out, like the crackled and shattered surface of a Jovian moon. Crow’s feet. Wrinkles. Signs of age. Hair the colour of moonlight. “It took so long,’’ he says, almost complaining. Sinks to his knees. “All that time we’ve been gone …’’ He leans against the side of the sub, a pale shadow, aged beyond his years. “The sun was so bright. And our radiation detectors. Must have been a solar flare or something.’’ He doubles over and retches at the edge of the platform.

Roger looks at him for a long, thoughtful minute: Gorman is twenty-five and a fixer for Big Black, early history in the Green Berets. He was in rude good health two days ago, when he set off through the gate to make the pick-up. Roger glances at the lieutenant. “I’d better go and tell the colonel,’’ he says. A pause. “Get these two back to Recovery and see they’re looked after. I don’t expect we’ll be sending any more crews through Victor-Tango for a while.’’

He turns and walks towards the lift shaft, hands clasped behind his back to keep them from shaking. Behind him, alien moonlight glimmers across the floor of Lake Vostok, three miles and untold light years from home.

General LeMay would be Proud

Warning

The following briefing film is classified SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE. If you do not have SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.

You have sixty seconds to comply.

Video clip

Shot of huge bomber, rounded gun turrets sprouting like mushrooms from the decaying log of its fuselage, weirdly bulbous engine pods slung too far out towards each wingtip, four turbine tubes clumped around each atomic kernel.

Voice-over

“The Convair B-39 Peacemaker is the most formidable weapon in our Strategic Air Command’s arsenal for peace. Powered by eight nuclear-heated Pratt and Whitney NP-4051 turbojets, it circles endlessly above the Arctic ice cap, waiting for the call. This is Item One, the flight training and test bird: twelve other birds await criticality on the ground, for once launched a B-39 can only be landed at two airfields in Alaska that are equipped to handle them. This one’s been airborne for nine months so far, and shows no signs of age.’’

Cut to:

A shark the size of a Boeing 727 falls away from the open bomb bay of the monster. Stubby delta wings slice through the air, propelled by a rocket-bright glare.

Voice-over

“A modified Navajo missile—test article for an XK-PLUTO payload—dives away from a carrier plane. Unlike the real thing, this one carries no hydrogen bombs, no direct-cycle fission ramjet to bring retaliatory destruction to the enemy. Travelling at Mach 3 the XK-PLUTO will overfly enemy territory, dropping megaton-range bombs until, its payload exhausted, it seeks out and circles a final enemy. Once over the target it will eject its reactor core and rain molten plutonium on the heads of the enemy. XK-PLUTO is a total weapon: every aspect of its design, from the shockwave it creates as it hurtles along at treetop height to the structure of its atomic reactor, is designed to inflict damage.’’

Cut to:

Belsen postcards, Auschwitz movies: a holiday in hell.

Voice-over

“This is why we need such a weapon. This is what it deters. The abominations first raised by the Third Reich’s Organisation Todt, now removed to the Ukraine and deployed in the service of New Soviet Man as our enemy calls himself.’’

Cut to:

A sinister grey concrete slab, the upper surface of a Mayan step pyramid built with East German cement. Barbed wire, guns. A drained canal slashes north from the base of the pyramid towards the Baltic coastline, relic of the installation process: this is where it came from. The slave barracks squat beside the pyramid like a horrible memorial to its black-uniformed builders.

Cut to:

The new resting place: a big concrete monolith surrounded by three concrete lined lakes and a canal. It sits in the midst of a Ukraine landscape, flat as a pancake, stretching out forever in all directions.

Voice-over

“This is Project Koschei. The Kremlin’s key to the gates of hell …’’

Technology taster

“We know they first came here during the Precambrian age.’’

Professor Gould is busy with his viewgraphs, eyes down, trying not to pay too much attention to his audience. “We have samples of macrofauna, discovered by palaeontologist Charles D. Walcott on his pioneering expeditions into the Canadian Rockies, near the eastern border of British Columbia—’’ a hand-drawing of something indescribably weird fetches up on the screen “—like this opabina, which died there six hundred and forty million years ago. Fossils of soft-bodied animals that old are rare; the Burgess shale deposits are the best record of the Precambrian fauna anyone has found to date.’’

A skinny woman with big hair and bigger shoulder-pads sniffs loudly; she has no truck with these antediluvian dates. Roger winces sympathy for the academic. He’d rather she wasn’t here, but somehow she got wind of the famous palaeontologist’s visit—and she’s the colonel’s administrative assistant. Telling her to leave would be a career-limiting move.

“The important item to note—’’ photograph of a mangled piece of rock, visual echoes of the opabina—“is the tooth marks. We find them also—their exact cognates—on the ring segments of the Z-series specimens returned by the Pabodie Antarctic expedition of 1926. The world of the Precambrian was laid out differently from our own; most of the land masses that today are separate continents were joined into one huge structure. Indeed, these samples were originally separated by only two thousand miles or thereabouts. Suggesting that they brought their own parasites with them.’’

“What do tooth-marks tell us about them, that we need to know?’’ asks the colonel.

The doctor looks up. His eyes gleam: “That something liked to eat them when they were fresh.’’ There’s a brief rattle of laughter. “Something with jaws that open and close like the iris in your camera. Something we thought was extinct.’’

Another viewgraph, this time with a blurry underwater photograph on it. The thing looks a bit like a weird fish—a turbocharged, armoured hagfish with side-skirts and spoilers, or maybe a squid with not enough tentacles. The upper head is a flattened disk, fronted by two bizarre fern-like tentacles drooping over the weird sucker-mouth on its underside. “This snapshot was taken in Lake Vostok last year. It should be dead: there’s nothing there for it to eat. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Anomalocaris, our toothy chewer.’’ He pauses for a moment. “I’m very grateful to you for showing it to me,’’ he adds, “even though it’s going to make a lot of my colleagues very angry.’’

Is that a shy grin? The professor moves on rapidly, not giving Roger a chance to fathom his real reaction. “Now this is interesting in the extreme,’’ Gould comments. Whatever it is, it looks like a cauliflower head, or maybe a brain: fractally branching stalks continuously diminishing in length and diameter, until they turn into an iridescent fuzzy manifold wrapped around a central stem. The base of the stem is rooted to a barrel-shaped structure that stands on four stubby tentacles.

“We had somehow managed to cram Anomalocaris into our taxonomy, but this is something that has no precedent. It bears a striking resemblance to an enlarged body segment of Hallucigena—’’ here he shows another viewgraph, something like a stiletto-heeled centipede wearing a war-bonnet of tentacles—“but a year ago we worked out that we had poor hallucigena upside down and it was actually just a spiny worm. And the high levels of iridium and diamond in the head here … this isn’t a living creature, at least not within the animal kingdom I’ve been studying for the past thirty years. There’s no cellular structure at all. I asked one of my colleagues for help and they were completely unable to isolate any DNA or RNA from it at all. It’s more like a machine that displays biological levels of complexity.’’

“Can you put a date to it?’’ asks the colonel.

“Yup.’’ The professor grins. “It predates the wave of atmospheric atomic testing that began in 1945; that’s about all. We think it’s from some time in the first half of this century, last half of last century. It’s been dead for years, but there are older people still walking this earth. In contrast—’’ he flips to the picture of Anomalocaris “—this specimen we found in rocks that are roughly six hundred and ten million years old.’’ He whips up another shot: similar structure, much clearer. “Note how similar it is to the dead but not decomposed one. They’re obviously still alive somewhere.’’

He looks at the colonel, suddenly bashful and tongue-tied: “Can I talk about the, uh, thing we were, like, earlier …?’’

“Sure. Go ahead. Everyone here is cleared for it.’’ The colonel’s casual wave takes in the big-haired secretary, and Roger, and the two guys from Big Black who are taking notes, and the very serious woman from the Secret Service, and even the balding, worried-looking Admiral with the double chin and coke-bottle glasses.

“Oh. Alright.’’ Bashfulness falls away. “Well, we’ve done some preliminary dissections on the Anomalocaris tissues you supplied us with. And we’ve sent some samples for laboratory analysis—nothing anyone could deduce much from,’’ he adds hastily. He straightens up. “What we discovered is quite simple: these samples didn’t originate in Earth’s ecosystem. Cladistic analysis of their intracellular characteristics and what we’ve been able to work out of their biochemistry indicates, not a point of divergence from our own ancestry, but the absence of common ancestry. A cabbage is more human, has more in common with us, than that creature. You can’t tell by looking at the fossils, six hundred million years after it died, but live tissue samples are something else.

“Item: it’s a multicellular organism, but each cell appears to have multiple structures like nuclei—a thing called a syncitium. No DNA, it uses RNA with a couple of base pairs that aren’t used by terrestrial biology. We haven’t been able to figure out what most of its organelles do, what their terrestrial cognates would be, and it builds proteins using a couple of amino acids that we don’t. That nothing does. Either it’s descended from an ancestry that diverged from ours before the archaeobacteria, or—more probably—it is no relative at all.’’ He isn’t smiling any more. “The gateways, colonel?’’

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. The critter you’ve got there was retrieved by one of our, uh, missions. On the other side of a gate.’’

Gould nods. “I don’t suppose you could get me some more?’’ he asks hopefully.

“All missions are suspended pending an investigation into an accident we had earlier this year,’’ the colonel says, with a significant glance at Roger. Suslowicz died two weeks ago; Gorman is still disastrously sick, connective tissue rotting in his body, massive radiation exposure the probable cause. Normal service will not be resumed; the pipeline will remain empty until someone can figure out a way to make the deliveries without losing the crew. Roger inclines his head minutely.

“Oh well.’’ The professor shrugs. “Let me know if you do. By the way, do you have anything approximating a fix on the other end of the gate?’’

“No,’’ says the colonel, and this time Roger knows he’s lying. Mission four, before the colonel diverted their payload capacity to another purpose, planted a compact radio telescope in an empty courtyard in the city on the far side of the gate. XK-Masada, where the air’s too thin to breathe without oxygen; where the sky is indigo, and the buildings cast razor-sharp shadows across a rocky plain baked to the consistency of pottery under a blood-red sun. Subsequent analysis of pulsar signals recorded by the station confirmed that it was nearly six hundred light years closer to the galactic core, inward along the same spiral arm. There are glyphs on the alien buildings that resemble symbols seen in grainy black-and-white Minox photos of the doors of the bunker in the Ukraine. Symbols behind which the subject of Project Koschei lies undead and sleeping: something evil, scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor. “Why do you want to know where they came from?’’

“Well. We know so little about the context in which life evolves.’’ For a moment the professor looks wistful. “We have—had—only one datum point: Earth, this world. Now we have a second, a fragment of a second. If we get a third, we can begin to ask deep questions like, not, ’is there life out there?’—because we know the answer to that one, now—but questions like ‘what sort of life is out there?’ and ’is there a place for us?’’’

Roger shudders: idiot, he thinks. If only you knew you wouldn’t be so happy—He restrains the urge to speak up. Doing so would be another career-limiting move. More to the point, it might be a life-expectancy-limiting move for the professor, who certainly didn’t deserve any such drastic punishment for his cooperation. Besides, Harvard professors visiting the Executive Office Building in DC are harder to disappear than comm-symp teachers in some fly-blown jungle village in Nicaragua. Somebody might notice. The colonel would be annoyed.

Roger realises that Professor Gould is staring at him. “Do you have a question for me?’’ asks the distinguished palaeontologist.

“Uh—in a moment.’’ Roger shakes himself. Remembering time-survivor curves, the captured Nazi medical atrocity records mapping the ability of a human brain to survive in close proximity to the Baltic Singularity. Mengele’s insanity. The SS’s final attempt to liquidate the survivors, the witnesses. Koschei, primed and pointed at the American heartland like a darkly evil gun. The “world-eating mind’’ adrift in brilliant dreams of madness, estivating in the absence of its prey: dreaming of the minds of sapient beings, be they barrel-bodied wing-flying tentacular things, or their human inheritors. “Do you think they could have been intelligent, professor? Conscious, like us?’’

“I’d say so.’’ Gould’s eyes glitter. “This one—’’ he points to a viewgraph—“isn’t alive as we know it. And this one—’’ he’s found a Predecessor, god help him, barrel-bodied and batwinged—“had what looks like a lot of very complex ganglia, not a brain as we know it, but at least as massive as our own. And some specialised grasping adaptations that might be interpreted as facilitating tool use. Put the two together and you have a high level technological civilization. Gateways between planets orbiting different stars. Alien flora, fauna, or whatever. I’d say an interstellar civilization isn’t out of the picture. One that has been extinct for deep geological time—ten times as long as the dinosaurs—but that has left relics that work.’’ His voice is trembling with emotion. “We humans, we’ve barely scratched the surface! The longest lasting of our relics? All our buildings will be dust in twenty thousand years, even the pyramids. Neil Armstrong’s footprints in the Sea of Tranquillity will crumble under micrometeoroid bombardment in a mere half million years or so. The emptied oil fields will refill over ten million years, methane percolating up through the mantle: continental drift will erase everything. But these people …! They built to last. There’s so much to learn from them. I wonder if we’re worthy pretenders to their technological crown?’’

“I’m sure we are, professor,’’ the colonel’s secretary says brassily. “Isn’t that right, Ollie?’’

The colonel nods, grinning. “You betcha, Fawn. You betcha!’’

The Great Satan

Roger sits in the bar in the King David hotel, drinking from a tall glass of second-rate lemonade and sweating in spite of the air conditioning. He’s dizzy and disoriented from jet-lag, the gut-cramps have only let him come down from his room in the past hour, and he has another two hours to go before he can try to place a call to Andrea. They had another blazing row before he flew out here; she doesn’t understand why he keeps having to visit odd corners of the globe. She only knows that his son is growing up thinking a father is a voice that phones at odd times of day.

Roger is mildly depressed, despite the buzz of doing business at this level. He spends a lot of time worrying about what will happen if they’re found out—what Andrea will do, or Jason for that matter, Jason whose father is a phone call away all the time—if Roger is led away in handcuffs beneath the glare of flash bulbs. If the colonel sings, if the shy bald admiral is browbeaten into spilling the beans to Congress, who will look after them then?

Roger has no illusions about what kills black operations: there are too many people in the loop, too many elaborate front corporations and numbered bank accounts and shady Middle Eastern arms dealers. Sooner or later someone will find a reason to talk, and Roger is in too deep. He isn’t just the company liaison officer any more: he’s become the colonel’s bag-man, his shadow, the guy with the diplomatic passport and the bulging briefcase full of heroin and end-user certificates.

At least the ship will sink from the top down, he thinks. There are people very high up who want the colonel to succeed. When the shit hits the fan and is sprayed across the front page of the Washington Post, it will likely take down cabinet members and secretaries of state: the President himself will have to take the witness stand and deny everything. The republic will question itself.

A hand descends on his shoulder, sharply cutting off his reverie. “Howdy, Roger! Whatcha worrying about now?’’

Jourgensen looks up wearily. “Stuff,’’ he says gloomily. “Have a seat.’’ The redneck from the embassy—Mike Hamilton, some kind of junior attache for embassy protocol by cover—pulls out a chair and crashes down on it like a friendly car wreck. He’s not really a redneck, Roger knows—rednecks don’t come with doctorates in foreign relations from Yale—but he likes people to think he’s a bumpkin when he wants to get something from them.

“He’s early,’’ says Hamilton, looking past Roger’s ear, voice suddenly all business. “Play the agenda, I’m your dim but friendly good cop. Got the background? Deniables ready?’’

Roger nods, then glances round and sees Mehmet (family name unknown) approaching from the other side of the room. Mehmet is impeccably manicured and tailored, wearing a suit from Jermyn Street that costs more than Roger earns in a month. He has a neatly trimmed beard and moustache and talks with a pronounced English accent. Mehmet is a Turkish name, not a Persian one: pseudonym, of course. To look at him you would think he was a westernized Turkish businessman—certainly not an Iranian revolutionary with heavy links to Hezbollah and (whisper this), Old Man Ruholla himself, the hermit of Qom. Never, ever, in a thousand years, the unofficial Iranian ambassador to the Little Satan in Tel Aviv.

Mehmet strides over. A brief exchange of pleasantries masks the essential formality of their meeting: he’s early, a deliberate move to put them off-balance. He’s outnumbered, too, and that’s also a move to put them on the defensive, because the first rule of diplomacy is never to put yourself in a negotiating situation where the other side can assert any kind of moral authority, and sheer weight of numbers is a powerful psychological tool.

“Roger, my dear fellow.’’ He smiles at Jourgensen. “And the charming doctor Hamilton, I see.’’ The smile broadens. “I take it the good colonel is desirous of news of his friends?’’

Jourgensen nods. “That is indeed the case.’’

Mehmet stops smiling. For a moment he looks ten years older. “I visited them,’’ he says shortly. “No, I was taken to see them. It is indeed grave, my friends. They are in the hands of very dangerous men, men who have nothing to lose and are filled with hatred.’’

Roger speaks: “There is a debt between us—’’

Mehmet holds up a hand. “Peace, my friend. We will come to that. These are men of violence, men who have seen their homes destroyed and families subjected to indignities, and their hearts are full of anger. It will take a large display of repentance, a high blood-price, to buy their acquiescence. That is part of our law, you understand? The family of the bereaved may demand blood-price of the transgressor, and how else might the world be? They see it in these terms: that you must repent of your evils and assist them in waging holy war against those who would defile the will of Allah.’’

Roger sighs. “We do what we can,’’ he says. “We’re shipping them arms. We’re fighting the Soviets every way we can without provoking the big one. What more do they want? The hostages—that’s not playing well in DC. There’s got to be some give and take. If Hezbollah don’t release them soon they’ll just convince everyone what they’re not serious about negotiating. And that’ll be an end to it. The colonel wants to help you, but he’s got to have something to show the man at the top, right?’’

Mehmet nods. “You and I are men of the world and understand that this keeping of hostages is not rational, but they look to you for defence against the great Satan that assails them, and their blood burns with anger that your nation, for all its fine words, takes no action. The great Satan rampages in Afghanistan, taking whole villages by night, and what is done? The United States turns its back. And they are not the only ones who feel betrayed. Our Ba’athist foes from Iraq … in Basra the unholy brotherhood of Takrit and their servants the Mukhabarat hold nightly sacrifice upon the altar of Yair-Suthot; the fountains of blood in Tehran testify to their effect. If the richest, most powerful nation on earth refuses to fight, these men of violence from the Bekaa think, how may we unstopper the ears of that nation? And they are not sophisticates like you or I.’’

He looks at Roger, who hunches his shoulders uneasily. “We can’t move against the Soviets openly! They must understand that it would be the end of far more than their little war. If the Taliban want American help against the Russians, it cannot be delivered openly.’’

“It is not the Russians that we quarrel with,’’ Mehmet says quietly, “but their choice in allies. They believe themselves to be infidel atheists, but by their deeds they shall be known; the icy spoor of Leng is upon them, their tools are those described in the Kitab al Azif. We have proof that they have violated the terms of the Dresden Agreement. The accursed and unhallowed stalk the frozen passes of the Himalayas by night, taking all whose path they cross. And will you stopper your ears even as the Russians grow in misplaced confidence, sure that their dominance of these forces of evil is complete? The gates are opening everywhere, as it was prophesied. Last week we flew an F-14C with a camera relay pod through one of them. The pilot and weapons operator are in paradise now, but we have glanced into hell and have the film and radar plots to prove it.’’

The Iranian ambassador fixes the redneck from the embassy with an icy gaze. “Tell your ambassador that we have opened preliminary discussions with Mossad, with a view to purchasing the produce of a factory at Dimona, in the Negev desert. Past insults may be set aside, for the present danger imperils all of us. They are receptive to our arguments, even if you are not: his holiness the Ayatollah has declared in private that any warrior who carries a nuclear device into the abode of the eater of souls will certainly achieve paradise. There will be an end to the followers of the ancient abominations on this Earth, doctor Hamilton, even if we have to push the nuclear bombs down their throats with our own hands!’’

Swimming pool

“Mister Jourgensen, at what point did you become aware that the Iranian government was threatening to violate UN Resolution 216 and the Non-Proliferation Protocol to the 1956 Geneva accords?’’

Roger sweats under the hot lights: his heartbeat accelerates. “I’m not sure I understand the question, sir.’’

“I asked you a direct question. Which part don’t you understand? I’m going to repeat myself slowly: when did you realise that the Iranian Government was threatening to violate resolution 216 and the 1956 Geneva Accords on nuclear proliferation?’’

Roger shakes his head. It’s like a bad dream, unseen insects buzzing furiously around him. “Sir, I had no direct dealings with the Iranian government. All I know is that I was asked to carry messages to and from a guy called Mehmet who I was told knew something about our hostages in Beirut. My understanding is that the colonel has been conducting secret negotiations with this gentleman or his backers for some time—a couple of years—now. Mehmet made allusions to parties in the Iranian administration but I have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth, and I never saw any diplomatic credentials.’’

There’s an inquisition of dark-suited congressmen opposite him, like a jury of teachers sitting in judgement over an errant pupil. The trouble is, these teachers can put him in front of a judge and send him to prison for many years, so that Jason really will grow up with a father who’s a voice on the telephone, a father who isn’t around to take him to air shows or ball games or any of the other rituals of growing up. They’re talking to each other quietly, deciding on another line of questioning: Roger shifts uneasily in his chair. This is a closed hearing, the television camera a gesture in the direction of the congressional archives: a pack of hungry democrats have scented republican blood in the water.

The congressman in the middle looks towards Roger. “Stop right there. Where did you know about this guy Mehmet from? Who told you to go see him and who told you what he was?’’

Roger swallows. “I got a memo from Fawn, like always. Admiral Poindexter wanted a man on the spot to talk to this guy, a messenger, basically, who was already in the loop. Colonel North signed off on it and told me to charge the trip to his discretionary fund.’’ That must have been the wrong thing to say, because two of the congressmen are leaning together and whispering in each other’s ears, and an aide obligingly sidles up to accept a note, then dashes away. “I was told that Mehmet was a mediator,’’ Roger adds. “In trying to resolve the Beirut hostage thing.’’

“A mediator.’’ The guy asking the questions looks at him in disbelief.

The man to his left—who looks as old as the moon, thin white hair, liver spots on his hooked nose, eyelids like sacks—chuckles appreciatively. “Yeah. Like Hitler was a diplomat. ‘One more territorial demand’—’’ he glances round. “Nobody else remember that?’’ he asks plaintively.

“No sir,’’ Roger says very seriously.

The prime interrogator snorts. “What did Mehmet tell you Iran was going to do, exactly?’’

Roger thinks for a moment. “He said they were going to buy something from a factory at Dimona. I understood this to be the Israeli Defence Ministry’s nuclear weapons research institute, and the only logical item—in the context of our discussion—was a nuclear weapon. Or weapons. He said the Ayatollah had decreed that a suicide bomber who took out the temple of Yog-Sothoth in Basra would achieve paradise, and that they also had hard evidence that the Soviets have deployed certain illegal weapons systems in Afghanistan. This was in the context of discussing illegal weapons proliferation; he was very insistent about the Iraq thing.’’

“What exactly are these weapons systems?’’ demands the third inquisitor, a quiet, hawk-faced man sitting on the left of the panel.

“The shoggot’im, they’re called: servitors. There are several kinds of advanced robotic systems made out of molecular components: they can change shape, restructure material at the atomic level—act like corrosive acid, or secrete diamonds. Some of them are like a tenuous mist—what Doctor Drexler at MIT calls a utility fog—while others are more like an oily globule. Apparently they may be able to manufacture more of themselves, but they’re not really alive in any meaning of the term we’re familiar with. They’re programmable, like robots, using a command language deduced from recovered records of the forerunners who left them here. The Molotov Raid of 1930 brought back a large consignment of them; all we have to go on are the scraps they missed, and reports by the Antarctic Survey. Professor Liebkunst’s files in particular are most frustrating—’’

“Stop. So you’re saying the Russians have these, uh, Shoggoths, but we don’t have any. And even those dumb Arab bastards in Baghdad are working on them. So you’re saying we’ve got a, a Shoggoth gap? A strategic chink in our armour? And now the Iranians say the Russians are using them in Afghanistan?’’

Roger speaks rapidly: “That is minimally correct, sir, although countervailing weapons have been developed to reduce the risk of a unilateral preemption escalating to an exchange of weakly godlike agencies.’’ The congressman in the middle nods encouragingly. “For the past three decades, the B-39 Peacemaker force has been tasked by SIOP with maintaining an XK-PLUTO capability directed at ablating the ability of the Russians to activate Project Koschei, the dormant alien entity they captured from the Nazis at the end of the last war. We have twelve PLUTO-class atomic-powered cruise missiles pointed at that thing, day and night, as many megatons as the entire Minuteman force. In principle, we will be able to blast it to pieces before it can be brought to full wakefulness and eat the minds of everyone within two hundred miles.’’

He warms to his subject. “Secondly, we believe the Soviet control of Shoggoth technology is rudimentary at best. They know how to tell them to roll over an Afghan hill-farmer village, but they can’t manufacture more of them. Their utility as weapons is limited—but terrifying—but they’re not much of a problem. A greater issue is the temple in Basra. This contains an operational gateway, and according to Mehmet the Iraqi political secret police, the Mukhabarat, are trying to figure out how to manipulate it; they’re trying to summon something through it. He seemed to be mostly afraid that they—and the Russians—would lose control of whatever it was; presumably another weakly godlike creature like the K-Thulu entity at the core of Project Koschei.’’

The old guy speaks: “This foo-loo thing, boy—you can drop those stupid K prefixes around me—is it one of a kind?’’

Roger shakes his head. “I don’t know, sir. We know the gateways link to at least three other planets. There may be many that we don’t know of. We don’t know how to create them or close them; all we can do is send people through, or pile bricks in the opening.’’ He nearly bites his tongue, because there are more than three worlds out there, and he’s been to at least one of them: the bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built by the NRO from their secret budget. He’s seen the mile-high dome Buckminster Fuller spent his last decade designing for them, the rings of Patriot air defence missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped fighters from the Skunk works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols the empty skies of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and apartment blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families and thousands of support personnel. In event of war they’ll be evacuated through the small gate that has been moved to the Executive Office Building basement, in a room beneath the swimming pool where Jack used to go skinny-dipping with Marilyn.

“Off the record now.’’ The old congressman waves his hand in a chopping gesture: “I say off, boy.’’ The cameraman switches off his machine and leaves. He leans forward, towards Roger. “What you’re telling me is, we’ve been waging a secret war since, when? The end of the second world war? Earlier, the Pabodie Antarctic expedition in the twenties, whose survivors brought back the first of these alien relics? And now the Eye-ranians have gotten into the game and figure it’s part of their fight with Saddam?’’

“Sir.’’ Roger barely trusts himself to do more than nod.

“Well.’’ The congressman eyes his neighbour sharply. “Let me put it to you that you have heard the phrase, ‘the great filter’. What does it mean to you?’’

“The great—’’ Roger stops. Professor Gould, he thinks. “We had a professor of palaeontology lecture us,’’ he explains. “I think he mentioned it. Something about why there aren’t any aliens in flying saucers buzzing us the whole time.’’

The congressman snorts. His neighbour starts and sits up. “Thanks to Pabodie and his followers, Liebkunst and the like, we know there’s a lot of life in the universe. The great filter, boy, is whatever force stops most of it developing intelligence and coming to visit. Something, somehow, kills intelligent species before they develop this kind of technology for themselves. How about meddling with relics of the elder ones? What do you think of that?’’

Roger licks his lips nervously. “That sounds like a good possibility, sir,’’ he says. His unease is building.

The congressman’s expression is intense: “These weapons your colonel is dicking around with make all our nukes look like a toy bow and arrow, and all you can say is it’s a good possibility, sir? Seems to me like someone in the Oval Office has been asleep at the switch.’’

“Sir, executive order 2047, issued January 1980, directed the armed forces to standardize on nuclear weapons to fill the mass destruction role. All other items were to be developmentally suspended, with surplus stocks allocated to the supervision of Admiral Poindexter’s joint munitions expenditure committee. Which Colonel North was detached to by the USMC high command, with the full cognizance of the White House—’’

The door opens. The congressman looks round angrily: “I thought I said we weren’t to be disturbed!’’

The aide standing there looks uncertain. “Sir, there’s been an, uh, major security incident, and we need to evacuate—’’

“Where? What happened?’’ demands the congressman. But Roger, with a sinking feeling, realises that the aide isn’t watching the house committee members: and the guy behind him is Secret Service.

“Basra. There’s been an attack, sir.’’ A furtive glance at Roger, as his brain freezes in denial: “If you’d all please come this way …’’

Bombing in fifteen minutes

Heads down, through a corridor where congressional staffers hurry about carrying papers, urgently calling one another. A cadre of dark-suited secret service agents close in, hustling Roger along in the wake of the committee members. A wailing like tinnitus fills his ears. “What’s happening?’’ he asks, but nobody answers.

Down into the basement. Another corridor, where two marine guards are waiting with drawn weapons. The secret service guys are exchanging terse reports by radio. The committee men are hustled away along a narrow service tunnel: Roger is stalled by the entrance. “What’s going on?’’ he asks his minder.

“Just a moment, sir.’’ More listening: these guys cock their heads to one side as they take instruction, birds of prey scanning the horizon for prey. “Delta four coming in. Over. You’re clear to go along the tunnel now, sir. This way.’’

“What’s happening?’’ Roger demands as he lets himself be hustled into the corridor, along to the end and round a sharp corner. Numb shock takes hold: he keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

“We’re now at Defcon one, sir. You’re down on the special list as part of the house staff. Next door on the left, sir.’’

The queue in the dim-lit basement room is moving fast, white-gloved guards with clipboards checking off men and a few women in suits as they step through a steel blast door one by one and disappear from view. Roger looks round in bewilderment: he sees a familiar face. “Fawn! What’s going on?’’

The secretary looks puzzled. “I don’t know. Roger? I thought you were testifying today.’’

“So did I.’’ They’re at the door. “What else?’’

“Ronnie was making a big speech in Helsinki; the colonel had me record it in his office. Something about not coexisting with the empire of evil. He cracked some kinda joke about how we start bombing in fifteen minutes, then this—’’

They’re at the door. It opens on a steel-walled airlock and the marine guard is taking their badges and hustling them inside. Two staff types and a middle-aged brigadier join them and the door thumps shut. The background noise vanishes, Roger’s ears pop, then the inner door opens and another marine guard waves them through into the receiving hall.

“Where are we?’’ asks the big-haired secretary, staring around.

“Welcome to XK-Masada,’’ says Roger. Then his childhood horrors catch up with him and he goes in search of a toilet to throw up in.

We need you back

Roger spends the next week in a state of numbed shock. His apartment here is like a small hotel room—a hotel with security, air conditioning, and windows that only open onto an interior atrium. He pays little attention to his surroundings. It’s not as if he has a home to return to.

Roger stops shaving. Stops changing his socks. Stops looking in mirrors or combing his hair. He smokes a lot, orders cheap bourbon from the commissary, and drinks himself into an amnesic stupor each night. He is, frankly, a mess. Self-destructive. Everything disintegrated under him at once: his job, the people he held in high regard, his family, his life. All the time he can’t get one thing out of his head: the expression on Gorman’s face as he stands there, in front of the submarine, rotting from the inside out with radiation sickness, dead and not yet knowing it. It’s why he’s stopped looking in mirrors.

On the fourth day he’s slumped in a chair watching taped I Love Lucy re-runs on the boob tube when the door to his suite opens quietly. Someone comes in. He doesn’t look round until the colonel walks across the screen and unplugs the TV set at the wall, then sits down in the chair next to him. The colonel has bags of dark skin under his eyes; his jacket is rumpled and his collar is unbuttoned.

“You’ve got to stop this, Roger,’’ he says quietly. “You look like shit.’’

“Yeah, well. You too.’’

The colonel passes him a slim manila folder. Without wanting to, Roger slides out the single sheet of paper within.

“So it was them.’’

“Yeah.’’ A moment’s silence. “For what it’s worth, we haven’t lost yet. We may yet pull your wife and son out alive. Or be able to go back home.’’

“Your family too, I suppose.’’ Roger’s touched by the colonel’s consideration, the pious hope that Andrea and Jason will be alright, even through his shell of misery. He realises his glass is empty. Instead of refilling it he puts it down on the carpet beside his feet. “Why?’’

The colonel removes the sheet of paper from his numb fingers. “Probably someone spotted you in the King David and traced you back to us. The Mukhabarat had agents everywhere, and if they were in league with the KGB …’’ he shrugs. “Things escalated rapidly. Then the president cracked that joke over a hot mike that was supposed to be switched off … Have you been checking in with the desk summaries this week?’’

Roger looks at him blankly. “Should I?’’

“Oh, things are still happening.’’ The colonel leans back and stretches his feet out. “From what we can tell of the situation on the other side, not everyone’s dead yet. Ligachev’s screaming blue murder over the hotline, accusing us of genocide: but he’s still talking. Europe is a mess and nobody knows what’s going on in the Middle East—even the Blackbirds aren’t making it back out again.’’

“The thing at Takrit.’’

“Yeah. It’s bad news, Roger. We need you back.’’

“Bad news?’’

“The worst.’’ The colonel jams his hands between his knees, stares at the floor like a bashful child. “Saddam Hussein al-Takriti spent years trying to get his hands on elder technology. It looks like he finally succeeded in stabilising the gate into Sothoth. Whole villages disappeared, Marsh Arabs, wiped out in the swamps of Eastern Iraq. Reports of yellow rain, people’s skin melting right off their bones. The Iranians got itchy and finally went nuclear. Trouble is, they did so two hours before that speech. Some asshole in Plotsk launched half the Uralskoye SS-20 grid—they went to launch on warning eight months ago—burning south, praise Jesus. Scratch the Middle East, period—everything from the Nile to the Khyber Pass is toast. We’re still waiting for the callback on Moscow, but SAC has put the whole Peacemaker force on airborne alert. So far we’ve lost the eastern seaboard as far south as North Virginia and they’ve lost the Donbass basin and Vladivostok. Things are a mess; nobody can even agree whether we’re fighting the commies or something else. But the box at Chernobyl—Project Koschei—the doors are open, Roger. We orbited a Keyhole-eleven over it and there are tracks, leading west. The PLUTO strike didn’t stop it—and nobody knows what the fuck is going on in WarPac country. Or France, or Germany, or Japan, or England.’’

The colonel makes a grab for Roger’s wild turkey, rubs the neck clean and swallows from the bottle. He looks at Roger with a wild expression on his face. “Koschei is loose, Roger. They fucking woke the thing. And now they can’t control it. Can you believe that?’’

“I can believe that.’’

“I want you back behind a desk tomorrow morning, Roger. We need to know what this Thulu creature is capable of. We need to know what to do to stop it. Forget Iraq; Iraq is a smoking hole in the map. But K-Thulu is heading towards the Atlantic coast. What are we going to do if it doesn’t stop?’’

Masada

The city of XK-Masada sprouts like a vast mushroom, a mile-wide dome emerging from the top of a cold plateau on a dry planet that orbits a dying star. The jagged black shapes of F-117’s howl across the empty skies outside it at dusk and dawn, patrolling the threatening emptiness that stretches as far as the mind can imagine.

Shadows move in the streets of the city, hollowed out human shells in uniform. They rustle around the feet of the towering concrete blocks like the dry leaves of autumn, obsessively focussed on the tasks that lend structure to their remaining days. Above them tower masts of steel, propping up the huge geodesic dome that arches across the sky: blocking out the hostile, alien constellations, protecting frail humanity from the dust storms that periodically scour the bones of the ancient world. The gravity here is a little lighter, the night sky whorled and marbled by the diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off the dying star that lights their days. During the long winter nights, a flurry of carbon dioxide snow dusts the surface of the dome: but the air is bone-dry, the city slaking its thirst on subterranean aquifers.

This planet was once alive—there is still a scummy sea of algae near the equator that feeds oxygen into the atmosphere, and there is a range of volcanoes near the north pole that speaks of plate tectonics in motion—but it is visibly dying. There is a lot of history here, but no future.

Sometimes, in the early hours when he cannot sleep, Roger walks outside the city, along the edge of the dry plateau. Machines labour on behind him, keeping the city tenuously intact: he pays them little attention. There is talk of mounting an expedition to Earth one of these years, to salvage whatever is left before the searing winds of time erase them forever. Roger doesn’t like to think about that. He tries to avoid thinking about Earth as much as possible: except when he cannot sleep but walks along the cliff top, prodding at memories of Andrea and Jason and his parents and sister and relatives and friends, each of them as painful as the socket of a missing tooth. He has a mouthful of emptiness, bitter and aching, out here on the edge of the plateau.

Sometimes Roger thinks he’s the last human being alive. He works in an office, feverishly trying to sort out what went wrong: and bodies move around him, talking, eating in the canteen, sometimes talking to him and waiting as if they expect a dialogue. There are bodies here, men and some women chatting, civilian and some military—but no people. One of the bodies, an army surgeon, told him he’s suffering from a common stress disorder, survivor’s guilt. This may be so, Roger admits, but it doesn’t change anything. Soulless days follow sleepless nights into oblivion, dust trickling over the side of the cliff like sand into the un-dug graves of his family.

A narrow path runs along the side of the plateau, just downhill from the foundations of the city power plant where huge apertures belch air warmed by the radiators of the nuclear reactor. Roger follows the path, gravel and sandy rock crunching under his worn shoes. Foreign stars twinkle overhead, forming unrecognizable patterns that tell him he’s far from home. The trail drops away from the top of the plateau, until the city is an unseen shadow looming above and behind his shoulder. To his right is a dizzying panorama, the huge rift valley with its ancient city of the dead stretched out before him. Beyond it rise alien mountains, their peaks as high and airless as the dead volcanoes of Mars.

About half a mile away from the dome, the trail circles an outcrop of rock and takes a downhill switchback turn. Roger stops at the bend and looks out across the desert at his feet. He sits down, leans against the rough cliff face and stretches his legs out across the path, so that his feet dangle over nothingness. Far below him, the dead valley is furrowed with rectangular depressions; once, millions of years ago, they might have been fields, but nothing like that survives to this date. They’re just dead, like everyone else on this world. Like Roger.

In his shirt pocket, a crumpled, precious pack of cigarettes. He pulls a white cylinder out with shaking fingers, sniffs at it, then flicks his lighter under it. Scarcity has forced him to cut back: he coughs at the first lungful of stale smoke, a harsh, racking croak. The irony of being saved from lung cancer by a world war is not lost on him.

He blows smoke out, a tenuous trail streaming across the cliff. “Why me?’’ he asks quietly.

The emptiness takes its time answering. When it does, it speaks with the Colonel’s voice. “You know the reason.’’

“I didn’t want to do it,’’ he hears himself saying. “I didn’t want to leave them behind.’’

The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. “You had no choice.’’

“Yes I did! I didn’t have to come here.’’ He pauses. “I didn’t have to do anything,’’ he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. “It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.’’

“—Evitable,’’ echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F117 hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. “Your family could still be alive, you know.’’

He looks up. “They could?’’ Andrea? Jason? “Alive?’’

The void laughs again, unfriendly: “There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.’’

Roger looks at his cigarette disbelievingly: throws it far out into the night sky above the plain. He watches it fall until its ember is no longer visible. Then he gets up. For a long moment he stands poised on the edge of the cliff nerving himself, and thinking. Then he takes a step back, turns, and slowly makes his way back up the trail towards the redoubt on the plateau. If his analysis of the situation is wrong, at least he is still alive. And if he is right, dying would be no escape.

He wonders why hell is so cold at this time of year.

© Charles Stross 2000, 2002.

This story was first published in Spectrum SF #3, and is reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ Years’ Best SF #18, and again in Charlie’s collection,

Toast (Cosmos Books, 2002).

Copyright © 2004 by Charles Stross.

Reprinted with permission from The Atrocity Archives

Golden Gryphon Press, 2004, ISBN 1-930846-25-8

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/

The death rattle of a mortally wounded telephone is a horrible thing to hear at four o’clock on a Tuesday morning. It’s even worse when you’re sleeping the sleep that follows a pitcher of iced margueritas in the basement of the Dog’s Bollocks, with a chaser of nachos and a tequila slammer or three for dessert. I come to, sitting upright, bare-ass naked in the middle of the wooden floor, clutching the receiver with one hand and my head with the other—purely to prevent it from exploding, you understand—and moaning quietly. “Who is it?” I croak into the microphone.

“Bob, get your ass down to the office right away. This line isn’t secure.” I recognize that voice: I have nightmares about it. That’s because I work for its owner.

“Whoa, I was asleep, boss. Can’t it—” I gulp and look at the alarm clock “—wait until morning?”

“No. I’m calling a code blue.”

“Jesus.” The band of demons stomping around my skull strike up an encore with drums. “Okay, boss. Ready to leave in ten minutes. Can I bill a taxi fare?”

“No, it can’t wait. I’ll have a car pick you up.” He cuts the call, and that is when I start to get frightened because even Angleton, who occupies a lair deep in the bowels of the Laundry’s Arcana Analysis Section—but does something far scarier than that anodyne title might suggest—is liable to think twice before authorising a car to pull in an employee at zero-dark o’clock.

I manage to pull on a sweater and jeans, tie my shoelaces, and get my ass downstairs just before the blue and red strobes light up the window above the front door. On the way out I grab my emergency bag—an overnighter full of stuff that Andy suggested I should keep ready, “just in case”—and slam and lock the door and turn around in time to find the cop waiting for me. “Are you Bob Howard?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” I show him my card.

“If you’ll come with me, sir.”

Lucky me: I get to wake up on my way in to work four hours early, in the front passenger seat of a police car with strobes flashing and the driver doing his best to scare me into catatonia. Lucky London: the streets are nearly empty at this time of night, so we zip around the feral taxis and somnolent cleaning trucks without pause. A journey that would normally take an hour and a half takes fifteen minutes. (Of course, it comes at a price: Accounting exists in a state of perpetual warfare with the rest of the civil service over internal billing, and the Metropolitan Police charge for their services as a taxi firm at a level that would make you think they provided limousines with wet bars. But Angleton has declared a code blue, so …)

The dingy-looking warehouse in a side street, adjoining a closed former primary school, doesn’t look too promising—but the door opens before I can raise a hand to knock on it. The grinning sallow face of Fred from Accounting looms out of the darkness in front of me and I recoil before I realise that it’s all right—Fred’s been dead for more than a year, which is why he’s on the night shift. This isn’t going to degenerate into plaintive requests for me to fix his spreadsheet. “Fred, I’m here to see Angleton,” I say very clearly, then I whisper a special password to stop him from eating me. Fred retreats back to his security cubbyhole or coffin or whatever it is you call it, and I cross the threshold of the Laundry. It’s dark—to save light bulbs, and damn the health and safety regs—but some kind soul has left a mouldering cardboard box of hand torches on the front desk. I pull the door shut behind me, pick up a torch, and head for Angleton’s office.

As I get to the top of the stairs I see that the lights are on in the corridor we call Mahogany Row. If the boss is running a crisis team then that’s where I’ll find him. So I divert into executive territory until I see a door with a red light glowing above it. There’s a note taped to the door handle: BOB HOWARD ACCESS PERMITTED. So I “access permitted” and walk right in.

As soon as the door opens Angleton looks up from the map spread across the boardroom table. The room smells of stale coffee, cheap cigarettes, and fear. “You’re late,” he says sharply.

“Late,” I echo, dumping my emergency bag under the fire extinguisher and leaning on the door. “‘Lo, Andy, Boris. Boss, I don’t think the cop was taking his time. Any faster and he’d be billing you for brown stain removal from the upholstery.” I yawn. “What’s the picture?”

“Milton Keynes,” says Andy.

“Are sending you there to investigate,” explains Boris.

“With extreme prejudice,” Angleton one-ups them.

“Milton Keynes?”

It must be something in my expression; Andy turns away hastily and pours me a cup of Laundry coffee while Boris pretends it’s none of his business. Angleton just looks as if he’s bitten something unpleasant, which is par for the course.

“We have a problem,” Angleton explains, gesturing at the map. “There are too many concrete cows.”

“Concrete cows.” I pull out a chair and flop down into it heavily, then rub my eyes. “This isn’t a dream is it, by any chance? No? Shit.”

Boris glowers at me: “Not a joke.” He rolls his eyes toward Angleton. “Boss?”

“It’s no joke, Bob,” says Angleton. His normally skeletal features are even more drawn than usual, and there are dark hollows under his eyes. He looks as if he’s been up all night. Angleton glances at Andy: “Has he been keeping his weapons certification up-to-date?”

“I practice three times a week,” I butt in, before Andy can get started on the intimate details of my personal file. “Why?”

“Go down to the armoury right now, with Andy. Andy, self-defense kit for one, sign it out for him. Bob, don’t shoot unless it’s you or them.” Angleton shoves a stack of papers and a pen across the table at me. “Sign the top and pass it back—you now have GAME ANDES REDSHIFT clearance. The files below are part of GAR—you’re to keep them on your person at all times until you get back here, then check them in via Morag’s office; you’ll answer to the auditors if they go missing or get copied.”

“Huh?”

I obviously still look confused because Angleton cracks an expression so frightening that it must be a smile and adds, “Shut your mouth, you’re drooling on your collar. Now, go with Andy, check out your hot kit, let Andy set you up with a chopper, and read those papers. When you get to Milton Keynes, do what comes naturally. If you don’t find anything, come back and tell me and we’ll take things from there.”

“But what am I looking for?” I gulp down half my coffee in one go; it tastes of ashes, stale cigarette ends, and tinned instant left over from the Retreat from Moscow. “Dammit, what do you expect me to find?”

“I don’t expect anything,” says Angleton. “Just go.”

“Come on,” says Andy, opening the door, “you can leave the papers here for now.”

I follow him into the corridor, along to the darkened stairwell at the end, and down four flights of stairs into the basement. “Just what the fuck is this?” I demand, as Andy produces a key and unlocks the steel-barred gate in front of the security tunnel.

“It’s GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, kid,” he says over his shoulder. I follow him into the security zone and the gate clanks shut behind me. Another key, another steel door—this time the outer vestibule of the armoury. “Listen, don’t go too hard on Angleton, he knows what he’s doing. If you go in with preconceptions about what you’ll find and it turns out to be GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, you’ll probably get yourself killed. But I reckon there’s only about a 10 percent chance it’s the real thing—more likely it’s a drunken student prank.”

He uses another key, and a secret word that my ears refuse to hear, to open the inner armoury door. I follow Andy inside. One wall is racked with guns, another is walled with ammunition lockers, and the opposite wall is racked with more esoteric items. It’s this that he turns to.

“A prank,” I echo, and yawn, against my better judgement. “Jesus, it’s half past four in the morning and you got me out of bed because of a student prank?”

“Listen.” Andy stops and glares at me, irritated. “Remember how you came aboard? That was me getting out of bed at four in the morning because of a student prank.”

“Oh,” is all I can say to him. Sorry springs to mind, but is probably inadequate; as they later pointed out to me, applied computational demonology and built-up areas don’t mix very well. I thought I was just generating weird new fractals; they knew I was dangerously close to landscaping Wolverhampton with alien nightmares. “What kind of students?” I ask.

“Architecture or alchemy. Nuclear physics for an outside straight.” Another word of command and Andy opens the sliding glass case in front of some gruesome relics that positively throb with power. “Come on. Which of these would you like?”

“I think I’ll take this one, thanks.” I reach in and carefully pick up a silver locket on a chain; there’s a yellow-and-black thaumaturgy hazard trefoil on a label dangling from it, and NO PULL ribbons attached to the clasp.

“Good choice.” Andy watches me in silence as I add a Hand of Glory to my collection, and then a second, protective amulet. “That all?” he asks.

“That’s all,” I say, and he nods and shuts the cupboard, then renews the seal on it.

“Sure?” he asks.

I look at him. Andy is a slightly built, forty-something guy; thin, wispy hair, tweed sports jacket with leather patches at the elbows, and a perpetually worried expression. Looking at him you’d think he was an Open University lecturer, not a managerial-level spook from the Laundry’s active service division. But that goes for all of them, doesn’t it? Angleton looks more like a Texan oil-company executive with tuberculosis than the legendary and terrifying head of the Counter-Possession Unit. And me, I look like a refugee from CodeCon or a dot-com startup’s engineering department. Which just goes to show that appearances and a euro will get you a cup of coffee. “What does this code blue look like to you?” I ask.

He sighs tiredly, then yawns. “Damn, it’s infectious,” he mutters. “Listen, if I tell you what it looks like to me, Angleton will have my head for a doorknob. Let’s just say, read those files on the way over, okay? Keep your eyes open, count the concrete cows, then come back safe.”

“Count the cows. Come back safe. Check.” I sign the clipboard, pick up my arsenal, and he opens the armoury door. “How am I getting there?”

Andy cracks a lopsided grin. “By police helicopter. This is a code blue, remember?”

I go up to the committee room, collect the papers, and then it’s down to the front door, where the same police patrol car is waiting for me. More brown-pants motoring—this time the traffic is a little thicker, dawn is only an hour and a half away—and we end up in the northeast suburbs, following the roads to Lippitts Hill where the Police ASU keep their choppers. There’s no messing around with check in and departure lounges; we drive round to a gate at one side of the complex, show our warrant cards, and my chauffeur takes me right out onto the heliport and parks next to the ready room, then hands me over to the flight crew before I realise what’s happening.

“You’re Bob Howard?” asks the copilot. “Up here, hop in.” He helps me into the back seat of the Twin Squirrel, sorts me out with the seat belt, then hands me a bulky headset and plugs it in. “We’ll be there in half an hour,” he says. “You just relax, try to get some sleep.” He grins sardonically then shuts the door on me and climbs in up front.

Funny. I’ve never been in a helicopter before. It’s not quite as loud as I’d expected, especially with the headset on, but as I’ve been led to expect something like being rolled down a hill in an oil drum while maniacs whack on the sides with baseball bats, that isn’t saying much. Get some sleep indeed; instead I bury my nose in the so-secret reports on GAME ANDES REDSHIFT and try not to upchuck as the predawn London landscape corkscrews around outside the huge glass windscreen and then starts to unroll beneath us.

REPORT 1: Sunday September 4th, 1892

CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET, Imperial War Ministry, September 11th, 1914

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES, Ministry of War, July 2nd, 1940

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988

My dearest Nellie,

In the week since I last wrote to you, I have to confess that I have become a different man. Experiences such as the ordeal I have just undergone must surely come but once in a lifetime; for if more often, how might man survive them? I have gazed upon the gorgon and lived to tell the tale, for which I am profoundly grateful (and I hasten to explain myself before you worry for my safety), although only the guiding hand of some angel of grace can account for my being in a position to put ink to paper with these words.

I was at dinner alone with the Mehtar last Tuesday evening—Mr Robertson being laid up, and Lieutenant Bruce off to Gilgut to procure supplies for his secret expedition to Lhasa—when we were interrupted most rudely at our repast. “Holiness!” The runner, quite breathless with fear, threw himself upon his knees in front of us. “Your brother … ! Please hasten, I implore you!”

His excellency Nizam ul-Mulk looked at me with that wicked expression of his: he bears little affection for his brutish hulk of a brother, and with good reason. Where the Mehtar is a man of refined, albeit questionable sensibilities, his brother is an uneducated coarse hill-man, one step removed from banditry. Chittral can very well do without his kind. “What has happened to my beloved brother?” asked ul-Mulk.

At this point the runner lapsed into a gabble that I could barely understand. With patience the Mehtar drew him out—then frowned. Turning to me, he said, “We have a—I know not the word for it in English, excuse please. It is a monster of the caves and passes who preys upon my people. My brother has gone to hunt it, but it appears to have got the better of him.”

“A mountain lion?” I said, misunderstanding.

“No.” He looked at me oddly. “May I enquire of you, Captain, whether Her Majesty’s government tolerates monsters within her empire?”

“Of course not!”

“Then you will not object to joining me in the hunt?”

I could feel a trap closing on me, but could not for the life of me see what it might be. “Certainly,” I said. “By Jove, old chap, we’ll have this monster’s head mounted on your trophy room wall before the week is out!”

“I think not,” Nizam said coolly. “We burn such things here, to drive out the evil spirit that gave rise to them. Bring you your mirror, tomorrow?”

“My—” Then I realised what he was talking about, and what deadly jeopardy I had placed my life in, for the honour of Her Majesty’s government in Chittral: he was talking about a Medusa. And although it quite unmans me to confess it, I was afraid.

The next day, in my cramped, windowless hut, I rose with the dawn and dressed for the hunt. I armed myself, then told Sergeant Singh to ready a squad of troopers for the hunt.

“What is the quarry, sahib?” he asked.

“The beast that no man sees,” I said, and the normally imperturbable trooper flinched.

“The men won’t like that, sir,” he said.

“They’ll like it even less if I hear any words from them,” I said. You have to be firm with colonial troops: they have only as much backbone as their commanding officer.

“I’ll tell them that, sahib,” he said and, saluting, went to ready our forces.

The Mehtar’s men gathered outside; an unruly bunch of hill-men, armed as one might expect with a mix of flintlocks and bows. They were spirited, like children, excitable and bickering; hardly a match for the order of my troopers and I. We showed them how it was done! Together with the Mehtar at our head, kestrel on his wrist, we rode out into the cold bright dawn and the steep-sided mountain valley.

We rode for the entire morning and most of the afternoon, climbing up the sides of a steep pass and then between two towering peaks clad in gleaming white snow. The mood of the party was uncommonly quiet, a sense of apprehensive fortitude settling over the normally ebullient Chittrali warriors. We came at last to a mean-spirited hamlet of tumbledown shacks, where a handful of scrawny goats grazed the scrubby bushes; the hetman of the village came to meet us, and with quavering voice directed us to our destination.

“It lies thuswise,” remarked my translator, adding: “The old fool, he say it is a ghost-bedevilled valley, by God! He say his son go in there two, three days ago, not come out. Then the Mehtar—blessed be he—his brother follow with his soldiers. And that two days ago.”

“Hah. Well,” I said, “tell him the great white empress sent me here with these fine troops he sees, and the Mehtar himself and his nobles, and we aren’t feeding any monster!”

The translator jabbered at the hetman for a while, and he looked stricken. Then Nizam beckoned me over. “Easy, old fellow,” he said.

“As you say, your excellency.”

He rode forward, beckoning me alongside. I felt the need to explain myself further: “I do not believe one gorgon will do for us. In fact, I do believe we will do for it!”

“It is not that which concerns me,” said the ruler of the small mountain kingdom. “But go easy on the hetman. The monster was his wife.”

We rode the rest of the way in reflective silence, to the valley where the monster had built her retreat, the only noises the sighing of wind, the thudding of hooves, and the jingling of our kits. “There is a cave halfway up the wall of the valley, here,” said the messenger who had summoned us. “She lives there, coming out at times to drink and forage for food. The villagers left her meals at first, but in her madness she slew one of them, and then they stopped.”

Such tragic neglect is unknown in England, where the poor victims of this most hideous ailment are confined in mazed bedlams upon their diagnosis, blindfolded lest they kill those who nurse them. But what more can one expect of the half-civilized children of the valley kingdoms, here on the top of the world?

The execution—for want of a better word—proceeded about as well as such an event can, which is to say that it was harrowing and not by any means enjoyable in the way that hunting game can be. At the entrance to the small canyon where the woman had made her lair, we paused. I detailed Sergeant Singh to ready a squad of rifles; their guns loaded, they took up positions in the rocks, ready to beat back the monster should she try to rush us.

Having thus prepared our position, I dismounted and, joining the Mehtar, steeled myself to enter the valley of death.

I am sure you have read lurid tales of the appalling scenes in which gorgons are found; charnel houses strewn with calcined bodies, bones protruding in attitudes of agony from the walls as the madmen and madwomen who slew them gibber and howl among their victims. These tales are, I am thankful to say, constructed out of whole cloth by the fevered imaginations of the degenerate scribblers who write for the penny dreadfuls. What we found was both less—and much worse—than that.

We found a rubble-strewn valley; in one side of it a cave, barely more than a cleft in the rock face, with a tumbledown awning stretched across its entrance. An old woman sat under the awning, eyes closed, humming to herself in an odd singsong. The remains of a fire lay in front of her, logs burned down to white-caked ashes; she seemed to be crying, tears trickling down her sunken, wrinkled cheeks.

The Mehtar gestured me to silence, then, in what I only later recognized as a supremely brave gesture, strode up to the fire. “Good evening to you, my aunt, and it would please me that you keep your eyes closed, lest my guards be forced to slay you of an instant,” he said.

The woman kept up her low, keening croon—like a wail of grief from one who has cried until her throat is raw and will make no more noise. But her eyes remained obediently shut. The Mehtar crouched down in front of her.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked gently.

The crooning stopped. “You are the royal one,” she said, her voice a cracked whisper. “They told me you would come.”

“Indeed I have,” he said, a compassionate tone in his voice. With one hand he waved me closer. “It is very sad, what you have become.”

“It hurts.” She wailed quietly, startling the soldiers so that one of them half-rose to his feet. I signalled him back down urgently as I approached behind her. “I wanted to see my son one more time … “

“It is all right, aunt,” he said quietly. “You’ll see him soon enough.” He held out a hand to me; I held out the leather bag and he removed the mirror. “Be at peace, aunt. An end to pain is in sight.” He held the mirror at arms length in front of his face, above the fire before her: “Open your eyes when you are ready for it.”

She sobbed once, then opened her eyes.

I didn’t know what to expect, dear Nellie, but it was not this: somebody’s aged mother, crawling away from her home to die with a stabbing pain in her head, surrounded by misery and loneliness. As it is, her monarch spared her the final pain, for as soon as she looked into the mirror she changed. The story that the gorgon kills those who see her by virtue of her ugliness is untrue; she was merely an old woman—the evil was something in her gaze, something to do with the act of perception.

As soon as her eyes opened—they were bright blue, for a moment—she changed. Her skin puffed up and her hair went to dust, as if in a terrible heat. My skin prickled; it was as if I had placed my face in the open door of a furnace. Can you imagine what it would be like if a body were to be heated in an instant to the temperature of a blast furnace? For that is what it was like. I will not describe this horror in any detail, for it is not fit material for discussion. When the wave of heat cleared, her body toppled forward atop the fire—and rolled apart, yet more calcined logs amidst the embers.

The Mehtar stood, and mopped his brow. “Summon your men, Francis,” he said, “they must build a cairn here.”

“A cairn?” I echoed blankly.

“For my brother.” He gestured impatiently at the fire into which the unfortunate woman had tumbled. “Who else do you think this could have been?”

A cairn was built, and we camped overnight in the village. I must confess that both the Mehtar and I have been awfully sick since then, with an abnormal rapidity that came on since the confrontation. Our men carried us back home, and that is where you find me now, lying abed as I write this account of one of the most horrible incidents I have ever witnessed on the frontier.

I remain your obedient and loving servant,

Capt. Francis Younghusband

As I finish reading the typescript of Captain Younghusband’s report, my headset buzzes nastily and crackles. “Coming up on Milton Keynes in a couple minutes, Mr Howard. Any idea where you want to be put down? If you don’t have anywhere specific in mind we’ll ask for a slot at the police pad.”

Somewhere specific … ? I shove the unaccountably top-secret papers down into one side of my bag and rummage around for one of the gadgets I took from the armoury. “The concrete cows,” I say. “I need to take a look at them as soon as possible. They’re in Bancroft Park, according to this map. Just off Monk’s Way, follow the A422 in until it turns into the H3 near the city centre. Any chance we can fly over them?”

“Hold on a moment.”

The helicopter banks alarmingly and the landscape tilts around us. We’re shooting over a dark landscape, trees and neat, orderly fields, and the occasional clump of suburban paradise whisking past beneath us—then we’re over a dual carriageway, almost empty at this time of night, and we bank again and turn to follow it. From an altitude of about a thousand feet it looks like an incredibly detailed toy, right down to the finger-sized trucks crawling along it.

“Right, that’s it,” says the copilot. “Anything else we can do for you?”

“Yeah,” I say. “You’ve got infrared gear, haven’t you? I’m looking for an extra cow. A hot one. I mean, hot like it’s been cooked, not hot as in body temperature.”

“Gotcha, we’re looking for a barbecue.” He leans sideways and fiddles with the controls below a fun-looking monitor. “Here. Ever used one of these before?”

“What is it, FLIR?”

“Got it in one. That joystick’s the pan, this knob is zoom, you use this one to control the gain, it’s on a stabilized platform; give us a yell if you see anything. Clear?”

“I think so.” The joystick works as promised and I zoom in on a trail of ghostly hot spots, pan behind them to pick up the brilliant glare of a predawn jogger, lit up like a light bulb—the dots are fading footprints on the cold ground. “Yeah.” We’re making about forty miles per hour along the road, sneaking in like a thief in the night, and I zoom out to take in as much of the side view as possible. After a minute or so I see the park ahead, off the side of a roundabout. “Eyes up, front: Can you hover over that roundabout?”

“Sure. Hold on.” The engine note changes and my stomach lurches, but the FLIR pod stays locked on target. I can see the cows now, grey shapes against the cold ground—a herd of concrete animals created in 1978 by a visiting artist. There should be eight of them, life-sized Friesians peacefully grazing in a field attached to the park. But something’s wrong, and it’s not hard to see what.

“Barbecue at six o’clock low,” says the copilot. “You want to go down and bring us back a take-away, or what?”

“Stay up,” I say edgily, slewing the camera pod around. “I want to make sure it’s safe first … “

REPORT 2: Wednesday March 4th, 1914

CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET, Imperial War Ministry, September 11th, 1914

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES, Ministry of War, July 2nd, 1940

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988

Dear Albert,

Today we performed Young’s double-slit experiment upon Subject C, our medusa. The results are unequivocal; the Medusa effect is both a particle and a wave. If de Broglie is right …

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Ernest has been pushing for results with characteristic vim and vigor and Mathiesson, our analytical chemist, has been driven to his wits’ end by the New Zealander’s questions. He nearly came to blows with Dr Jamieson who insisted that the welfare of his patient—as he calls Subject C—comes before any question of getting to the bottom of this infuriating and perplexing anomaly.

Subject C is an unmarried woman, aged 27, of medium height with brown hair and blue eyes. Until four months ago, she was healthy and engaged as household maid to an eminent KC whose name you would probably recognize. Four months ago she underwent a series of seizures; her employers being generous, she was taken to the Royal Free Infirmary where she described having a series of blinding headaches going back eighteen months or so. Dr Willard examined her using one of the latest Roentgen machines, and determined that she appeared to have the makings of a tumour upon her brain. Naturally this placed her under Notification, subject to the Monster Control Act (1864); she was taken to the isolation ward at St Bartholomew’s in London where, three weeks, six migraines, and two seizures later, she experienced her first Grand Morte fit. Upon receiving confirmation that she was suffering from acute gorgonism, Dr Rutherford asked me to proceed as agreed upon; and so I arranged for the Home Office to be contacted by way of the Dean.

While Mr McKenna was at first unenthusiastic about the prospect of a gorgon running about the streets of Manchester, our reassurances ultimately proved acceptable and he directed that Subject C be released into our custody on her own cognizance. She was in a state of entirely understandable distress when she arrived, but once the situation was explained she agreed to cooperate fully in return for a settlement which will be made upon her next of kin. As she is young and healthy, she may survive for several months, if not a year, in her current condition: this offers an unparallelled research opportunity. We are currently keeping her in the old Leprosarium, the windows of which have been bricked up. A security labyrinth has been installed, the garden wall raised by five feet so that she can take in the air without endangering passers-by, and we have arranged a set of signals whereby she can don occlusive blindfolds before receiving visitors. Experiments upon patients with acute gorgonism always carry an element of danger, but in this case I believe our precautions will suffice until her final deterioration begins.

Lest you ask why we don’t employ a common basilisk or cockatrice instead, I hasten to explain that we do; the pathology is identical in whichever species, but a human source is far more amenable to control than any wild animal. Using Subject C we can perform repeatable experiments at will, and obtain verbal confirmation that she has performed our requests. I hardly need to remind you that the historical use of gorgonism, for example by Danton’s Committee for Public Safety during the French revolution, was hardly conducted as a scientific study of the phenomenon. This time, we will make progress!

Once Subject C was comfortable, Dr Rutherford arranged a series of seminars. The New Zealander is of the opinion that the effect is probably mediated by some electromagnetic phenomenon, of a type unknown to other areas of science. He is consequently soliciting new designs for experiments intended to demonstrate the scope and nature of the gorgon effect. We know from the history of Mademoiselle Marianne’s grisly collaboration with Robespierre that the victim must be visible to the gorgon, but need not be directly perceived; reflection works, as does trivial refraction, and the effect is transmitted through glass thin enough to see through, but the gorgon cannot work in darkness or thick smoke. Nobody has demonstrated a physical mechanism for gorgonism that doesn’t involve an unfortunate creature afflicted with the characteristic tumours. Blinding a gorgon appears to control the effect, as does a sufficient visual distortion. So why does Ernest insist on treating a clearly biological phenomenon as one of the greatest mysteries in physics today?

“My dear fellow,” he explained to me the first time I asked, “how did Madame Curie infer the existence of radioactivity in radium-bearing ores? How did Wilhelm Roentgen recognize X-rays for what they were? Neither of those forms of radiation arose within our current understanding of magnetism, electricity, or light. They had to be something else. Now, our children of Medusa apparently need to behold a victim in order to injure them—but how is the effect transmitted? We know, unlike the ancient Greeks, that our eyes work by focussing ambient light on a membrane at their rear. They used to think that the gorgons shone forth beams of balefire, as if to set in stone whatever they alighted on. But we know that cannot be true. What we face is nothing less than a wholly new phenomenon. Granted, the gorgon effect only changes whatever the medusoid can see directly, but we know the light reflected from those bodies isn’t responsible. And Lavoisier’s calorimetric experiments—before he met his unfortunate end before the looking glass of l’Executrice—proved that actual atomic transmutation is going on! So what on earth mediates the effect? How can the act of observation, performed by an unfortunate afflicted with gorgonism, transform the nuclear structure?”

(By nuclear structure he is of course referring to the core of the atom, as deduced by our experiments last year.)

Then he explained how he was going to seat a gorgon on one side of a very large device he calls a cloud chamber, with big magnetic coils positioned above and below it, to see if there is some other physical phenomenon at work.

I can now reveal the effects of our team’s experimentation. Subject C is cooperating in a most professional manner, but despite Ernest’s greatest efforts the cloud chamber bore no fruit—she can sit with her face pressed up against the glass window on one side, and blow a chicken’s egg to flinders of red-hot pumice on the target stand, but no ionization trail appears in the saturated vapour of the chamber. Or rather, I should say no direct trail appears. We had more success when we attempted to replicate other basic experiments. It seems that the gorgon effect is a continuously variable function of the illumination of the target, with a sharply defined lower cut-off and an upper limit! By interposing smoked glass filters we have calibrated the efficiency with which Subject C transmutes the carbon nuclei of a target into silicon, quite accurately. Some of the new electrostatic counters I’ve been working on have proven fruitful: secondary radiation, including gamma rays and possibly an elusive neutral particle, are given off by the target, and indeed our cloud chamber has produced an excellent picture of radiation given off by the target.

Having confirmed the calorimetric and optical properties of the effect, we next performed the double-slit experiment upon a row of targets (in this case, using wooden combs). A wall with two thin slits is interposed between the targets and our subject, whose gaze was split in two using a binocular arrangement of prisms. A lamp positioned between the two slits, on the far side of the wall from our subject, illuminates the targets: as the level of illumination increases, a pattern of alternating gorgonism was produced! This exactly follows the constructive reinforcement and destruction of waves Professor Young demonstrated with his examination of light corpuscules, as we are now supposed to call them. We conclude that gorgonism is a wave effect of some sort—and the act of observation is intimately involved, although on first acquaintance this is such a strange conclusion that some of us were inclined to reject it out of hand.

We will of course be publishing our full findings in due course; I take pleasure in attaching a draft of our paper for your interest. In any case, you must be wondering by now just what the central finding is. This is not in our paper yet, because Dr Rutherford is inclined to seek a possible explanation before publishing; but I regret to say that our most precise calorimetric analyses suggest that your theory of mass/energy conservation is being violated—not on the order of ounces of weight, but by enough to detect. Carbon atoms are being transformed into silicon ions with an astoundingly high electropositivity, which can be accounted for if we assume that the effect is creating nuclear mass from somewhere. Perhaps you, or your new colleagues at the Prussian Academy, can shed some light on the issue? We are most perplexed, because if we accept this result we are forced to accept the creation of new mass ab initio, or treat it as an experimental invalidation of your general theory of relativity.

Your good friend,

Hans Geiger

A portrait of the agent as a (confused) young man:

Picture me, standing in the predawn chill in a badly mown field, yellowing parched grass up to the ankles. There’s a wooden fence behind me, a road on the other side of it with the usual traffic cams and streetlights, and a helicopter in police markings parked like a gigantic cyborg beetle in the middle of the roundabout, bulging with muscular-looking sensors and nitesun floodlights and making a racket like an explosion in a noise factory. Before me there’s a field full of concrete cows, grazing safely and placidly in the shadow of some low trees which are barely visible in the overspill from the streetlights. Long shadows stretch out from the fence, darkness exploding toward the ominous lump at the far end of the paddock. It’s autumn, and dawn isn’t due for another thirty minutes. I lift my modified camcorder and zoom in on it, thumbing the record button.

The lump looks a little like a cow that’s lying down. I glance over my shoulder at the chopper, which is beginning to spool up for takeoff; I’m pretty sure I’m safe here but I can’t quite suppress a cold shudder. On the other side of the field—

“Datum point: Bob Howard, Bancroft Park, Milton Keynes, time is zero seven fourteen on the morning of Tuesday the eighteenth. I have counted the cows and there are nine of them. One is prone, far end of paddock, GPS coordinates to follow. Preliminary surveillance indicated no human presence within a quarter kilometre and residual thermal yield is below two hundred Celsius, so I infer that it is safe to approach the target.”

One unwilling foot goes down in front of another. I keep an eye on my dosimeter, just in case: there’s not going to be much secondary radiation hereabouts, but you can never tell. The first of the cows looms up at me out of the darkness. She’s painted black and white, and this close up she’s clearly a sculpture. I pat her on the nose. “Stay cool, Daisy.” I should be safely tucked up in bed with Mo—but she’s away on a two-week training seminar at Dunwich and Angleton got a bee in his bonnet and called a code blue emergency. The cuffs of my jeans are damp with dew, and it’s cold. I reach the next cow, pause, and lean on its rump for a zoom shot of the target.

“Ground zero, range twenty metres. Subject is bovine, down, clearly terminal. Length is roughly three metres, breed … unidentifiable. The grass around it is charred but there’s no sign of secondary combustion.” I dry-swallow. “Thermal bloom from abdomen.” There’s a huge rip in its belly where the boiling intestinal fluids exploded, and the contents are probably still glowing red-hot inside.

I approach the object. It’s clearly the remains of a cow; equally clearly it has met a most unpleasant end. The dosimeter says it’s safe—most of the radiation effects from this sort of thing are prompt, there are minimal secondary products, luckily—but the ground underneath is scorched and the hide has blackened and charred to a gritty, ashlike consistency. There’s a smell like roast beef hanging in the air, with an unpleasant undertang of something else. I fumble in my shoulder bag and pull out a thermal probe, then, steeling myself, shove the sharp end in through the rip in the abdomen. I nearly burn my hand on the side as I do so—it’s like standing too close to an open oven.

“Core temperature two six six, two six seven … stable. Taking core samples for isotope ratio checks.” I pull out a sample tube and a sharp probe and dig around in the thing’s guts, trying to tease a chunk of ashy, charred meat loose. I feel queasy: I like a well-cooked steak as much as the next guy, but there’s something deeply wrong about this whole scene. I try not to notice the exploded eyeballs or the ruptured tongue bursting through the blackened lips. This job is quite gross enough as it is without adding my own dry heaves to the mess.

Samples safely bottled for analysis, I back away and walk in a wide circle around the body, recording it from all angles. An open gate at the far end of the field and a trail of impressions in the ground completes the picture. “Hypothesis: open gate. Someone let Daisy in, walked her to this position near the herd, then backed off. Daisy was then illuminated and exposed to a class three or better basilisk, whether animate or simulated. We need a plausible disinformation pitch, forensics workover of the paddock gate and fence—check for exit signs and footprints—and some way of identifying Daisy to see which herd she came from. If any livestock is reported missing over the next few days that would be a useful indicator. Meanwhile, core temperature is down to under five hundred Celsius. That suggests the incident happened at least a few hours ago—it takes a while for something the size of a cow to cool down that far. Since the basilisk has obviously left the area and there’s not a lot more I can do, I’m now going to call in the cleaners. End.”

I switch off the camcorder, slide it into my pocket, and take a deep breath. The next bit promises to be even less pleasant than sticking a thermocouple in the cow’s arse to see how long ago it was irradiated. I pull out my mobile phone and dial 999. “Operator? Police despatch, please. Police despatch? This is Mike Tango Five, repeat, Mike Tango Five. Is Inspector Sullivan available? I have an urgent call for him … “

REPORT 3: Friday October 9th, 1942

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES, Ministry of War, October 9th, 1942

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988

ACTION THIS DAY:

Three reports have reached SOE Department Two, office 337/42, shedding new light on the recent activities of Dr Ing Professor Gustaf Von Schachter in conjunction with RSHA Amt. 3 and the inmates of the Holy Nativity Hospital for the Incurably Insane.

Our first report ref. 531/892-(i) concerns the cessation of action by a detached unit of RSHA Amt. 3 Group 4 charged with termination of imbeciles and mental defectives in Frankfurt as part of the Reich’s ongoing eugenics program. An agent in place (code: GREEN PIGEON) overheard two soldiers discussing the cessation of euthanasia operations in the clinic in negative terms. Herr Von Schachter had, as of 24/8/42, acquired a Führer Special Order signed either by Hitler or Borman. This was understood by the soldiers to charge him with the authority to requisition any military resources not concerned with direct security of the Reich or suppression of resistance, and to override orders with the effective authority of an obergruppenführer. This mandate runs in conjunction with his existing authority from Dr Wolfram Sievers, who is believed to be operating the Institute for Military Scientific Research at the University of Strasbourg and the processing centre at Natzweiler concentration camp.

Our second report ref. 539/504-(i) concerns prescriptions dispensed by a pharmacy in Frankfurt for an unnamed doctor from the Holy Nativity Hospital. The pharmaceutical assistant at this dispensary is a sympathiser operated by BLUE PARTRIDGE and is considered trustworthy. The prescriptions requisitioned were unusual in that they consisted of bolus preparations for intrathecal (base of cranium) injection, containing colchicine, an extract of catharanthides, and morphine. Our informant opined that this is a highly irregular preparation which might be utilized in the treatment of certain brain tumours, but which is likely to cause excruciating pain and neurological side effects (ref. GAME ANDES) associated with induction of gorgonism in latent individuals suffering an astrocytoma in the cingulate gyrus.

Our final report ref. 539/504-(ii) comes from the same informant and confirms ominous preparatory activities in the Holy Nativity Hospital grounds. The hospital is now under guard by soldiers of Einsatzgruppen 4. Windows have been whitewashed, mirrors are being removed (our emphasis) or replaced with one-way observation glass, and lights in the solitary cells rewired for external control from behind two doors. Most of the patients have disappeared, believed removed by Group 4 soldiers, and rumours are circulating of a new area of disturbed earth in the countryside nearby. Those patients who remain are under close guard.

Conclusion: The preparation referenced in 539/504-(i) has been referred to Special Projects Group ANDES, who have verified against records of the suppressed Geiger Committee that Von Schachter is experimenting with drugs similar to the catastrophic Cambridge IV preparation. Given his associate Sievers influence in the Ahnenerbe-SS, and the previous use of the Holy Nativity Hospital for the Incurably Insane as a secondary centre for the paliative care of patients suffering seizures and other neuraesthenic symptoms, it is believed likely that Von Schachter intends to induce and control gorgonism for military purposes in explicit violation of the provisions for the total suppression of stoner weapons laid out in Secret Codicil IV to the Hague Convention (1919).

Policy Recommendation: This matter should be escallated to JIC as critical with input from SOE on the feasibility of a targeted raid on the installation. If allowed to proceed, Von Schachter’s program shows significant potential for development into one of the rumoured Vertlesgunswaffen programs for deployment against civilian populations in free areas. A number of contingency plans for the deployment of gorgonism on a mass observation basis have existed in a MOW file since the early 1920s and we must now consider the prospects for such weapons to be deployed against us. We consider essential an immediate strike against the most advanced development centres, coupled with a strong reminder through diplomatic back channels that failure to comply with all clauses (secret and overt) of the Hague Convention will result in an allied retalliatory deployment of poison gas against German civilian targets. We cannot run the risk of class IV basilisks being deployed in conjunction with strategic air power …

By the time I roll into the office, four hours late and yawning with sleep deprivation, Harriet is hopping around the common room as if her feet are on fire, angrier than I’ve ever seen her before. Unfortunately, according to the matrix management system we operate she’s my boss for 30 percent of the time, during which I’m a technical support engineer. (For the other 70 percent I report to Angleton and I can’t really tell you what I am except that it involves being yanked out of bed at zero four hundred hours to answer code blue alerts.)

Harriet is a back-office suit: mousy and skinny, forty-something, and dried up from spending all those years devising forms in triplicate with which to terrorize field agents. People like Harriet aren’t supposed to get excited about anything. The effect is disconcerting, like opening a tomb and finding a break-dancing mummy.

“Robert! Where on earth have you been? What kind of time do you call this? McLuhan’s been waiting on you—you were supposed to be here for the licence policy management committee meeting two hours ago!”

I yawn and sling my jacket over the coat rack next to the “C” department coffee station. “Been called out,” I mumble. “Code blue alert. Just got back from Milton Keynes.”

“Code blue?” she asks, alert for a slip. “Who signed off on it?”

“Angleton.” I hunt around for my mug in the cupboard over the sink, the one with the poster on the front that says CURIOUS EYES COST LIVES. The coffee machine is mostly empty, full of black tarry stuff alarmingly similar to the toxic waste they make roads out of. I hold it under the tap and rinse. “His budget, don’t worry about it. Only he pulled me out of bed at four in the morning and sent me off to—” I put the jug down to refill the coffee filter “—never mind. It’s cleared.”

Harriet looks as if she’s bitten into a biscuit and found half a beetle inside. I’m pretty sure that it’s not anything special; she and her boss Bridget simply have no higher goal in life than trying to cut everyone else down so they can look them in the eye. Although, to be fair, they’ve been acting more cagy than usual lately, hiding out in meetings with strange suits from other departments. It’s probably just part of their ongoing game of Bureaucracy, whose goal is the highest stakes of all—a fully vested Civil Service pension and early retirement. “What was it about?” she demands.

“Do you have GAME ANDES REDSHIFT clearance?” I ask. “If not, I can’t tell you.”

“But you were in Milton Keynes,” she jabs. “You told me that.”

“Did I?” I roll my eyes. “Well, maybe, and maybe not. I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“What’s so interesting about Milton Keynes?” she continues.

“Not much.” I shrug. “It’s made of concrete and it’s very, very boring.”

She relaxes almost imperceptibly. “Make sure you get all the paperwork filed and billed to the right account,” she tells me.

“I will have before I leave this afternoon at two,” I reply, rubbing in the fact that I’m on flexitime; Angleton’s a much more alarming, but also understanding, manager to work for. Due to the curse of matrix management I can’t weasel out completely from under Bridget’s bony thumb, but I must confess I get a kick out of having my other boss pull rank on her. “What was this meeting about?” I ask slyly, hoping she’ll rise to it.

“You should know, you’re the administrator who set up the mailing list,” she throws right back at me. Oops. “Mr McLuhan’s here to help us. He’s from Q Division, to help us prepare for our Business Software Alliance audit.”

“Our—” I stop dead and turn to face her, the coffee machine gurgling at my back. “Our audit with who?”

“The Business Software Alliance,” she says smugly. “CESG outsourced our COTS application infrastructure five months ago contingent on us following official best practices for ensuring quality and value in enterprise resource management. As you were too busy to look after things, Bridget asked Q Division to help out. Mr McLuhan is helping us sort out our licencing arrangements in line with guidelines from Procurement. He says he’s able to run a full BSA-certified audit on our systems and help us get our books in order.”

“Oh,” I say, very calmly, and turn around, mouthing the follow-on shit silently in the direction of the now-burbling percollator. “Have you ever been through a BSA audit before, Harriet?” I ask curiously as I scrub my mug clean, inside and out.

“No, but they’re here to help us audit our—”

“They’re funded by the big desktop software companies,” I say, as calmly as I can. “They do that because they view the BSA as a profit centre. That’s because the BSA or their subcontractors—and that’s what Q Division will be acting as, they get paid for running an audit if they find anything out of order—come in, do an audit, look for anything that isn’t currently licensed—say, those old machines in D3 that are still running Windows 3.1 and Office 4, or the Linux servers behind Eric’s desk that keep the departmental file servers running, not to mention the FreeBSD box running the Daemonic Countermeasures Suite in Security—and demand an upgrade to the latest version under threat of lawsuit. Inviting them in is like throwing open the doors and inviting the Drugs Squad round for a spliff.”

“They said they could track down all our installed software and offer us a discount for volume licensing!”

“And how precisely do you think they’ll do that?” I turn round and stare at her. “They’re going to want to install snooping software on our LAN, and then read through its take.” I take a deep breath. “You’re going to have to get him to sign the Official Secrets Act so that I can formally notify him that if he thinks he’s going to do that I’m going to have him sectioned. Part Three. Why do you think we’re still running old copies of Windows on the network? Because we can’t afford to replace them?”

“He’s already signed Section Three. And anyway, you said you didn’t have time,” she snaps waspishly. “I asked you five weeks ago, on Friday! But you were too busy playing secret agents with your friends downstairs to notice anything as important as an upcoming audit. This wouldn’t have been necessary if you had time!”

“Crap. Listen, we’re running those old junkers because they’re so old and rubbish that they can’t catch half the proxy Internet worms and macro viruses that are doing the rounds these days. BSA will insist we replace them with stonking new workstations running Windows XP and Office XP and dialing into the Internet every six seconds to snitch on whatever we’re doing with them. Do you really think Mahogany Row is going to clear that sort of security risk?”

That’s a bluff—Mahogany Row retired from this universe back when software still meant silk unmentionables—but she isn’t likely to know that, merely that I get invited up there these days. (Nearer my brain-eating God to thee … )

“As for the time thing, get me a hardware budget and a tech assistant who’s vetted for level five Laundry IT operations and I’ll get it seen to. It’ll only cost you sixty thousand pounds or so in the first year, plus a salary thereafter.” Finally, finally, I get to pull the jug out of the coffee machine and pour myself a mug of wake-up. “That’s better.”

She glances at her watch. “Are you going to come along to the meeting and help explain this to everybody then?” she asks in a tone that could cut glass.

“No.” I add cow juice from the fridge that wheezes asthmatically below the worktop. “It’s a public/private partnership fuck-up, film at eleven. Bridget stuck her foot in it of her own free will: if she wants me to pull it out for her she can damn well ask. Besides, I’ve got a code blue report meeting with Angelton and Boris and Andy, and that trumps administrative make-work any day of the week.”

“Bastard,” she hisses.

“Pleased to be of service.” I pull a face as she marches out the room and slams the door. “Angleton. Code blue. Jesus.” All of a sudden I remember the modified camcorder in my jacket pocket. “Shit, I’m running late … “

REPORT 4: Tuesday June 6th, 1989

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, June 6th, 1989

ABSTRACT: Recent research in neuroanatomy has characterised the nature of the stellate ganglial networks responsible for gorgonism in patients with advanced astrocytoma affecting the cingulate gyrus. Tests combining the “map of medusa” layout with appropriate video preprocessing inputs have demonstrated the feasibility of mechanical induction of the medusa effect.

Progress in the emulation of dynamically reconfigurable hidden-layer neural networks using FPGA (fully programmable gate array) technology, combined with realtime digital video signal processing from binocular high-resolution video cameras, is likely within the next five years to allow us to download a “medusa mode” into suitably prepared surveillance CCTV cameras, allowing realtime digital video monitoring networks to achieve a true line-of-sight look-to-kill capability. Extensive safety protocols are discussed which must be implemented before this technology can be deployed nationally, in order to minimize the risk of misactivation.

Projected deployment of CCTV monitoring in public places is estimated to result in over one million cameras in situ in British mainland cities by 1999. Coverage will be complete by 2004-06. Anticipated developments in internetworking and improvements in online computing bandwidth suggest for the first time the capacity of achieving a total coverage defense-in-depth against any conceivable insurgency. The implications of this project are discussed, along with its possible efficacy in mitigating the consequences of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN in September 2007.

…

Speaking of Mahogany Row, Angleton’s picked the boardroom with the teak desk, the original bakelite desk fittings, and the frosted windows onto the corridor as the venue for my debriefing. He’s sitting behind the desk tapping his bony fingers, with Andy looking anxious and Boris imperturbable when I walk in and flip the red MEETING light on.

“Home movies.” I flip the tape on the desktop. “What I saw on my holiday.” I put my coffee mug down on one of the disquietingly soft leather mats before I yawn, just in case I spill it. “Sorry, been up for hours. What do you want to know?”

“How long had it been dead?” asks Andy.

I think for a moment. “I’m not sure—have to call Pathology if you want a hard answer, I’m afraid, but clearly for some time when I found it after zero seven hundred. It had cooled to barely oven temperature.”

Angleton is watching me like I’m a bug under a microscope. It’s not a fun sensation. “Did you read the files?” he asks.

“Yes.” Before I came up here I locked them in my office safe in case a busy little Tom, Dick, or Harriet decided to do some snooping. “I’m really not going to sleep well tonight.”

“The basilisk, is found.” Boris.

“Um, no,” I admit. “It’s still in the wild. But Mike Williams said he’d let me know if they run across it. He’s cleared for OSA-III, he’s our liaison in—”

“How many traffic cameras overlooked the roundabout?” Angleton asks almost casually.

“Oh—” I sit down hard. “Oh shit. Shit.” I feel shaky, very shaky, guts doing the tango and icy chills running down the small of my back as I realise what he’s trying to tell me without saying it out loud, on the record.

“That’s why I sent you,” he murmurs, waving Andy out of the room on some prearranged errand. A moment later Boris follows him. “You’re not supposed to get yourself killed, Bob. It looks bad on your record.”

“Oh shit,” I repeat, needle stuck, sample echoing, as I realise how close to dying I may have been. And the crew of that chopper, and everyone else who’s been there since, and—

“Half an hour ago someone vandalized the number seventeen traffic camera overlooking Monk’s Road roundabout three: put a .223 bullet through the CCD enclosure. Drink your coffee, there’s a good boy, do try not to spill it everywhere.”

“One of ours.” It comes out as a statement.

“Of course.” Angleton taps the file sitting on the desk in front of him—I recognize it by the dog-ear on the second page, I put it in my office safe only ten minutes ago—and looks at me with those scary grey eyes of his. “So. The public at large being safe for the moment, tell me what you can deduce.”

“Uh.” I lick my lips, which have gone as dry as old boot leather. “Some time last night somebody let a cow into the park and used it for target practice. I don’t know much about the network topology of the MK road traffic-control cams, but my possible suspects are, in order: someone with a very peculiar brain tumour, someone with a stolen stoner weapon—like the one I qualified for under OGRE REALITY—or someone with access to whatever GAME ANDES REDSHIFT gave birth to. And, going from the questions you’re asking, if it’s GAME ANDES REDSHIFT it’s unauthorised.”

He nods, very slightly.

“We’re in deep shit then,” I say brightly and throw back the last mouthful of coffee, spoiling the effect slightly by nearly coughing my guts up immediately afterward.

“Without a depth-gauge,” he adds drily, and waits for my coughing fit to subside. “I’ve sent Andrew and Mr B down to the stacks to pull out another file for you to read. Eyes only in front of witnesses, no note-taking, escort required. While they’re signing it out I’d like you to write down in your own words everything that happened to you this morning so far. It’ll go in a sealed file along with your video evidence as a deposition in case the worst happens.”

“Oh shit.” I’m getting tired of saying this. “It’s internal?”

He nods.

“CPU business?”

He nods again, then pushes the antique portable manual typewriter toward me. “Start typing.”

“Okay.” I pick up three sheets of paper and some carbons and begin aligning their edges. “Consider me typing already.”

REPORT 5: Monday December 10th, 2001

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, December 10th, 2001

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET MAGINOT BLUE STARS, Ministry of Defense, December 10th, 2001

Abstract: This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To prevent accidental premature deployment or deliberate exploitation, the SCORPION STARE software is not actually loaded into the camera firmware. Instead, reprogrammable FPGA chips are integrated into all cameras and can be loaded with SCORPION STARE by authorised MAGINOT BLUE STARS users whenever necessary.

…

Preamble: It has been said that the US Strategic Defense Initiative Organisation’s proposed active ABM defense network will require the most complex software ever developed, characterised by a complexity metric of >100 MLOC and heavily criticized by various organisations (see footnotes [1][2][4]) as unworkable and likely to contain in excess of a thousand severity-1 bugs at initial deployment. Nevertheless, the architectural requirements of MAGINOT BLUE STARS dwarf those of the SDIO infrastructure. To provide coverage of 95 percent of the UK population we require a total of 8 million digitally networked CCTV cameras (terminals). Terminals in built-up areas may be connected via the public switched telephone network using SDSL/VHDSL, but outlying systems may use mesh network routing over 802.11a to ensure that rural areas do not provide a pool of infectious carriers for demonic possession. TCP/IP Quality of Service issues are discussed below, along with a concrete requirement for IPv6 routing and infrastructure that must be installed and supported by all Internet Service Providers no later than 2004.

There are more than ninety different CCTV architectures currently on sale in the UK, many of which are imported and cannot be fitted with FPGAs suitable for running the SCORPION STARE basilisk neural network prior to installation. Data Disclosure Orders served under the terms of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2001) serve to gain access to camera firmware, but in many regions upgrades to Level 1 MAGINOT BLUE STARS compliance is behind schedule due to noncompliance by local police forces with what are seen as unreasonable Home Office requests. Unless we can achieve a 340 percent compliance improvement by 2004, we will fail to achieve the target saturation prior to September 2007, when CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is due.

…

Installation has currently been completed only in limited areas; notably Inner London (“Ring of Steel” for counter-terrorism surveillance) and Milton Keynes (advanced next-generation MAN with total traffic management solution in place). Deployment is proceeding in order of population density and potential for catastrophic demonic takeover and exponential burn through built-up areas …

…

Recommendation: One avenue for ensuring that all civilian CCTV equipment is SCORPION STARE compatible by 2006 is to exploit an initiative of the US National Security Agency for our own ends. In a bill ostensibly sponsored by Hollywood and music industry associations (MPAA and RIAA: see also CDBTPA), the NSA is ostensibly attempting to legislate support for Digital Rights Management in all electronic equipment sold to the public. The implementation details are not currently accessible to us, but we believe this is a stalking-horse for requiring chip manufacturers to incorporate on-die FPGAs in the one million gate range, reconfigurable in software, initially laid out as DRM circuitry but reprogrammable in support of their nascent War on Un-Americanism.

If such integrated FPGAs are mandated, commercial pressures will force Far Eastern vendors to comply with regulation and we will be able to mandate incorporation of SCORPION STARE Level Two into all digital consumer electronic cameras and commercial CCTV equipment under cover of complying with our copyright protection obligations in accordance with the WIPO treaty. A suitable pretext for the rapid phased obsolescence of all Level Zero and Level One cameras can then be engineered by, for example, discrediting witness evidence from older installations in an ongoing criminal investigation.

If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals—or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link—will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

“So, what this boils down to is a Strategic Defense Initiative against an invasion by alien mind-suckers from beyond spacetime, who are expected to arrive in bulk at a set date. Am I on message so far?” I asked.

“Very approximately, yes,” said Andy.

“Okay. To deal with the perceived alien mind-sucker threat, some nameless genius has worked out that the CCTV cameras dotting our green and pleasant land can be networked together, their inputs fed into a software emulation of a basilisk’s brain, and turned into some kind of omnipresent look-to-kill death net. Even though we don’t really know how the medusa effect works, other than that it relies on some kind of weird observationally mediated quantum-tunneling effect, collapse of the wave function, yadda yadda, that makes about 1 percent of the carbon nuclei in the target body automagically turn into silicon with no apparent net energy input. That right?”

“Have a cigar, Sherlock.”

“Sorry, I only smoke when you plug me into the national grid. Shit. Okay, so it hasn’t occurred to anyone that the mass-energy of those silicon nuclei has to come from somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere in the Dungeon Dimensions … damn. But that’s not the point, is it?”

“Indeed not. When are you going to get to it?”

“As soon as my hands stop shaking. Let’s see. Rather than do this openly and risk frightening the sheeple by stationing a death ray on every street corner, our lords and masters decided they’d do it bottom-up, by legislating that all public cameras be networked, and having back doors installed in them to allow the hunter-killer basilisk brain emulators to be uploaded when the time comes. Which, let’s face it, makes excellent fiscal sense in this age of outsourcing, public-private partnerships, service charters, and the like. I mean, you can’t get business insurance if you don’t install antitheft cameras, someone’s got to watch them so you might as well outsource the service to a security company with a network operations centre, and the brain-dead music industry copyright nazis are campaigning for a law to make it mandatory to install secret government spookware in every walkman—or camera—to prevent home taping from killing Michael Jackson. Absolutely brilliant.”

“It is elegant, isn’t it? Much more subtle than honking great ballistic missile submarines. We’ve come a long way since the Cold War.”

“Yeah. Except you’re also telling me that some script kiddie has rooted you and dialed in a strike on Milton Keynes. Probably in the mistaken belief that they think they’re playing MISSILE COMMAND.”

“No comment.”

“Jesus Fucking Christ riding into town on top of a pickup truck full of DLT backup tapes—what kind of idiot do you take me for? Listen, the ball has gone up. Someone uploaded the SCORPION STARE code to a bunch of traffic cams off Monk’s Road roundabout and turned Daisy into six hundred pounds of boiled beef on the bone a la basilisk, and all you can say is no comment?”

“Listen, Bob, I think you’re taking this all too personally. I can’t comment on the Monk’s Road incident because you’re officially the tag-team investigative lead and I’m here to provide backup and support, not to second-guess you. I’m trying to be helpful, okay?”

“Sorry, sorry. I’m just a bit upset.”

“Yes, well, if it’s any consolation that goes for me, too, and for Angleton believe it or not, but ‘upset’ and fifty pence will buy you a cup of coffee and what we really need is to finger the means, motive, and murderer of Daisy the Cow in time to close the stable door. Oh, and we can rule out external penetration—the network loop to Monk’s Road is on a private backbone intranet that’s firewalled up to the eyeballs. Does that make it easier for you?”

“No shit! Listen, I happen to agree with you in principle, but I am still upset, Andy, and I want to tell you—no shit. Look, this is so not-sensible that I know I’m way the hell too late but I think the whole MAGINOT BLUE STARS idea is fucking insane, I mean, like, bull-goose barking-at-the-moon hairs-on-the-palm-of-your-hands crazy. Like atomic landmines buried under every street corner! Didn’t they know that the only unhackable computer is one that’s running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off? What did they think they were doing?”

“Defending us against CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, Bob. Which I’ll have you know is why the Russians are so dead keen to get Energiya flying again so they can launch their Polyus orbital battle stations, and why the Americans are getting so upset about the Rune of Al-Sabbah that they’re trying to build censorware into every analogue-to-digital converter on the planet.”

“Do I have CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN clearance? Or do I just have to take it on trust?”

“Take it on trust for now, I’ll try and get you cleared later in the week. Sorry about that, but this truly … look, in this instance the ends justify the means. Take it from me. Okay?”

“Shit. I need another—no, I’ve already had too much coffee. So, what am I supposed to do?”

“Well, the good news is we’ve narrowed it down a bit. You will be pleased to know that we just ordered the West Yorkshire Met’s computer crime squad to go in with hobnailed boots and take down the entire MK traffic camera network and opcentre. Official reason is a suspicion of time bombs installed by a disgruntled former employee—who is innocent, incidentally—but it lets us turn it into a Computer Misuse case and send in a reasonably clueful team. They’re about to officially call for backup from CESG, who are going to second them a purported spook from GCHQ, and that spook is going to be you. I want you to crawl all over that camera network and figure out how SCORPION STARE might have got onto it. Which is going to be easier than you think because SCORPION STARE isn’t exactly open source and there are only two authorised development teams working on it on the planet that we know of, or at least in this country, one of them is—surprise—based in Milton Keynes, and as of right this minute you have clearance to stamp all over their turf and play the Gestapo officer with our top boffin labs. Which is a power I trust you will not abuse without good reason.”

“Oh great, I always fancied myself in a long, black leather trench coat. What will Mo think?”

“She’ll think you look the part when you’re angry. Are you up for it?”

“How the fuck could I say no, when you put it that way?”

“I’m glad you understand. Now, have you got any other questions for me before we wrap this up and send the tape to the auditors?”

“Uh, yeah. One question. Why me?”

“Why—well! Hmm. I suppose because you’re already on the inside, Bob. And you’ve got a pretty unique skill mix. Something you overlook is that we don’t have many field qualified agents, and most of those we have are old school two-fisted shoot-from-the-hip-with-a-rune-of-destruction field necromancers; they don’t understand these modern Babbage engine Internet contraptions like you do. And you’ve already got experience with basilisk weapons, or did you think we issued those things like toothpaste tubes? So rather than find someone who doesn’t know as much, you just happened to be the man on the spot who knew enough and was thought … appropriate.”

“Gee, thanks. I’ll sleep a lot better tonight knowing that you couldn’t find anyone better suited to the job. Really scraping the barrel, aren’t we?”

“If only you knew … if only you knew.”

The next morning they put me on the train to Cheltenham—second class of course—to visit a large office site, which appears as a blank spot on all maps of the area, just in case the Russians haven’t noticed the farm growing satellite dishes out back. I spend a very uncomfortable half hour being checked through security by a couple of Rottweilers in blue suits who work on the assumption that anyone who is not known to be a Communist infiltrator from North Korea is a dangerously unclassified security risk. They search me and make me pee in a cup and leave my palmtop at the site security office, but for some reason they don’t ask me to surrender the small leather bag containing a mummified pigeon’s foot that I wear on a silver chain round my neck when I explain that it’s on account of my religion.

Idiots.

It is windy and rainy outside so I have no objection to being ushered into an air-conditioned meeting room on the third floor of an outlying wing, offered institutional beige coffee the same colour as the office carpet, and to spending the next four hours in a meeting with Kevin, Robin, Jane, and Phil, who explain to me in turn what a senior operations officer from GCHQ detached for field duty is expected to do in the way of maintaining security, calling on backup, reporting problems, and filling out the two hundred and seventeen different forms that senior operations officers are apparently employed to spend their time filling out. The Laundry may have a bureaucracy surfeit and a craze for ISO9000 certification, but GCHQ is even worse, with some bizarre spatchcock version of BS5720 quality assurance applied to all their procedures in an attempt to ensure that the Home Office minister can account for all available paper clips in near realtime if challenged in the House by Her Majesty’s loyal opposition. On the other hand, they’ve got a bigger budget than us and all they have to worry about is having to read other people’s email, instead of having their souls sucked out by tentacular horrors from beyond the universe.

“Oh, and you really ought to wear a tie when you’re representing us in public,” Phil says apologetically at the end of his spiel.

“And get a haircut,” Jane adds with a smile.

Bastards.

The Human Resources imps billet me in a bed and breakfast run by a genteel pair of elderly High Tory sociopaths, a Mr and Mrs MacBride. He’s bald, loafs around in slippers, and reads the Telegraph while muttering darkly about the need for capital punishment as a solution to the problem of bogus asylum seekers; she wears heavy horn-rimmed glasses and the hairdo that time forgot. The corridors are wallpapered with an exquisitely disgusting floral print and the whole place smells of mothballs, the only symptom of the twenty-first century being a cheap and nasty webcam on the hall staircase. I try not to shudder as I slouch upstairs to my room and barricade the door before settling down for the evening phone call to Mo and a game of Civ on my palmtop (which I rescued from Security on my way out.) “It could be worse,” Mo consoles me, “at least your landlord doesn’t have gill slits and greenish skin.”

The next morning I elbow my way onto an early train to London, struggle through the rush hour crush, and somehow manage to weasel my way into a seat on a train to Milton Keynes; it’s full of brightly clad German backpackers and irritated businessmen on their way to Luton airport, but I get off before there and catch a taxi to the cop shop. “There is nothing better in life than drawing on the sole of your slipper with a biro instead of going to the pub on a Saturday night,” the lead singer of Half Man Half Biscuit sings mournfully on my iPod, and I am inclined to agree, subject to the caveat that Saturday nights at the pub are functionally equivalent to damp Thursday mornings at the police station. “Is Inspector Sullivan available?” I ask at the front desk.

“Just a moment.” The moustachioed constable examines my warrant card closely, gives me a beady-eyed stare as if he expects me to break down and confess instantly to a string of unsolved burglaries, then turns and ambles into the noisy back office round the corner. I have just enough time to read the more surreal crime prevention posters for the second time (“Are your neighbours fox-hunting reptiles from the planet of the green wellies? Denounce them here, free of charge!”) when the door bangs open and a determined-looking woman in a grey suit barges in. She looks how Annie Lennox would look if she’d joined the constabulary, been glassed once or twice, and had a really dodgy curry the night before.

“Okay, who’s the joker?” she demands. “You.” A bony finger points at me. “You’re from—” she sees the warrant card “—oh shit.” Over her shoulder: “Jeffries, Jeffries, you rat bastard, you set me up! Oh, why do I bother.” Back in my direction: “You’re the spook who got me out of bed the day before yesterday after a graveyard shift. Is this your mess?”

I take a deep breath. “Mine and yours both. I’m just back down from—” I clear my throat “—and I’ve got orders to find an inspector J. Sullivan and drag him into an interview room.” Mentally crossing my fingers: “What’s the J stand for?”

“Josephine. And it’s detective inspector, while you’re about it.” She lifts the barrier. “You’d better come in then.” Josephine looks tired and annoyed. “Where’s your other card?”

“My other—oh.” I shrug. “We don’t flash them around; might be a bit of a disaster if one went missing.” Anyone who picked it up would be in breach of Section Three, at the very least. Not to mention in peril of their immortal soul.

“It’s okay, I’ve signed the Section, in blood.” She raises an eyebrow at me.

“Paragraph two?” I ask, just to be sure she’s not bluffing.

She shakes her head. “No, paragraph three.”

“Pass, friend.” And then I let her see the warrant card as it really is, the way it reaches into your head and twists things around so you want to throw up at the mere thought of questioning its validity. “Satisfied?”

She just nods: a cool customer for sure. The trouble with Section Three of the Official Secrets Act is that it’s an offense to know it exists without having signed it—in blood. So us signatories who are in theory cleared to talk about such supersecret national security issues as the Laundry’s tea trolley rota are in practice unable to broach the topic directly. We’re supposed to rely on introductions, but that breaks down rapidly in the field. It’s a bit like lesbian sheep; as ewes display their sexual arousal by standing around waiting to be mounted, it’s hard to know if somebody else is, well, you know. Cleared. “Come on,” she adds, in a marginally less hostile tone, “we can pick up a cup of coffee on the way.”

Five minutes later we’re sitting down with a notepad, a telephone, and an antique tape recorder that Smiley probably used to debrief Karla, back when men were real men and lesbian sheep were afraid. “This had better be important,” Josephine complains, clicking a frighteningly high-tech sweetener dispenser repeatedly over her black Nescafé. “I’ve got a persistent burglar, two rapes, a string of car thefts, and a phantom pisser who keeps breaking into department stores to deal with, plus a bunch of cloggies from West Yorkshire who’re running some kind of computer audit—your fault, I believe. I need to get bogged down in X-Files rubbish right now like I need a hole in my head.”

“Oh, it’s important all right. And I hope to get it off your desk as soon as possible. I’d just like to get a few things straight first.”

“Hmm. So what do you need to know? We’ve only had two flying saucer sightings and six alien abductions this year so far.” She raises one eyebrow, arms crossed and shoulders set a trifle defensively. (Who’d have thought it? Being interviewed by higher authorities makes the alpha female detective defensive.) “It’s not like I’ve got all day: I’m due in a case committee briefing at noon and I’ve got to pick up my son from school at four.”

On second thought, maybe she really is busy. “To start with, did you get any witness reports or CCTV records from the scene? And have you identified the cow, and worked out how it got there?”

“No eyewitnesses, not until three o’clock, when Vernon Thwaite was out walking his girlfriend’s toy poodle which had diarrhoea.” She pulls a face, which makes the scar on her forehead wrinkle into visibility. “If you want we can go over the team reports together. I take it that’s what pulled you in?”

“You could say that.” I dip a cheap IKEA spoon in my coffee and check cautiously after a few seconds to see if the metal’s begun to corrode. “Helicopters make me airsick. Especially after a night out when I was expecting a morning lie-in.” She almost smiles before she remembers she’s officially grumpy with me. “Okay, so no earlier reports. What else?”

“No tape,” she says, flattening her hands on the tabletop to either side of her cup and examining her nail cuticles. “Nothing. One second it’s zero zero twenty-six, the next it’s zero seven fourteen. Numbers to engrave in your heart. Dennis, our departmental geek, was most upset with MKSG—they’re the public-private partners in the regional surveillance outsourcing sector.”

“Zero zero twenty-six to zero seven fourteen,” I echo as I jot them down on my palmtop. “MKSG. Right, that’s helpful.”

“It is?” She tilts her head sideways and stares at me like I’m a fly that’s landed in her coffee.

“Yup.” I nod, then tell myself that it’d be really stupid to wind her up without good reason. “Sorry. What I can tell you is, I’m as interested in anything that happened to the cameras as the cow. If you hear anything about them—especially about them being tampered with—I’d love to know. But in the meantime—Daisy. Do you know where she came from?”

“Yes.” She doesn’t crack a smile but her shoulders unwind slightly. “Actually, she’s number two six three from Emmett-Moore Ltd, a dairy factory out near Dunstable. Or rather, she was two six three until three days ago. She was getting along a bit, so they sold her to a local slaughterhouse along with a job lot of seven other cows. I followed-up on the other seven and they’ll be showing up in your McHappy McMeal some time next month. But not Daisy. Seems a passing farmer in a Range Rover with a wagon behind it dropped by and asked if he could buy her and cart her away for his local family butcher to deal with.”

“Aha!”

“And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.” She takes a sip of her coffee, winces, and strafes it with sweeteners again. Responding on autopilot I try a mouthful of my own and burn my tongue. “Turns out that there’s no such farmer Giles of Ham Farm, Bag End, The Shire, on record. Mind you, they had a camera on their stockyard and we nailed the Range Rover. It turned up abandoned the next day on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard and it’s flagged as stolen on HOLMES2. Right now it’s sitting in the pound down the road; they smoked it for prints but it came up clean and we don’t have enough money to send a SOCO and a forensics team to do a full workup on every stolen car we run across. However, if you twist my arm and promise me a budget and to go to the mat with my boss I’ll see what I can lay on.”

“That may not be necessary: we have ways and means. But can you get someone to drive me down there? I’ll take some readings and get out of your face—except for the business with Daisy. How are you covering that?”

“Oh, we’ll find something. Right now it’s filed under ‘F’ for Fucking Fortean Freakery, but I was thinking of announcing it’s just an old animal that had been dumped illegally by a farmer who didn’t want to pay to have it slaughtered.”

“That sounds about right.” I nod slowly. “Now, I’d like to play a random word-association game with you. Okay? Ten seconds. When I say the words tell me what you think of. Right?”

She looks puzzled. “Is this—”

“Listen. Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. By the authority vested in me by the emissaries of Y’ghonzzh N’hai I have the power to bind and to release, and your tongue be tied of these matters of which we have spoken until you hear these words again: Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. Got that?”

She looks at me cross-eyed and mouths something, then looks increasingly angry until finally she gets it together to burst out with: “Hey, what is this shit?”

“Purely a precaution,” I say, and she glares at me, gobbling for a moment while I finish my coffee until she figures out that she simply can’t say a word about the subject. “Right,” I say. “Now. You’ve got my permission to announce that the cow was dumped. You have my permission to talk freely to me, but to nobody else. Anyone asks any questions, refer them to me if they won’t take no for an answer. This goes for your boss, too. Feel free to tell them that you can’t tell them, nothing more.”

“Wanker,” she hisses, and if looks could kill I’d be a small pile of smouldering ashes on the interview room floor.

“Hey, I’m under a geas, too. If I don’t spread it around my head will explode.”

I don’t know whether she believes me or not but she stops fighting it and nods tiredly. “Tell me what you want then get the hell out of my patch.”

“I want a lift to the car pound. A chance to sit behind the wheel of that Range Rover. A book of poetry, a jug of wine, a date tree, and—sorry, wrong question. Can you manage it?”

She stands up. “I’ll take you there myself,” she says tersely. We go.

I get to endure twenty-five minutes of venomous silence in the back seat of an unmarked patrol car driven by one Constable Routledge, with DI Sullivan in the front passenger seat treating me with the warmth due a serial killer, before we arrive at the pound. I’m beyond introspective self-loathing by now—you lose it fast in this line of work. Angleton will have my head for a keyring fob if I don’t take care to silence any possible leaks, and a tongue-twisting geas is more merciful than most of the other tools at my disposal—but I still feel like a shit. So it comes as a great relief to get out of the car and stretch my legs on the muddy gravel parking lot in the pouring rain.

“So where’s the car?” I ask, innocently.

Josephine ignores me. “Bill, you want to head over to Bletchley Way and pick up Dougal’s evidence bag for the Hayes case. Then come back to pick us up,” she tells the driver. To the civilian security guard: “You, we’re looking for BY 476 ERB. Came in yesterday, Range Rover. Where is it?”

The bored security goon leads us through the mud and a maze of cars with POLICE AWARE stickers glued to their windshields then gestures at a half-empty row. “That’s it?” Josephine asks, and he passes her a set of keys. “Okay, you can piss off now.” He takes one look at her face and beats a hasty retreat. I half-wish I could join him—whether she’s a detective inspector or not, and therefore meant to be behaving with the gravitas of a senior officer in public, DI Sullivan looks to be in a mood to bite the heads off chickens or Laundry field agents, given half an excuse.

“Right, that’s it,” she says, holding out the keys and shaking them at me impatiently. “You’re done, I take it, so I’ll be pushing off. Case meeting to run, mystery shopping centre pisser to track down, and so on.”

“Not so fast.” I glance round. The pound is surrounded by a high wire fence and there’s a decrepit Portakabin office out front by the gate: a camera sits on a motorised mount on a pole sticking up from the roof. “Who’s on the other end of that thing?”

“The gate guard, probably,” she says, following my finger. The camera is staring at the entrance, unmoving.

“Okay, why don’t you open up the car.” She blips the remote to unlock the door and I keep my eyes on the camera as she takes the handle and tugs. Could I be wrong? I wonder as the rain trickles down my neck. I shake myself when I notice her staring, then I pull out my palmtop, clamber up into the driver’s seat, and balance the pocket computer on the steering wheel as I tap out a series of commands. What I see makes me shake my head. Whoever stole the car may have wiped for fingerprints but they didn’t know much about paranormal concealment—they didn’t use the shroud from a suicide, or get a paranoid schizophrenic to drive. The scanner is sensitive to heavy emotional echoes, and the hands I’m looking for are the most recent ones to have chilled from fright and fear of exposure. I log everything and put it away, and I’m about to open the glove locker when something makes me glance at the main road beyond the chainlink fence and—

“Watch out! Get down!” I jump out and go for the ground. Josephine is looking around so I reach out and yank her ankles out from under her. She yells, goes down hard on her backside, and tries to kick me, then there’s a loud whump from behind me and a wave of heat like an open oven door. “Shit, fuck, shit—” I take a moment to realise the person cursing is me as I fumble at my throat for the bag and rip it open, desperately trying to grab the tiny claw and the disposable cigarette lighter at the same time. I flick the lighter wheel and right then something like a sledgehammer whacks into the inside of my right thigh.

“Bastard … !”

“Stop it—” I gasp, just as the raw smell of petrol vapour reaches me and I hear a crackling roar. I get the pigeon claw lit in a stink of burning keratin and an eerie glow, nearly shitting myself with terror, lying in a cold damp puddle, and roll over: “Don’t move!”

“Bastard! What—hey, what’s burning?”

“Don’t move,” I gasp again, holding the subminiature Hand of Glory up. The traffic camera in the road outside the fence is casting about as if it’s dropped its contact lens, but the one on the pole above the office is locked right onto the burning tires of the Range Rover. “If you let go of my hand they’ll see you and kill you oh shit—”

“Kill—what?” She stares at me, white-faced.

“You! Get under cover!” I yell across the pound, but the guy in the blue suit—the attendant—doesn’t hear me. One second he’s running across the car park as fast as his portly behind can manage; the next moment he’s tumbling forward, blackening, puffs of flame erupting from his eyes and mouth and ears, then the stumps as his arms come pinwheeling off, and the carbonized trunk slides across the ground like a grisly toboggan.

“Oh shit, oh shit!” Her expression changes from one second to the next, from disbelief to dawning horror. “We’ve got to help—”

“Listen, no! Stay down!”

She freezes in place for a full heartbeat, then another. When she opens her mouth again she’s unnaturally cool. “What’s going on?”

“The cameras,” I pant. “Listen, this is a Hand of Glory, an invisibility shield. Right now it’s all that’s keeping us alive—those cameras are running SCORPION STARE. If they see us we’re dead.”

“Are you—the car? What happened to it?”

“Tires. They’re made of carbon, rubber. SCORPION STARE works on anything with a shitload of long-chain carbon molecules in it—like tires, or cows. Makes them burn.”

“Oh my sainted aunt and holy father … “

“Hold my hand. Make skin to skin contact—not that hard. We’ve got maybe three, four minutes before this HOG burns down. Bastards, bastards. Got to get to the control shack—”

The next minute is a nightmare of stumbling—shooting pains in my knees from where I went down hard and in my thigh where Josephine tried to kick the shit out of me—soaking cold damp jeans, and roasting hot skin on my neck from the pyre that I was sitting inside only seconds ago. She holds onto my left hand like it’s a lifesaver—yes, it is, for as long as the HOG keeps burning—and we lurch and shamble toward the modular site office near the entrance as fast as we can go. “Inside,” she gasps, “it can’t see inside.”

“Yeah?” She half-drags me to the entrance and we find the door’s open, not locked. “Can we get away round the other side?”

“Don’t think so.” She points through the building. “There’s a school.”

“Oh shit.” We’re on the other side of the pound from the traffic camera in the road, but there’s another camera under the eaves of the school on the other side of the road from the steel gates out front, and it’s a good thing the kids are all in lessons because what’s going on here is every teacher’s nightmare. And we’ve got to nail it down as fast as possible, because if they ring the bell for lunch—“We’ve got to kill the power to the roofcam first,” I say. “Then we’ve got to figure a way out.”

“What’s going on? What did that?” Her lips work like a fish out of water.

I shake my head. “Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars tongue be loosed. Okay, talk. I reckon we’ve got about two, three minutes to nail this before—”

“This was all a setup?”

“I don’t know yet. Look, how do I get onto the roof?”

“Isn’t that a skylight?” she asks, pointing.

“Yeah.” Being who I am I always carry a Leatherman multitool so I whip it out and look around for a chair I can pile on top of the desk and stand on, one that doesn’t have wheels and a gas strut. “See any chairs I can—”

I’ll say this much, detective training obviously enables you to figure out how to get onto a roof fast. Josephine simply walks over to the ladder nestling in a corner between one wall and a battered filing cabinet and pulls it out. “This what you’re looking for?”

“Uh, yeah. Thanks.” She passes it to me and I fumble with it for a moment, figuring out how to set it up. Then another moment, juggling the multitool and the half-consumed pigeon’s foot and looking at the ladder dubiously.

“Give me those,” she says.

“But—”

“Listen, I’m the one who deals with idiot vandals and climbs around on pitched roofs looking for broken skylights, okay? And—” she glances at the door “—if I mess up you can phone your boss and let him know what’s happening.”

“Oh,” I mumble, then hand her the gadgets and hold the ladder steady while she swarms up it like a circus acrobat. A moment later there’s a noise like a herd of baby elephants thudding on the rooftop as she scrambles across to the camera mount. The camera may be on a moving platform but there’s a limit to how far it can depress and clearly she’s right below the azimuth platform—just as long as she isn’t visible to both the traffic camera out back and the schoolyard monitor out front. More shaking, then there’s a loud clack and the Portakabin lights go out.

A second or two later she reappears, feet first, through the opening. “Right, that should do it,” she says. “I shorted the power cable to the platform. “Hey, the lights—”

“I think you shorted a bit more than that.” I hold the ladder as she climbs down. “Now, we’ve got an immobilized one up top, that’s good. Let’s see if we can find the controller.”

A quick search of the hut reveals a bunch of fun stuff I hadn’t been expecting, like an ADSL line to the regional police IT hub, a PC running some kind of terminal emulator, and another dedicated machine with the cameras showing overlapping windows onscreen. I could kiss them; they may have outsourced the monitoring to private security firms but they’ve kept the hardware all on the same backbone network. The blinkenlights are beeping and twittering like crazy as everything’s now running on backup battery power, but that’s okay. I pull out a breakout box and scramble around under a desk until I’ve got my palmtop plugged into the network hub to sniff packets. Barely a second later it dings at me. “Oh, lovely.” So much for firewalled up to the eyeballs. I unplug and surface again, then scroll through the several hundred screenfuls of unencrypted bureaucratic computerese my network sniffer has grabbed. “That looks promising. Uh, I wouldn’t go outside just yet but I think we’re going to be all right.”

“Explain.” She’s about ten centimetres shorter than I am, but I’m suddenly aware that I’m sharing the Portakabin with an irate, wet, detective inspector who’s probably a black belt at something or other lethal and who is just about to really lose her cool: “You’ve got about ten seconds from now to tell me everything. Or I’m calling for backup and, warrant card or no, you are going in a cell until I get some answers. Capisce?”

“I surrender.” I don’t, really, but I point at my palmtop. “It’s a fair cop, guv. Look, someone’s been too clever by half here. The camera up top is basically a glorified webcam. I mean, it’s running a web server and it’s plugged into the constabulary’s intranet via broadband. Every ten seconds or so a program back at HQ polls it and grabs the latest picture, okay? That’s in addition to whatever the guy downstairs tells it to look at. Anyway, someone else just sent it an HTTP request with a honking great big file upload attached, and I don’t think your IT department is in the habit of using South Korean primary schools as proxy servers, are they? And a compromised firewall, no less. Lovely! Your cameras may have been 0wnZ0r3d by a fucking script kiddie, but they’re not as fucking smart as they think they are otherwise they’d have fucking stripped off the fucking referrer headers, wouldn’t they?” I stop talking and make sure I’ve saved the logfile somewhere secure, then for good measure I email it to myself at work.

“Right. So I know their IP address and it’s time to locate them.” It’s the work of about thirty seconds to track it to a dial-up account on one of the big national ISPs—one of the free anonymous ones. “Hmm. If you want to help, you could get me an S22 disclosure notice for the phone number behind this dial-up account. Then we can persuade the phone company to tell us the street address and go pay them a visit and ask why they killed our friend with the key ring—” My hands are shaking from the adrenalin high and I am beginning to feel angry, not just an ordinary day-to-day pissed-off feeling but the kind of true and brutal rage that demands revenge.

“Killed? Oh.” She opens the door an inch and looks outside: she looks a little grey around the gills, but she doesn’t lose it. Tough woman.

“It’s SCORPION STARE. Look, S22 data disclosure order first, it’s a fucking murder investigation now, isn’t it? Then we go visiting. But we’re going to have to make out like it’s accidental, or the press will come trampling all over us and we won’t be able to get anything done.” I write down the hostname while she gets on the mobile to head office. The first sirens start to wail even before she picks up my note and calls for medical backup. I sit there staring at the door, contemplating the mess, my mind whirling. “Tell the ambulance crew it’s a freak lightning strike,” I say as the thought takes me. “You’re already in this up to your ears, we don’t need to get anyone else involved—”

Then my phone rings.

As it happens we don’t visit any murderous hackers, but presently the car pound is fronted with white plastic scene-of-crime sheeting, a photographer and a couple of forensics guys show up, and Josephine (who has found something more urgent to obsess over than ripping me a new asshole) is busy directing their preliminary workover. I’m poring over screenfuls of tcpdump output in the control room when the same unmarked car that dropped us off here pulls up with Constable Routledge at the wheel and a very unexpected passenger in the back. I gape as he gets out of the car and walks toward the hut. “Who’s this?” demands Josephine, coming over and sticking her head in through the window.

I open the door. “Hi, boss. Boss, meet Detective Inspector Sullivan. Josephine, this is my boss—you want to come in and sit down?”

Andy nods at her distractedly: “I’m Andy. Bob, brief me.” He glances at her again as she shoves through the door and closes it behind her. “Are you—”

“She knows too much already.” I shrug. “Well?” I ask her. “This is your chance to get out.”

“Fuck that.” She glares at me, then Andy: “Two mornings ago it was a freak accident and a cow, today it’s a murder investigation—I trust you’re not planning on escallating it any further, terrorist massacres and biological weapons are a little outside my remit—and I want some answers. If you please.”

“Okay, you’ll get them,” Andy says mildly. “Start talking,” he tells me.

“Code blue called at three thirty the day before yesterday. I flew out to take a look, found a dead cow that had been zapped by SCORPION STARE—unless there’s a basilisk loose in Milton Keynes—went down to our friends in Cheltenham for briefing yesterday, stayed overnight, came up here this morning. The cow was bought from a slaughterhouse and transported to the scene in a trailer towed by a stolen car, which was later dumped and transferred to this pound. Inspector Sullivan is our force liaison—external circle two, no need to know. She brought me here and I took a patch test, and right then someone zapped the car—we were lucky to survive. One down out front. We’ve, uh, trapped a camera up top that I think will prove to have firmware loaded with SCORPION STARE, and I sniffed packets coming in from a compromised host. Police intranet, firewalled to hell and back, hacked via some vile little dweeb using a primary school web server in South Korea. We were just about to run down the intruder in meatspace and go ask some pointed questions when you arrived.” I yawn, and Andy looks at me oddly. Extreme stress sometimes does that to me, makes me tired, and I’ve been running on my nerves for most of the past few days.

“All right.” Andy scratches his chin thoughtfully. “There’s been a new development.”

“New development?” I echo.

“Yes. We received a blackmail note.” And it’s no fucking wonder that he’s looking slightly glassy-eyed—he must be in shock.

“Blackmail? What are they—”

“It came via email from an anonymous remixer on the public Internet. Whoever wrote it knows about MAGINOT BLUE STARS and wants us to know that they disapprove, especially of SCORPION STARE. No sign that they’ve got CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, though. They’re giving us three days to cancel the entire project or they’ll blow it wide open in quote the most public way imaginable unquote.”

“Shit.”

“Smelly brown stuff, yes. Angleton is displeased.” Andy shakes his head. “We tracked the message back to a dial-up host in the UK—”

I hold up a piece of paper. “This one?”

He squints at it. “I think so. We did the S22 soft-shoe shuffle but it’s no good, they used the SIM card from a prepaid mobile phone bought for cash in a supermarket in Birmingham three months ago. The best we could do was trace the caller’s location to the centre of Milton Keynes.” He glances at Josephine. “Did you impress her—”

“Listen.” She speaks quietly and with great force: “Firstly, this appears to be an investigation into murder—and now blackmail, of a government department, right?—and in case you hadn’t noticed, organising criminal investigations just happens to be my speciality. Secondly, I do not appreciate being forcibly gagged. I have signed a certain piece of paper, and the only stuff I leak is what you get when you drill holes in me. Finally, I am getting really pissed off with the runaround you’re giving me about a particularly serious incident on my turf, and if you don’t start answering my questions soon I’m going to have to arrest you for wasting police time. Now, which is it going to be?”

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Andy rolls his eyes, then says very rapidly: “By the abjuration of Dee and the name of Claude Dansey I hereby exercise subsection D paragraph sixteen clause twelve and bind you to service from now and forevermore. Right, that’s it. You’re drafted, and may whatever deity you believe in have mercy on your soul.”

“Hey. Wait.” She takes a step back. “What’s going on?” There’s a faint stink of burning sulphur in the air.

“You’ve just talked yourself into the Laundry,” I say, shaking my head. “Just try to remember I tried to keep you out of this.”

“The Laundry? What are you talking about? I thought you were from Cheltenham?” The smell of brimstone is getting stronger. “Hey, is something on fire?”

“Wrong guess,” says Andy. “Bob can explain later. For now, just remember that we work for the same people, ultimately, only we deal with a higher order of threat than everyday stuff like rogue states, terrorist nukes, and so on. Cheltenham is the cover story. Bob, the blackmailer threatened to upload SCORPION STARE to the ring of steel.”

“Oh shit.” I sit down hard on the edge of a desk. “That is so very not good that I don’t want to think about it right now.” The ring of steel is the network of surveillance cameras that were installed around the financial heart of the city of London in the late 1990s to deter terrorist bombings. “Look, did Angleton have any other—”

“Yes. He wants us to go visit Site Able right now, that’s the lead development team at the research centre behind SCORPION STARE. Um, inspector? You’re in. As I said, you’re drafted. Your boss, that would be Deputy Chief Constable Dunwoody, is about to get a memo about you from the Home Office—we’ll worry about whether you can go back to your old job afterward. As of now, this investigation is your only priority. Site Able runs out of an office unit at Kiln Farm industrial estate, covered as a UK subsidiary of an American software company: in reality they’re part of the residual unprivatised rump of DERA, uh, QinetiQ. The bunch that handles Q-projects.”

“While you’re busy wanking over your cow-burning nonsense I’ve got a ring of car thieves to—” Josephine shakes her head distractedly, sniffs suspiciously, then stops trying to fight the geas. “That smell … Why do these people at Kiln Farm need a visit?”

“Because they’re the lead team on the group who developed SCORPION STARE,” Andy explains, “and Angleton doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that our blackmailer burned a cow in Milton Keynes. He thinks they’re a bunch of locals. Bob, if you’ve got a trace that’ll be enough to narrow it down to the building—”

“Yes?” Josephine nods to herself. “But you need to find the individual responsible, and any time bombs they’ve left, and there’s a small matter of evidence.” A thought strikes her. “What happens when you catch them?”

Andy looks at me and my blood runs cold. “I think we’ll have to see about that when we find them,” I extemporise, trying to avoid telling her about the Audit Commission for the time being; she might blow her stack completely if I have to explain how they investigate malfeasance, and then I’d have to tell her that the burning smell is a foreshadowing of what happens if she is ever found guilty of disloyalty. (It normally fades a few minutes after the rite of binding, but right now it’s still strong.) “What are we waiting for?” I ask. “Let’s go!”

In the beginning there was the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA. And DERA was where HMG’s boffins hung out, and they developed cool toys like tanks with plastic armour, clunky palmtops powered by 1980s chips and rugged enough to be run over by a truck, and fetal heart monitors to help the next generation of squaddies grow up strong. And lo, in the thrusting entrepreneurial climate of the early nineties a new government came to power with a remit to bring about the triumph of true socialism by privatising the post office and air traffic control systems, and DERA didn’t stand much of a chance. Renamed QinetiQ by the same nameless marketing genius who turned the Royal Mail into Consignia and Virgin Trains into fodder for fuckedcompany-dot-com, the research agency was hung out to dry, primped and beautified, and generally prepared for sale to the highest bidder who didn’t speak with a pronounced Iraqi accent.

However …

In addition to the ordinary toys, DERA used to do development work for the Laundry. Q Division’s pedigree stretches back all the way to SOE’s wartime dirty tricks department—poison pens, boot-heel escape kits, explosive-stuffed sabotage rats, the whole nine yards of James Bond japery. Since the 1950s, Q Division has kept the Laundry in more esoteric equipment: summoning grids, basilisk guns, Turing oracles, self-tuning pentacles, self-filling beer glasses, and the like. Steadily growing weirder and more specialised by the year, Q Division is far too sensitive to sell off—unlike most of QinetiQ’s research, what they do is classified so deep you’d need a bathyscaphe to reach it. And so, while QinetiQ was being dolled up for the city catwalk, Q Division was segregated and spun off, a little stronghold in the sea of commerce that is forever civil service territory.

Detective Inspector Sullivan marches out of the site office like a blank-faced automaton and crisply orders her pet driver to take us to Site Able then to bugger off on some obscure make-work errand. She sits stiffly in the front passenger seat while Andy and I slide into the back and we proceed in silence—nobody seems to want to make small talk.

Fifteen minutes of bumbling around red routes and through trackless wastes of identical brick houses embellished with satellite dishes and raw pine fences brings us into an older part of town, where the buildings actually look different and the cycle paths are painted strips at the side of the road rather than separately planned routes. I glance around curiously, trying to spot landmarks. “Aren’t we near Bletchley Park?” I ask.

“It’s a couple of miles that way,” says our driver without taking his hands off the wheel to point. “You thinking of visiting?”

“Not just yet.” Bletchley Park was the wartime headquarters of the Ultra operation, the department that later became GCHQ—the people who built the Colossus computers, originally used for breaking Nazi codes and subsequently diverted by the Laundry for more occult purposes. Hallowed ground to us spooks; I’ve met more than one NSA liaison who wanted to visit in order to smuggle a boot heel full of gravel home. “Not until we’ve visited the UK offices of Dillinger Associates, at any rate.”

Dillinger Associates is the cover name for a satellite office of Q Division. The premises turn out to be a neoclassical brick-and-glass edifice with twee fake columns and wilted-looking ivy that’s been trained to climb the facade by dint of ruthless application of plant hormones. We pile out of the car in the courtyard between the dry fountain and the glass doors, and I surreptitiously check my PDA’s locator module for any sign of a match. Nothing. I blink and put it away in time to catch up with Andy and Josephine as they head for the bleached blonde receptionist who sits behind a high wooden counter and types constantly, as unapproachably artificial-looking as a shop window dummy.

“HelloDillingerAssociatesHowCanIHelpEwe?” She flutters her eyelashes at Andy in a bored, professional way, hands never moving away from the keyboard of the PC in front of her. There’s something odd about her, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Andy flips open his warrant card. “We’re here to see Doctor Voss.”

The receptionist’s long, red-nailed fingers stop moving and hover over the keyboard. “Really?” she asks, tonelessly, reaching under the desk.

“Hold it—” I begin to say, as Josephine takes a brisk step forward and drops a handkerchief over the webcam on top of the woman’s monitor. There’s a quiet pop and the sudden absence of noise from her PC tips me off. I sidestep the desk and make a grab for her just as Andy produces a pistol with a ridiculously fat barrel and shoots out the camera located over the door at the rear of the reception area. There’s a horrible ripping sound like a joint of meat tearing apart as the receptionist twists aside and I realise that she isn’t sitting on a chair at all—she’s joined seamlessly at the hips to a plinth that emerges from some kind of fat swivel base of age-blackened wood, bolted to the floor with heavy brass pins in the middle of a silvery metallic pentacle with wires trailing from one corner back up to the PC on the desk. She opens her mouth and I can see that her tongue is bright blue and bifurcated as she hisses.

I hit the floor shoulder first, jarringly hard, and grab for the nearest cable. Those red nails are reaching down for me as her eyes narrow to slits and she works her jaw muscles as if she’s trying to get together a wad of phlegm to spit. I grab the fattest cable and give it a pull and she screams, high-pitched and frighteningly inhuman.

What the fuck? I think, looking up as the red-painted claws stretch and expand, shedding layers of varnish as their edges grow long and sharp. Then I yank the cable again, and it comes away from the pentacle. The wooden box drools a thick, blue-tinted liquid across the carpet tiles, and the screaming stops.

“Lamia,” Andy says tersely. He strides over to the fire door that opens onto the corridor beyond, raises the curiously fat gun, and fires straight up. A purple rain drizzles back down.

“What’s going on?” says Josephine, bewildered, staring at the twitching, slowly dying receptionist.

I point my PDA at the lamia and ding it for a reading. Cool, but nonzero. “Got a partial fix,” I call to Andy. “Where’s everyone else? Isn’t this place supposed to be manned?”

“No idea.” He looks worried. “If this is what they’ve got up front the shit’s already hit the fan—Angleton wasn’t predicting overt resistance.”

The other door bangs open of a sudden and a tubby middle-aged guy in a cheap grey suit and about three day’s worth of designer stubble barges out shouting, “Who are you and what do you think you’re doing here? This is private property, not a paintball shooting gallery! It’s a disgrace—I’ll call the police!”

Josephine snaps out of her trance and steps forward. “As a matter of fact, I am the police,” she says. “What’s your name? Do you have a complaint, and if so, what is it?”

“I’m, I’m—” He focusses on the no-longer-twitching demon receptionist, lolling on top of her box like a murderous shop mannequin. He looks aghast. “Vandals! If you’ve damaged her—”

“Not as badly as she planned to damage us,” says Andy. “I think you’d better tell us who you are.” Andy presents his card, ordering it to reveal its true shape: “by the authority vested in me—”

He moves fast with the geas and ten seconds later we’ve got mister fat guy—actually Dr Martin Voss—seated on one of the uncomfortable chrome-and-leather designer sofas at one side of reception while Andy asks questions and records them on a dictaphone. Voss talks in a monotone, obviously under duress, drooling slightly from one side of his mouth, and the stench of brimstone mingles with a mouth-watering undertone of roast pork. There’s purple dye from Andy’s paintball gun spattered over anything that might conceal a camera, and he had me seal all the doorways with a roll of something like duct tape or police incident tape, except that the symbols embossed on it glow black and make your eyes water if you try to focus on them.

“Tell me your name and position at this installation.”

“Voss. John Voss. Res-research team manager.”

“How many members are there on your team? Who are they?”

“Twelve. Gary. Ted. Elinor. John. Jonathan. Abdul. Mark—”

“Stop right there. Who’s here today? And is anyone away from the office right now?” I plug away at my palmtop, going cross-eyed as I fiddle with the detector controls. But there’s no sign of any metaspectral resonance; grepping for a match to the person who stole the Range Rover draws a blank in this building. Which is frustrating because we’ve got his (I’m pretty sure it’s a he) boss right here, and there ought to be a sympathetic entanglement at work.

“Everyone’s here but Mark.” He laughs a bit, mildly hysterical. “They’re all here but Mark. Mark!”

I glance over at Detective Inspector Sullivan, who is detective inspecting the lamia. I think she’s finally beginning to grasp at a visceral level that we aren’t just some bureaucratic Whitehall paper circus trying to make her life harder. She looks frankly nauseated. The silence here is eerie, and worrying. Why haven’t the other team members come to find out what’s going on? I wonder, looking at the taped-over doors. Maybe they’ve gone out the back and are waiting for us outside. Or maybe they simply can’t come out in daylight. The smell of burning meat is getting stronger: Voss seems to be shaking, as if he’s trying not to answer Andy’s questions.

I walk over to the lamia. “It’s not human,” I explain quietly. “It never was human. It’s one of the things they specialise in. This building is defended by guards and wards, and this is just part of the security system’s front end.”

“But she, she spoke … “

“Yes, but she’s not a human being.” I point to the thick ribbon cable that connected the computer to the pentacle. “See, that’s a control interface. The computer’s there to stabilize and contain a Dho-Nha circuit that binds the Dee-space entity here. The entity itself—it’s a lamia—is locked into the box which contains, uh, other components. And it’s compelled to obey certain orders. Nothing good for unscheduled visitors.” I put my hands on the lamia’s head and work my fingers into the thick blonde hair, then tug. There’s a noise of ripping Velcro then the wig comes off to reveal the scaly scalp beneath. “See? It’s not human. It’s a lamia, a type of demon bound to act as a front-line challenge/response system for a high security installation with covert—”

I manage to get out of the line of fire as Josephine brings up her lunch all over the incredibly expensive bleached pine workstation. I can’t say I blame her. I feel a little shocky myself—it’s been a really bad morning. Then I realise that Andy is trying to get my attention. “Bob, when you’re through with grossing out the inspector I’ve got a little job for you.” He pitches his voice loudly.

“Yeah?” I ask, straightening up.

“I want you to open that door, walk along the corridor to the second room on the right—not pausing to examine any of the corpses along the way—and open it. Inside, you’ll find the main breaker board. I want you to switch the power off.”

“Didn’t I just see you splashing paint all over the CCTV cameras in the ceiling? And, uh, what’s this about corpses? Why don’t we send Doctor Voss—oh.” Voss’s eyes are shut and the stink of roast meat is getting stronger: he’s gone extremely red in the face, almost puffy, and he’s shaking slightly as if some external force is making all his muscles twitch simultaneously. It’s my turn to struggle to hang onto breakfast. “I didn’t know anyone could make themselves do that,” I hear myself say distantly.

“Neither did I,” says Andy, and that’s the most frightening thing I’ve heard today so far. “There must be a conflicted geas somewhere in his skull. I don’t think I could stop it even if—”

“Shit.” I stand up. My hand goes to my neck automatically but the pouch is empty. “No HOG.” I swallow. “Power. What happens if I don’t?”

“Voss’s pal Mark McLuhan installed a dead man’s handle. You’d know all about that. We’ve got until Voss goes into brain stem death and then every fucking camera in Milton Keynes goes live with SCORPION STARE.”

“Oh, you mean we die.” I head for the door Voss came through. “I’m looking for the service core, right?”

“Wait!” It’s Josephine, looking pale. “Can’t you go outside and cut the power there? Or phone for help?”

“Nope.” I rip the first strip of sealing tape away from the door frame. “We’re behind Tempest shielding here, and the power is routed through concrete ducts underground. This is a Q Division office, after all. If we could call in an air strike and drop a couple of BLU-114/Bs on the local power substations, that might work—” I tug at the second tape “—but these systems were designed to be survivable.” Third tape.

“Here,” calls Andy, and he chucks something cylindrical at me. I catch it one-handed, yank the last length of tape with the other hand, and do a double-take. Then I shake the cylinder, listen for the rattle of the stirrer, and pop the lid off.

“Take cover!” I call. Then I open the door, spritz the ceiling above me with green spray paint, and go to work.

I’m sitting in the lobby, guarding the lamia’s corpse with a nearly empty can of paint and trying not to fall asleep, when the OCCULUS team bangs on the door. I yawn and sidestep Voss’s blistered corpse—he looks like he’s gone a few rounds with Old Sparky—then try to remember the countersign. Ah, that’s it. I pull away a strip of tape and tug the door open and find myself staring up the snout of an H&K carbine. “Is that a gun in your hand or are you just here to have a wank?” I ask.

The gun points somewhere else in a hurry. “Hey, Sarge, it’s the spod from Amsterdam!”

“Yeah, and someone’s told you to secure the area, haven’t they? Where’s Sergeant Howe?” I ask, yawning. Daylight makes me feel better—that, and knowing that there’s backup. (I get sleepy when people stop shooting at me. Then I have nightmares. Not a good combination.)

“Over here.” They’re dressed in something not unlike Fire Service HAZMAT gear, and the wagons are painted cheerful cherry-red with luminous yellow stripes; if they weren’t armed to the teeth with automatic weapons you’d swear they were only here because somebody had phoned in a toxic chemical release warning. But the pump nozzles above the cabs aren’t there to spray water, and that lumpy thing on the back isn’t a spotlight—it’s a grenade launcher.

The inspector comes up behind me, staggering slightly in the daylight. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Here, meet Scary Spice and Sergeant Howe. Sarge, Scary, meet Detective Inspector Sullivan. Uh, the first thing you need to do is to go round the site and shoot out every closed circuit TV camera you can see—or that can see you. Got that? And webcams. And doorcams. See a camera, smash it, that’s the rule.”

“Cameras. Ri-ight.” Sergeant Howe looks mildly skeptical, but nods. “It’s definitely cameras?”

“Who are these guys?” asks Josephine.

“Artist Rifles. They work with us,” I say. Scary nods, deeply serious. “Listen, you go outside, do anything necessary to keep the local emergency services off our backs. If you need backup ask Sergeant Howe here. Sarge, she’s basically sound and she’s working for us on this. Okay?”

She doesn’t wait for confirmation, just shoves past me and heads out into the daylight, blinking and shaking her head. I carry on briefing the OCCULUS guys. “Don’t worry about anything that uses film, it’s the closed circuit TV variety that’s hostile. And, oh, try to make sure that you are never in view of more than one of ’em at a time.”

“And don’t walk on the cracks in the pavement or the bears will get us, check.” Howe turns to Scary Spice: “Okay, you heard the man. Let’s do it.” He glances at me. “Anything inside?”

“We’re taking care of it,” I say. “If we need help we’ll ask.”

“Check.” Scary is muttering into his throat mike and fake firemen with entirely authentic fire axes are walking around the bushes along the side of the building as if searching for signs of combustion. “Okay, we’ll be out here.”

“Is Angleton in the loop? Or the captain?”

“Your boss is on his way out here by chopper. Ours is on medical leave. You need to escallate, I’ll get you the lieutenant.”

“Okay.” I duck back into the reception area then nerve myself to go back into the development pool at the rear of the building, below the offices and above the labs.

Site Able is a small departmental satellite office, small for security reasons: ten systems engineers, a couple of manager dogsbodies, and a security officer. Most of them are right here right now, and they’re not going anywhere. I walk around the service core in the dim glow of the emergency light, bypassing splashes of green paint that look black in the red glow. The octagonal developer pool at the back is also dimly illuminated—there are no windows, and the doors are triple-sealed with rubber gaskets impregnated with fine copper mesh—and some of the partitions have been blown over. The whole place is ankle deep in white mist left over from the halon dump system that went off when the first bodies exploded—it’s a good thing the air conditioning continued to run or the place would be a gas trap. The webcams are all where I left them, in a trash can at the foot of the spiral staircase up to level one, cables severed with my multitool just to make sure nobody tries to plug them back in again.

The victims—well, I have to step over one of them to get up the staircase. It’s pretty gross but I’ve seen dead bodies before, including burn cases, and at least this was fast. But I don’t think I’m going to forget the smell in a hurry. In fact, I think I’m going to have nightmares about it tonight, and maybe get drunk and cry on Mo’s shoulder several times over the next few weeks until I’ve got it out of my system. But for now, I shove it aside and step over them. Got to keep moving, that’s the main thing—unless I want more of them on my conscience.

At the top of the staircase there’s a narrow corridor and partitioned offices, also lit by the emergency lights. I follow the sound of keyclicks to Voss’s office, the door of which is ajar. Potted cheese plants wilting in the artificial light, puke-brown antistatic carpet, ministry-issue desks—nobody can accuse Q Division’s brass of living high on the hog. Andy’s sitting in front of Voss’s laptop, tapping away with a strange expression on his face. “OCCULUS is in place,” I report. “Found anything interesting?”

Andy points at the screen. “We’re in the wrong fucking town,” he says mildly.

I circle the desk and lean over his shoulder. “Oh shit.”

“You can say that again if you like.” It’s an email Cc’d to Voss, sent over our intranet to a Mike McLuhan. Subject: meeting. Sender: Harriet.

“Oh shit. Twice over. Something stinks. Hey, I was supposed to be in a meeting with her today,” I say.

“A meeting?” Andy looks up, worried.

“Yeah. Bridget got a hair up her ass about running a BSA-authorised software audit on the office, the usual sort of make-work. Don’t know that it’s got anything to do with this, though.”

“A software audit? Didn’t she know Licencing and Compliance handles that on a blanket department-wide basis? We were updated on it about a year ago.”

“We were—” I sit down heavily on the cheap plastic visitor’s chair “—what are the chances this McLuhan guy put the idea into Harriet’s mind in the first place? What are the chances it isn’t connected?”

“McLuhan. The medium is the message. SCORPION STARE. Why do I have a bad feeling about this?” Andy sends me a worried look.

“‘Nother possibility, boss-man. What if it’s an internal power play? The software audit’s a cover, Purloined Letter style, hiding something fishy in plain sight where nobody will look at it twice until it’s too late.”

“Nonsense, Bridget’s not clever enough to blow a project wide open just to discredit—” His eyes go wide.

“Are you sure of that? I mean, really and truly sure? Bet-your-life sure?”

“But the body count!” He’s shaking his head in disbelief.

“So it was all a prank and it was meant to begin and end with Daisy, but it got a bit out of control, didn’t it? These things happen. You told me the town police camera network’s capable of end-to-end tracking and zone hand-off, didn’t you? My guess is someone in this office—Voss, maybe—followed me to the car pound and realised we’d found the vehicle McLuhan used to boost Daisy. Stupid wankers, if they’d used one of their own motors we’d not be any the wiser, but they tried to use a stolen one as a cutout. So they panicked and dumped SCORPION STARE into the pound, and it didn’t work, so they panicked some more and McLuhan panicked even more—bet you he’s the go-between, or even the guy behind it. What is he, senior esoteric officer? Deputy site manager? He’s in London so he planted the crazy blackmail threat then brought down the hammer on his own coworkers. Bet you he’s a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers—and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it’s to defend his position.”

“Damn,” Andy says mildly as he stands up. “Okay, so. Internal politics, stupid bloody prank organised to show up Angleton, they use idiots to run it so your cop finds the trail, then the lunatic in chief cuts loose and starts killing people. Is that your story?”

“Yup.” I nod like my neck’s a spring. “And right now they’re back at the Laundry doing who the fuck knows what—”

“We’ve got to get McLuhan nailed down fast, before he decides the best way to cover his tracks is to take out head office. And us.” He smiles reassuringly. “It’ll be okay, Angleton’s on his way in. You haven’t seen him in action before, have you?”

Picture a light industrial/office estate in the middle of anytown with four cherry-red fire pumps drawn up, men in HAZMAT gear combing the brush, a couple of police cars with flashing light bars drawn up across the road leading into the cul-de-sac to deter casual rubberneckers. Troops disguised as firemen are systematically shooting out every one of the security cameras on the estate with their silenced carbines. Others, wearing police or fire service uniforms, are taking up stations in front of every building—occupied or otherwise—to keep the people inside out of trouble.

Just another day at the office, folks, nothing to see here, walk on by.

Well, maybe not. Here comes a honking great helicopter—the Twin Squirrel from the Met’s ASU that I was in the other night, only it looks a lot bigger and scarier when seen in full daylight as it settles in on the car park, leaves and debris blowing out from under the thundering rotors.

The chopper is still rocking on its skids when one of the back doors opens and Angleton jumps down, stumbling slightly—he’s no spring chicken—then collects himself and strides toward us, clutching a briefcase. “Speak,” he tells me, voice barely raised to cover the rush of slowing rotors.

“Problem, boss.” I point to the building: “Andy’s still inside confirming the worst but it looks like it started as a fucking stupid interdepartmental prank; it went bad, and now one of the perps has wigged out and gone postal.”

“A prank.” He turns those icy blue peepers on me and just for a fraction of a second I’m not being stared at by a sixty-something skinny bald guy in a badly fitting suit, but by a walking skeleton with the radioactive fires of hell burning balefully in his eye sockets. “You’d better take me to see Andrew. Fill me in on the way.”

I’m stumbling over my tongue and hurrying to keep up with Angleton when we make it to the front desk, where Andy’s busy giving the OCCULUS folks cleanup directions and tips for what to do with the broken lamia and the summoning altars in the basement. “Who’s—oh, it’s you. About time.” He grins. “Who’s holding the fort?”

“I left Boris in charge,” Angleton says mildly, not taking exception at Andy’s brusque manner. “How bad is it?”

“Bad.” Andy’s cheek twitches, which is a bad sign: all his confidence seems to have fled now that Angleton’s arrived. “We need to—damn.”

“Take your time,” Angleton soothes him. “I’m not going to eat you.” Which is when I realise just how scared I am, and if I’m half out of my tree what does that say about Andy? I’ll give Angleton this much, he knows when not to push his subordinates too hard. Andy takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, then tries again.

“We’ve got two loose ends: Mark McLuhan, and a John Doe. McLuhan worked here as senior esoteric officer, basically an oversight role. He also did a bunch of other stuff for Q Division that took him down to Dansey House in a liaison capacity. I can’t believe how badly we’ve slipped up on our vetting process—”

“Take your time,” Angleton interrupts, this time with a slight edge to his voice.

“Sorry, sorry. Bob’s been putting it together.” A nod in my direction. “McLuhan is working with a John Doe inside the Laundry to make us look bad via a selective disclosure leak—basically one that was intended to be written off as bad-ass forteana, nothing for anyone but the black helicopter crowd to pay any attention to, except that it would set you up. I’ve found some not very good email from Bridget inviting McLuhan down to headquarters, some pretext to do with a software audit. Really fucking stupid stuff that Bob can do the legwork on later. But what I really think is happening is, Bridget arranged this to make you look bad in support of a power play in front of the director’s office.”

Angleton turns to me: “Phone head office. Ask for Boris. Tell him to arrest McLuhan. Tell him, SHRINKWRAP. And MARMOSET.” I raise an eyebrow. “Now, lad!”

Ah, the warm fuzzies of decisive action. I head for the lamia’s desk and pick up the phone and dial 666; behind me Andy is telling Angleton something in a low voice.

“Switchboard?” I ask the sheet of white noise. “I want Boris. Now.” The Enochian metagrammar parsers do their thing and the damned souls or enchained demons or whatever on switchboard hiss louder then connect the circuit. I hear another ring tone. Then a familiar voice.

“Hello, Capital Laundry Services, system support department. Who are you wanting to talk to?”

Oh shit. “Hello, Harriet,” I say, struggling to sound calm and collected. Getting Bridget’s imp at this juncture is not a good sign, especially as she and Boris are renowned for their mutual loathing. “This is a red phone call. Is Boris about?”

“Oh-ho, Robert! I was wondering where you were. Are you trying to pull a sickie again?”

“No, I’m not,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I need to talk to Boris urgently, Harriet, is he around?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly say. That would be disclosing information prejudicial to the good running of the department over a public network connection, and I couldn’t possibly encourage you to do that when you can bloody well show your face in the office for the meeting we scheduled the day before yesterday, remember that?”

I feel as if my guts have turned to ice. “Which meeting?” I ask.

“The software audit, remember? You never read the agenda for meetings. If you did, you might have taken an interest in the any other business … Where are you calling from, Bob? Anyone would think you didn’t work here … “

“I want to talk to Boris. Right now.” The graunching noise in the background is my jaw clenching. “It’s urgent, Harriet. To do with the code blue the other day. Now you can get him right now or you can regret it later, which is your choice?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” she says in what I can only describe as a gloating tone of voice. “After missing the meeting, you and your precious Counter-Possession Unit will be divisional history, and you’ll have only yourselves to blame! Goodbye.” And the bitch hangs up on me.

I look round and see both Andy and Angleton staring at me. “She hung up,” I say stupidly. “Fucking Harriet has a diversion on Boris’s line. It’s a setup. Something about making an end run around the CPU.”

“Then we shall have to attend this meeting in person,” Angleton says, briskly marching toward the front doors, which bend aside to get out of his way. “Follow me!”

We proceed directly to the helicopter, which has kept its engines idling while we’ve been inside. It’s only taken, what? Three or four minutes since Angleton arrived? I see another figure heading toward us across the car park—a figure in a grey trouser suit, slightly stained, a wild look in her eyes. “Hey, you!” she shouts. “I want some answers!”

Angleton turns to me. “Yours?” I nod. He beckons to her imperiously. “Come with us,” he calls, raising his voice over the whine of gathering turbines. Past her shoulder I see one of the fake firemen lowering a kit-bag that had been, purely coincidentally, pointed at DI Sullivan’s back. “This bit I always dislike,” he adds in a low monotone, his face set in a grim expression of disapproval. “The fewer lives we warp, the better.”

I half-consider asking him to explain what he means, but he’s already climbing into the rear compartment of the chopper and Andy is following him. I give Josephine a hand up as the blades overhead begin to turn and the engines rise in a full-throated bellowing duet. I get my headset on in time to hear Angleton’s orders: “Back to London, and don’t spare the horses.”

The Laundry is infamous for its grotesque excesses in the name of accounting; budgetary infractions are punished like war crimes, and mere missing paper clips can bring the wrath of dead alien gods down on your head. But when Angleton says don’t spare the horses he sends us screaming across the countryside at a hundred and forty miles per hour, burning aviation fuel by the ton and getting ATC to clear lower priority traffic out of our way—and all because he doesn’t want to be late for a meeting. There’s a police car waiting for us at the pad, and we cut through the chaotic London traffic incredibly fast, almost making it into third gear at times.

“McLuhan’s got SCORPION STARE,” I tell Angleton round the curve of Andy’s shoulder. “And headquarters’s security cams are all wired. If he primes them before we get back there, we could find a lockout—or worse. It all depends on what Harriet and her boss have been planning.”

“We will just have to see.” Angleton nods very slightly, his facial expression rigid. “Do you still have your lucky charm?”

“Had to use it.” I’d shrug, if there was more room. “What do you think Bridget’s up to?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment.” I’d take Angleton’s dismissal as a put-down, but he points his chin at the man in the driver’s seat. “When we get there, Bob, I want you to go in through the warehouse door and wake the caretaker. You have your mobile telephone?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say, hoping like hell that the battery hasn’t run down.

“Good. Andrew. You and I will enter through the front door. Bob, set your telephone to vibrate. When you receive a message from me, you will know it is time to have the janitor switch off the main electrical power. And the backup power.”

“Oops.” I lick my suddenly dry lips, thinking of all the electrical containment pentacles in the basement and all the computers plugged into the filtered and secured circuit on the other floors. “All hell’s going to break loose if I do that.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” The bastard smiles, and despite all the horrible sights I’ve seen today so far, I hope most of all that I never see it again before the day I die.

“Hey, what about me?” Angleton glances at the front seat with a momentary flash of irritation. Josephine stares right back, clearly angry and struggling to control it. “I’m your liaison officer for North Buckinghamshire,” she says, “and I’d really like to know who I’m liaising with, especially as you seem to have left a few bodies on my manor that I’m going to have to bury, and this jerk—” she means me, I am distraught! Oh, the ignominy! “—promised me you’d have the answers.”

Angleton composes himself. “There are no answers, madam, only further questions,” he says, and just for a second he sounds like a pious wanker of a vicar going through the motions of comforting the bereaved. “And if you want the answers you’ll have to go through the jerk’s filing cabinet.” Bastard. Then there’s a flashing sardonic grin, dry as the desert sands in June: “Do you want to help prevent any, ah, recurrence of what you saw an hour ago? If so, you may accompany the jerk and attempt to keep him from dying.” He reaches out a hand and drops a ragged slip of paper over her shoulder. “You’ll need this.”

Provisional warrant card, my oh my. Josephine mutters something unkind about his ancestry, barnyard animals, and lengths of rubber hose. I pretend not to hear because we’re about three minutes out, stuck behind a slow-moving but gregarious herd of red double-decker buses, and I’m trying to remember the way to the janitor’s office in the Laundry main unit basement and whether there’s anything I’m likely to trip over in the dark.

“Excuse me for asking, but how many corpses do you usually run into in the course of your job?” I ask.

“Too many, since you showed up.” We turn the street corner into a brick-walled alley crowded by wheelie bins and smelling of vagrant piss. “But since you ask, I’m a detective inspector. You get to see lots of vile stuff on the beat.”

Something in her expression tells me I’m on dangerous ground here, but I persist: “Well, this is the Laundry. It’s our job to deal with seven shades of vile shit so that people like you don’t have to.” I take a deep breath. “And before we go in I figured I should warn you that you’re going to think Fred and Rosemary West work for us, and Harold Shipman’s the medical officer.” At this point she goes slightly pale—the Demon DIYers and Doctor Death are the acme of British serial killerdom after all—but she doesn’t flinch.

“And you’re the good guys?”

“Sometimes I have my doubts,” I sigh.

“Well, join the club.” I have a feeling she’s going to make it, if she lives through the next hour.

“Enough bullshit. This is the street level entrance to the facilities block under Headquarters Building One. You saw what those fuckers did with the cameras at the car pound and Site Able. If my guess is straight, they’re going to do it all over again here—or worse. From here there’s a secure line to several of the Met’s offices, including various borough-level control systems, such as the Camden Town control centre. SCORPION STARE isn’t ready for nationwide deployment—”

“What the hell would justify that?” she demands, eyes wide.

“You do not have clearance for that information.” Amazing how easily the phrase trips off the tongue. “Besides, it’d give you nightmares. But you’re the one who mentioned hell, and as I was saying—” I stop, with an overflowing dumpster between us and the anonymous doorway “—our pet lunatic, who killed all those folks at Dillinger Associates and who is now in a committee meeting upstairs, could conceivably upload bits of SCORPION STARE to the various camera control centres. Which is why we are going to stop him, by bringing down the intranet backbone cable in and out of the Laundry’s headquarters. Which would be easy if this was a bog-standard government office, but a little harder in reality because the Laundry has guards, and some of those guards are very special, and some of those very special guards will try to stop us by eating us alive.”

“Eating. Us.” Josephine is looking a little glassy. “Did I tell you that I don’t do headhunters? That’s Recruitment’s job.”

“Look,” I say gently, “have you ever seen Night of the Living Dead? It’s really not all that different—except that I’ve got permission to be here, and you’ve got a temporary warrant card too, so we should be all right.” A thought strikes me. “You’re a cop. Have you been through firearms training?”

Click-clack. “Yes,” she says drily. “Next question?”

“Great! If you’d just take that away from my nose—that’s better—it won’t work on the guards. Sorry, but they’re already, uh, metabolically challenged. However, it will work very nicely on the CCTV cameras. Which—”

“Okay, I get the picture. We go in. We stay out of the frame unless we want to die.” She makes the pistol vanish inside her jacket and looks at me askance—for the first time since the car pound with something other than irritation or dislike. Probably wondering why I didn’t flinch. (Obvious, really: compared with what’s waiting for us inside a little intracranial air conditioning is a relatively painless way to go, and besides, if she was seriously pissed at me she could have gotten me alone in a nice soundproofed cell back in her manor with a pair of size twelve boots and their occupants.) “We’re going to go in there and you’re going to talk our way past the zombies while I shoot out all the cameras, right?”

“Right. And then I’m going to try to figure out how to take down the primary switchgear, the backup substation, the diesel generator, and the batteries for the telephone switch and the protected computer ring main all at the same time so nobody twigs until it’s too late. While fending off anyone who tries to stop us. Clear?”

“As mud.” She stares at me. “I always wanted to be on TV, but not quite this way.”

“Yeah, well.” I glance up the side of the building, which is windowless as far as the third floor (and then the windows front onto empty rooms three feet deep, just to give the appearance of occupation). “I’d rather call in an air strike on the power station but there’s a hospital two blocks that way and an old folks’ home on the other side … you ready?”

She nods. “Okay.” And I take a step round the wheelie bin and knock on the door.

The door is a featureless blue slab of paint. As soon as I touch it, it swings open—no creaking here, did you think this was a Hammer horror flick?—to reveal a small, dusty room with a dry powder fire extinguisher bolted to one wall and another door opposite. “Wait,” I say, and take the spray paint can out of my pocket. “Okay, come on in. Keep your warrant note handy.”

She jumps when the door closes automatically with a faint hiss, and I swallow to make my ears pop—it only looks like a cheap fire door from the outside. “Okay, here’s the fun part.” I give the inner door a quick scan with a utility on my palmtop and it comes up blank, so I put my hand on the grab-bar and pull. This is the moment of truth; if the shit has truly hit the fan already the entire building will be locked down tighter than a nuclear bunker, and the thaumaturgic equivalent of a three-phase six-hundred-volt bearer will be running through all the barred portals. But I get to keep on breathing, and the door swings open on a dark corridor leading past shut storeroom doors to a dingy wooden staircase. And that’s all it is—there’s nothing in here to confuse an accidental burglar who makes it in past the wards in hope of finding some office supplies to filch. All the really classified stuff is either ten storeys underground or on the other side of the cellar walls. Twitching in the darkness.

“I don’t see any zombies,” Josephine says edgily, crowding up behind me in the gloom.

“That’s because they’re—” I freeze and bring up the dry powder extinguisher. “Have you got a pocket mirror?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

“Hold on.” I hear a dry click, and then she passes me something like a toothbrush fucking a contact lens. “Will this do?”

“Oh wow, I didn’t know you were a dentist.” It’s on a goddamn telescoping wand almost half a metre long. I lean forward and gingerly stretch the angled mirror so I can view the stairwell.

“It’s for checking the undersides of cars for bombs—or cut brake pipes. You never know what the little fuckers in the school playground will do while you’re talking to the headmistress.”

Gulp. “Well, I guess this is a suitable alternative use.”

I don’t see any cameras up there so I retract the mirror and I’m about to set foot on the stairs when she says, “You missed one.”

“Huh … ?”

She points. It’s about waist level, the size of a doorknob, embedded in the dark wooden wainscoting, and it’s pointing up the stairs. “Shit, you’re right.” And there’s something odd about it. I slide the mirror closer for an oblique look and dry-swallow. “There are two lenses. Oh, tricky.”

I pull out my multitool and begin digging them out of the wall. It’s coax cable, just like the doctor ordered. There’s no obvious evidence of live SCORPION STARE, but my hands are still clammy and my heart is in my mouth as I realise how close I came to walking in front of it. How small can they make CCTV cameras, anyway? I keep seeing smaller and smaller ones …

“Better move fast,” she comments.

“Why?”

“Because you’ve just told them you’re coming.”

“Oh. Okay.” We climb the staircase in bursts, stopping before the next landing to check for more basilisk bugs. Josephine spots one, and so do I—I tag them with the mostly empty can of paint, then she blasts their lenses from behind and underneath, trying not to breathe the fumes in before we move past them. There’s an unnaturally creaky floorboard, too, just for yucks. But we make it to the ground floor landing alive, and I just have time to realise how badly we’ve fucked up when the lights come up and the night watchmen come out from either side.

“Ah, Bob! Decided to visit the office for once, have we?”

It’s Harriet, looking slightly demented in a black pin-striped suit and clutching a glass of what looks like fizzy white wine.

“Where the fuck is everyone else?” I demand, looking round. At this time of day the place should be heaving with office bodies. But all I see here is Harriet—and three or four silently leaning night watchmen in their grey ministry suits and hangdog expressions, luminous worms of light glowing in their eyes.

“I do believe we called the monthly fire drill a few hours ahead of schedule.” Harriet smirks. “Then we locked the doors. It’s quite simple, you know.”

Fred from Accounting lurches sideways and peers at me over her shoulder. He’s been dead for months: normally I’d say this was something of an improvement, but right now he’s drooling like it’s past his teatime and I’m on the canteen menu.

“Who’s that?” asks Josephine.

“Who? Oh, one of them’s a shambling undead bureaucrat and the other one used to work in accounts before he had a little accident with a summoning.” I bare my teeth at Harriet. “The game’s up.”

“I don’t think so.” She’s just standing there, looking supercillious and slightly triumphant behind her bodyguard of zombies. “Actually the boot is on the other foot. You’re late and you’re out of a job, Robert. The Counter-Possession Unit is being liquidated—that old fossil Angleton isn’t needed anymore, once we get the benefits of panopticon surveillance combined with look-to-kill technology and rolled out on a departmental basis. In fact, you’re just in time to clear your desk.” She grins, horribly. “Stupid little boy, I’m sure they can find a use for you below stairs.”

“You’ve been talking to our friend Mr McLuhan, haven’t you?” I ask desperately, trying to keep her talking—I really don’t want the night watchmen to carry me away. “Is he upstairs?”

“If so, you probably need to know that I intend to arrest him. Twelve counts of murder and attempted murder, in case you were wondering.” I almost look round, but manage to resist the urge: Josephine’s voice is brittle but controlled. “Police.”

“Wrong jurisdiction, dear,” Harriet says consolingly. “And I do believe our idiot tearaway here has got you on the wrong message. That will never do.” She snaps her fingers. “Take the woman, detain the man.”

“Stop—” I begin. The zombies step forward, lurching jerkily, and then all hell breaks loose about twenty centimetres from my right ear. Zombies make excellent night watchmen and it takes a lot to knock one down, but they’re not bulletproof, and Josephine unloads her magazine two rounds at a time. I’m dazzled by the flash and my head feels as if someone is whacking me on the ear with a shovel—bits of meat and unspeakable ripped stuff go flying, but precious little blood, and they keep coming.

“When you’ve quite finished,” Harriet hisses, and snaps her fingers at Josephine: the zombies pause for a moment then close in, as their mistress backs toward the staircase up to the first floor.

“Quick, down the back corridor there!” I gasp, pointing to my left.

“The—what?”

“Quick!”

I dash along the corridor, tugging Josephine’s arm until I feel her running with me. I pull my warrant card and yell, “Open sesame!” ahead and doors slam open to either side—including the broom closets and ductwork access points. “In here!” I dive in to one side and Josephine piles in after me and I yank at the door—“Close, damn you, fuck, close sesame!” and it slams shut with the hardscrabble of bony fingertips on the outside.

“Got a light?” I ask.

“Naah, I don’t smoke. But I’ve got a torch somewhere—”

The scrabbling’s getting louder. “I don’t want to hurry you or anything, but—” And lo, there is light.

We’re standing at the bottom of a shallow shaft with cable runs vanishing above us into the gloom. Josephine looks frantic. “They didn’t drop! I shot them and they didn’t drop!”

“Don’t sweat it, they’re run by remote control.” Maybe now is not the time to explain about six-node summoning points, the Vohlman exercise, and the minutiae of raising and binding the dead: they’re knocking on the door and they want in. But look, here’s something even more interesting. “Hey, I see CAT-5 cabling. Pass me your torch?”

“This isn’t the time to go all geeky on me, nerd-boy. Or are you looking for roaches?”

“Just fucking do it, I’ll explain later, okay?” Harriet really got to me; it’s been a long day and I told myself ages ago that if I ever heard another fucking lecture about timekeeping from her I’d go postal.

“Bingo.” It is CAT-5, and there’s an even more interesting cable running off to one side that looks like a DS-3. I whip out my multitool and begin working on the junction box. The scrabbling’s become insistent by the time I’ve uncovered the wires, but what the fuck. Who was it who said, When they think you’re technical, go crude? I grab a handful of network cables and yank, hard. Then I grab another handful. Then, having disconnected the main trunk line—mission accomplished—I take another moment to think.

“Bob, have you got a plan?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Then think faster, they’re about to come through the door—”

Which is when I remember my mobile phone and decide to make a last-ditch attempt. I speed-dial Bridget’s office extension—and Angleton picks up after two rings. Bastard.

“Ah, Bob!” He sounds positively avuncular. “Where are you? Did you manage to shut down the Internet?”

I don’t have time to correct him. Besides, Josephine is reloading her cannon and I think she’s going to try a really horrible pun if I don’t produce a solution PDQ. “Boss, run McLuhan’s SCORPION STARE tool and upload the firmware to all the motion-tracking cameras on the ground floor east wing loop right now.”

“What? I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”

I take a deep breath. “She’s subverted the night watchmen. Everybody else is out of the building. Do it now or I’m switching to a diet of fresh brains.”

“If you say so,” he agrees, with the manner of an indulgent uncle talking to a tearaway schoolboy, then hangs up.

There’s a splintering crash and a hand rams through the door right between us and embeds itself in the wall opposite. “Oh shit,” I have time to say as the hand withdraws. Then a bolt of lightning goes off about two feet outside the door, roughly simultaneous with a sizzling crash and a wave of heat. We cower in the back of the cupboard, terrified of fire, until after what seems like an eternity the sprinklers come on.

“Is it safe yet?” she asks—at least I think that’s what she says, my ears are still ringing.

“One way to find out.” I take the broken casing from the network junction box and chuck it through the hole in the door. When it doesn’t explode I gingerly push the door open. The ringing is louder; it’s my phone. I pull it wearily out of my pocket and hunch over it to keep it dry, leaning against the wall of the corridor to stay as far away from the blackened zombie corpses as I can. “Who’s there?”

“Your manager.” He sounds merely amused this time. “What a sorry shower you are! Come on up to Mahogany Row and dry off, both of you—the director has a personal bathroom, I think you’ve earned it.”

“Uh. Harriet? Bridget? McLuhan?”

“Taken care of,” he says complacently, and I shiver convulsively as the water reaches gelid tentacles down my spine and tickles my balls like a drowned lover.

“Okay. We’ll be right up.” I glance back at the smashed-in utility cupboard and Josephine smiles at me like a frightened feral rat, all sharp teeth and savagery and shining .38 automatic. “We’re safe now,” I say, as reassuringly as possible. “I think we won … “

The journey to Angleton’s lair takes us up and along—he normally works out of a gloomy basement on the other side of the hollowed-out block of prime London real estate that is occupied by the Laundry, but this time he’s ensconced in the director’s suite on the abandoned top floor of the north wing.

The north wing is still dry. Over there, people are still at work, oblivious to the charred zombies lying on the scorched, soaked, thaumaturgically saturated wing next door. We catch a few odd stares—myself, soaked and battered in my outdoors gear, DI Sullivan in the wreckage of an expensive grey suit, oversized handgun clenched in a death grip at her side—but wisely or otherwise, nobody asks me to fix the Internet or demands to know why we’re tracking muddy water through Human Resources.

By the time we reach the thick green carpet and dusty quietude of the director’s suite Josephine’s eyes are wide but she’s stopped shaking. “You’ve got lots of questions,” I manage to say. “Try to save them for later. I’ll tell you everything I know and you’re cleared for, once I’ve had time to phone my fiancée.”

“I’ve got a husband and a nine year old son, did you think of that before you dragged me into this insane nightmare? Sorry. I know you didn’t mean to. It’s just that shooting up zombies and being zapped by basilisks makes me a little upset. Nerves.”

“I know. Just try not to wave them in front of Angleton, okay?”

“Who is Angleton, anyway? Who does he think he is?”

I pause before the office door. “If I knew that, I’m not sure I’d be allowed to tell you.” I knock three times.

“Enter.” Andy opens the door for us. Angleton is sitting in the director’s chair, playing with something in the middle of the huge expanse of oak desk that looks as if it dates to the 1930s. (There’s a map on the wall behind him, and a quarter of it is pink.) “Ah, Mister Howard, Detective Inspector. So good of you to come.”

I peer closer. Clack. Clack. Clack. “A Newton’s cradle; how 1970s.”

“You could say that.” He smiles thinly. The balls bouncing back and forth between the arms of the executive toy aren’t chromed, rather they appear to be textured: pale brown on one side, dark or blonde and furry on the other. And bumpy, disturbingly bumpy …

I take a deep breath. “Harriet was waiting for us. Said we were too late and the Counter-Possession Unit was being disbanded.”

Clack. Clack.

“Yes, she would say that, wouldn’t she.”

Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Finally I can’t stand it anymore. “Well?” I demand.

“A fellow I used to know, his name was Ulyanov, once said something rather profound” Angleton looks like the cat that’s swallowed the canary—and the feet are sticking out of the side of his mouth; he wants me to know this, whatever it is. “Let your enemies sell you enough rope to hang them with.”

“Uh, wasn’t that Lenin?” I ask.

A flicker of mild irritation crosses his face. “This was before he took that name,” he says quietly. Clack. Clack. Clack. He flicks the balls to set them banging again and I suddenly realise what they are and feel quite sick. No indeed, Bridget and Harriet—and Bridget’s predecessor, and the mysterious Mr McLuhan—won’t be troubling me again. (Except in my nightmares about this office, visions of my own shrunken head winding up in one of the director’s executive toys, skull clattering away eternally in a scream that nobody can hear anymore … ) “Bridget’s been plotting a boardroom coup for a long time, Robert. Probably since before you joined the Laundry—or were conscripted.” He spares Josephine a long, appraising look. “She suborned Harriet, bribed McLuhan, installed her own corrupt geas on Voss. Partners in crime, intending to expose me as an incompetent and a possible security leak before the Board of Auditors, I suppose—that’s usually how they plan it. I guessed this was going on, but I needed firm evidence. You supplied it. Unfortunately, Bridget was none too stable; when she realised that I knew, she ordered Voss to remove the witnesses then summoned McLuhan and proceeded with her palace coup d’état. Equally unfortunately for her, she failed to correctly establish who my line manager was before she attempted to go over my head to have me removed.” He taps the sign on the front of the desk: PRIVATE SECRETARY. Keeper of the secrets. Whose secrets?

“Matrix management,” I finally say, the lightbulb coming on above my head at last. “The Laundry runs on matrix management. She saw you on the org chart as head of the Counter-Possession Unit, not as private secretary to … “ So that’s how come he’s got the free run of the director’s office!

Josephine is aghast. “You call this a government department?”

“Worse things happen in parliament every day of the year, my dear.” Now that the proximate threat is over, Angleton looks remarkably imperturbable; right now I doubt he’d turn her into a frog even if she started yelling at him. “Besides, you are aware of the maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Here we deal every day of the week with power sufficient to destroy your mind. Even worse, we cannot submit to public oversight—it’s far too dangerous, like giving atomic weapons to three-year-olds. Ask Robert to tell you what he did to attract our attention later, if you like.” I’m still dripping and cold, but I can feel my ears flush.

He focusses on her some more. “We can reinforce the geas and release you,” he adds quietly. “But I think you can do a much more important job here. The choice is yours.”

I snort under my breath. She glances at me, eyes narrowed and cynical. “If this is what passes for a field investigation in your department, you need me.”

“Yes, well, you don’t need to make your mind up immediately. Detached duty, and all that. As for you, Bob,” he says, with heavy emphasis on my name, “you have acquitted yourself satisfactorily again. Now go and have a bath before you rot the carpet.”

“Bathroom’s two doors down the hall on the left,” Andy adds helpfully from his station against the wall, next to the door: there’s no doubt right now as to who’s in charge here.

“But what happens now?” I ask, bewildered and a bit shocky and already fighting off the yawns that come on when people stop trying to kill me. “I mean, what’s really happened?”

Angleton grins like a skull: “Bridget forfeited her department, so the directors have asked me to put Andrew in acting charge of it for the time being. Boris slipped up and failed to notice McLuhan; he is, ah, temporarily indisposed. And as for you, a job well done wins its natural reward—another job.” His grin widens. “As I believe the youth of today say, don’t have a cow …

A perspective on Particulate 7: HiNRG & B-OND

Venue: Maastricht Hilton Travelodge International Hotel, 30 March—2 April 2018

Yr hmbl crrspndnt rprts:

This was the seventh and biggest Particulate. It’s fair to say that these cons have come of age; with about seven hundred guests and maybe three—hundred walkins on the door there’s no longer any question that the concom can make ends meet. Indeed they’re already hard at work scoping out a venue for Particulate #8.

I checked in on Friday morning to find that about a hundred die-hard geeks had hit the con the night before, and the registration desk’s bookings system was toast. The hotel has hosted the last two Particulates, and they knew what to expect; as I arrived two bemused porters were helping a spotty youth hump weird-shaped bits of gear crusted in radiation trefoils into the baggage lifts. Everyone had to pass a check at a discreet security booth by the door, to prevent any recurrence of the regrettable incident that nearly wrecked last year’s con.

The first thing I noticed in reception was a big whiteboard beside the main lifts. Various messages were scribbled on it, but right in the middle, written in big blue letters, was a notice:

DONT TRY CRITICALITY EXPERIMENTS IN YOUR BEDROOM—UNLESS YOU WANT TO TEST THE SPRINKLERS.

I started by checking out the cafe, which was blue with dope fumes by the time I arrived and which got steadily worse until the end of the con (when the Bremsstrahlung Regressives tried to use it as a cloud chamber). The usual suspects were there, sipping capuccino and smoking like there was no tomorrow. And lo, who should I run into at the bar but my old acquaintance, Doktor Strangelove?

I first met the Dok back at Criticality II (though I’d run across him before on the net). That was back when his home town (Buttfahrk, Ontario) was trying to prosecute him for attempting to assemble a fissile device within city limits—of which charge, incidentally, he was found not guilty—and it struck me as unusually harsh that a local prosecutor was calling for a twenty-four year sentence on a guy who was still, basically, a kid. Since then the Dok has done some growing up, and I can safely say that if he wasn’t a menace to society then, he certainly is now. Or he’d like to think he was.

Dok:

Hiya Betsy, howzit going?

Me:

Oh, I dunno. Just got here, dumped my bags, thought I’d take a sniff of the breeze.

Dok:

Huh-huh-huh.

Me:

Anything cool going?

Dok: [ pushes glasses up bridge of nose, fidgets with head-up projector on left spectacle frame]:

I guess it depends what splices your code. The Fabulous Rubensteins say they’re gonna do something weird tomorrow lunchtime during the birds-of-a—feather on fusion experiments, and like Sunday morning word is that Pion Overdrive are building a long column down the banquet hall and coopting some heavy control bandwidth. Should be fireworks, maybe some stray neutron soup boiling off of that if they kick it into the fifty TeV range. And there’s some dude from CERN knocking around to give a talk on law’n’order and basement nucleonics. He’s kind of weird, but I don’t think he’s stasi.

Me:

What’s with the fusion gig?

Dok: [raises eyebrow suspiciously]:

mean you haven’t heard?

Me: [hastily]:

well, there’ve been rumours about a breakthrough in self-criticalizing muon-catalysis reactions …

Dok: [playing hard to get]:

that remains to be seen. Buy me a drink?

Me:

I thought you were …

Dok:

Minimum drinking age is 21 here.

Me:

Okay.

That’s the way it is. The nerds are on parade. They’ve always been paranoid about the way outsiders see them. First it was SF fans. Then computer hackers and phone phreaks. These days it’s extropians, roboticists, and hard physics geeks. But the character type is the same: very bright, highly strung, defensive about their hobby, competitive within their field. They realize it’s not something the rest of society understands or cares much about, but they care and that’s what makes the difference.

I staggered out of the cafe with my lungs on fire and my eyes streaming and headed for the swimming pool. The swimming pool is a really good place to hang out at a Particulate gig, but it’s not worth bringing your swimsuit: it’s where the re-enactment crowd get together. A bunch of kids in sarongs and TELLER IS GOD tshirts were pouring ion-exchange beads into the pool and there was a suspicious-looking bunch of metal piping already sitting in racks on the bottom. The pool looked very blue. When I asked what they were doing they stared at me as if I was crazy: “dechlorinating the moderator,” one of them finally deigned to tell me. I nodded and backed out fast; I could see I wasn’t wanted.

Opening speech. Some middle-aged American guy in a three-piece suit, probably ex—Wall Street rocket scientist, told the assembled geekswarm that they were the future of mankind. He said it in a voice choking with deep emotion. Physicists always did their best work by thirty, and this guy talked about his own career on the SSC project out in Texas, before the Death of Big Physics in the mid-nineties. The audience were hushed, as if chastened by the idea of being deprived of their accelerators by fiat.

Next on was a gangling youth named Curtis in baggy shorts, baseball cap, and iguana. (It was green, about half a metre long, and sat placidly on his shoulder throughout the talk.) Curtis talked very fast indeed about the fractal dimensionality of the universe as measured using the Genocide Mechanics’ new beat-wave petatron and some really eldritch decay paths they scoped out in a quark-gluon plasma when they cranked it up high enough to fuse the power supply. “I tell ya, at first I thought it was the drugs, man, but then I realized it was the bats. The vampire bats from beyond spacetime.” He was talking about a fractal map they derived for a scalar field decay process; and it did look sort of like a bat, if you squinted at it by the light of a lava lamp after smoking too much dope.

Curtis got a standing ovation (whether for the delivery or the message), and the iguana made a mess down the back of his t-shirt. He didn’t seem to mind.

Everyone then pissed off to the cafe or the bar, leaving a rather sad-looking Englishman to talk about cross-section derivatives in subcritical masses of plutonium to a nearly—empty auditorium.

I don’t remember much about that evening, except that I woke up at ten the next morning with a splitting hangover and three teenagers crashed out in the bathroom suite. Breakfast was black coffee and codeine, washed down with runny scrambled eggs a la hotel. Back to the program:

A talk about positronium, the care and feeding thereof, and how to bottle it for storage. One of the problems modern particle physicists face—besides the lack of funding—is that they don’t have huge relativistic storage rings any more. The maximum energies the big old synchrotrons could get up to were pretty puny by current standards, but the one thing they were good at was acting as a relativistic reservoir. Stick a bunch of particles with a half life of a billionth of a second into a storage ring at close enough to the speed of light and they’ll hang around for tea. But modern accelerators are all linear, and nobody can afford the big metal power bills. The panel discussed various condensation traps and magnetic bottle topologies (including a really weird five-dimensional Klein bottle) but didn’t really resolve the issue.

Lunchtime: the Fabulous Rubensteins (who looked more like Shyster, Shyster and Flywheel) presented their pion-catalysed criticality experiment. It was the size of a truck fuel cell, and pumped out four watts of power less than it took to run—but they said it had sucked in thirty watts two weeks earlier, and could theoretically achieve fusion bootstrap and run hot with a bit more tuning. More intrusions from the world of high finance: they cited some algorithms patented by Barclays de Zoet Webb and Whole Earth Systems in their control rig, and a couple of suits from Exxon were seen lurking at the back of the lecture hall. modeling systems (agoric decision processors? basically evolutionary algorithms used for market simulations) on predicting particle state decay options. A lot of the weird shit the hard physics dudes get up to these days drops back to ground state via some really strange nondeterministic transition states. Zap some of them with enough energy along the way and you get even weirder, less probable, transitions. Financial modeling protocols evaluate particle decay chains in terms of “bid” and “offer” prices on their probability, and give really neat derivatives for that big discovery-killing. (No wonder the guys who wrote that software did well on Wall Street before the Softlanding.)

There was a cool cocktail party that night by the poolside, ghostly blue illumination courtesy of cerenkov radiation from the slow neutrons in the pond. I was surrounded by crazed physics geeks and geek-ettes, stoned on the most bizarre mixtures of smart drugs and neurotransmitter analogues imaginable: the introspection mixes actually slowed them down enough for a mere mortal to talk to them and get something interesting back. It was really good. For a while I actually felt as if I understood the Pauli exclusion principle—not as a law handed down from on high, but from the inside out. It didn’t last, though. I went to bed, and the next morning the equations were as dry and cracked as the surface of my tongue.

Sunday morning I skipped breakfast. The Pion Overdrive Grrrls were bolting their petatron together in the banquet hall and I did not feel like receiving an intimate lesson in scattering effects if they got enthusiastic about testing it before the demo. It looked impressive—all of ten metres long.

A seminar entitled: “embedded universes 101”, discussing the possibility of creating Linde-Mezhlumian fractally-embedded self—reproducing universes—in effect, mini-big-bangs contained within pocket black holes—which rapidly deteriorated into quasi-religious ranting when someone in the audience asked a remarkably convoluted question about the practicality of “implementing the preconditions for a Barrow-Tipler strong anthropic cosmology” within the toy universes.

Some time during that last talk my brain underwent a loss of coolant accident and melted down. I confess: I’m not a true geek. The theological significance of the Higgs scalar field leaves me cold. I don’t really understand how to create a pocket universe, or what it means. I’m just repeating what I heard there. These dudes are beyond it. Way beyond it. Whatever it is.

I wandered back into the banquet hall to see the grrrls demonstrate top quark decay characteristics. It went smoothly and for an encore they manufactured some W’s and a handful of Higgs bosons. Then one of their laser stages failed and they shut the rig down. I got chatting to one of them afterwards and it turned out they were using home—brewed chirped—pulse amplifiers bolted straight in front of simple high-gigahertz network driver diodes—lasers produced by the million for wavelength multiplexed networks like your cable video system.

I kid you not. Thirty years ago it cost ten billion ecus and a machine thirty kilometres in diameter. Today a bunch of teenagers spend maybe a couple of thousand ecus, build a Rube Goldberg contraption three metres long, and achieve a hundred times the peak energy.

And this is what a Particulate is about. Fast, cheap, and out of control. That law—Moore’s Law—used to be just computers. But computers peaked, and now they’re stitched into the collar of your shirt to tell the washing machine how much detergent it takes. Next it was biotechnology, but after the cancer fix and the old age hack all the really hot biogeeks went underground … or became merchant bankers. That left physics. The old physicists hit Wall Street, leaving the field clear for the old-time hackers and phreaks.

Raw enthusiasm, and left-recursive universe generators. But they still get carded at the bar and they still can’t blow up the world. Physics may have a bad rap these days, but it’s harmless enough: a fine subject for kids to get enthusiastic about. I never did find out what happened to the Vampire Bats from Beyond Spacetime, though.

The five of them gathered together on the stone balcony that jutted from the western wing of the ballroom, high above the formal gardens of the Schloss Twilight. The dancers whirled on into the evening behind them, unaware of the passage of time outside their dream of music and motion. Bishop Morden looked over the crumbling balustrade at the hedges and flower beds below. One of the stuffed penguins caught a slanting ray of light and seemed to wink at him; he shuddered, briefly genuflected to the five poi nts, then turned away.

“Would you care for an aperitif?” asked Lady Stael, expectantly. “I am aware that the servants cannot be relied upon today, but—”

The Bishop smiled uneasily and sidled away from the edge of the terrace. “No my dear,” he said, “I fear for my digestion! Perhaps an infusion of gentian would be of help, but for the time being I am distraught with worries that I would not care to inflict upon your gentle head: and they have sorely aggravated my colic. Perhaps, however, our noble friend the Paramage—”

Lady Stael stared at him; her eyes raked him with a peculiarly matronly expression of disdain that sat ill with her appearance of blossoming youth, making her look like something preserved beyond its time. “The so-called Paramage and his disreputable colleagues are here at the bidding of my fate, to honour an appointment made some seventy years ago,” she murmured. “If they should ask for refreshments, why, I should have to ensure their satisfaction! But they are not welcome, you understand. Unlike yourself.”

“My apologies, madam,” said the Bishop, sweating under his stiff collar. “I was unaware—”

Lady Stael turned and stared past the Bishop. He followed the direction of her gaze. A table of filigree and shadow graced the far end of the balcony, concealed from the dancers in the ballroom by the thick velvet drapes of the curtains. Five chairs were drawn up around it. One was occupied by a strange gentleman whose appearance was that of a ruinous ruffian or cutthroat; a man who by rights should grace her dungeon rather than her balcony. The brim of his hat was drawn low across his eyes, and it was ob vious that there was room-a-plenty for any number of dark thoughts behind his shadowed brow. Next to him sat Jack-Jones the Paramage, a saturnine man of middle years who wore his beard in the archaic manner of a castillian noble. His expression was jovial but his hair and his pale blue eyes were glacial, even when he laughed. And finally, occupying a seat so close to the curtains that he almost blended in with the shadows, was a figure that Jack-Jones had not introduced. This person was swathed from head to foot in a black and odiferous robe, such that the Bishop could hardly blame Lady Stael for not desiring him on her premises. He looked like a hedge-priest and he smelt, not to put too fine a point upon it, like Death.

“It is sometimes said,” Lady Stael muttered, “that the presence of guests is a trial sent by the Lord to test our wits and our witticisms. If that is the case then I am afraid I am sore wanting, for whenever I confront these three desperadoes all badinage flees! Perhaps it bears upon the evening ahead. Your holiness, I do not wish to sit with these alone, and I would surely not wish to presume upon your patience, but—”

The Bishop smiled and bobbed his head. “But why, if that is the case, do you come out here to take in the sunset?” he asked. “Surely there is a ball behind us, and no shortage of guests who would willingly trip away the darkness with the lady of the household come Heaven or Nightmare! Why come out here?”

He watched her face closely. The Bishop was not a young man—there were very few such still alive—and he had done many strange things before he took the cloth, yet there was a kernel within Lady Stael that, should it crack, he feared to see. She had lived within her shell for a long time; and she had steeped herself soul-deep in a bitterness like that of cyanic almonds, until her facade of youth was a mockery. Her husband had not been seen for many years, not since he set off on his crusade in search of the unsighted lands of the anti-arctic: and yet still she remained loyal to his memory and maintained appearances.

She breathed deeply. “I am not a young maiden any more, Marcus, however I might preserve this flesh I inhabit. Please don’t presume upon my innocence. Presume by all means upon my chastity—certainly, in the absence of my lord and master —but not upon my naivete! Without the Paramage all life might have fled this soul long ago. I owe him this appointment, upon the unburied body of my past lives, but I shall not be coerced into enjoying it! For I know what game that man has brought his friends h ere to play, tonight.”

The Bishop was taken aback at this invective, directed by a member of the fair sex at a gentleman of whom, although he had little direct knowledge, he had heard much. “Surely it is not as bad as that?” he asked, unwisely treading upon her sensibilities. “Has he made any improper adv—”

“He has not,” she said icily. “It is merely his presence, and all that it implies! On this night of all nights, to be trapped on a crumbling balcony with such a man! The indignity!”

The Bishop sighed. “My Lady,” he said, “do you not remember the teachings of Our

Lord? That selfconsciousness is the greatest sin, for the unconscious mind does

know things of which we are unaware, so that we would live lives enchained within the dungeons of our psyches were we not to expose it to each other in agape? That, therefore, to hold to this grudge solely on behalf of his perceived guilt for a crime not yet—”

“—You have not heard it from his own lips!” she exclaimed, falling silent with a sudden vehemence that spoke louder than her words. “From the lips of the Paramage, I mean; far be it from me to impute doubts as to your interpretation of Our Lord’s Message!”

“Pardon me then, my Lady,” said the Bishop, touching his rosary to feel the holy pentagon. “Would it not then be worthwhile for me to discern the truth for myself, from the lips of the man whom you assert is making this demand upon you? And perhaps, in so doing, lead another lost soul into the light?”

She sighed, and suddenly he perceived the evanescent quality of youth that her husband Lord Stael must have discerned in her when he married her so many years ago. “You are right and true as always, Marcus: your Holiness. I should not lose my temper over such … trifles. If the world is indeed coming to an end, tonight of all nights, it is unfitting for me to reach the extent of my life as a middle-aged harridan … “

“How many years have you been lady of this demesne?” asked the Bishop, softly. He turned and stared out at the shadows lengthening across the lawn below.

“Four decades past,” she said quietly. With a gloved hand she gathered up the ice-blue skirts of her gown and turned towards the table. “And I was thrice reborn when he married me: firstly as a sailor of no consequence upon the Sea of Yang, then as a—woman—who met with an untimely end, and then into my present skin. Three lives, Bishop: is that all there is to this universe? Come, let us join the gamers. You are right as usual, it would not be correct for me to be inhospitable to my guests on this night of all nights.”

She extended her arm and the Bishop took it, escorting her across the mossy flagstones of the balcony towards the gaming table at which the wizard and his companions waited. Behind them, the dancers whirled to the strains of a chamber orchestra; they whirled as the rays of the setting sun lanced through the tall glass windows and fell across the parquet for the last time; they spun like tops across the polished floor as the sands trickled out through the smallest aperture of all, as the great and universa l orrery ran down.

As they approached the table the Paramage glanced up. He paused in mid-sentence, his mouth open as if entrapped in the incantation of some mystic function, and then he began to smile. As he smiled, the two vacant chairs moved silently, turning to accommodate their approaching occupants.

“Good evening to you, my Lady,” said Jack-Jones. “Is that not Bishop Moran you bring to our table? I must admit I was half-expecting him. A delight, I’m sure!”

He stood and extended a hand; behind him the rogue and the cowled sacerdote rose to their feet.

Lady Stael extended an arm, and the Paramage bent to kiss her wrist. As his lips brushed the black velvet of her glove a shot rang out from beneath the balcony, followed by a moan of utter despair and loathing. The wizard and the lady froze as the hooded monastic turned to stare across the garden. “The servants are playing Muscovian Roulette,” he said, his voice bereft of all intonation. “The cook appears to have won. That is his wife’s lament.” There was a second shot, and the moaning ceased instantly.

“Who will clear the dishes, then?” asked Lady Stael.

Jack-Jones smiled again. “That is hardly a problem,” he said. “Come, my Lady! Eat, drink, be merry—for tomorrow we will most certainly not be around to die.”

The Bishop sat down uneasily. As he did so, the chair slid towards the table as if an invisible footman stood at his back. He grasped the arms, feeling carved lion-faces press into his palms. “Would that I could be so certain, your Excellency. If perhaps I have understood your prophecy correctly—”

“Call me Jack, please!” said the wizard; “and I may call you Marcus, perhaps? My Lady, you are radiant tonight! The earrings of amber are so fine; am I correct in perceiving that those are tiny salamanders trapped within?”

She smiled coolly and withdrew her hand. “They are not amber but glass, and the occupants are not reptiles,” she said. “They are the embalmed brains of my first-born twins, who came into this world rather too early. I shall not bear any others,” she added, “but it gives me a certain comfort to wear them from time to time. I fancy I can hear them whispering to me … “

The cowled priest nodded understandingly, and an odour of tomb-rot swept from his hood. “That is a meagre encouragement, but a real one,” he said. “As one who has never sown or reaped the seed of the loins, it behoves me to congratulate you upon your partial success. There was once a time when motherhood was cheap and lives were short: but no more!”

He retreated from the balustrade, sat down and rearranged his cowl. The Bishop was intrigued, and somewhat chilled, to realise that not once had the man’s face come into view. There was a great geas at work on Lady Stael, if his senses were informing him correctly: and this secretive monk was part of it.

The rough-looking man in the wide-brimmed hat and the leather suit sat down. He had remained silent during the introductions, but now he tilted his face up and looked at his hostess. His jaw was unshaven and his eyes were expressionless. “I am pleased to meet you,” he said slowly. “My friend, his Excellency Jack-Jones, instructed me to come to this place to facilitate the coming event. I am deeply appreciative of such an—”

“But what’s your name?” Lady Stael interrupted.

The ruffian grinned with the fey expression of one who knew all the cards in the game of life. “I am the Last Gambler,” he said. “I teach the statistics of uncertainty, those of the honourable Thomas Bayes in particular. Would you care for a lesson?”

The Lady recoiled, her cheeks flushing bright red. “Certainly not!” she said furiously. “Unless you can tell me the odds upon my husband being alive and returning to wreak justice upon such as yourself!” She turned away suddenly, so that only the Bishop glimpsed the film of tears that lay across her eyes as she stared at the distant hills.

“That and other things can I estimate,” said the Gambler softly, his undertone directed at the hooded monk. “But methinks the Lady would not be of a mind to thank me for it.” He reached to the table and raised a tulip-stemmed glass to his lips. Red liqueur caught the setting rays. “Shall we begin?”

“Begin what?” asked the Bishop distractedly. His attention was directed upon Lady Stael, towards whom he felt more concern than he knew to be right and proper. She was, he decided, very beautiful, especially when she shaved her scalp so that only a thin patina of gold fuzz caught the light, setting off the magnificence of her decolletage.

The Gambler produced a deck of peculiarly large cards, and laid it flat upon the tabletop. He sat back, contemplating it. “Has anyone explained to you why we are gathered here tonight?” asked Jack-Jones.

The Bishop shook his head. “I fear not,” he said benignly. “Am I to understand that this is something more than a friendly soiree, on the occasion of the ball given by her Ladyship in honour of the end of the world?”

The Paramage smiled enigmatically.

“It is more than that,” said the hooded figure. “For tonight is the twilight of the universe, as the worms of rebirth multiply through the fabric of incarnation. It is an evening for truth and consequences, for naked ambition and lust laid bare to reveal the chance of stillborn futures; an evening for the revelation of doom. And we who are gathered here tonight all have a role to play—yourself, your Holiness, and her Ladyship too—for this was the only event that was foreordained.”

“What do you mean?” Sudden icy fear rooted Marcus to his chair and liquefied his guts. He looked up as Lady Stael glanced back at him. Her face resembled a shattered mask of anguish as she met his eyes.

“False pretences, Bishop Moran,” she whispered. “I pray you will forgive me, but I could not bear to face this ordeal alone! Not only is one of these three men responsible for the end of the universe, but another has the ability to revoke such a cosmic judgement as has gathered all the threads of time through this one knot-hole, and poised the blade above it. Yet they will not tell me who, or why, or how to avert this fate, until I judge with my own wits and emotions as to which of us, and why, might desi re the ending of eternity itself! And so I brought you along, for if this world should end at midnight you too will end with it; and if you can advise me fearlessly and correctly, as in the past … why, then we might survive.”

Her face went ashen as the Last Gambler reached out with a certain panache and turned the top card on his deck face up. It was not a card with which Marcus was familiar; it was neither playing card nor tarot, of either major or minor arcana with which he was familiar. Instead, drawn in the finest of water-colours upon the parchment was a round and luminous cloud with a stem beneath it like a flowering cactus, or perhaps a toadstool. Superimposed above it was a strange artefact, a cylinder with stubby wing s attached; it glowed with a light reflected from the strange cloud. Inscribed at the top of the card in gold leaf were the runes

E = mc2

“Let the game begin,” he said decisively. “I have been informed of the variant Rules for this case, and the appropriate authorities will be watching this table to prevent any turpitude. I challenge—Jack-Jones.”

The hooded sacerdote leaned across to Marcus and whispered, in a voice as dry as any crypt; “Jones must now tell his tale, with total honesty and truth. When your turn comes, you too must do so. It is imperative, no matter how painful it might be, to tell the truth. The order—” the cowl twisted for a moment, so that Marcus caught a glimpse of dark, hooded eyes in a shadowy, gaunt face—“is determined by the cards. For if chaos is to teach us a lesson of life, how else are we to learn it?”

His words were punctuated by an unearthly shriek. In the gardens below a peacock was spreading its plumage in iridescent display, to reflect the tattered glory of the fading sunlight. Marcus started, then quickly looked to Lady Stael for guidance. She sat bolt-upright, as if welded into position by the stays of her strapless gown. A diamond glittered from one finely-sculpted nostril, but her white skin outshone it against the ice-blue taffeta of her corsetry; and for an instant she seemed to personify fem inine perfection in his eyes, to be the substance and ideal of all that he desired to possess and protect and exhibit and dominate in life. He wondered how he had ever taken such a turning as to become a Bishop, so that she was simultaneously inaccessible to and intimate with him, being as she was a prominent member of his flock. He held his breath, as if she was chiselled from ice and a single false, hot gust might cause her to melt away before the heat of his single dreams. Remembering the ordinal comman ment, Know Thyself, he forced himself to look away. You are here to help her in her moment of weakness, he berated his libido; not to take advantage of her vulnerability!

He directed his attention to Jack-Jones the Paramage, who appeared to be sweating. And so he should, for if the hooded one was correct the stakes depending upon his truthfulness ran higher than his reincarnate soul.

“Speak,” said the Gambler. “It is time we heard the truth from your lips.

Enlighten us; his Holiness—” he raised an eyebrow at the Bishop—“is dying to know how the current predicament arose. And who knows? Perhaps if you speak truthfully, we shall live to see the dawn.”

Jones grimaced slightly, and raised his glass to his lips. It was a tumblerful of stroeh, a fiery spirit from Dansk; he sipped it gingerly, then replaced it on the table and sat back.

“Very well then,” he said; “you have asked, so I suppose I must tell you all! Very well. I was not present for much of this, and I have little first-hand knowledge of the major actress in this drama, but for the sake of enlightenment let me tell you about Imad the Insane, who was once my student, and about the Countessa Danielle, and what they did. And then, perhaps, the meaning of the current situation will become clear.”

Raw and Tenderly

A long distance away, in both space and time, there was a misguided youth named Imad who apprenticed himself to the magus named Jones in order to search out Truth Absolut. Imad was young and had no memory of his previous existences; he was gangling and thin and pale-faced, and there was about him the shifty expression of one who spent too much time in libraries, after the fashion of the ancients. Unfortunately this did not give Jones cause for concern, for in those days he had yet to receive the ad ditional soul that gave him his extra name and his reputation for infallibility. Instead of sending the youth packing, he gave him tasks to accomplish—the mild services of the postulant—and took it upon himself to give Imad the tools of wisdom with which to learn his trade. The fact that Imad later misused them horribly was not Jones’s responsibility, for by that time the youth had long since absconded: but nevertheless Jones was galled by the whip of hindsight and, resolving not to permit events to continue unhindered, sent an Eye to watch over his runaway tutee.

This is what he saw:

Imad nearly died in the Marches, hanged as a poacher and a horse-thief and anything else they cared to accuse him of. The fact that he was travelling afoot was beside the point, for there was no notion of a fair trial in that harsh land of exiles and river-barons. The villagers who apprehended him as he dozed by the highway one afternoon bore him up to the gates of the small and ruinous castle, and were already preparing a celebratory rope for his gullet when the knight of the demesne and his soldiers rod e back from the hunt and interrupted the lynching.

“What is going on?” demanded the lord. “Who is this man?” His shadow fell across the villagers, who cowered in abject terror before his mounted might. Imad, his arms twisted behind him in the grip of two peasant lads, gulped and stared fixedly at the mounted warrior clad all in chain mail, with his lance at his side and six armoured riders behind him.

The village hetman blinked stupidly, then knelt. Behind him, the two peasants pushed Imad face-down. “He be a stranger, y’r highness,” said the hetman, still holding the coarse noose in his hands. “Caught’m lurkin’ by th’ fields, ’e was. Up ter no good, ‘ll warrant.”

“But what has he done?” asked the knight, idly fingering the pommel of his saddle. His eyes were dark and utterly unreadable. Insects creaked in the background, but not a man dared move.

“Rr … nuthin’ yet, y’r highness. But ’e was goin’ ter!” The hetman was agitated. “There be a demon in ’im! ’E’s a stranger round ’ere, see!” His Lordship looked bored.

“I understand. You.” He pointed at Imad with an armoured finger. “What have you to say for yourself?” Imad couldn’t see, but he could hear when he was being addressed. And he knew what was likely to happen, should he fail to speak in his own defence.

“I’ve done nothing, your Lordship,” he said desperately. “I’m just a journeyman of magic, learning my trade at country fairs! I haven’t done anything! Please—”

All of a sudden, the peasants who were holding him down released his arms. He scrambled to his knees and looked up, meeting the eyes of the knight for the first time. The warrior stared down at him pitilessly, one hand gripping his lance as if challenging Imad to outrun his steed.

“A magician,” said the knight, slowly. “Well, well … “ He pointed an iron finger at Imad. “My apothecary died last month,” he said quietly. “You will take his place, won’t you?”

Imad looked at the hetman, who was still fingering his noose, and nodded violently. “Anything you say,” he blurted. “Anything at all!”

“Good.” The knight didn’t smile. “Welcome to Castle Capeluche. I hope you enjoy your stay.”

Imad was happy to escape with his life, but less pleased with his new accommodation. A flea-ridden straw tick in an outhouse within the courtyard was his closest approach to privacy; that, and a workroom with cluttered benches, a stuffed crocodile hanging from the rafters, and such a profusion of dusty herbs and simples as to make his nose sting and his eyes water. After his arrival he was acquainted with his post by one of the men-at-arms, and then ignored by everybody except the cook—who cursed him r oundly when he enquired after victuals.

“But what am I to do?” he asked in confusion. “What are my duties here?”

The dark-skinned chef fixed him with a beady stare as he honed his cleaver upon a leather strop. “Keep out of way,” he said. “See tower? Lord Capeluche keeps wife locked up there. Her father, he come to war soon. Very bad thing; Lord Capeluche very angry, want death spells, demons, big loud curses. Meanwhile, best not let self be seen.”

He put down his cleaver and rotated the spit. The truncated torso of a small pig sizzled and dripped fat into the fireplace. “Lord Capeluche not like women,” he hinted darkly, his voice drowned in the crackling of the flames. “He had vision, told him they all evil. Look at village—see any wives, huh? He sent them away. Don’t cross him. He wears skin of enemies under his armour.”

Imad looked at the spitted pig and swallowed. Saliva filled his mouth, even though when he looked closer the roast didn’t look much like a pig at all. In such a backward area as this, it was unwise to enquire too closely about the dietary habits of the residents. He turned away as the chef rolled the spit again. “Is there a library here?” he asked slowly. “A place with books?”

The chef nodded. “Other tower,” he said. “Has old guy’s books, what-his-name—he cast spell here before he dead. Warn you—not to tamper with Lord Capeluche’s place. Don’t get them mixed, huh? Bad for you.”

“Thanks,” said Imad without any real feeling. His fingers were itching. Real books? he wondered: in a place like this? Imad was an obsessive bibliophile, pursuing his habit to extremes. He was also a magician. He resolved that he would not attempt to escape until he had seen this library; who knew what he might discover?

Leaving the kitchen he walked across to the far tower. It was decrepit, the window-slits boarded with rotted timbers and the thatching on the roof turned grey-green with age. Although Lord Capeluche’s guards patrolled the walls, none so much as glanced down at him as he pushed open the door to the abandoned turret and went inside. Their attention was focused on the other tower, their master’s boudoir, and the wild forest beyond the walls.

Within the tower, everything was dark. A thick layer of dust coated the broken furniture; leaves had drifted in, and something scuttled away in sudden panic as

Imad tugged the boards away from one of the windows. With added light, the scene that met his eyes was dismal. Although it looked unpromising and he was still unfed, Imad climbed the tightly-spiralling staircase to the upper floor and shoved his way through the first door he came to.

A roosting bat flashed past his head, squeaking in panic; he instinctively reached out and plucked it from the air. It lay in the palm of his hand, twitching slightly as he examined it; he’d broken one of its delicate wings with the speed of his reflexes and now it was no more than an ungainly air-shrew, damaged and in pain. So small, and yet so natural, he thought as he closed his fingers around it and squeezed it gently dead. Then why do I feel incomplete, when creatures such as this need noth ing more in life? It was an unanswerable question, so Imad forgot about it and passed through the doorway instead, closing another more insubstantial portal in his mind at the same time.

Inside the room Imad found a small fortune in books lining the walls. There were no vermin, although numerous small skeletons littered the corners of the library; the former occupant had been efficient. Bat droppings streaked the spines of some of the tomes and stained the floor white, but there was no significant damage—so Imad browsed for an afternoon, taking in the chronicles and metagrammars and methodologies of the unknown librarian who, judging by the depth of dust, had been dead far longer than Lord Capeluche’s apothecary. This is priceless, he thought after a while, when he looked up and realised how low the sun had drifted in the heavens. I could have travelled for years and not come upon such a collection! I must apply myself and study … there will be clues with which to enhance my understanding …

He sighed happily and left the library, taking with him a chap-book written in a crabbed hand. When he closed the door he renewed the decade-old wards that had destroyed the rodents. It will be good to study by candle-light again, he thought. He completely failed to wonder why it was so easy for him to rebuild a charm intended to kill, but that insouciance was completely characteristic of Imad; it was, in effect, the reason why Jones the Paramage had driven him forth.

Imad, unless he grew out of it , was gifted with all the makings of an excellent sadomancer—an aptitude for destruction and pain—and his master had taken exception to this. But now by accident or destiny he had come to the right place, for Castle Capeluche was full of pain.

That evening, a mute slave-child came for him. “What is it?” Imad asked, irritated at being accosted by lamplight as he sat reading at his cramped apothecary’s desk.

The child opened his mouth and pointed. “Oh,” said Imad. “You want me to come? To his Lordship?” The child nodded, his eyes stretched wide with fear. Imad yawned. “Very well,” he said. “Lead me.”

The tongueless boy turned and walked out into the night. Imad followed, not pausing for a cloak; it occurred to him that his new master was not of a disposition to be impressed by delay. The boy led him across the yard towards the motte on which stood the central tower, then up the side of the steep hill to a heavily-barred door. This he gestured at.

“I am to go in? Alone? Very well.” He pushed on the door, and it opened inwards, smoothly and silently.

Within the hill, Imad found himself in a tunnel where the smell of damp was pervasive and the only light was shed by a single guttering cresset mounted on one wall. Pulling the sally-port shut behind him, he walked forward expectantly.

There was a stench in the air that he found distinctly invigorating, for it made him think of iron. The corridor turned and there were barred doors to either side, but Imad followed his nose and presently came to a landing where stone steps spiralled up towards the cellars of the tower above.

“Magus,” said Lord Capeluche, “I have a task for you.”

Imad turned round. The knight was standing stock-still, his back against the wall beside the door; he must have been watching Imad’s progress for some time.

He wore a strange suit of pale leather, and a huge sword slung across his back.

“Yes, my Lord?” said Imad alertly.

Capeluche stared at him from the shadows. His eyes glittered like chips of black glass as the flames leapt and fell back from the smoking torch. “I had you sent here in order to show you what becomes of those who dismay me. You might care to look inside the cells as you leave, magus.”

“Thank you sir. Is there anything else?” asked Imad, his throat itching terribly from the oily smoke.

A shadow crossed Capeluche’s face. “A curse,” he said. “The father of my bride prepares an army to dispossess me of my territory and my wife. He claims that the marriage is void, which is a lie! He wishes to destroy me. Unless he is killed, all who live here will suffer the same fate!” As he spoke he shook, a string of spittle flying from his mouth. Imad stood stock-still, a cold sweat standing out on his forehead. “I will not tolerate it! Wreak me a spell, wizard! Cast me a glamour, construct for me a sc ript, such that it will stop the Count of Westmarch dead, dead, I say—dead in his boots! Do so by the end of the week, using any materials you require, or I shall ensure that you respect my hospitality of a weekend!” Capeluche stared at Imad with the wild expression of a feral creature trapped in human skin: which Imad saw he was, when he observed his suit more clearly.

“I will need a virgin,” said Imad thinking fast, the concentration of the hangman at his back.

The statement cooled Capeluche’s ardour a fraction, so that a semblance of humanity returned to him. “You will have one,” he said, breathing heavily. “Prepare your spell, using any materials you desire. I will deliver an appropriate woman to you at the appointed hour. Now, I am becoming angry. You do not wish to remain here when I am like this. Go now!”

Imad left in silent haste, sweat dripping from his brow. As he went he glanced through the door of a cell at one of the oozing, silent inmates who had contributed to Capeluche’s leathery wardrobe already, and would soon contribute to his dinner table. Being Imad, he was neither revolted nor terrified; he had insufficient imagination to conceive of a situation in which he himself might lie broken and bleeding on such a pallet in the dungeon. However, it did give him cause for concern. He had two days until Friday, and he resolved to use them fruitfully. His new-found Lord required a spell? Very well, then. He could oblige. It would require a life for a life; but he would endeavour to oblige.

Only the outcome might be unexpected …

The next day, Imad went exploring.

He took along a pinch of herbs looted from the apothecary’s stores, a small iron triangle, and a long pin. Then he returned to the abandoned tower, only instead of returning to the upstairs library he sought around the lower rooms for a door he expected to find.

Eventually he located it; a stout oak portal, locked with a heavy catch from the other side. It opened into the space within the walls of the castle, unused except in time of siege. Imad examined the lock for a while, probing with the needle and listening to the click and scrape of the stiff mechanism, then he stood back and thought for a bit. Presently he struck the iron triangle a single ringing blow, and muttered a command in an ancient diction. There was a click, but nothing happened. Cursing, he trie d again, this time transposing two vowels and a glottal stop: the lock sprang open.

The corridor was dry and dusty, stacked with supplies of a military nature. Imad stepped across racks of torches and arrows, over firepots filled with frozen lead, past an antique Gatling gun hunched on its stand like a maimed beetle.

At the next door, Imad’s spell of opening worked perfectly. But before he could open the door, it opened itself for him—and he was confronted with the sight of twelve inches of cold steel, pointed at him by an alert guard. “Hey,” said the guard, “aren’t you the new pharmacion, you bastard? What are you doing—”

He toppled over and Imad caught him before he clattered to the floor. Some words did not have to be spoken to be effective, and such was the force of Imad’s will that surely he would have qualified as a magus in terms of power. His only deficit was wisdom.

Imad was now standing in the cellar of Lord Capeluche’s tower. Time was of the essence. He gathered his wits about him, concentrated, and then uttered a somewhat different version of the spell that he had beguiled the guard with.

Some functions were unchanged, but there was an enveloping loop that took in all within earshot: unbroken silence descended. Imad began to climb the stairs, intent on solving a question that had troubled him since the night before.

Capeluche wished his father-in-law dead. Why?

Presently he came to the knight’s chambers. The door was unlocked, for his spell of opening had operated throughout the castle; Imad entered, passed through an antechamber and a study to come at last to the bedroom. There was a wide window, high above the ground—too high to jump from—and a guard lying prostrate outside the door, and no furniture but a dark oaken chair and a huge bed. A maiden of such beauty as Imad had never before set eyes on lay sleeping in the bed. The breath stopped in his throa t as he gazed upon her. Her hair was long and unshorn, her ribs showed through her skin which was dotted with bedsores, and she was chained hand-and-foot to each post. Love or lust clouded his vision with its heady scent of fulfilment. If this was the daughter of Count Westmarch, he reasoned, his question was answered, for surely Capeluche must resent any greater than himself. He resolved then and there that to sacrifice her would be something of a waste: for was not a magus of his stature a worthy match < P> or a countessa? Thinking these unquiet thoughts he glanced towards the window in time to see Lord Capeluche’s hunting party returning along the highway. His heart pounding with fear and something other than loathing, Imad beat a hasty retreat. Any solution to this conflict of interests would require careful planning.

He needed time to think …

Programmers and Magicians

At this point, Jack-Jones paused in his narrative.

“If you will excuse me,” he said, “my throat is somewhat dry and this spirit is too fiery by half. May I suggest that the time is ripe for a cup of coffee?”

Lady Stael nodded graciously. “You may suggest it, sir. Your tale is intriguing, and I would be pleased to hasten its’ climax!” She looked over towards the ballroom, where the dancers were gliding to a stately gavotte. “Rupert!”

“He cannot hear you,” said the hooded priest, “now or ever. The servants game has continued apace: did you not hear the shots?”

“Oh,” said Lady Stael. She mustered her composure. “Then, sir magician, I regret we will have to serve ourselves. Rupert is—was—my butler.”

“That is not an insurmountable problem,” said Jack-Jones. “If you will tell me where the pantry is, I will effect a transposition.”

Lady Stael’s brow wrinkled. “Truth be told,” she said, “I don’t really know.”

She looked abashed; “it is the retainers job to serve, after all, is it not?”

“Then I shall just have to summon some … informants,” said Jack-Jones. “Please bear with me.” He closed his eyes and appeared to murmur to himself silently.

Bishop Moran shivered and rose to his feet; to his surprise, he realised that it was dusk already and his legs were tingling with pins and needles. “Will you excuse me?” he asked; “I feel the need to stretch these shanks. This is obviously not going to be a short game, and I would not want to disappoint you by providing short measure of my wisdom by virtue of physical distraction.”

Lady Stael nodded then rose, her gown rustling. “Perhaps you will accompany me around the garden?” she asked. “Some parts of it are best seen by twilight, and

I fear you have never seen them before. And if not tonight, then what other opportunity might there be?”

Marcus looked abashed. “I fear, my lady, that there might never be such an opportunity. I would look upon your garden, it is true, but only from the balustrade. Call me craven, but I am not keen to leave this company while this particular game is afoot.”

“Very well, then,” she said. “Let us take the air by the rail, and smell the night blossom for a final time!”

She walked around the table and, very forward, took his wrist. Marcus allowed her to lead him towards the far end of the balcony. It was built in the shape of a horseshoe wrapped around the outside of the ballroom, which filled the entire western wing of the castle; it was not long before they had passed round the curvature of the walls and were out of view of the gaming table and the doors.

Now only curtained windows opened out from the ballroom; they were alone.

“Look,” he said, “the moons are full.”

“Indeed.” Lady Stael released his wrist and rested her hands on the banister.

“Look, Marcus. The garden is untidy. What’s that over there?”

“It appears to be the gardener,” said Marcus, feeling bitter nausea sweep through him: “and there! Could that be your butler?”

She sighed. “First my husband, now my servants. Is nobody reliable?”

Marcus looked up at the stars that hung unblinking in a vault that was slowly turning from aquamarine to violet. There were no clouds to be seen, even on the horizon. “I could ask the same question of you,” he said, “but I am sure I could predict the answer. Angelica, why did you agree to host this meeting?”

She inclined her head, looking up at him with an expression of innocent dismay. “What makes you assume that my complicity was requested? Should there be any question of my voluntarily participating in any dubious acts, you would most certainly not have been my choice of chaperon, Marcus! I know you too well, just as well as you know me. This is most serious; it was imposed upon me without my consent, by an agency that I was powerless to refuse. You think improper for a lady to be involved in such an occas ion, don’t you?”

He met her eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I worry for your incarnate soul, madam. Not only is it not ladylike, it is not safe! I have read of these games, the like of which is played out here tonight. I tell you it is dangerous!”

“That is why I invited you,” she replied. “I need a lord protector, Marcus. My husband: let us not bandy around. You believe, and I too, that he has been dead these thirty-six years, is that not the case? And that being so, what am I, a frail woman, meant to do? If he were here today to stand by me, there would be no drama. But I am fated to be host to this trial, and so … “

Marcus reached out, put his hands upon her bare shoulders and gathered her to him. She did not hug him back, but neither did she pull away. “What are we to do, Marcus?” she whispered. “Can even Jack-Jones stand between us and the fate of losers?”

Marcus ran gentle fingertips across her golden-stubbled scalp. “Perhaps he can,” he said. “Remember, my dear, there is one advantage to our cause that does not pertain to the one who precipitated this crisis, if I understand it aright; for against us is arrayed a most powerful sorcerer, a magician of the first order: but on our side we have Jack-Jones, and he is not merely a magus but a programmer of destiny.”

Lady Stael stiffened slightly in his arms, and he released her instantly. She pulled away and adjusted her skirts, then smiled at him. “That was most welcome,

Marcus. Come, will you give me the pleasure of a dance before we return to the fray?”

Marcus felt himself flush. “My dear, much as I would love to do you that favour I regret that I have some difficulty dancing; I have neither the training nor the aptitude, and under the circumstances I feel it would be wrong to devote myself to learning the minuet while the world teeters on the brink of oblivion.”

“Ah.” She looked away from him. “But will you at least join me in a glass of wine within, so that we may escape the gamesters on the balcony for a few scant minutes? Their presence oppresses me … “

He nodded slowly. “And I, likewise. Yes, I would be glad to join you for a brief drink, my lady.” She extended her arm, and he took it; they strolled slowly back round the balcony, towards the open doors.

Someone had ignited the chandeliers within the ballroom, so that the room glowed with a brilliant white light that cast deep shadows. Diamonds burned themselves slowly into air, exhaling invisible vapours as the dancers swirled around beneath them. Bishop Moran and Lady Stael paused at the edge of the floor, then circled slowly round it towards the sideboard beneath the huge portrait of her husband that faced the orchestra. It was still heaped with untouched delicacies—honeyed larks tongues and sturgeo n’s roe and strange, green cheeses—for the dancers appeared to have no appetite other than for ceaseless motion, and the orchestra played tirelessly.

“A glass of wine, your holiness?” asked Lady Stael.

“I should be delighted,” said Marcus. A liveried footman, his face concealed behind a lacy mask of fine-wrought steel, poured him a goblet of fine red wine and proffered it. He blinked. Although he had seen no other servants, Lady Stael was already holding a full glass. “Jack-Jones is as efficacious as his reputation leads me to believe,” he said.

Lady Stael smiled, showing pearly teeth. “He says he believes in tools, Marcus, in finely crafted interlocking invocations that serve but a single purpose, and can be assembled into superstructures of power upon demand. He also says that those who play with devils are apt to take on the attributes of their servants. Is that what you meant when you said we are lucky to have a programmer on our side, rather than a sorcerer?”

“You are perspicacious, my lady.” Marcus peered at her again, wishing that she did not have this habit of disconcerting him with her sophistication from time to time. “Have you studied the arcana?”

She laughed. A few of the dancing couples glanced at her disapprovingly, then whirled away. The orchestra struck a crescendo and hovered there; she withheld her reply until the diminuendo. “You know and I know that there are no arcana, your holiness. There is only memory, and meaning, and the nature of time itself. For is it not true that time and space are interchangeable, and a man who controls one can manipulate the other?”

“In your case, my lady, would it be appropriate to substitute the feminine pronoun?” asked Marcus. His heart hammered in his ribs suddenly, for he had just realised how isolated he was.

“No, Marcus; I am not a witch.” Her smile lingered, despite his obvious suspicion. “But memories of my previous lives conspire to haunt me from time to time. I was not a witch then, either, but I was, I knew of—” she shook her head. “When we return, remember that the tale Jack-Jones is recounting happened a long time ago. Time means something else to that man, for he is a chronomancer.” She fell silent for a moment. “Tell me, is there any likelihood of my servants being reborn before the end of the wor ld?”

Marcus pondered this question as she sipped her wine. “If I was a servitor,” he said, “I would not choose to be reincarnated. This is supposing that the dogma of Assigned Destiny holds true, and that souls know their true place in the order of things. If it is false, however, and we merely repress our memories of those lives in which our status and condition are unacceptable—why, then, might they not be reborn as princes and courtesans and fine nobles?”

“Angels, Marcus, dancing upon the veriest point of a needle!” She smiled at him humorously. “If I did not know better I would accuse you of being indecisive.”

Marcus nodded. “And I might accuse you of lingering too long in your previous lives, my lady.”

Suddenly, her smile slipped. “Don’t say that,” she said sharply. “How could you know what I might forget or mis-remember? Is it not true that just one person who remembered sufficiently well could prove or disprove your endless theological dialectics, all the Church’s debates over Will and Carnation and Assigned Position; that such a person’s memories could overturn the foundations on which our fine and noble system of justice and truth and duty is built?”

Marcus shivered. “That one person, my lady, would have to remember what it was like to be dead,” he said. “To remember how the choice is made, how destiny is shaped. Never forget; we can remember our previous lives, but what is life without death? What is Man without Woman? What is duty without responsibility?”

“How is nobility to be savoured without the shadow of slavery?” she retored. “Marcus, you presume upon my feminine nature. I am not unaware of the difference between my status and that of the masses. But if you are right, if the dogma of Assigned Destiny is false, then … “

He smiled. “I cannot believe that such a sublime vessel as yourself might carry the soul of a higgler or costermonger!”

“Neither can I,” she said quietly. But she didn’t meet his eyes, and she drained her wine-glass with unseemly haste then reached for more. “Shall we return to the game of futures?” she asked.

“I think that’s a good—”

The music stopped. “Quick, take my hand,” hissed Lady Stael. “I have seen this happen before when Jack-Jones is distracted—”

The dancers stopped. Elegant couples disengaged and stood waiting attentively for the music to begin; the women in their incredible frocks and gowns, their heads decorously shaven and inlaid with gemstones: the men coiffed and bearded and expressionless in their dress uniforms and evening suits. The Bishop drew his breath in sharply and held Lady Stael’s hand tightly. There was such total quiet in the ballroom that they might have been standing on the other side of a huge pane of glass, sealed off from th e dancers by a wall of silence made solid.

“Magic tools,” whispered Stael. “Jack-Jones programmed this. These dancers—”

“They were for me?” hazarded Marcus.

“Yes,” admitted Lady Stael. “It is a projection of a ball that might have been, or that will be, or somesuch. But it was not intended as an entrapment, I assure you; merely as a reassurance that things were as near to normal as, as … “

“As they are not.”

“Yes.” She drew close to him, put down her glass, took his other hand in her own and stared into his eyes. “Do you remember who you were, before?”

Marcus Moran, Bishop of the Duchy of Marguerete, shuddered. He could not look away from her eyes: they trapped him, forcing his attention to sink into their dark pupils. “You expect too much,” he said nervously.

“Maybe not,” she countered. “Do you remember yet?”

Marcus forced himself to reply. Sweat oozed cold and clammy fingers down the small of his back. “I was newborn, these fifty years since,” he said vehemently. “I can honestly say that I have no, no memories of—no former lives: I have never died! There, I have said it. I am tabula rasa, an unwritten soul, yet to proceed to the first judgement. A rarity in these latter days … “

She smiled. “Perhaps you should pay heed to what you preach,” she said, then genuflected to the five points: “know thyself, Bishop!” She stretched up and lightly kissed Marcus on the mouth.

He recoiled, as if stung; his lips seemed to burn with possibilities. “Let me go,” he said tightly. “This is indiscreet.”

“Oh?” she asked, looking past his shoulder. He turned. The wall of silence seemed to have congealed in the ballroom, and the dancers were fading like unremembered ghosts. “There are none here to be scandalised, Marcus. Will you forgive me for being somewhat crazed, on this of all possible nights? I didn’t mean to offend you. It was simply that—”

Marcus flinched, torn between guilt and desire. He felt as if she was drowning him by increments, pulling him into her tangled web of conspiracy. He could see what was happening, but he didn’t know how to resist her attractions effectively; with a sense of desperation he realised that he was collaborating in his own seduction, an almost-eager victim being led to the slaughter. “Let’s go,” he said tensely, and turned back to the balcony. She followed him at a distance, her scent conspiring to fill his nost rils so that even the night air could not remove the tingling in his blood.

They strolled back to the gaming table to discover that a morose silence had descended across it. “My lords,” said Lady Stael, smiling, “has the evening so wearied you already?”

Jack-Jones glanced up, and two chairs pulled themselves out for Stael and Bishop Moran. His cheek twitched. “The stars are out,” he said. “I am ready to continue my narrative, if friend Gambler will draw another card from his tarot.”

Marcus sat down gingerly, watching Lady Stael do likewise. She glanced at him and her eyes lingered on his face knowingly for a while before she looked away again. “That is a good idea,” she said. Marcus blinked. In the twilight he could have sworn that she was looking younger; not in terms of physical age, which was meaningless, but as if she was somehow becoming invigorated, the sap rising from the roots of her being as the universe itself wound down around her. He silently prayed to himself; the hard shell she had built up around her soul was cracking open, and he was terrified of what he might witness emerging from the interior.

There was a sudden noise from the garden directly beneath where they were sitting: it sounded like a monstrous insect shedding its skin. The Gambler made as if to stand up, but the hooded preacher raised an arm. “Do not worry,” he said tonelessly. “It is only the gardener’s wife hatching from her corpse. She will remember nothing and do no harm; you are best advised to leave her be.”

“Hah.” The Gambler sat down again. “I like not the odds on such a contemporary rebirth.” He shuffled his deck.

“On what authority do you claim the right to dictate my conduct in the manse of my husband?” demanded Lady Stael, staring at the hooded priest. “She was my maid, and I am entitled to determine the disposition of my servants in all respects, both before and after their deaths!”

“Do not contradict me,” said the cowled priest. “I have travelled among the stars; I am aged beyond belief! I am so ancient that I remember when Virgo’s corset was Orion’s belt. I came here not to bicker with fools but to determine the future!” Lady Stael flushed and was about to reply when Jack-Jones cut in.

“Then reveal yourself,” said the Paramage. “It is long past time that your identity was explained; otherwise, these two worthies might doubt your right to participate in this rite.”

The hooded priest reached up and pushed back his cowl abruptly. Lady Stael froze, angry words faltering on the edge of her lips; Bishop Moran stared at the priest, all colour draining from his face.

“Are you Death?” he asked.

“No,” said the man, whose face resembled that of a mummy abducted from the catacombs. “I am merely intellect pure and simple. In an age when things were not as they are now, my progenitors replaced my skeleton with bones of metal and ceramic. My nerves were spliced with woven fibres of glass, and then they sent me out to wander the heavens aboard a ship of stars. Long lifetimes I spent out there, and when the flesh began to wither on my bones I returned to the world that created me in order to find my tomb. But they forgot to provide one for me … and so I am still alive, undead, unable to die, my mind trapped in a brain of crystallised sand. I have come to this place to offer advice, the wisdom of an earlier age. Tell me Bishop, do you consider yourself experienced enough to scorn the wisdom of ages?”

Marcus shook his head silently. The skull-faced man, whose eye sockets were occupied by obsidian spheres that whirred when he moved his gaze, stared at him.

“What name do you call yourself by?” he asked, dry-lipped.

“I am known to some as the Iron Brain,” said the cyborg. “It is my second most noteworthy characteristic.”

“And what is your first?” asked Lady Stael, her curiosity momentarily overcoming her acrimonious temper.

The Iron Brain turned to focus on her, grinning like a skull. “I am immune to time,” it said. “Gambler—turn your next card.”

The Last Gambler whistled tunelessly and flipped over the top card on the pack. It drifted down on top of the strange, angry cloud and everyone stared at it. Marcus could feel his pulse pounding: he was most certainly not enjoying this evening. He had a headache, and somewhere inside him a gathering nucleus of raw panic was condensing. “What is it?” he demanded, looking at the picture on the card.

Hanging in the middle of the picture, with no visible means of support, was a knight in strangely fashioned armour: his helmet was a sphere with a black visor that hid his face entirely. Behind him was a starry blackness, like a painting of the sky at night. Emerging from his belly was a swollen cable like a baby’s umbilical. And most strangely, reflected in the black depths of the knight’s visor was a silver box positioned in front of a blue circle.

“What is it?” echoed Lady Stael.

“A picture of a knight, from a time when programmers were magicians,” said the Last Gambler. “Your move, Death.”

The skull glistened in the twilight. “I believe that Jack-Jones should continue,” the Iron Brain said softly. “We have not yet heard out his story, which is of some importance. Therefore I yield up my priority.”

“A dangerous move,” said Lady Stael, her nose-gem glittering as it caught the lamplight from the empty ballroom. Marcus looked over his shoulders and saw cobwebs, dust, shrivelled fruit.

“Nevertheless,” said the Iron Brain. “I insist.” His presence stank of mildew and damp places.

“In that case let the Paramage continue,” replied Stael. She smiled like a hungry cat and appeared to relax in her chair, but Marcus had a sickly feeling of apprehension when he considered what this was doing to her. It is not right that she be exposed to this! he thought. It is not right—

Lost her Cherry

“Tell me about the countessa,” said Imad.

The cook, who knew bettmer than to tattle about the affairs of his master, rolled his eyes and spat over his shoulder. “She his lawful wedded wife,” he said. “Is all you need to know.”

“No,” persisted Imad. “What about her father?”

“Ahh,” said the cook, pausing at his pestle as he ground together the peculiar herbs that Lord Capeluche liked his meat spiced with. “Long story there. He wedded her—”

“—The father?”

“Him not like Capeluche, oh no. Capeluche, he strange. Rumours … “ the cook turned and spat over his shoulder again, then put a leaf in his mouth and began chewing rhythmically. “Marriage or war. Now, war anyhow. So why bother with woman? Capeluche not like woman at all; prefers killing. Eats them, but won’t

… “ he made an obscene gesture.

“So the countessa is a virgin?” asked Imad.

The cook laughed. “You think she lost cherry to Lord?” His laughter was bitter and high pitched, almost like the hissing of a snake. “Say again: Capeluche not like women. What more, he not like other men who like women. He caught me, my wife, years ago. Fed her my—” another obscene gesture—“then when I awake again, he make me eat her.” He turned his back on Imad and spat again, this time straight into the mortar full of herbs destined for his master’s table. “Was glad we not had children, then.”

Imad was taken aback, but had sufficient sense not to enquire as to the extent of his companion’s injuries. Some scars ran below the surface, he reasoned, and if it were possible that the cook’s feelings for his wife had approximated his new-found love for the countessa he would be mortally offended were anyone to ask him about them. He retreated to the abandoned library for the afternoon and buried himself in hermetic texts and the minutiae of his metagrammars, there to stoke the fires of his infatuatio n with the fuel of daydreams.

At twilight he sallied forth again to find the kitchen busy. The cook was racing about, hindered by the need to direct two of the tongueless slaves about their tasks of serving at the high table; he barely spared a glance for Imad as he helped himself to a thick rasher of what might have been bacon and toasted it over the fire. Imad sat there munching, then speared a second rasher and waited for the cook to slow down. There was much noise from the great hall, not a little singing and roaring like a herd o f wild animals, and under cover of the noise the cook turned and hissed at him. “What you doing here?” he demanded.

“Steal food from Capeluche foolish! Come on. What you doing?”

Imad stared at him. “Are there bats anywhere here?” he asked.

“Bats? Yes, you bats! Come, move, must give food to highness or he roast us too.”

Imad moved reluctantly, the equations of sympathy and contagion roiling slowly in his head. “Give me a sack,” he said. One of the slave-boys stared at him incomprehendingly; “a sack,” he mimed. The boy vanished in the direction of a back cellar, then returned with a noisesome bag. “Good,” said Imad, quirking his cheeks in what people often mistook for a smile. The cook returned. “Where do the bats roost?” Imad asked him.

The man threw up his hands in anguish. “In cave outside walls, half mile north of here!” he said. “Go away! Eat and go! You make me feel cold.”

Imad nodded, and left the kitchen still chewing on a piece of gristle. Not bad, he thought. Just as long as it’s well cooked. He took the sack with him; it would come in handy. Now as long as he’d judged the drop correctly …

That night, Imad sat out in the courtyard. It was oppressively warm and he passed the time counting stars; he noted when the planets rose, and how much later it was that the light began to burn brighter in the room at the top of the tower of Capeluche. Then the light in the window burned down low, and a little later there was an unearthly shriek. Is he raping her? he wondered: but from what he knew of Lord Capeluche, that was extremely improbable. It sounded inhuman, a scream of pure rage and fury that send a shiver racing down his spine. Perhaps it is himself, giving in to his nature, Imad thought. He wished, briefly, that he could tap such a potent source of energy himself, for although his magic revolved around the power of pain it was difficult to inflict on one’s self and harder still to induce in another whilst on the move.

He sighed, and carried on counting stars. There was another scream, and presently a faint, heart-wrenching sobbing that faded as the wind changed direction. Imad went to bed. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.

The next morning, he took his sack and set off on a hunt.

“Halt!” challenged the guard on the gate. “Where be ye going?”

Imad stared at him coldly. “Your master entrusted me with a mission,” he said. “I am to collect ingredients for a spell that he requires to be cast. Am I correct in understanding that there is a cave where bats roost during the day, five miles north of here?”

The soldier looked at him, less self-confident now that he realised who it was he was addressing. “Half a mile,” he corrected. “Follow that path ’till ye come to the cliff. Halfway up’t is an opening, tis inside there.”

“Good,” said Imad; “then I had better be going.”

“What is it ye go to collect?” asked the guard, relaxing slightly.

“Pain.” Imad grinned. It was not a pretty sight. “I need bat’s blood,” he explained. “Human blood will not do … “

The guard didn’t trouble him again.

It was a hot morning, and it took Imad until noon to reach the cave. By that time, all the bats were roosting; not only that, but they were cosily asleep, safe and secure from any daytime threat. Imad set about changing the situation with a will. Rather than smoking them out, he harvested them by hand with a combination of stealth and precision that would be the envy of any cat; he thrust them one by one through the neck of his sack, and presently their panicky fluttering subsided as they surrendered to the warm darkness and fell asleep once more. He did not take all the furry occupants of the cave—there was no need—but he took sufficient to provide him with the raw material he needed. Then he set off back to the village, tired and sweaty and cursing the weather.

His next task was to find the smithy, and see if the occupants had what he required.

“A mangle?” asked the blacksmith incredulously. “You demand a mangle of me? Wherefore, oh apothecary? Is it the washing that is now your domain? Or the mangling of hands?” The poor man appeared to be becoming hysterical. Imad quirked his face into a passable smile and stared at him. The man sobered up rapidly. “There is nonesuch here, lad,” said the smith, “but if you were to look in the dungeon you might well find a press such as would suit your description.”

He paled. “’Tis a place of ill omen, but mind you my words—any instrument of excruciation you would care to identify can be found therein. Now get ye hence and leave me to the beating of this here sword for our masters’ sergeant at arms!”

Imad did as he was bid and left the smithy.

Across the square, he came to the door of the castle and banged on it. “Who goes there?” demanded a guard. “Oh, ’tis you again. Get thee inside, troublemaker!”

Cursing, the soldier released the bolt on the sally-port and Imad stepped through.

“I need access to the dungeon,” he said to the guard, and waited for the man to stop laughing. “Who do I go to?”

“You need access to the dungeon, you scoundrel? Whatever for?”

Imad grinned humourlessly and hefted his sack. “Be glad ’tis not yourself in here, man,” he said. “I have work to be done with a leather apron. By the wishes of our lord!”

The guard stood back, an expression of disgust upon his face. “Don’t you play your vile tricks on me, lad,” he said, abruptly contemptuous. “Do your magicks and leave us be.” So saying, he yanked open the inner door of the tower he stood by and thrust Imad inside. “Begone!” he shouted after him.

Imad stood in the cool darkness, a sack of bats upon his back and a pouch of somewhat more obscure equipment at his belt. He sniffed; the scent of iron was in the air again. Blood. He followed it, navigating by the faint light that filtered through the murder-holes in the ceiling, until presently he came to a guttering torch and a staircase leading down into the murky depths.

Presently he reached the landing that he remembered from before. Chains dangled from the walls, and several doors and passages opened off it; evidently it was used for access to the cellars as well as the dungeons. A guard dozing in a chair awakened with a jolt, to see Imad staring at him with a dark expression.

“What do you want?” asked the man, somehow managing to scratch in an armpit and yawn simultaneously.

“I need the Press,” said Imad, smiling with hideous sincerity. He hefted the sack of bats, who were becoming restive. “I want to hear their screams.”

The guard nodded. “In there, first on your right,” he said. “Mind how you go—better take a torch.”

Imad took a fresh one from the pile by the guards’ stool, then entered the indicated passage. There was a stench of damp and decay in it, but nothing of rotting meat; Lord Capeluche was evidently too fasti-dious to permit corpses to decay unattended beneath his castle.

Within the room the guard had indicated, Imad found the Press. For the first time he had doubts about what he was about to do; it was very big. Maybe too big. Nevertheless he manhandled the upper slab open, and slid the bag of agitated bats in, and then sprinkled certain herbs across the sack. He concentrated, reciting certain words he had read only the day before from memory, then placed his empty canteen beneath the lower edge of the Press.

And, closing the lid, stooped to catch what trickled out when the screams were finished and the silence began to bite.

That night, the boy came for him again. He had already gone to bed, anticipating sleepless nights to come, but the boy shook his shoulder insistently until he sat up. “What is ..?” he began, then realised that his questions were not worth asking. He sighed reluctantly and pulled his jerkin on. “Take me to him,” he said.

The boy shook his head, but led him across the courtyard towards the tower in which Lord Capeluche dwelt with his unwilling bride. Imad stared at the door unwillingly, but the boy knocked thrice and it swung open. He beckoned.

Damnation, thought Imad. Can he read minds, as well? He shuddered, but stepped across the portal regardless; if Capeluche had decided to do away with his new magician in a fit of pique there was nothing he could do about it. Psychopaths were notoriously invulnerable to magical coercion.

The boy led him up the staircase, towards two impassive guards who stood with drawn steel before the door to the noble chambers. They didn’t even deign to look at Imad but the door opened spontaneously, as if by some geas that recognised only those who were expected.

The boy stopped at the inner door to the study and gestured. Imad knocked.

“Enter,” called Capeluche. The boy cowered away and Imad, his heart pounding, raised the latch and entered.

“My lord,” he said.

Lord Capeluche was seated on a throne of ancient oak, a writing-desk at his side—an oddly chilling touch of civilisation to contrast with his arctic eyes—and a small black cat asleep in his lap. He was dressed in one of his sinister suits, but over it he wore a silk sur-coat embroidered with the face of a demon.

“I bid you be seated, magician,” he rumbled.

“Yes, my lord,” said Imad, a shiver of pure terror running up and down his spine. Suddenly face-to-face with the man who had saved him from an untimely lynching, his big plans of rescue and reward seemed to dwindle to something very small indeed. He tried to ignore the tingling that emanated from his sealed belt-pouch.

“I summoned you here to discuss the mechanisms of the ceremony this Friday night,” said Lord Capeluche. “I refer of course to the ritual by which you are to ensorcel the Count of Westmarch. Pray tell me what preparations you have made so far?”

Imad swallowed. “I have discovered the old library,” he said, “and have applied myself to certain studies. The effect that you require can be achieved with considerable ease, given one of two attributes; either a blood relative of the subject, or a virgin female who can be excruciated freely beneath the full moons or within a chamber especially fitted to the design.”

Capeluche nodded slowly. “Then it will be so,” he said. “I will be rid of the bitch and her sire at last!” He looked at Imad sharply. “You know whereof I speak?” he demanded.

“I would presume upon your indulgence, my lord,” Imad replied, almost stuttering with fear. He had seen Capeluche’s eyes, and he was not reflected in them; that stare went on for miles. “Perhaps you could enlighten me?” His skin crawled, but Capeluche merely nodded again and glanced down at his crowded desk.

“The countessa Danielle is fractious and undisciplined,” Capeluche said, with a mincingly haughty expression. “She refuses to submit to my conjugal rights, accuses me of all sorts of abnormality, and has upon occasion attempted to poison me. You may well wonder why I restrain her in our chambers,” he added. “Truth be told the spiteful girl would seek any opportunity to kill me, and it was in full knowledge of this that her father imposed her on me: there is no love lost between us.” He rested his hands in his lap and cradled the head of the sleepy kitten, which purred contentedly then opened its eyes and yawned. “I would not have it thus,” said Capeluche, with dangerous plausibility. Then he froze and looked at his lap.

Imad looked, too. The kitten, awakened from its slumber, had nipped the knight on his thumb. Imad glanced up at Capeluche’s face. There was no expression there, nothing of humanity to distinguish him from the stone of the fortress itself. Imad kept watching, even as he heard the crackle of tiny vertebrae and the limp thud of the discarded corpse.

“Nobody bites my hands, magician,” said Capeluche. “Not now: not ever. Remember that, and you will do well by me. Otherwise—” he looked towards the shuttered window. “There is no otherwise. Remember that.”

The audience was at an end.

Cyanide Blue

“That was quite, quite disgusting,” said Lady Stael. The Bishop studied her expression. One half of her face was in shadow, the other half illuminated by light filtering through the ballroom windows; distaste had thinned her lips to lines and drained all colour from her face.

“I agree completely,” said Marcus. “Was it necessary to recount such an incident in the presence of a lady?”

Jack-Jones stared at him enigmatically. “What I tell you is three-times true,” he said. “This is no time for falsehood: would you have it any other way?”

“Then the structure of this ‘game’ is not to my liking,” said the Bishop, taking a last sip from his empty wine glass. “An extended tale of gross moral turpitude recounted at night in the presence, if I may make so bold, of strangers! Is it really necessary?”

“Yes,” said the Iron Brain remorselessly. “Understanding is a prerequisite for action. This is not a game, Bishop: this is history. Are you ignorant of the rules?”

Marcus desperately wished to say yes, yes, I am ignorant and wish to remain so—but, as the Iron Brain had observed, this was an evening for truth and consequences: he could only proclaim himself culpable by such an outburst.

“I have read certain books about the subject,” he said slowly. “I think I understand the nature of the ghosts we are here to exorcise—for this is a kind of exorcism, is it not?—and we appear to be following the normal forms.

What more do you want?”

“Your cooperation,” said Jack-Jones. He breathed deeply. “Your Holiness, I believe I have told as best I can the whole section that falls within my domain; the process will have to continue with a different guiding light, so to speak. I would like to talk to you in private, if I may. Lady and gentlemen, will you excuse us for a few minutes?”

Lady Stael’s eyes blazed in the twilight. Marcus looked at her; “I fear I must go,” he said tentatively. “I will return—”

Her expression softened abruptly. “Then depart,” she said, and smiled. “I anticipate the pleasure of your company in ten minutes’ time. Please consider, though, that we have only the rest of this evening to avail ourselves of.”

Marcus felt his chair retreat spontaneously from the table until there was room for him to stand. He pushed himself to his feet and bowed. “Ten minutes,” he said to no-one in particular and turned to walk towards the far end of the balcony where he had stood with Angelica Stael in his arms. Only moments seemed to have passed, moments and lifetimes. He felt as if he was drowning in intrigue: his heart throbbed as if he had run for miles.

“You’re taking it badly,” Jack-Jones confided close to his left shoulder.

“Perhaps we should take a brief walk in the garden.”

Marcus started, but managed at the last possible instant to maintain control.

“That is a pleasant idea,” he said nervously.

“Would you care for a glass of wine as we walk?” asked the Paramage.

“If it is no—” Marcus looked up at his companion sharply. Jack-Jones passed him a full glass.

“There is a little-used staircase at the far end of the balcony,” said the wizard. “It descends into a corner of the maze. Shall we explore?”

Marcus smiled experimentally. He felt in control, but beneath the surface of his mind he was the victim of turbulent forces; it was as if the gears of his soul were stripping their teeth and spinning out of control towards a chaotic pursuit of all that was beautiful and meaningful in life. “There is so little time left, and so much left to do,” he said to himself wistfully.

Together they walked around the terrace, until the table of filigree and shadow was hidden by the curvature of the wall. Jack-Jones showed Marcus the staircase, which had not been there when last he came this way, then they descended into the scented darkness.

Lady Stael watched them walk together until they passed into shadow; then she turned her attention back to the table. Nameless emotions gnawed at her heart, a sense of loss that was entirely appropriate coupled with a slight cold fear of the very dangerous men who sat opposite her.

“You are not in control of events any more than the rest of us, it would appear,” said the Last Gambler.

“And you are taking liberties!” she retorted. Despite knowing that it was indecorous, she glared at him. “I did not invite you here: Jack-Jones did that, in accordance with the terms of my fate. Do you take pleasure in your imposition upon my hospitality, or is it simply that you lack the discernment to see—”

“He is antagonising you deliberately,” said the Iron Brain. The light of the ballroom chandeliers reflecting from his cranium lent him an expression of terminally bored amusement. “I do believe he enjoys it.”

“Faugh!” She stood, clutching her skirts to her with indignation. “You tire me with your importunities! If you two gentlemen will excuse me, I must needs retire to my boudoir. I have preparations to complete before the end of the world, and I shall return when Bishop Moran and his excellency the Paramage complete their constitutional.”

She did not expect any civilised response to her tirade, but the Last Gambler stood and removed his hat apologetically. “My lady,” he said: “I did not mean to offend.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “Noted,” she replied. Then she stepped rapidly towards the ballroom door, her heels clacking on the flagstones. An icicle of fear lodged in the small of her back, making her shiver with the realisation that the Last Gambler was correct: that she had lost control, had she indeed ever possessed it.

She swept through the desolate ballroom, past the table of delicacies and the furniture draped in dust-sheets until she came to the grand entrance hall and the wide staircase that swept up to the uppermost floor. She gathered up her skirts and climbed the steps one at a time, for her high heels tended to unbalance her and the stairs were very high. Pausing halfway up, she turned and stared back down into the hall. Her eyes narrowed and her vision blurred with nascent tears of self-pity as she thought; he should have been here by my side. It should be on his arm that I ascend these steps. But then she steeled herself. If Jack-Jones had not intervened …

The door to her suite was already ajar when she reached it. Maid Elenea is in need of chastisement again, the sloven! she thought. Then she paused in the doorway and raised her hands to cover her mouth in shock. But Elenea is dead, she realised. She shot herself! What kind of inner strength did that woman have, to take her own life at the random whim of a gun? A sick wave of envy and dread swept through her, for she knew that if she had possessed half as much resolve she would not be here today. Such ideas were dangerous; it was a good thing that the Church discouraged suicide.

The sensation of satin and lace against her cheeks was uncomfortable. Suddenly she longed to strip off the veneer of civilisation, to touch her skin directly, to disregard the stifling constrictions of her position and upbringing. She began to roll her evening gloves down from her elbows, pausing in annoyance when she realised that the jewelled rings she wore would hamper their removal. Damn, she thought. Why did it have to be my maid and not the dog-handler?

Working the heavy rings along her gloves, she turned and walked into her bedroom. The door to one of her wardrobes had sprung open, revealing the rack of formal gowns that she wore on occasions such as this. Pursing her lips in mild annoyance she sat down on the ottoman beside her dressing table. The rings came free and she dropped them idly beside a crystal decanter of finest vodja: then she rolled off her silk gloves, on their own worth half a year’s wages to her maid, and flicked them towards the shado ws that gathered in the far corner of the room.

She frowned experimentally, a grimace that she would never dare to use in public. She was tired and a little depressed, but she could not yet retreat from the public evening; there was still a while to go before the universe drifted to a close, and in any case she would soon have to brave the game again. Then it occurred to her that she had a more immediate problem. She had drunk perhaps two-thirds of a bottle of strong red wine, and it appeared that she would have to remove her corsetry unaided before sh e could retreat to her chamber and piss.

The hedges rose two cubits above the top of Jack-Jones’ head, sufficiently high that Bishop Moran had to crane his neck to see the fantastic birds trimmed into the top of them. “I am impressed,” he declaimed tipsily, “by your creativity! Either that or the gardener has created a posthumous masterpiece that shall ensure his future immortality among topiarists—were there any posterity to bestow it upon. Oh dear.” He gulped a full mouthful of wine and stifled a belch.

“I do believe you are reaching the end of your self-restraint,” said the magician, “and about time too! We need a full and frank discussion this evening, once the tale of Imad and Danielle has worked its way to its logical and terrible conclusion. What say you?”

“I am unaware of the conclusion you refer to,” admitted Marcus, “but I should like to hear it. It induces in me pangs of deja vu that are quite disquieting; as if, to draw a gastronomic analogy, I have eaten one of the notorious madrashi dishes to which Baron Heisen is so addicted, and the belches of memory torment the surface of my waking mind for hours afterward.”

Jack-Jones walked slowly along the avenue of hedges, until he came to a crossing. “Which way shall I go now, do you suppose?” he asked with a twinkle in his eyes.

Bishop Moran consulted the skies. The moons were drifting to one side; either that or his head was nodding.

“Left,” he said. “The light is better that way.” He breathed deeply of the invigorating night air and tripped after the magician. When he caught up with him they walked together along a turf as neatly groomed as the hair of any dandy.

“It is right and proper that the tale should induce in you some sense of recognition,” commented the paramage. “It is an isomyth, after all—a structure that when decomposed into its component elements holds a mirror to the heroic lays of old. I confess that I myself am moved by it, even though I know it to be true.”

“But you said it was a myth!” protested the Bishop.

“An isomyth,” corrected Jack-Jones. “Not the same at all, my dear fellow. An isomyth decomposes the stuff of legend, inverts it and exposes it to the light of day. I knew Imad in person, you know. A foolish youth who met his fate just as he was showing signs of maturity.”

“Then why not continue the tale?” asked Marcus tetchily, forgetting that to hasten the ending of such a story might spoil the enjoyment of it for more than just himself, the impatient listener.

Jack-Jones smiled secretively. “Because it is no longer my tale to tell,” he said. “I laid an Eye on Imad, and it is true that I was best fitted to discuss the whys and wherefores of his coming to Castle Capeluche, but of his flight and quest there is one far better suited than I to carry the narrative forward!”

“The Iron Brain?” guessed Marcus wildly. “Did he meet them in his travels?” But the wizard merely shook his head silently, and chose another path.

They came to a central grove in which an iron bench sat beside a marble pillar surmounted by a small and disturbing sculpture. One of the ubiquitous stuffed penguins watched them with glassy eyes, its head tilted permanently at an inquisitive angle, as if it was awaiting the reply to some obscure question. The moonlit shadows ran as deep as the lines on Jack-Jones’ face.

“You ask many imponderable questions, Bishop,” he said heavily. “Perhaps it is time you let go and simply drifted with events. I am aware that self-comprehension is the first step along your Church’s path to redemption, but surely there comes a point where rigorous self-scrutiny becomes mere recursive navel-gazing?”

“Yes, by all means,” agreed Marcus, trying desperately to regain a measure of self control; “but you fail to grasp that I am disturbed because somehow the story seems to me to be—”

He froze, and stared at the penguin. It seemed to be laughing at him, and for an instant there was no more sinister entity in his entire universe.

“Yes,” said the Paramage after a discreet interval. “I know. You are disturbed because Imad resembles yourself in certain respects. And you refuse to draw the logical conclusion; that the isomyth is not about a deceased magician after all—but about the participants of this soiree.”

Angelica, Lady Stael, stood naked in front of a long mirror that hung inside one door of her wardrobe. Moonlight filtered in through the diamond-leaded panes of the window and fell across the wreckage of her gown. Silk stockings and underskirts and shoes lay at random; eventually she had taken a dagger to her corsetry, almost crying in frustration because her maid was not there to assist her with the recalcitrant lacework. But now she was free; dark-rimmed eyes stared back at her from the mirror, wreath ed with wild shadows. She lifted the decanter to her lips and threw back a choking, burning draught of vodja, then looked at the mirror again.

“And what have you got to say for yourself?” she demanded of her reflection.

“What indeed?” retorted her dark twin. Her exp ression was contemptuous. “Tell me, sister. Don’t spare yourself.”

“Sixty years old; forty years married, thirty-six of them a widow (don’t interrupt!) to an eccentric Lord whose polar obsession was almost certainly the death of him. Sixty years of gentility, and what have you achieved? You don’t even know where your own pantry is!” She flung the decanter to the floor; it landed upon the cyanide-blue skirts of her dress and began to leak.

She snatched up the knife from her dressing table. It glinted, flashing reflections of steel across the darkened space within the mirror. Her twins’ eyes tracked it carefully, as if assessing the hand of the madwoman behind it.

“If nothing else, you should think about the last thirty-six years,” she said carefully, the bitterness in her voice sufficient to curdle milk. “Think of the years wasted: the years wrapped in black velvet, the years of self-deprivation, the decades of shameful neglect. Look at yourself!”

She stared at her reflection unselfconsciously. Her breasts were small and high, her waist slim, and her skin showed no blemishes. She might as well have been twenty years old: the magic of the physicians ensured that no member of the aristocracy need ever look their real age.

“A third of a century,” she mused, abruptly thoughtful. She deposited the knife on top of the rest of the damp detritus, and raised one sweating hand to her breast, the other to her groin. She felt hot. “Damn!”

A wave of dizziness swept through her head, making the room waver as if in a mirage. She saw herself as she might have been: as one of her former incarnations had been. Accomplishments, freedom, none of the claustrophobia of aristocracy. Her skin was hot, her nipples icy cold. “Damn!” she repeated, staggering slightly because she felt sick. Then she glanced through the window.

The moons were nearing the zenith; there was no telling how long she had been in seclusion for. When they began to set, the world would come to an end.

Another dizzy spell gripped her, and suddenly she felt her stomach turn over in rejection, preparing itself to expel the alien spirits that had entered—or been inserted into—her body. “Oh god,” she gasped in disgust, half-panicking and clutching at her stomach as she realised that she was about to be sick. Then she bent double and vomited over her ball-gown.

Marcus and Jack-Jones returned to the moonlit staircase in silence. It was not that there was nothing to say, merely that Marcus dared not permit himself to say it. It was a warm night, but even the heat could not account for the sweat that trickled from his brow. He repeatedly glanced at his magical colleague in the hope of starting a conversation, but the uneasy silence lingered on in the night air. Somehow he did not feel like starting a dialogue about the rich odours of the night-flowering plants; it would be too close to admitting defeat, to confessing a desire to surrender his insights to the mysterious and imposing Paramage. Like most members of his profession, Marcus harboured a vague distrust directed at all practitioners of the magical sciences; for although priests relied on the tenuosities of insight, the paramagi had a more readily demonstrable method.

When they reached the balcony Jack-Jones paused suddenly and looked at him.

“What is it?” asked Marcus, suddenly glad of the excuse to break his silence.

“I must warn you,” said Jack-Jones, “that what you are about to hear may be even more distasteful to you than what has gone before, especially considering the lips from which it will come. I should advise you to fortify yourself with spirits; it will cushion the blow, and perhaps render your memories of this evening more tender.”

Marcus shrugged uncomfortably. “Why bother?” he asked. “It is the end, after all—”

“That might be so,” warned the Paramage; “ but then again, there is also the chance that what we are about to witness is no less than a new beginning. Consider the miracle of reincarnation—if human souls migrate, what then of the world-soul itself? Might it not bear us, its children, to safety in some other continuum of joy? Or might the prophecies indeed be wrong? Marcus, Bishop Moran, you should not assume the worst merely because it is the most convenient basis on which to determine your conduct!”

Marcus shivered. “In that case, I should like another glass of wine,” he said. “And, for whatever record there might be, I am sorry for my treatment of you.”

“What treatment?” asked Jack-Jones obliquely, passing him a full glass. “Come, let us take our seats.”

When they returned to the table, only two of the chairs were occupied. “What has happened to Lady Stael?” Marcus enquired nervously. “Where has she gone?”

The Iron Brain turned its head and looked at him. “I believe she wished to repair her cosmetics,” it said coolly. The Last Gambler continued to shuffle his deck listlessly. “Why don’t you sit down? I am sure she will return presently.”

Marcus forced himself to relax, restrained his hands from fidgeting. Jack-Jones stood, staring across the garden: then after what felt like only a few seconds he turned and looked at the ballroom door. “My lady,” he said.

“My estraordinaire,” she replied. Marcus turned, saw her, and rose to his feet.

She approached the table and nodded to them; “are we ready to resume?” she enquired brightly.

“By all means,” said Marcus. “My lady, your dress is very—”

Her nose-gem flashed a warning light in his eye. “Thank you Marcus,” she said. “Perhaps you would be so good as to let me to sit beside you.”

He pulled out a chair for her, and she sat down. She had changed into a black tunic with a cowled neck and puffed sleeves: everyday wear among the courtiers whom provincial fashion aped. What was less usual was the short length of her skirt, and the clinging leggings she wore beneath it; and her boots. They had definitely been crafted with uses other than court appearances in mind.

“Perhaps it is time for you to draw the next card, Gambler,” suggested

Jack-Jones, returning to his seat.

“Very well, then,” said the Last Gambler in a jaded tone. He moved a finger to flip the top of the deck, but the Iron Brain reached a skeletal hand across the table and restrained him.

“Wait,” said the skull.

“Why?” he asked.

Marcus noticed that Angelica was staring at him intently. He also noticed that her nose-diamond was now the only bauble she wore; and that she had neglected her corsetry.

“It’s my turn,” she said, in a curiously detached tone of voice. “I never thought it would come—never—but it really is my turn, and now I will not be ignored.” She sounded as if she was baffled by some incomprehensible riddle that had been posed.

“Are you sure you are well, my Lady?” enquired Marcus.

“Never felt better,” she replied rapidly. “Gambler, please remove your hand. Let me … “

Both the Iron Brain and the Last Gambler let go of the tarot pack, and Lady Stael flipped the third card onto the face-up stack. Strange; it was a picture of a naked forearm, the veins bulging. Hovering above it was a hand, the fingers of which were wrapped around a tiny barbers’ syringe blown from glass. The barrel of it was filled with some clear fluid, while the needle was embedded in a vein. “That doesn’t make sense,” said Marcus. “If it’s drawing from a vessel, why is the vein distended? And why is the fluid clear? It should be the colour of blood.”

“Perhaps it is not drawing, but injecting,” said the Iron Brain. It stared at the card for a long time.

“That’s disgusting,” said Marcus.

“I’ve heard of worse,” replied Lady Stael; he looked at her sharply, but her expression was serious. “Is it my turn now?”

The Gambler looked at her and nodded, slowly. “I fear it is,” he said. “If you want to let—”

“No,” she interrupted. “I’ll do it my way.” She reached out to drag the card of the syringe across the strange knight, and Marcus saw that her hand was shaking slightly. “I’ve wanted to tell this tale for years.”

She looked around at the expectant faces. “It’s the part that wouldn’t be told otherwise,” she said sharply. “None of you think too much about the world of women, do you? After all, we are nothing to you now that reproduction has been replaced by resurrection; nothing but ornaments to grace the beds of our lucky owners, is that not so?” Marcus blinked. Does she mean us? he wondered. Why, what could be further from the truth! But he saw that the Iron Brain, replete with the knowledge of the ancients, was n odding: and Jack-Jones looked chastened.

She stared at Marcus challengingly, then nodded to herself as if some deep suspicion was confirmed. “I must tell you what happened the night before

Capeluche sacrificed his bride,” she said. “Then you will understand.”

6. The End of the World, Reversed

Shaken by his master’s warning, Imad returned to his hay-filled tick and slept uneasily until dawn. It was not the quality of the warning that dismayed him, but the pointlessness of it; as if Capeluche believed that everyone was as thick-skinned as himself. In his disturbing dreams, Imad saw himself as he would become after thirty years of living with such a master. Cruelty would become not a means, but an end—an extreme that struck him as both indecent and inelegant. And what Lord Capeluche expected o f him! It was not that he was incapable of the action, but the thought of simply butchering the countessa Danielle as a method of attacking her father struck him as wasteful in the extreme.

That morning he began his preparations. And by nightfall, he was ready to attempt his escapade. But meanwhile:

As she had done every morning for the past three years, Danielle awakened with the dawn to find herself alone. She could not remember shedding the tears that stained her pillow, and her manacles chafed at her wrists despite the calluses that she had built up over the years. She sat up and rattled her chains loudly, her eyes dry and cold with the hatred she had felt upon waking every day since her marriage.

There was an answering rattle from the door. One of the guards entered, bearing a bucket and a platter on which was heaped an unappetising mound of cold stew. Careful not to get too close to her, he placed the bucket on the floor beside the bed then backed out of the room. There was a click as he locked the door, and then she was alone again.

Danielle sat up and worked her way to the edge of the bed. Although she was manacled at ankle and wrist, her chains were looped through holes in the bed-posts so that she could—by dint of careful manoeuvre—reach any part of the bed itself, and even extend a limb at a time beyond it. This she did, drawing back her lips in a feral snarl until her fingertips brushed the handle of the bucket and, closing on it, dragged it towards her. She carefully removed the platter and put it by her pillow, for later consumption; the bucket she hoisted onto the bed and placed under herself. Then she pissed in it.

The guards had learned through experience that it was a bad idea to leave her victuals too close to hand. She had broken the skull of the last man to do so; she still had the whip-marks to remember the incident by.

Having evacuated herself, Danielle picked listlessly at her food with a soiled finger. It had galled her at first that she was not allowed to bathe, and she had been enraged when her clothing was forcibly removed and she was chained in this—this elevated dungeon—but now she had lost sight of her origins so thoroughly that she was oblivious to her condition except when her sores wept, or the lice that swarmed in her matted hair drew blood. It is a dungeon no less for being high above the ground, she reminded herself for the millionth time. My father will rescue me! But it was a hollow mantra, for she had long since abandoned all hope of rescue from the madman who claimed the right to control her body and soul, who had condemned her to this life of degradation and imprisonment.

Presently her platter was bare. She looked around dully, but there was nothing of interest; the furniture beyond the bed might as well have graced the surface of one of the moons, for her chains did not permit her sufficient freedom even to reach the chest where her garments and dowry were stored. And besides, nothing ever changed. She could not remember how long she had been a prisoner in this tower; it could have been three weeks or three centuries for all that she could tell. Truth be told she was hers elf becoming slightly insane, for the only man who was permitted to speak to her was himself a lunatic who paraded in the skins of his victims and who took pride in the eating of human flesh.

Her day passed with excruciating slowness. A few hours after she had eaten, she pissed in the bucket again and added some dark stool to it. Then she pushed it to the floor, not heeding which way it went, and rolled over onto her belly to spare the healing sore on her left buttock. The chains tightened but she was used to them by now, and ignored them. She drifted in a light trance in which she held the severed head of her husband high on a scaffold before a roaring crowd of onlookers, then awakened to dis cover that it was afternoon and a second platter had been placed beside her while she slept.

She shoved it on the floor. She was no longer hungry; she was trying to learn to live without eating. If she could last long enough, she reasoned, her hands might slip through her manacles and she could free herself. She had realised several months ago that if she tried to cut her arms off at the wrist she would be unable to release her legs, and ever since then anorexia had been her policy.

Meanwhile, she exercised as best she could in her restraints. This was her other obsession: that although she must be thin, she must be wiry and agile—for how else was she to beat off her husbands’ advances, if and when he ever made them? In her isolation she had become paranoid, for the daughters of counts were chaperoned from earliest childhood and she was still virginal, at least with respect to the opposite sex.

Finally, she dozed again until dusk. She was awakened by the creak of footsteps within the room; every muscle tensed, but she didn’t open her eyes. She hoped he would think she was asleep.

“Don’t be silly,” said her husband. “Open your eyes and look at me, whore.”

Danielle opened her eyes and glared up at him. He seemed to fill her universe, a monstrous void at the end of the tunnel of existence; nemesis writ large upon her tombstone. “I’m not a whore,” she said in a dangerously low tone.

He smiled oddly, his face askew as if the muscles connected to one cheek had been severed by accident and failed to reconnect properly.”I know what you’re thinking,” he said, in a lilting tone of voice; “you’re thinking how to kill me, to bury me, so that you can dance upon my grave. Say it isn’t so, whore?”

Her vision blurred momentarily with tears of rage and hatred; but gainsay him she could not. Her verbal cooption was one of his most savage weapons against her, for the truth was this: Lord Capeluche was afraid to so much as touch her skin. He believed that she was contagion itself, the personification of his doom, and that if he—or anyone else—touched her then the spark of her malice would track him down and slay him wherever he stood. And perhaps he was right.

She stayed silent. “Very well then,” said Capeluche. “As you were.” He giggled slightly; “enjoy your dinner.” He left the bedchamber, and she spat at the door as it closed behind him. That was another of his regular jokes. It meant she was going to starve for a day.

Presently it grew dark. Danielle exercised, continuing a program of press-ups and sit-ups that might have daunted a stevedore, marking time with her silent litany of rage. When she was too tired to continue, and all her muscles were shivering and weak, she lay back and placed her head upon the pillow and shut her eyes. Silent tears trickled down her cheeks unnoticed, as they had every evening for a thousand days.

At some point, her husband returned. He entered the room quietly, turned and ensured that the door was locked, then walked across to his chair beneath the window and sat in it with his feet upon a cushion. It was not the noise of his entrance but the intensity of his stare that awakened her, as usual.

“What is it?” she murmured, still half-asleep.

“Tomorrow,” he whispered. “Tomorrow I shall be rid of you for ever. Sleep well, my princess. Sleep well and deep.”

“Good riddance,” she whispered, too drained by hatred to wonder what he meant.

She rolled over again, rattling her chains in their sockets, and buried her face in the bolster. Perhaps one day it would stifle her; if so, it was something to look forward to. One small mercy among few, the greatest of which was that the madman dared not touch her with his filthy body, not even one square inch of it.

Now she fell into a deep slumber and dreamed, just as her psychotic husband had bidden her. In her dream, a dark and shadowy rescuer was approaching. He came by stealth, lurking in dark tunnels beneath the castle walls; he brought with him a sack of clothing, a sword, a pouch of arcana, and a bright new set of immaterial manacles. He came clothed in darkness, and he paused at a door in the foundations of the tower to whisper words of power that caused the lock on her door to spring open, then other words that came down upon her head like a hammer of velvet-black night.

Somewhere in her subconscious, hope stirred. Her fingers flexed, broken nails poised ready to gouge.

Then she was permitted to awaken.

“What—” she murmured, then felt a palm clamped unsteadily across her jaw.

Realising that her dream was reality, she refrained from biting it.

“Patience,” he whispered, and removed his hand. There was the faintest of clicks at wrist and ankle, and an intoxicating sense of freedom overcame her. She shivered uncontrollably. Her rescuer was a dark shadow against the night; did he know about her husband?

“My lord—” she whispered, sitting up.

“—don’t worry,” her rescuer said quietly. “Will you come with me?”

He was a man: she said “yes” as she had been trained to, before she even considered what she was doing. Despite all her experiences. “In the chest, over there,” she said, pointing. “He keeps my belongings in it. Take the bag on top, leave the rest. Have you fast horses waiting? My father will be grateful—”

“No horses,” whispered her rescuer, holding up something that glittered in the faint moonlight. “Tonight we fly by magic.”

Her spirits soared; freedom by dawn! She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, wincing at the strangeness of the sensation. “Still, be careful. We don’t want to wake my husband.”

“Your—” her shadowy rescuer froze then turned to face the window, the chair: the sleeping lunatic therein. “Shit,” he said.

Danielle was dizzy; it was the first time she had stood up—except upon a bed with her arms bowed to slacken her chains—for more than three years. She stumbled towards the chest and opened it, grabbing at her bag: she didn’t notice the empty platter on the lid until it crashed to the floor.

Lord Capeluche grunted and stiffened.

“Quick! Hold me tight,” said her rescuer. He threw back his head and drank from the small vial that he held; she reached around his waist and linked her arms tightly, keeping hold of the neck of her bag. He uttered words that caused her skin to itch as if termites were burrowing within it, then he fell silent with his head thrown back in an attitude of intense concentration.

“Halt!” mumbled Lord Capeluche. “You cannot do this—” he jerked, and one eye opened. Her feet left the ground and her stomach lurched: she was flying, and there was a faint inhuman shrieking in her ears as if her rescuer was turning into a giant bat. “You’ll miss the execution!” shouted her husband.

They rose over Capeluche’s head as he struggled to his feet: the glass burst outwards before them as if a giant fist had punched into it, and then there was nothing below her feet for a very long way except the moonlit crowns of trees and a scream of pure and chilling rage that welled up through the window behind them.

They flew into the night, and she realised that perhaps her rescuer was not an agent of her father after all. That, perhaps, she had been abandoned to her fate. “Who are you?” she asked, holding tight to the waist of her rescuer; “what made you rescue me?”

He turned his face to her, but his lips were sealed as if he was holding back words. The strangeness of it, of the wind across her naked skin and the vast emptiness around her, made her laugh until the tears flowed freely and acknowledged for the first time. Then they began to descend towards the midnight forest beyond Castle Capeluche.

As the trees loomed up to either side, Danielle looked around in fascination. She had not been outside for years, and it still seemed unutterably strange. Then the rough grass of a clearing came up and batted her across the soles of her feet and she let go of her captor, staggering as she held her sack of dusty possessions.

“Can you speak yet?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said. “The spell is flown …” he looked up towards the branches, through which the stars were barely visible.

“Good,” she said. “I believe we shall have to make good our escape before my husband calls out the hunt. If he find us he’ll kill us. You do realise that, don’t you?”

Looking at him as her eyes adapted to the darkness, Danielle realised that her captor was little more than a youth; barely older than herself, shabbily dressed and unsophisticated. “You are prepared for this, are you not?” she prompted.

He stared at her in apparent confusion. “Not exactly,” he said. “You talk … “

She felt the pine needles beneath the soles of her feet, the breath of owls and night violets in her lungs; long grass tickled her calves, while a gentle night breeze dried the sweat from her body as she continued to breathe deeply, trying desperately to soak up as much of this natural world as possible before the universe of men reached out again to imprison her with its restrictions. The dead leather weight of her bag dangled from her fingers. “You had no idea?” she asked disbelievingly.

“No,” he said quietly. “It seemed a waste.”

“What did?” she demanded.

“He wants your father dead. He wanted me to strike him down by necromancy, using you as a portal vessel. Your father should be grateful.”

There was something disquieting about this young man, she decided; perhaps he was inexperienced in pain, unaware of the significance of what he was talking about. “My father can go hang for all I care,” she said softly. “But now, will you help me?”

“I—” he looked at the ground. “Yes.”

“Then stop staring at me,” she said. “I must clothe myself.”

He turned away, just as he was told, and something inside her relaxed slightly.

Maybe, just maybe, she thought, this is a sane one. Squatting, she opened her bag and drew out the travelling clothes she had worn habitually before her enforced marriage, her bride-sale of three years past. Her boots were there, too, and the short knife she had carried on her person. “You may look again,” she said. “I would not like to be responsible for an adder biting you while your eyes were shut.”

He blinked “You are—” he paused. “These are your clothes?” he asked disbelievingly.

“Why do you think my father wished to dispose of me?” she asked, savagely. “I was more trouble than he was used to.” She hefted her knife meaningfully, then thrust it into her belt. “Now. You say you brought no horses or provisions?”

“Provisions, yes,” said the youth. “I have brought enough travelling food for us both to last a week, with care. And I have a book that might be of use under certain circumstances.” He looked at her curiously and she laughed.

“You’re hardly cut out for the raping and pillaging business, are you?” she asked. Reaching deep into her pockets, she drew on knuckle-rings surmounted by brazen pyramids sharp enough to cut leather. “Who and what manner of rescuer are you, and where do you hail from, oh chivalrous one who comes by night?”

“I am called Imad, and I was recruited—forcibly—to be your husband’s magus,” said her rescuer reluctantly.

“And why did he recruit you?” she asked. “Were you all he could afford, or did you come free from one who wanted to dispose of you too?”

“Neither,” he said sharply, turning away as if stung. “I am an exile. My master sent me away after telling me that my aptitude was of less than no worth whatsoever, and that he did not wish to train me further.”

“Then it was the latter case, just like me,” she said wryly, hiding from him the secret calculations that trickled through her mind like drops of blood along a blade. “And what is your gift?”

He looked at her knowingly. “I am very good at dealing with pain,” he said.

She smiled. “I can see that we are going to get on very well,” she replied, removing her claws from her pockets. “Now, Imad, shall we walk, or would you like to guest at my husband’s table in an entirely undesirable capacity?”

If Danielle had had her way they would have ridden out the night, but without horses or torches that would have been foolhardy; instead they sat with their backs to a fallen beech tree and discussed, in quiet voices, what they were going to do. Certain subjects were avoided (the question of motives in particular) for Danielle was still wary of Imad, and for his part Imad was taken aback by her self-assertive manner.

“How far from the road are we?” she asked, idly paring strips of bark off the tree with her knife, collecting it for tinder.

“Not far,” he said. “I followed it as I flew, but the bat’s blood was thinning rapidly and had I continued much further we’d like as not have fallen.”

“That sounds interesting,” she said. “Bat’s blood? Is that how—”

“A symbolic philtre,” he interrupted. “The higher the screams, the higher the altitude; sympathic powers obey a law of proportionality, though I would not expect you to understand—”

“My training was in the arts of reading and writing,” she interrupted. “No one bothered themselves with what I read.”

“And what did you occupy yourself with?” he asked, chastened.

“At first with heroic myths, and epics of the hunt. Then I realised that my sex proscribed these, and I would be better applying myself to romance and comedy.”

“So what did you do?”

She rammed her dagger into the tree. “I went hunting.”

Imad shivered. “What is it?” she asked mockingly. “Am I alarming you? I assure you that at my fathers’ court there are plenty of refined and ineffectual ladies to plight your troth to, should you so desire!”

“That was not what I was thinking,” he said shortly. “It was simply this; you say Lord Capeluche—”

She spat. “—That scum—”

“—is afraid of you? Why, then, will he come after us?”

She gazed into the night woods. Already, although she might have been imagining it, it appeared to be growing less dark. “Because he is afraid,” she said. “He thinks that I am his nemesis, that my spirit will pursue him to the ends of the earth and haunt him to death.” She turned and looked at Imad, who flinched only slightly under the full intensity of her stare. “Maybe he’s right.”

She retrieved her dagger. “We had better take the road,” she said. “He will follow us at break of dawn with all of his men. Neither of us can expect any mercy, you know. He’s got an excuse to kill me now, without my father being oblige d to take reluctant revenge: he can accuse us of adultery together. What do you say, sheltered magus? Do you realise what desperate situation you have insinuated yourself into?”

He looked gloomy. “Perhaps we have a future together,” he said. “And perhaps I was naive to stand in the way of your husband: but I’ve prepared this thorny bed for myself, so I suppose I must now lie in it.” She could see inside his head; and I doubt that he would forgive me, even were I to return you instantly. She nodded to herself. Such thoughts were to be expected.

“Our match would certainly seem to be fated,” she said drily. “Now come. Let us move; we have a long distance to go before we can consider ourselves safe, and a sensible start might be made by the stealing of a pair of horses!”

“Agreed,” he said. And together they set off for the ends of the world, to liberate themselves from their respective demons.

Against the Expanding Night

The table fell silent.

“Well I must say,” said Bishop Moran, “this is not what I had expected to hear!”

Lady Stael looked at him and shook her head. I wonder how he’s going to take it when he realises what he is, she thought. “I didn’t think it was,” she said sharply. “The truth is often unpalatable. You didn’t think about it very deeply, did you? The myth of the maiden imprisoned in the high tower, who waits for nothing more than her rescuer … how true does it have to be? Might it not perhaps be the malicious propaganda of her captors themselves, who conspire to drug and imprison her so that her l ife becomes meaningless, given direction only by proxy through her children?”

She realised abruptly that the anger she was showing was out of place, that in other company it would have had terrible consequences for her social status: but this time it no longer mattered. A wildness without joy filled her; she could do whatever she wanted. She looked at the balustrade and understood what it was that Elenea the maid had sensed, that as the universe was drawing to a logical conclusion suicide was as sensible an option as abandoning a sinking ship. She glanced at Marcus. “Think,” she sa id determinedly, “for once in your privileged, insulated life! Don’t you see what it must be like? The myth, the story that we are constructing, is from the time before we remembered all our other lives, before we knew that transamnemsis was possible: before the determinism of history became overt! The dead did not hatch again, to stride the earth in renewed bodies: they were dead! And women, despite all the abuse that they suffered, had a vital function: for without them there would be an end to al l exp rience.”

“But now, as the world winds down, the mechanism is disrupted,” said Jack-Jones heavily. “Is that what you mean, my Lady?”

“Where is my life?” she cried. “Why am I entrapped, deprived of any function save decoration? There was a time when—”

“Overpopulation,” said the Iron Brain, as coarsely as a turd cast upon the floor of heaven. “Time has run its mill-race, and now the flow becomes turbulent. How else do you explain the thinning rate of incarnation of previous lives?”

“That was not what she was referring to,” said Marcus tetchily. “I do believe—”

“—I will speak for myself, thank you,” said Lady Stael, irritated by his blind protectiveness. “This game is a valuable prompt to my memory, although some things still do not become clearer; why did the countessa have no recollection of her previous lives, for example? I would like to find out, but I fear that time is running short. It will be necessary before long to hasten the end and free the ghosts, otherwise we might well be too busy to appreciate the final act of the cosmic drama taking place out side.”

“I doubt that very much,” said the Iron Brain. It grinned at her darkly and she looked away, disturbed. She still remembered her outburst about freedom, but somehow it seemed hollow when she considered the words from the speaking skull.

And what is really going on in Marcuses head? she wondered. “It is becoming cold,” she announced. “I intend to go inside, and will shortly meet you in the western drawing-room, where we may continue the game in relative comfort. If we finish in time we can come out here again for the final event.” She pushed back her chair, rose, and walked away without so much as a by-your-leave. It was a minor triumph, but sufficiently irrelevant to leave a bitter taste in her mouth.

So many lost years! sh e wondered. Am I in time?

She entered the ballroom, where the chandeliers were burning down dark and the shadows crept along the floor even as she watched. The sideboard of delicacies seemed to be caught in a frozen instant of motion even as she watched; approaching it, she saw that the snails themselves were returning to life, hatching and writhing among the shells of their corpses, renewing themselves with impossible speed. There was a faint twittering noise from the dish of pickled lark’s tongues. She stared at it, simultaneous ly fascinated and disgusted. It reminded her of sexual intercourse with her husband, in the days before she remembered from her previous lives what it was that she should have been told prior to her marriage.

Turning away, she walked lightly towards the grand hall and the staircase to her rooms. She had a wild urge to set light to the carpets and dance upon the blazing pyre of her deranged and repressive past: she suppressed it and climbed the stairs instead. Something was tugging at the edge of her mind and she was not sure whether she wished to become fully conscious of it, of a dangerous obsession left over from a previous journey through the halls of life. It’s strange, she thought. I could almos t believe myself to be Danielle; not merely her transamnetrix, but her very flesh and soul! It was exciting and frightening, not least because she had so little time to get used to it—the world was due to end in only two and three quarter hours. Perhaps that’s why, she brooded, walking along the corridor past her suite, towards another room that she had not visited for a long time. Perhaps as time runs down the barrier between past and present is thinning. I am becoming my own ghost , like the Iron Brain

Her skin was tingling. As she looked about she realised that she had come to her vanished husband’s bedroom. The door loomed in front of her, its casement limned in faint blue fire.

“I’m not your toy,” she said quietly. “I’m not afraid.” The years draped themselves heavily across her shoulders as she turned the handle and entered.

The dead Lord Stael’s room was identical to her own, save only that the dust lay thick within it. Drifts of pale ash heaped the picture frames, hung in the shafts of moonlight that shone through the windows; she sneezed, then turned to the bed. A counterpane lay across it, dusty and faded. She turned it back, and sat on one corner of the mattress. It creaked beneath her weight.

“May I come in?” asked Marcus.

She peered at him in the gloom. He appeared somewhat dishevelled, and although it was very dark his eyes were screwed tight. He held something behind his back.

“Only if you show me what you’re holding,” she said cautiously.

“A bottle of wine, nothing more.” He brought it out and she saw that it was not just any wine: it was the most ancient vintage of Schloss Stael, stored in the cellars so that the bottle was dusted with a powdery crust that had accumulated over a full century. It was quite an appropriate vintage, she thought, for it was lych-wine, drunk only at noble funerals: the cellar where it was stored tunnelled into the catacombs.

“That is a sensible choice,” she said. “Did you have any body in mind to anoint with it?”

“Only myself,” he said quietly. “I’ve been a fool, Angelica. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

She licked her lips. “Yes, Imad.”

“Don’t call me that!” he said angrily, and she shivered. “I’m not Imad, and you’re not Danielle any more either. Don’t forget that or we’re lost.” He sat down on the chaise longue opposite her and placed the bottle between his knees.

He looked haunted, as well he might.

“We still have our memories,” she reminded him. “We still remember our other lives.”

“Don’t.” He stared past her shoulder, broodingly. “Have I made a fool of myself?”

She swallowed bile and memories. “Only for the past fifty years, Marcus. You have made no more a fool of yourself than I have.”

“But why?” he demanded. “Why did I refuse to remember—”

She smiled grimly. “If you remembered, you would understand why you wanted to forget. Perhaps we should call an end to the game at this stage: after all, it is your turn next.”

“Hah.” He looked round. “Is there a corkscrew here?”

“There’s a sideboard,” she said. He stood up and opened the wine, then returned with two glasses, the bottle breathing the dusty air. She looked up at him. “Sit by me?” she asked.

Marcus sighed and sat down next to her. Dust rose from the bedding but the frame was solid. “We share our memories,” he said, pouring a glass of fluid that was as black as congealed blood in the moonlight: “what else do we have in common?”

“I don’t know,” she said, staring at the veins on his hand. “We could grow old, not understanding one another, or—” Her fingers closed on the stem of the glass. “I put on this dress because it was as near to her old hunting garb as I could find,” she added softly. “Anything closer is alien to my status, Marcus. I am entrapped, and yet I was told it is a privilege. Where did the lie begin?”

“That’s a dangerous question to ask,” he said. She found that she liked his new candour, whether or not it was born of despair: it was more than just a drunken counterweight to piety and intellect, the two poles around which his personality seemed to revolve. “I don’t know where it started. Maybe when the first man told the first woman that she was beautiful, as a means of persuading her to hold his baby rather than as a statement of bald truth.”

“His baby?” she asked, raising an eyebrow; “even the language we speak turns against us!”

“You include me?” he asked; “aren’t I excluded by my sex?”

She thought for a moment, then took in a mouthful of thick, dark wine. “No,” she said. “For what belittles any person belittles all. Don’t you see?”

He seemed puzzled. “I think so,” he said, a pained expression on his face. “I didn’t realise it meant so much to you.”

“It didn’t. Not until the game commenced, and I began to remember who I am.”

She drained her glass carelessly, and watched him through a haze of moonbeam possibilities. He took a sip. “What are we doing here?” he asked.

“The dead have friendships,” she said, feeling her pulse race as she considered her next words carefully. “It’s been a long time. Who are we to restrain them, at the end of the universe?”

His back straightened. “That is an improper suggestion to—” he stopped, then took a mouthful of wine, made a face, and put the glass down on the floor. “I sounded just like a Bishop then, didn’t I?” he said, a desperate fear visible in his eyes. “Come here—”

Angelica leaned close and kissed him. Their lips met and parted, tongues eagerly renewing an acquaintance that was both ancient and new together. “Quickly,” she said, pulling away from him. Her eyes watered with fear that the moment might be lost. “There’s so little time! We must finish the game.”

For a minute they were all fingers and thumbs, feverishly stripping each other bare until skin shivered under moonlight. Then Marcus reached out and ran a finger across her tense-skinned breast. “No,” she said, feeling her nipples contract and harden. “I want you to lie down first.”

“Is it—” he did as she said—“that important?”

“Yes,” she said, not quite able to remember why it was that she had to do this.

“On your back—”

She bent over him, and endeavoured to rub every part of him with all of her anatomy; as if to fuse their frail bags of protoplasm, so that their identities too might be merged. He gasped and she sealed his mouth with her lower lips, moving her hips in narrow circles until she felt as if she was about to scream.

Then she leaned forward and took him into her mouth, licking back and forth with gentle motions. “Please,” he gasped. Somehow, smiling blindly at the expanding night, they switched ends and she finally lowered herself onto him. The shock of feeling ran right through her core, thrilling her and setting every inch of her on fire: they began to move together, tentatively at first, then faster, in a rhythm older than their species.

Angelica began to come. As the shuddering contraction rippled through her she drew up her legs; and at that moment she distantly felt a warm release as Marcus added his climax to her own. It ended almost simultaneously and, temporarily exhausted, she lay down on top of him. Closing her eyes, she felt his arms around her: not imprisoning, not protecting … simply there. So late, but so good, she thought tiredly. Why can’t it be so easy in every respect? But it wasn’t. If it had been, this mi ght have taken place forty years ago. Or even earlier.

The table on the balcony was deserted, the detritus of an evening abandoned around it. A leaf, harbinger of an autumn that would never arrive, blew across it and lodged in a cranny between welds. Perhaps if time held its breath, a tree would grow through the table: and perhaps not.

The Iron Brain ignored it, moving through a night as thick and dark as inner space. The Last Gambler had already occupied the drawing room, and had lit a fire in the grate—for reason of comfort as much as temperature—and was now sunk deep in a leather chair that was as overstuffed as he was thin. Jack-Jones stood and studied a painting on the wall, a devotional depicting Our Lord working in his study, a copy of the works of Jung at his side. The Iron Brain swayed slightly as it entered the room, pau sing in the doorway like a spectre.

“Where is the Bishop?” It asked unemotionally.

“Praying, I think,” said Jack-Jones.

“Restoring her make-up,” suggested the Gambler.

Jack-Jones turned cold eyes on him. “If you cannot be polite, be silent,” he said. “Without them, none of us would be here. Besides which, it is now the Bishop’s move. What say you, Brain?”

The Brain turned its pitiless photoreceptors on him, soaking up all the light as if in search of the dawn of the new age. “I say that they will come to us in their own time,” it said. “What does it matter if they re-enact their romance, or express their affection? They are alive, and we are dead.”

“Speak for yourself,” said the Gambler. “I’m—”

“—All of us are dead,” asserted the cyborg. Firelight glittered from its vertebrae, which whirred faintly as it moved. A perfect skeleton modelled in wolfram and ebony plastics, wrapped in a caul of mummified flesh: “you do not recognise the truth for it describes a wider context than your soul, a context in which you are embedded. This universe is dead, yet you will not admit it! You earn your name well, Gambler, for no other statistician would remain to test the odds on the future of th is continuum.”

“Statistics are not about gambling,” said the Last Gambler, somewhat nettled by this reproach: “they are about certainties. Or at least the statistics I study are concerned with certainty and its absence.”

“A funny thing,” said Jack-Jones. “In the old world, before I gained my second soul and passed beyond the grave, it was said that the one branch of the mathematica that had not been mapped was the study of certainty. I am unsure of the significance of this, but your theories must be uniquely advanced to carry you so far! Imagine that, a calculus of confidence.”

“I need no confidence,” retorted the Gambler: “faith is all I require. An ad hoc preparation to banish all doubts. Now do you understand why I am a gambler?”

The Iron Brain looked at him steadily. “Yes,” it said. “You have no alternative. Just like the rest of us. Are you by any chance a lapsed clergyman?” The Last Gambler bristled.

Before blood or bone could be spilt, the door opened again. Marcus and Angelica stood there; but they no longer resembled the widowed noble-Lady or the middle-aged Bishop who had started the evening together. There was something wild and terrible about Angelica’s eyes, an expression of freedom brought at any price: she wore her eccentric tunic and trousers as before, but the hilt of a dagger protruded from the top of her left boot and she had restored her foetal earrings to her apparel. As for Marcus, his expression was knowing: no longer the benign mask of a sacred fool. He appeared to have experienced some private apotheosis that had conferred insight upon him, so that when he stared at the

Last Gambler that individual froze and looked guiltily away.

“It is time to continue the Game,” said Angelica. “I believe we have very little left, if we are to complete on schedule.” She sat down on an overstuffed sofa, brazenly crossed her legs, then looked around. “Marcus.”

The Bishop sat down beside her and openly put his arm around her shoulders. The Iron Brain noted with something approximating amusement that his shirt was a size too large: evidently it was looted from the dead Lord Stael’s wardrobe.

“Let’s resume,” he said. “I draw this time, I believe?”

His sudden change of confidence was remarkable. The Iron Brain watched as the Last Gambler, careful not to meet his eye, placed the deck of cards on the small occasional table where Marcus could reach it. He picked up the deck and shuffled it for himself, then took a card from the top and placed it face-up on the other three (which the Iron Brain had itself carried through from the table on the balcony).

“How interesting,” said Angelica. She stared at it closely, and the reddish light from the fireplace betrayed a faint sheen of sweat upon her brow.

“Yes it is, isn’t it,” commented Marcus. His face was remarkably pale. The picture depicted a pretty young woman, naked but for a brief jewelled wrap around her hips: she sat with her head bent back and her eyes shut, straddling a young man in a position that left little to the imagination. Yet the background, rather than depicting a bedroom scene, showed rows of faces: unsmiling, obsessive faces, bored faces, sweating faces, row upon row of them all focused upon the copulating couple. Above the spectator s, a row of multi-coloured lights painted scene all the colours of hell.

If the Iron Brain had still possessed a nose, it would have been willing to wager that it could smell the stale sweat and alcoholic breath of the club or brothel which the scene depicted. It shut off it’s visual cortex temporarily, giving in to a rush of nostalgia for the time when it had possessed a full complement of glands and a fleshy brain with which to enjoy them. “I think you should continue, Bishop,” it said. “I do not wish to leave here without learning the end of the story.”

Marcus looked up. His face was like a death mask, rigidly composed and expressionless. Angelica glanced away from the card and put her arm tenderly about his waist, but he showed no sign of recognition: he was battling some internal demon instead. Presently he licked his lips. “Very well then,” he said.

“I shall tell you the end of the story. And then—” he looked at the Iron Brain—“you will tell us why you are here.”

Love and Executions

They walked until they came to a stream, which Danielle insisted they follow for a short distance. This was a wise move, for at mid-morning they heard the far-off baying of dogs. But the hounds had no scent to follow, and by early afternoon the escapers were more than twenty miles from the castle. They were close to the edge of the Marches, where the ground began to rise and the trees to thin, and it was unlikely that Capeluche would venture this far without first ensuring the security of his home before he set out.

The weather was hot but not unbearable, and the trees shaded them from the worst of it. Imad lost himself in thought as he walked; his behaviour was strange, he reflected, for he could have made quite a name for himself had he stayed with his erstwhile employer. Why did I reject the opportunity? he wondered, his earlier vision of a warped future already fading in his memories. All I had to do was kill her. He glanced surreptitiously at his companion. While they paused for lunch, she had hack ed off most of her hair with her dagger; then she had rinsed what was left of it in the water of the stream. The enchanted prisoner was gone, replaced entirely by this purposeful stranger. Was she ever like that?

Imad wondered. Or was I deluding myself? Like many men he lacked sufficient will-power to turn the rhetorical question on its head and make a truth of it: he had been trained not to expect women to act of their own accord, and consequently he half-expected to see some hidden master l urking in her shadow

As the sun passed the zenith Danielle asked him a question that she had spent two hours considering, rolling around her tongue, and tasting from every angle before she dared utter it. “Tell me,” she said, “what is it that you expect from life? I am aware you were apprenticed and your master rejected you—but surely you could have made something of yourself without too much difficulty, even in the service of my husband?” She kept her hand close to her knife as she waited for him to reply. Imad noted this with mild dismay; what did she expect of him?

“I don’t know,” he said, playing for time. “Will you give me a moment to think about it?”

She didn’t reply, so he thought about it as they walked, and it seemed to him the longer he thought about it that he had been completely right—that he didn’t know what he wanted, except that he did not possess it.

“I’m looking for something,” he said finally.

“What?” she asked, maintaining her grip on the dagger.

“I don’t know.” It was frustration that made him scowl, but so fierce was his expression that it made her look around sharply for enemies. “If I knew I would not be seeking it.”

“Is it wealth?” she guessed. “Or a long-lost relative? Or power?” Her cheek twitched: her imprisonment had not cured her of a certain romantic imagination, but had tempered it with cynicism.

“None of those,” he said listlessly. “I would say it was understanding, or fulfilment, but those terms are inadequate; nothing can describe what I seek. I doubt that I shall ever find it in this life.”

“What then?” she hazarded. “Is it love? Or religion?”

He smiled wryly. “If I knew I could tell you,” he said. “I think it is some of all of those, though. I mislike the waste and inefficiency of a vast fortune: it seems so incredibly futile. I am not sure about children, for what good is a lineage to a corpse? Comfort perhaps, but comfort is an illusion that can be shattered at any moment. Maybe you appreciate that better than I do; it’s merely verbiage, after all.”

She seemed content with that for an answer, and they walked on in silence.

Presently they came to a road that was better maintained than any in the Marches, and in the distance a plume of smoke that rose from a fearless chimney.

“Is it an inn, do you suppose?” he asked, but she didn’t reply.

They approached it, and presently saw that indeed it was an inn. Danielle touched his arm lightly. “A warning,” she said, a faint smile at the edge of her lips. “I mislike me the treatment of women in these parts, and so soon after my confinement I do not wish to be taken for … “ she shook her head. “I am your brother. Do you understand me?”

Imad considered for a moment, then nodded. “If that is your wish,” he said.

“Good.” Now she smiled properly, and Imad noted that she was somewhat boyish in appearance: but to his eye she somehow merged with his memory of the imprisoned maiden of the tower. “We must make enquiries after horses, and the next town.”

“But what will you do?” Imad asked suddenly. “I mean, do you not wish to return to your father?”

She stared at him. “Whatever for?” she asked.

“But you—” he paused, sensing that he was treading upon dangerous ground.

“Say it,” she challenged. “Why should I not do as you do? You seek for what you will. Say then that I am disillusioned with my life to date, and would go in search of fulfilment! Not to speak of the death of my bastard husband, should his neck ever present itself to my blade.”

Imad breathed deeply and looked at her anew. “How will you earn a living?” he asked.

She looked straight at him. “What makes you think I cannot?” she challenged.

He nodded. “Very well, then. You are my younger brother: I am a journeyman magus, and you are travelling with me as bodyguard and tutee. Is that to your satisfaction?”

“It’ll do,” she said shortly, fingering the pommel of her knife. “Do you know how to use that sword you wear so inexpertly?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Then give it here before you do yourself an injury.”

Imad was reluctant to part with the blade, both because it was valuable and also because he had a nagging mistrust of her intentions, but the logic of her statement was inarguable. “Very well,” he said. “I suppose you won’t trip over it?”

She frowned and drew it carefully. “The balance is poor,” she said, “but it will do.”

They continued towards the inn and reached it at twilight. It was nearly empty, little more than a roadside farmhouse with boarding rooms in what had once been a hay-loft, and a surly farmer and his sickly wife who served up rancid scrumpy and pie and little in the way of conversation. It transpired that the nearest town was ten miles further along the road and there were no horses to be had for love nor money: so in order to reduce the drain on his half-empty purse Imad arranged to share a room with his brother, who seemed less than keen on the idea.

It grew dark before long, and Imad retired upstairs. Presently Danielle came in and stared at him coldly by candle-light as he lay on the straw-filled tick, massaging the aches out of his calves. “Why did you do this?” she demanded, sitting on the other side of the bed.

“Because you’re my brother,” he said tiredly, not wanting to think why he did it. “If it means so much to you I’ll sleep on the damned floor.” He shut his eyes and yawned. After a moment he added: “I didn’t think you’d mind.” Then honesty forced his tongue further. “Truthfully, with Himself in pursuit I didn’t wish to spend a night alone. I have troubled enough dreams as it is.”

He sat up and shook his head. “I’m to bed,” he said, and rolled out his blanket on the floor.

Various thoughts ran through his head, not all of them noble, as he heard her removing her outer clothes behind him. Then he heard her pull the quilt up over her, and all thought of intimacy fled before a tide of sleep. He yawned a final time and closed his eyes.

After an eternity of drifting on the edge of sleep, a voice whispered at the edge of his hearing: “Wizard, why did you rescue me?”

So tired was he that he could barely reply, but some agency seemed to open his mouth for him. “I saw a part of my solution,” he mumbled, “lying chained in a tower with a north-facing window. Then I heard screams at night. I couldn’t sleep.”

A slim hand touched his shoulder. “Come here,” she said.

“What?” he rolled half-over and looked up at her face.

“You heard: there’s room for two in this bed. You won’t sleep any better on the floor.”

“But you’re not what I was looking for,” he protested, even as he sat up and dragged himself under the quilt. You’re not the imprisoned princess of my dreams, he thought confusedly; you’re too real.

“Maybe,” she whispered inp his ear, “but perhaps you are what I was waiting for!” He shivered as he held her, uncertain of what he was doing: and she shivered too for quite different reasons, altogether too sure what she was doing for comfort. They shivered each other to sleep and neither of them were plagued by dreams of their insane pursuer, clad in the skins of his victims. Neither did they make love, then or on the next night or the one after that; but there came a time when their intimacy pres sed closer than any chaste embrace, and they rolled upon the floor of a room in a city inn one afternoon until the inkeep was like to denounce them as sodomites and Imad looked into her eyes and saw laughter and joy reflected in them. But there were no dreams of Capeluche—and all the while they moved closer to their destiny.

The year rolled slowly round to autumn, and the illusions began to hang heavy around them. Imad was forced to seek intermittent employment as a healer of warts and a diviner of wells, which galled him for he longed to wreak impressive works by which he would be remembered. More than once Danielle deterred a casual thief or bag-man from making an attempt on his life as they worked their way north-west, beating a more or less direct path away from the March lands. For his part, Imad was confused by her. He had stolen a countess and discovered a brooding huntress, who went for days without speaking to him—other than to discuss the requirements of the road—then suddenly imposed astonishing demands upon his stamina and emotions. It was not what he had been led to believe conjugal relations were about, although it had its compensations. Then they crossed the frontier into the Alfine mountains, generally regarded as an uncivilised wasteland; and Danielle became pregnant.

It was almost inevitable. Imad had been an apprenticed magus, not a hedge-wizard’s disciple; and Danielle, who should have known better, had too much pride and self-possession to think of consulting some village witch on her travels. It caused them to become fractious, turning on one another, for pregnancy clashed with both of their plans. Danielle brooded for a week, refusing to talk to him, and Imad in turn withdrew into his own head. Presently they came to a town halfway up the side of the Avilnian Pass, and Danielle gave in to her own unvoiced ultimatum. “We shall have to find somewhere to stop,” she told him. “I shall be a woman again, for I cannot pass for your brother like this: and either we shall have a family or not.”

Imad looked at her sadly and shook his head. They sat together in a cramped room they had rented above a tanner’s shop, and the bitter smell of the vats rose up through cracks in the floorboards to assail his nostrils. “I don’t understand how you can be so calm about it,” he said, for he had learnt a lot about her in the past four months—but not enough, perhaps.

“One confinement is much like any other,” she replied tartly. Then she caught his hand and his gaze and shook her head sadly. “Dreams are not destined to come true,” she said. “When you rescued me from the castle of the madman, did you ever wonder what would happen next? People do not live happily ever after, not in real life. You are seeking something special; I wish for freedom of a kind that my position forbade me. Maybe there was a way out of it for us both, once, but I fear the moment is long flown.” She stroked his hand, for he obviously did not know what to say next.

“I’m going to bear a child,” she said, trying to keep her statements simple and disentangled so that she could fit them between her lips; she knew it bothered him when she became distant or vague or could not communicate her feelings by verbal means. “I might die. Or I might become a fat, blowsy housewife, unable to travel. The child might die. Or it might live; and we will have a family, if you want. But things cannot be the same between us as they were before this happened.”

Imad turned away, for a great cry of sorrow was welling up inside him; he wanted to stifle it, but he knew that he could not succeed.

“Is this what they mean by responsibility?” he asked bitterly.

She didn’t answer. She knew that he understood, and that he would grow cold and distant over the years if they remained together as man and wife. That much was foreordained. But she didn’t care. She felt totally numb: just when she thought she had found herself, she discovered that she had been lost from the beginning.

The next day, Danielle visited a cloth merchant and began stitching herself a dress; she shaved her head so that Imad barely recognised her, so changed was she from the huntress who had travelled three hundred miles by his side. The silences grew deeper and more meaningful between them, for each of them bore a certain bitterness about the way events had turned, and neither was willing to concede that it might be for the best. Danielle had a certain fear of marriage—and who, knowing her history, could blame her?—and Imad realised that at some stage he had betrayed himself, surrendering his lofty and arcane goals in return for a romantic illusion. So they lapsed from high romance to grim domesticity and Imad hung his sign, Wisard and Scrivener, outside their rooms, and they became to all intents and purposes a young emigrant couple of the merchant class.

One morning at the time of the spring festival, when all the town trades were shut and there was no other call upon his services, a wealthy farmer summoned Imad out to his estate. He was to supervise the enchantment of a new barn, that it might not harbour vermin and insects—for Imad still excelled at such tasks, despite his increasingly settled ways. Danielle now spent much of her time indoors and was swelling visibly with child.

“I hope your work’s as good as rumour has it,” said the farmer; “if so, perchance I might have need of yon sorceries again.”

“Oh?” asked Imad with mild interest.

“Aye,” said the landlord, beaming widely. “Drink you this, a most excellent cider of my tenant client. Yes, for you see I intend to expand. Such as you are worth your weight in silver to an honest farmer such as I, do you see? The savings in grain be enough to pay for a new farm in only five years … “

The farmer rambled on like this at some length, and Imad paid half an ear to it because his future welfare depended on it: he might soon have a family, he reasoned, and if he failed to look to his trade how would he feed them? He blinked. Feed them? A family? He shook his head, bemused.

“What be it?” demanded the landlord. “Are you tired, is that it?”

“No sir,” said Imad good-humouredly. “I was simply thinking that what’s good for you is, in turn, good for my family.”

“Aye, I see,” said the farmer. A shadow crossed his face, then vanished abruptly. “You be married?”

“Yes,” said Imad. “We are expecting.”

“Aye well, that be good. Well indeed! Now you look towards your wife, young feller. Don’t spare the strap and spoil the brat, keep a tight rein on your household; and if you take my advice you’ll have dutiful children to support you in your old age! That’s what I say,” he added.

“I suppose so,” said Imad, somewhat vacuously. Something the farmer had said kept circling through his skull; spare the strap and spoil the brat, spare the brat and spoil the strap … he shook his head. “Well, I must be going,” he said, and smiled and made his apologies and left. It was two miles back to the town and clouds were building up over the mountains, and he thought for a while.

Do I really want to become like that farmer? he wondered. A fat sullen wife who does what I say only because I beat her as a matter of principle? A rich, bloated landlord whose clients eat barely enough to live and yet who intends to buy up a new farm every five years? He shook his head. I don’t have to do that, he decided. I don’t have to live like that. Neither does Danielle. But we’ll have to be ready to move as soon as the babe comes. We can’t live as we wish among people like these, there is no room …

As he walked past the largest inn in the town, he caught sight of a number of horses hitched to the rail outside; evidently a party had arrived for whom there was insufficient accommodation in the stables. This town is too prosperous, he thought; it’s probably some rich merchant and his bodyguards. Another thought struck him. Maybe we can enlist, a journeyman wizard and his wife, or his brother even. If they’re going east … East?

His stomach lurched. The door to the tannery above which they lived was ajar.

9. The Central Dogma

Marcus stopped talking. Angelica rested her face in her hands. She did not sob aloud, but her shoulders shook until he stroked them gently.

“What of the ending?” enquired Jack-Jones, discreetly inquisitive.

Marcus shook his head. His face was ashen. “I will not tell it,” he said. “Some things should be left unremembered.”

“It still remains a part of you,” said the Iron Brain coldly. “You are the self-same lovers, rediscovered in different flesh. How convenient! My felicitations.”

“Shut up,” said Jack-Jones tensely.

“I would merely like to understand what happened in the end,” said the Iron Brain. “I believe I have a right to know,” it added a touch petulantly.

The Gambler stared at it darkly, and cast another card upon the table. This one was drawn from a more conventional tarot deck: the hanged man.

“When Imad entered their room, his heart was pounding,” said Marcus. His own voice was unsteady. “The first thing he saw was her feet. There was dried blood on her left ankle. She had been hanged.”

Marcus blinked and looked away. There were tears in his eye; tears of suppressed rage. “Give me a drink, for the love of mercy,” he snarled; “and get one for Angelica too!”

She raised her head and rubbed her eyes, then looked about. “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “Remember it’s long gone.”

“No it isn’t,” he said, cutting the air with his hands; “it isn’t over for me! Maybe it never will be. Because I remember—” his face contorted in naked grief. Jack-Jones passed him a glass of blackish wine, and it took him a few seconds to notice; then he took it and gulped it back in a single swallow. He shuddered. Angelica put her glass down in concern and raised a hand to his wrist.

“You needn’t tell them the rest,” she said softly. “The game is over.”

“But there’s no winner,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

“There never is,” said Jack-Jones. “It’s a zero-sum game after all, isn’t it?”

“Bastard filth,” said Marcus, glowering up at him. “I know exactly what you are!”

“And so do I,” said the paramage, a mild note of amusement in his voice. “Such resentment, locked up for so long in so refined a Bishop and noble Lady! Such fantastic fatalism, incredible romance, beauty, tragedy, variety … it gives me fresh hope for life after all.”

“With barely an hour to go,” reminded the Last Gambler. “It’s a shame that truth and beauty cut no ice with entropy: I had better be leaving, all things considered.”

“Where to?” asked the Iron Brain.

“The next universe.” The Gambler frowned. “Statistics are comforting, but I’d rather not gamble with my own existence, if it pleases you! Goodbye.” So saying he faded slowly into thin air, leaving behind him only his esoteric deck of cards.

Angelica picked up her wine-glass and took another mouthful. “Good riddance,” she said tactlessly. “He gave me the creeps.”

Marcus raised an eyebrow at her. “Danielle, you’re not supposed—” he began.

“Gather up his cards,” she said tersely. Then; “I shouldn’t answer to that name, you know. The memory runs deep.”

“I suppose so,” said the Iron Brain disinterestedly; “I wouldn’t know. No synapses, you see, just squitterons and fibre optics.”

“Then what are we?” she asked.

“Don’t start that now,” said Marcus. “I have enough trouble managing my own memories as it is. Why does remembering have to be so painful?”

“That’s a much more interesting question,” said Jack-Jones approvingly. “Ask again!”

Marcus stood suddenly. “I don’t want to have anything more to do with this,” he said angrily. “The world is ending: what’s the point? I’m going outside!”

He headed for the door before anyone could say anything more. As he passed it he turned and flung his empty glass into the fireplace. Angelica stared at

Jack-Jones. “Why did you have to start this?” she demanded.

Jack-Jones shrugged. “It’s a nonlinear system,” he said. “Sometimes the attractors must exert such colossal force that the entire structure spirals in on itself before an equilibrium point is attained. Do you have any idea how rare a phenomenon this meeting of minds might be?”

She stood up. “I don’t,” she said tightly, “and I don’t need to. You have tilted the world on its axis, opened up the whole universe to question! And yet I can see no benefit in it. You have turned my dreams to ashes by revealing these memories, and to what end?” She turned away. “If you will excuse me, there’s still time for me to find Marcus before the end.”

Only the Iron Brain was left now, to confront the paramage with its toothsome grin. “It appears we may not hear the ending after all,” said Jack-Jones mockingly. “Or would you care to stalk these two young love-birds from the other side of the hedge?”

The cyborg stared at him. It had a slight overbite, Jack-Jones noticed, and the fine cables surrounding its photosensors gave it the appearance of a skull with two fat spiders nestling in its eye sockets. “I don’t understand why we were both summoned,” it said slowly, as near to puzzlement as he had ever seen it.

“Are we both really necessary to the closure of this text?”

Jack-Jones sighed. “Your trouble is that you have no soul,” he said, “whilst I am afflicted with two. Will you not take it from me that a certain balance is essential to the reinterpretation of these lives?”

With a faint hum of stepper motors, the Iron Brain stood and paced the room. “I will concede that for the moment,” it said, head bowed towards the infinite fractal design imprinted on the woollen carpet. “You know more about souls, about state vectors, than I: but even you must admit that when it comes to entropy I have no rival!”

Jack-Jones glanced up at the window. The huge, foetal heart that was rising in the east blotted out half the sky; the end was beginning. “Agreed,” he said. “Let us examine the cards together. Perhaps then we can deduce the truth?”

The mobile skeleton turned towards him and nodded. “Very well.” It sat down on the other side of the table and scooped out the bottommost card with a bony digit.

“First,” said Jack-Jones, “we see the symbol of destruction. I believe it was known as the cruise missile: an icon that never fulfilled itself, but which promised such a disastrous rebirth as we have seen approaching tonight.”

The cyborg looked past his head, towards the rising viscera. “I agree,” it said. “Repressed destruction: vicious rebirth.”

Jack-Jones flipped over the next card. “Now we have the Astronaut. A voyager into a meaningless and unfulfilled void; the seeking after purpose of Imad the journeyman, the urgent desire for escape held by countessa Danielle of Capeluche. They coincide at every turning, you see.”

“On the contrary,” said the Iron Brain. “I merely see a harbinger of travel.”

The Paramage stared at it. “You would, wouldn’t you,” he said. “Will you leave to me the analysis of souls?”

“Ah, conceded.” The skeletal figure emitted a rattling buzz which might, in other days, have been a rich laugh.

“Your turn.”

The Iron Brain slipped the third card from the pile; a syringe.

“Control,” it said. “A needle dripping Peace into a vein; the absence of language. Alternatively, escape.”

“Of a morbid kind,” Jack-Jones agreed. “And the next?”

There was no need to turn the card over. It rested alone, on top of the table.

“The stripper: the truth revealed. All the banality of destiny. A quick fuck in public. Is that all it means?”

“No,” said the paramage. He spared a quick glance for the window. The beating heart was growing larger, and now it was evident that it was no physical organ; rather, it was the manifestation of something less substantial, of some idealised pulse of life itself. “It also stands for renewal.”

“But there are no happy endings!” protested the Iron Brain. “At least, not outside of stories!”

Jack-Jones smiled mysteriously. “But this story is an isomyth,” he reminded his companion. “And, in all honesty, would you wish to deny them their reincarnation outside of the system? That, after all, is what this game is about.”

The Iron Brain, devil’s advocate assigned to be the hand of one who had no hand—and no awareness, actually being the negation of such—stared at the paramage. “You are stepping beyond the bounds,” it said. “The central dogma that souls know their assigned places.”

Jack-Jones stood up. “The central dogma is nothing but words, a construct. Maybe it’s time for me to leave,” he said. “Will you deny this tormented couple their union in flesh?” The skeleton did not reply. “Because if not, I beg you, await me in this room. I must seek them in the garden to inform them of the final verdict.”

He turned and walked from the drawing-room, to leave death’s emissary alone and speechless by the fire. He strode out into the garden, and the night air was cool on his cheeks as he began to search for the haunted couple. His heart was light, as it always was when the powers that determined his trade allowed him to choose his desired outcome: above him the fiery pulse of a new being crept across the horizon, threatening to drown the world in unborn light. The eyes of the stuffed penguins pointed the way f or him as if they were eager to convey the good news themselves, despite being mute and speechless. Unlike Jack-Jones.

As he entered the maze, he carefully rehearsed what he was about to tell them.

“If one more soul entered the world, the universe would explode. But there is a way—”

A “Bob Howard/Laundry” short story

Ah, the joy of summer: here in the south-east of England it’s the season of mosquitoes, sunburn, and water shortages. I’m a city boy, so you can add stifling pollution to the list as a million outwardly mobile families start their Chelsea tractors and race to their holiday camps. And that’s before we consider the hellish environs of the Tube (far more literally hellish than anyone realizes, unless they’ve looked at a Transport for London journey planner and recognized the recondite geometry underlying the superimposed sigils of the underground map).

But I digress …

One morning, my deputy head of department wanders into my office. It’s a cramped office, and I’m busy practicing my Frisbee throw with a stack of beer mats and a dart-board decorated with various cabinet ministers. “Bob,” Andy pauses to pluck a moist cardboard square out of the air as I sit up, guiltily: “a job’s just come up that you might like to look at—I think it’s right up your street.”

The first law of Bureaucracy is, show no curiosity outside your cubicle. It’s like the first rule of every army that’s ever bashed a square: never volunteer.

If you ask questions (or volunteer) it will be taken as a sign of inactivity, and the devil, in the person of your line manager (or your sergeant) will find a task for your idle hands. What’s more, you’d better believe it’ll be less appealing than whatever you were doing before (creatively idling, for instance), because inactivity is a crime against organization and must be punished. It goes double here in the Laundry, that branch of the British secret state tasked with defending the realm from the scum of the multiverse, using the tools of applied computational demonology: volunteer for the wrong job and you can end up with soul-sucking horrors from beyond spacetime using your brain for a midnight snack. But I don’t think I could get away with feigning overwork right now, and besides: he’s packaged it up as a mystery. Andy knows how to bait my hook, damn it.

“What kind of job?”

“There’s something odd going on down at the Funny Farm.” He gives a weird little chuckle. “The trouble is going to be telling whether it’s just the usual, or a more serious deviation. Normally I’d ask Boris to check it out but he’s not available this month. It has to be an SSO 2 or higher, and I can’t go out there myself. So … how about it?”

Call me impetuous (not to mention a little bored) but I’m not stupid. And while I’m far enough down the management ladder that I have to squint to see daylight, I’m an SSO 3, which means I can sign off on petty cash authorizations up to the price of a pencil and get to sit in on interminable meetings, when I’m not tackling supernatural incursions or grappling with the eerie, eldritch horrors in Human Resources. I even get to represent my department on international liaison junkets, when I don’t dodge fast enough. “Not so quick—why can’t you go? Have you got a meeting scheduled, or something?” Most likely it’s a five course lunch with his opposite number from the Dustbin liaison committee, knowing Andy, but if so, and if I take the job, that’s all for the good: he’ll end up owing me.

Andy pulls a face. “It’s not the usual. I would go, but they might not let me out again.”

Huh? “‘They’? Who are ‘they’?”

“The Nurses.” He looks me up and down as if he’s never seen me before. Weird. What’s gotten into him? “They’re sensitive to the stench of magic. It’s okay for you, you’ve only been working here, what? Six years? All you need to do is turn your pockets inside out before you go, and make sure you’re not carrying any gizmos, electronic or otherwise. But I’ve been here coming up on fifteen years. And the longer you’ve been in the Laundry … it gets under your skin. Visiting the Funny Farm isn’t a job for an old hand, Bob. It has to be someone new and fresh, who isn’t likely to attract their professional attention.”

Call me slow, but finally I figure out what this is about. Andy wants me to go because he’s afraid.

(See, I told you the rules, didn’t I?)

Anyway, that’s why, less than a week later, I am admitted to a Lunatickal Asylum—for that is what the gothic engraving on the stone Victorian workhouse lintel assures me it is. Luckily mine is not an emergency admission: but you can never be too sure …

The old saw that there are some things that mortal men were not meant to know cuts deep in my line of work. Laundry staff—the Laundry is what we call the organization, not a description of what it does—are sometimes exposed to mind-blasting horrors in the course of our business. I’m not just talking about the usual PowerPoint presentations and self-assessment sessions to which any bureaucracy is prone: they’re more like the mythical Worse Things that happen at Sea (especially in the vicinity of drowned alien cities occupied by tentacled terrors). When one of our number needs psychiatric care, they’re not going to get it in a normal hospital, or via care in the community: we don’t want agents babbling classified secrets in public, even in the relatively safe confines of a padded cell. Perforce, we take care of our own.

I’m not going to tell you what town the Funny Farm is embedded in. Like many of our establishments it’s a building of a certain age, confiscated by the government during the Second World War and not returned to its former owners. It’s hard to find; it sits in the middle of a triangle of grubby shopping streets that have seen better days, and every building that backs onto it sports a high, windowless, brick wall. All but one: if you enter a small grocery store, walk through the stock room into the back yard, then unlatch a nondescript wooden gate and walk down a gloomy, soot-stained alley, you’ll find a dank alleyway. You won’t do this without authorization—it’s protected by wards powerful enough to cause projectile vomiting in would-be burglars—but if you did, and if you followed the alley, you’d come to a heavy green wooden door surrounded by narrow windows with black-painted cast-iron bars. A dull, pitted plaque next to the doorbell proclaims it to be St Hilda of Grantham’s Home For Disgruntled Waifs And Strays. (Except that most of them aren’t so much disgruntled as demonically possessed when they arrive at these gates.)

It smells faintly of boiled cabbage and existential despair. I take a deep breath and yank the bell-pull.

Nothing happens, of course. I phoned ahead to make an appointment, but even so, someone’s got to unlock a bunch of doors and then lock them again before they can get to the entrance and let me in. “They take security seriously there,” Andy told me—“can’t risk some of the battier inmates getting loose, you know.”

“Just how dangerous are they?” I’d asked.

“Mostly they’re harmless—to other people.” He shuddered. “But the secure ward—don’t try and go there on your own. Not that the Sisters will let you, but I mean, don’t even think about trying it. Some of them are … well, we owe them a duty of care and a debt of honour, they fell in the line of duty and all that, but that’s scant consolation for you if a senior operations officer who’s succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia decides that you’re a BLUE HADES and gets hold of some red chalk and a hypodermic needle before your next visit, hmm?”

The thing is, magic is a branch of applied mathematics, and the inmates here are not only mad: they’re computer science graduates. That’s why they came to the attention of the Laundry in the first place, and it’s also why they ultimately ended up in the Farm, where we can keep them away from sharp pointy things and diagrams with the wrong sort of angles. But it’s difficult to make sure they’re safe. You can solve theorems with a blackboard if you have to, after all, or in your head, if you dare. Green crayon on the walls of a padded cell takes on a whole different level of menace in the Funny Farm: in fact, many of the inmates aren’t allowed writing implements, and blank paper is carefully controlled—never mind electronic devices of any kind.

I’m mulling over these grim thoughts when there’s a loud clunk from the door, and a panel just large enough to admit one person opens inward. “Mr Howard? I’m Dr. Renfield. You’re not carrying any electronic or electrical items or professional implements, fetishes, or charms?” I shake my head. “Good. If you’d like to come this way, please?”

Renfield is a mild-looking woman, slightly mousy in a tweed skirt and white lab coat, with the perpetually harried expression of someone who has a full Filofax and hasn’t worked out yet that her watch is losing an hour a day. I hurry along behind her, trying to guess her age. Thirty five? Forty five? I give up. “How many inmates do you have, exactly?” I ask.

We come to a portcullis-like door and she pauses, fumbling with an implausibly large key ring. “Eighteen, at last count,” she says. “Come on, we don’t want to annoy Matron. She doesn’t like people obstructing the corridors.” There are steel rails recessed into the floor, like a diminutive narrow-gauge railway. The corridor walls are painted institutional cream, and I notice after a moment that the light is coming through windows set high up in the walls: odd-looking devices like armoured-glass chandeliers hang from pipes, just out of reach. “Gas lamps,” Renfield says abruptly. I twitch. She’s noticed my surreptitious inspection. “We can’t use electric ones, except for Matron, of course. Come into my office, I’ll fill you in.”

We go through another door—oak, darkened with age, looking more like it belongs in a stately home than a Lunatick Asylum, except for the two prominent locks—and suddenly we’re in mahogany row: thick wool carpets, brass doorknobs, light switches, and overstuffed armchairs. (Okay, so the carpet is faded with age and transected by more of the parallel rails. But it’s still Officer Country.) Renfield’s office opens off one side of this reception area, and at the other end I see closed doors and a staircase leading up to another floor. “This is the administrative wing,” she explains as she opens her door. “Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee, thanks,” I say, sinking into a leather-encrusted armchair that probably dates to the last but one century. Renfield nods and pulls a discreet cord by the door frame, then drags her office chair out from behind her desk. I can’t help noticing that not only does she not have a computer, but her desk is dominated by a huge and ancient manual typewriter—an Imperial Aristocrat ‘66’ with the wide carriage upgrade and adjustable tabulator, I guess, although I’m not really an expert on office appliances that are twice as old as I am—and one wall is covered in wooden filing cabinets. There might be as much as thirty megabytes of data stored in them. “You do everything on paper, I understand?”

“That’s right.” She nods, serious-faced. “Too many of our clients aren’t safe around modern electronics. We even have to be careful what games we let them play—Lego and Meccano are completely banned, obviously, and there was a nasty incident involving a game of Cluedo, back before my time: any board game that has a nondeterministic set of rules can be dangerous in the wrong set of hands.”

The door opens. “Tea for two,” says Renfield. I look round, expecting an orderly, and freeze. “Mr Howard, this is Nurse Gearbox,” she adds. “Nurse Gearbox, this is Mr Howard. He is not a new admission,” she says hastily, as the thing in the doorway swivels its head towards me with a menacing hiss of hydraulics.

Whirr-clunk. “Miss-TER How-ARD. WelCOME to”—ching—“Sunt-HIL-dah’s”—hiss-clank. The thing in the very old-fashioned nurse’s uniform—old enough that its origins as a nineteenth-century nun’s habit are clear—regards me with unblinking panopticon lenses. Where its nose should be, something like a witch-finder’s wand points towards me, stellate and articulated: its face is a brass death mask, mouth a metal grille that seems to grimace at me in pointed distaste.

“Nurse Gearbox is one of our eight Sisters,” explains Dr Renfield. “They’re not fully autonomous”—I can see a rope-thick bundle of cables trailing from under the hem of the Sister’s floor-length skirt, which presumably conceals something other than legs—“but controlled by Matron, who lives in the two sub-basement levels under the administration block. Matron started life as an IBM 1602 mainframe, back in the day, with a summoning pentacle and a trapped class four lesser nameless manifestation constrained to provide the higher cognitive functions.”

I twitch. “It’s a grid, please, not a pentacle. Um. Matron is electrically powered?”

“Yes, Mr. Howard: we allow electrical equipment in Matron’s basement as well as here in the staff suite. Only the areas accessible to the patients have to be kept power-free. The Sisters are fully equipped to control unseemly outbursts, pacify the over-stimulated, and conduct basic patient care tasks. They also have Vohlman-Flesch Thaumaturgic Thixometers for detecting when patients are in danger of doing themselves a mischief, so I would caution you to keep any occult activities to a minimum in their presence—despite their hydraulic delay line controls, their reflexes are very fast.”

Gulp. I nod appreciatively. “When was the system built?”

The set of Dr. Renfield’s jaw tells me that she’s bored with the subject, or doesn’t want to go there for some reason. “That will be all, Sister.” The door closes, as if on oiled hinges. She waits for a moment, head cocked as if listening for something, then she relaxes. The change is remarkable: from stressed-out psychiatrist to tired housewife in zero seconds flat. She smiles tiredly. “Sorry about that. There are some things you really shouldn’t talk about in front of the Sisters: among other things, Matron is very touchy about how long she’s been here, and everything they hear, she hears.”

“Oh, right.” I feel like kicking myself.

“Did Mr. Newstrom brief you about this installation before he pitched you in at the deep end?”

Just when I thought I had a handle on her … “Not in depth.” (Let’s not mention the six sheet letter of complaint alleging staff brutality, scribbled in blue crayon on both sides of the toilet paper. Let’s not go into the fact that nobody has a clue how it was smuggled out, much less how it appeared on the table one morning in the executive boardroom, which is always locked overnight.) “I gather it’s pretty normal to fob inspections off on a junior manager.” (Let’s not mention just how junior.) “Is that a problem?”

“Humph.” Renfield sniffs. “You could say so. It’s a matter of necessity, really. Too much exposure to esoterica in the course of duty leaves the most experienced operatives carrying traces of, hmm, disruptive influences.” She considers her next words carefully. “You know what our purpose is, don’t you? Our job is to isolate and care for members of staff who are a danger to themselves and others. That’s why such a small facility—we only have thirty beds—has two doctors on staff: it takes two to sign the committal papers. Matron and the Sisters are immune to cross-infection and possession, but have no legal standing, so Dr. Hexenhammer and I are needed.”

“Right.” I nod, trying to conceal my unease. “So the Sisters have a tendency to react badly to senior field agents?”

“Occasionally.” Her cheek twitches. “Although they haven’t made a mistake and tried to forcibly detain anyone who wasn’t at risk for nearly thirty years now.” The door opens again, without warning. This time, Sister is pushing a trolley, complete with teapot, jug, and two cups and saucers. The trolley wheels fit perfectly on the narrow-gauge track, and the way Nurse Gearbox shunts it along makes me think wheels. “Thank you, Sister, that will be all,” Renfield says, taking the trolley.

“So what clients do you have at present?” I ask.

“We have eighteen,” she says, without missing a beat. “Milk or sugar?”

“Milk, no sugar. Nobody at head office seems able to tell me much about them.”

“I don’t see why not—we file regular updates with Human Resources,” she says, pouring the tea.

I consider my next words carefully: no need to mention the confusing incident with the shredder, the medical files, and the photocopies of Peter-Fred’s buttocks at last year’s Christmas party. (Never mind the complaint, which isn’t worth the toilet paper it was scribbled on except insofar as it proves that the Funny Farm’s cordon sanitaire is leaking. One of the great things about ISO9000 compliant organizations is that not only is there a form for everything, but anything that isn’t submitted on the correct form can be ignored.) “It’s the paper thing, apparently. Manual typewriters don’t work well with the office document management system, and someone tried to feed them to a scanner a couple of years ago. Then they sent the originals for recycling without proof-reading the scanner output. Anyway, it turns out that we don’t have a completely accurate idea of who’s on long-term remand here, and HR want their superannuation files bringing up to date, as a matter of some urgency.”

Renfield sighs. “So someone had an accident with a shredder again. And no photocopies?” She looks at me sharply for a moment: “Well, I suppose that’s just typical. We’re just another of those low-priority outposts nobody gives a damn about. I suppose I should be grateful they sent someone to look into it … “ She takes a sip of tea. “We’ve got fourteen short-stay patients right now, Mr Howard. Of those, I think the prognosis is good in all cases, except perhaps Merriweather … if you give me your desk number I’ll post you a full list of names and payroll references tomorrow. The four long term patients are another matter. They live in the secure wing, by the way. All of them have a nurse of their own, just in case. Three of them have been here so long that they don’t have current payroll numbers—the system was first computerized in 1972, and they’d all been permanently decertified for duty before that point—and one of them, between you and me, I’m not even sure what his name is.”

I nod, trying to look encouraging. The complaint I’m supposed to investigate apparently came from one of the long-term patients. The question is, which one? Nobody’s sure: the doorman on the night shift when the document showed up isn’t terribly communicative (he’s been dead for some years himself), and the CCTV system didn’t spot anything. Which is in itself suggestive—the Laundry’s HQ CCTV surveillance is rather special, extremely hard to deceive, and guaranteed not to be hooked up to the SCORPION STARE network any more, which would be the most obvious route to suborning it. “Perhaps you could introduce me to the inmates? The transients first, then the long-term ones?”

She looks a little shocked. “But they’re the long term residents! I assure you, they each need a full-time Sister’s attention just to keep them under control!”

“Of course,” I shrug, trying to look embarrassed (it’s not hard): “but HR have got a bee in their bonnet about some European Directive on workplace health and safety and long-term disability resource provisioning that requires them to appoint a patient advocate to mediate with the ombudsman in disputes over health and safety conditions”—I shrug again. “It’s bullshit. You know it and I know it. But we’ve got to comply, or Questions will be Asked. This is the civil service, after all. And they’re still technically Laundry employees, even if they’ve been remanded into long-term care, so someone has to do the job. My managers played spin-the-bottle and I got the job, so I’ve got to ask you. If you don’t mind?”

“If you insist, I’m sure something can be arranged,” Renfield concedes. “But Matron won’t be happy about you visiting the secure wing. It’s very irregular—she likes to keep a firm grip on it. It’ll take a while to sort a visit out, and if any of them get wind … “

“Well, then, we’d just better make it a surprise, and the sooner we get it over with, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair!” I grin like a loon. “They told me about the observation gallery. Would you mind showing me around?”

We do the short-stay ward first. The ward is arranged around a corridor, with bathrooms and a nursing station at either end, and individual rooms for the patients. There’s a smoking room off to one side, with a yellow patina to the white gloss paint around the door frame. The smoking room is empty but for a huddle of sad-looking leather armchairs and an imposing wall-board covered in health and safety notices (including the obligatory “Smoking is Illegal” warning). If it wasn’t for the locks and the observation windows in the doors, it could be mistaken for the day room of a genteel, slightly decaying Victorian railway hotel, fallen on hard times.

The patients are another matter.

“This is Henry Merriweather,” says Dr Renfield, opening the door to Bed Three. “Henry? Hello? I want you to meet Mr Howard. He’s here to conduct a routine inspection. Hello? Henry?”

Bed Three is actually a cramped studio flat, featuring a small living room with sofa and table, and separate bedroom and toilet areas opening off it opposite the door. A wind-up gramophone with a flaring bell-shaped horn sits atop a hulking wooden sideboard, stained almost black. There’s a newspaper, neatly folded, and a bowl of fruit. The frosted window glass is threaded with wire, but otherwise there’s little to dispel the illusion of hospitality, except for the occupant.

Henry squats, cross-legged, on top of the polished wooden table. His head is tilted in my direction, but he’s not focusing on me. He’s dressed in a set of pastel-striped pyjamas the like of which I haven’t seen this century. His attention is focused on the Sister waiting in the corridor behind us. His face is a rictus of abject terror, as if the automaton in the starched pinafore is waiting to pull his fingers to pieces, joint by joint, as soon as we leave.

“Hello?” I say tentatively, and wave a hand in front of him.

Henry jack-knifes to his feet and tumbles off the table backwards, making a weird gobbling noise that I mistake at first for laughter. He backs into the corner of the room, crouching, and points past me: “auditor! Auditor!”

“Henry?” Renfield steps sideways around me. She sounds concerned. “Is this a bad time? Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You—you—” His wobbly index finger points past me, twitching randomly. “Inspection! Inspection!”

Renfield obviously used the wrong word and set him off. The poor bastard’s terrified, half out of his tree with fear. My stomach just about climbs out through my ribs in sympathy: the auditors are one of my personal nightmares, and Henry (that’s Senior Scientific Officer Third, Henry Merriweather, Operations Research and Development Group) may be half-catatonic and a danger to himself, but he’s got every right to be afraid of them. “It’s all right, I’m not”—There’s a squeaking grinding noise behind me.

Whirr-Clunk. “Miss-TER MerriWEATHER. GO to your ROOM.” Click. “Time for BED. IMMediateLY.” Click-clunk. Behind me, Nurse Flywheel is blocking the door like a starched and pintucked Dalek: she brandishes a cast-iron sink plunger menacingly. “IMMediateLY!”

“Override!” barks Renfield. “Sister! Back away!” To me, quietly: “the Sisters respond badly when inmates get upset. Follow my lead.” To the Sister, who is casting about with her stalk-like Thaumic Thixometer: “I have control!”

Merriweather stands in the corner, shaking uncontrollably and panting as the robotic nurse points at him for a minute. We’re at an impasse, it seems. Then: “DocTOR—Matron says the patIENT must go to bed. You have CONtrol.” Clunk-whirr. The sister withdraws, rotates on her base, and glides backward along her rails to the nursing station.

Renfield nudges the door shut with one foot. “Mr Howard, would you mind standing with your back to the door? And your head in front of that, ah, spy-hole?”

“You’re not, not, nuh-huh—” Merriweather gobbles for words as he stares at me.

I spread my hands. “Not an auditor,” I say, smiling.

“Not an—an—” His mouth falls open and his eyes shut. A moment later, I see the moisture trails on his cheeks as he begins to weep with quiet desperation.

“He’s having a bad day,” Renfield mutters in my direction. “Here, let’s get you to bed, Henry.” She approaches him slowly, but he makes no move to resist as she steers him into the small bedroom and pulls the covers back.

I stand with my back to the door the whole time, covering the observation window. For some reason, the back of my neck is itching. I can’t help thinking that Nurse Flywheel isn’t exactly the chatty talkative type who’s likely to put her feet up and relax with a nice cup of tea. I’ve got a feeling that somewhere in this building, an unblinking red-rimmed eye is watching me, and sooner or later I’m going to have to meet its owner.

Andy was afraid.

Well, I’m not stupid; I can take a hint. So right after he asked me to go down to St Hilda’s and find out what the hell was going on, I plucked up my courage and went and knocked on Angleton’s office door.

Angleton is not to be trifled with. I don’t know anyone else currently alive and in the organization who could get away with misappropriating the name of the CIA’s legendary chief of counterespionage as a nom de guerre. I don’t know anyone else in the organization whose face is visible in circa-1942 photographs of the Laundry’s line-up, either, barely changed across all those years. Angleton scares the bejeezus out of most people, myself included. Study the abyss for long enough and the abyss will study you right back; Angleton’s qualified to chair a university department of necromancy—if any such existed—and meetings with him can be quite harrowing. Luckily the old ghoul seems to like me, or at least not to view me with the distaste and disdain he reserves for Human Resources or our political masters. In the wizened, desiccated corners of what passes for his pedagogical soul he evidently longs for a student, and I’m the nearest thing he’s got right now.

Knock, knock.

“Enter.”

“Boss? Got a minute?”

“Sit, boy.” I sat. Angleton bashed away at the keyboard of his device for a few more seconds, then pulled the carbon papers out from under the platen—for really secret secrets in this line of work, computers are flat-out verboten—and laid them face-down on his desk, then carefully draped a stained tea-towel over them. “What is it?”

“Andy wants me to go and conduct an unscheduled inspection of the Funny Farm.”

Whoa. Angleton stares at me, fully engaged. “Did he say why?” he asks, finally.

“Well.” How to put it? “He seems to be afraid of something. And there’s some kind of complaint. From one of the inmates.”

Angleton props his elbows on the desk and makes a steeple of his bony fingers. A minute passes before a cold wind blows across the charnel house roof: “well.”

I have never seen Angleton nonplussed before. The effect is disturbing, like glancing down and realizing that, like Wile E. Coyote, you’ve just run over the edge of a cliff and are standing on thin air. “Boss?”

“What exactly did Andy say?” Angleton asks slowly.

“We received a complaint.” I briefly outline what I know about the shit-stirring missive. “Something about one of the long-stay inmates. And I was just wondering, do you know anything about them?”

Angleton peers at me over the rims of his bifocals. “As a matter of fact I do,” he says slowly. “I had the privilege of working with them. Hmm. Let me see.” He unfolds creakily to his feet, turns, and strides over to the shelves of ancient Eastlight files that cover the back wall of his office. “Where did I put it … “

Angleton going to the paper files is another whoa! moment. He keeps most of his stuff in his Memex, the vast, hulking microfilm mechanism built into his desk. If it’s still printed on paper then it’s really important. “Boss?”

“Yes?” he says, without turning away from his search.

“We don’t know how the message got out,” I say. “Isn’t it supposed to be a secure institution?”

“Yes, it is. Ah, that’s more like it.” Angleton pulls a box file from its niche and blows vigorously across its upper edge. Then he casually opens it. There’s a pop and a sizzle of ozone as the ward lets go, harmlessly bypassing him—he is, after all, its legitimate owner. “Hmm, in here somewhere … “

“Isn’t it supposed to be leak-proof, by definition?”

“I’m getting to that. Be patient, Bob.” There’s a waspish note in his voice and I shut up hastily.

A minute later, Angleton pulls a mimeographed booklet from the file and closes the lid. He returns to the desk, and slides the booklet towards me.

“I think you’d better read this first, then go and do what Andy wants,” he says slowly. “Be a good boy and copy me on your detailed itinerary before you depart.”

I read the cover of the booklet, which is dog-eared and dusty. There’s a picture of a swell guy in a suit and a gal in a fifties beehive hairdo sitting in front of a piece of industrial archaeology. The title reads: POWER, COOLING, AND SUBSTATION REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUR IBM S/1602-M200. I sneeze, puzzled. “Boss?”

“I suggest you read and memorize this booklet, Bob. It is not impossible that there will be an exam and you really wouldn’t want to fail it.”

My skin crawls. “Boss?”

Pause.

“It’s not true that the Funny Farm is entirely leak-proof, Bob. It’s surrounded by an air-gap but it was designed to leak under certain very specific conditions. I find it troubling that these conditions do not appear to apply in the present circumstances. In addition to memorizing this document you might want to review the files on GIBBOUS MOON and AXIOM REFUGE before you go.” Pause. “And if you see Cantor, give my regards to the old coffin-dodger. I’m particularly interested in hearing what he’s been up to for the past thirty years … “

Renfield takes me back to the smoking room and shuts the door. “He’s having a bad day, I’m afraid.” She pulls out a cardboard packet and extracts a cigarette. “Smoke?”

“Uh, no thanks.” The sash windows are nailed shut and their frames painted over. There’s a louvered vent near the top of the windows, grossly unfit for purpose: I try not to breathe too deeply. “What happened to him?”

She strikes a match and contemplates the flame for a moment. “Let’s see. He’s forty two. Married, two kids—he talks about them. Wife’s a schoolteacher, his deep cover is that he works in MI6 clerical.” (You’re not supposed to talk about your work to your partner, but it’s difficult enough that we’ve been given dispensation to tell little white lies—and if necessary, HR will back them up.) “He’s not field-qualified—mostly he does theory—but he worked for Q Division and he was on secondment to the Abstract Attractor Working Group when he fell ill.”

In other words, he’s a theoretical thaumaturgist. Magic being a branch of applied mathematics, when you carry out certain computational operations, it has echoes in the Platonic realm of pure mathematics—echoes audible to beings whose true nature I cannot speak of, on account of doing so being a violation of the Official Secrets Act. Theoretical Thaumaturgists are the guys who develop new efferent algorithms (or, colloquially, “spells”): it’s an occupation with a high attrition rate.

“He’s convinced the Auditors are after him for thinking inappropriate thoughts on organization time. There’s an elaborate confabulation, and it looks a little like paranoid schizophrenia at first glance, but underneath … we sent him to our Trust hospital for an MRI scan and he’s got the characteristic lesions.”

“Lesions?”

She takes a deep drag from the cigarette. “His prefrontal lobes look like Swiss cheese. It’s one of the early signs of Krantzberg Syndrome. If we can keep him isolated from work for a couple more months, then retire him to a nice quiet desk job, we might be able to stabilize him. K Syndrome’s not like Alzheimer’s: if you remove the insult it frequently goes into remission. Mind you, he may also need a course of chemotherapy. At various times my predecessors tried electroconvulsive treatment, prefrontal lobotomy, neuroleptics, daytime television, LSD—none of them work consistently or reliably. The best treatment still seems to be bed rest followed by work therapy in a quiet, undemanding office environment.” Blue cloud spirals toward the ceiling. “But he’ll never run a great summoning again.”

I’m beginning to regret not accepting her offer of a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. My mouth’s dry. I sit down: “Do we have any idea what causes K Syndrome?” I’ve skimmed GIBBOUS MOON, but the medical jargon didn’t mean much to me; and AXIOM REFUGE was even less helpful. (It turned out to be a dense mathematical treatise introducing a notation for describing certain categories of topological defect in a twelve-dimensional space.) Only the power supply for the mainframe—presumably the one Matron used—seemed remotely relevant to the job in hand.

“There are several theories.” Renfield twitches ash on the threadbare carpet as she paces the room. “It tends to hit theoretical computational demonologists after about twenty years: Merriweather is unusually young. It also hits people who’ve worked in high-thaum fields for too long. Initial symptoms include mild ataxia—you saw his hand shaking?—and heightened affect: it can be mistaken for bipolar disorder or hyperactivity. There’s also the disordered thinking and auditory hallucinations typical of some types of schizophrenia.” She pauses to inhale. “There are two schools of thought, if you leave out the Malleus Maleficarum stuff about souls contaminated by demonic effusions: one is that exposure to high thaum fields cause progressive brain lesions. Trouble is, it’s rare enough that we haven’t been able to quantify that, and—”

“The other theory?” I prod.

“My favourite.” She nearly smiles. “Computational demonology—you carry out calculations, you prove theorems; somewhere else in the platonic realm of mathematics Listeners notice your activities and respond, yes? Well, there’s some disagreement over this, but the current orthodoxy in neurophysiology is that the human brain is a computational organ. We can carry out computational tasks, yes? We’re not very good at it, and at an individual neurological level there’s no mechanism that might invoke the core Turing theorems, but … if you think too hard about certain problems you might run the risk of carrying out a minor summoning in your own head. Nothing big enough or bad enough to get out, but … those florid daydreams? And the sick feeling afterwards because you can’t quite remember what it was about? Something in another universe just sucked a microscopic lump of neural tissue right out of your intraparietal sulcus, and it won’t grow back.”

Urk. Not so much “use it or lose it” as “use it and lose it”, then. Could be worse, could be a NAND gate in there … “Do we know why some people suffer from it and others don’t?”

“No idea.” She drops what’s left of her cigarette and grinds it under the heel of a sensible shoe. She catches my eye: “Don’t worry about it, the Sisters keep everything orderly,” she says. “Do you know what you want to do next?”

“Yes,” I say, damning myself for a fool before I take the next logical step: “I want to talk to the long term inmates.”

I’m half hoping Renfield will put her foot down and refuse point blank to let me do it, but she only puts up a token fight: she makes me sign a personal injury claims waiver and scribble out a written order instructing her to show me the gallery. So why do I feel as if I’ve somehow been outmanoeuvred?

After I finish signing forms to her heart’s content, she uncaps an ancient and battered speaking tube beside her desk and calls down it. “Matron, I am taking the inspector to see the observation gallery, in accordance with orders from Head Office. He will then meet with the inmates in Ward Two. We may be some time.” She screws the cap back on before turning to me apologetically: “It’s vital to keep Matron informed of our movements, otherwise she might mistake them for an escape attempt and take appropriate action.”

I swallow. “Does that happen often?” I ask, as she opens the office door and stalks towards the corridor at the other end.

“Once in a while a temporary patient gets stir-crazy.” She starts up the stairs. “But the long-term residents … no, not so much.”

Upstairs, there’s a landing very similar to the one we just left—with one big exception: a narrow, white-painted metal door in one wall, stark and raw, secured by a shiny brass padlock and a set of wards so ugly and powerful that they make my skin crawl. There are no narrow-gauge rails leading under this door, no obvious conductive surfaces, nothing to act as a conduit for occult forces. Renfield fumbles with a huge key ring at her side, then unfastens the padlock. “This is the way in via the observation gallery,” she says. “There are a couple of things to bear in mind. Firstly, the Nurses can’t guarantee your safety: if you get in trouble with the prisoners, you’re on your own. Secondly, the gallery is a Faraday cage, and it’s thaumaturgically grounded too—it’d take a black mass and a multiple sacrifice to get anything going in here. You can observe the apartments via the periscopes and hearing tubes provided. That’s our preferred way—you can go into the ward by proceeding to the other end of the gallery, but I’d be very grateful if you could refrain from doing so unless it’s absolutely essential. They’re difficult enough to manage as it is. Finally, if you insist on meeting them, just try to remember that appearances can be deceptive.”

“They’re not demented,” she adds: “just extremely dangerous. And not in a Hannibal Lecter bite-your-throat-out sense. They—the long-term residents—aren’t regular Krantzberg Syndrome cases. They’re stable and communicative, but … you’ll see for yourself.”

I change the subject before she can scare me any more. “How do I get into the ward proper? And how do I leave?”

“You go down the stairs at the far end of the gallery. There’s a short corridor with a door at each end. The doors are interlocked so that only one can be open at a time. The outer door will lock automatically behind you when it closes, and it can only be unlocked from a control panel at this end of the viewing gallery. Someone up here”—meaning, Renfield herself—“has to let you out.” We reach the first periscope station in the viewing gallery. “This is room two. It’s currently occupied by Alan Turing.” She notices my start: “Don’t worry, it’s just his safety name.”

(True names have power, so the Laundry is big on call by reference, not call by value; I’m no more “Bob Howard” than the “Alan Turing” in room two is the father of computer science and applied computational demonology.)

She continues: “The real Alan Turing would be nearly a hundred by now. All our long-term residents, are named for famous mathematicians. We’ve got Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, Georg Cantor, and Benoit Mandelbrot. Turing’s the oldest, Benny is the most recent—he actually has a payroll number, 16.”

I’m in five digits—I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Who’s the nameless one?” I ask.

“That would be Georg Cantor,” she says slowly. “He’s probably in room four.”

I bend over the indicated periscope, remove the brass cap, and peer into the alien world of the nameless K Syndrome survivor.

I see a whitewashed room, quite spacious, with a toilet area off to one side and a bedroom accessible through a doorless opening—much like the short term ward. The same recessed metal tracks run around the floor, so that a Nurse can reach every spot in the apartment. There’s the usual comfortable, slightly shabby furniture, a pile of newspapers at one side of the sofa and a sideboard with a wind-up gramophone. In the middle of the floor there’s a table, and two chairs. Two men sit on either side of an ancient travel chess set, leaning over a game that’s clearly in its later stages. They’re both old, although how old isn’t immediately obvious—one has gone bald, and his liver-spotted pate reminds me of an ancient tortoise, but the other still has a full head of white hair and an impressive (but neatly trimmed) beard. They’re wearing polo shirts and grey suits of a kind that went out of fashion with the fall of the Soviet Union. I’m willing to bet there are no laces in their brogues.

The guy with the hair makes a move, and I squint through the periscope. That was wrong, wasn’t it? I realize, trying to work out what’s happening. Knights don’t move like that. Then the implication of something Angleton said back in the office sinks in, and an icy sweat prickles in the small of my back. “Do you play chess?” I ask Dr Renfield without looking round.

“No.” She sounds disinterested. “It’s one of the safe games—no dice, no need for a pencil and paper. And it seems to be helpful. Why?”

“Nothing, I hope.” But my hopes are dashed a moment later when turtle-head responds with a sideways flick of a pawn, two squares to the left, and takes beardy’s knight. Turtle-head drops the knight into a biscuit-tin along with the other disused pieces; it sticks to the side, as if magnetized. Beardy nods, as if pleased, then leans back and glances up.

I recoil from the periscope a moment before I meet his eyes. “The two players. Guy like a tortoise, and another with a white beard and a full head of hair. They are … ?”

“That’d be Turing and Cantor. Turing used to be a Detached Special Secretary in Ops, I think; we’re not sure who or what Cantor was, but he was someone senior.” I try not to twitch. DSS is one of those grades, the fuzzy ones that HR aren’t allowed to get their grubby little fingers on. I think Angleton’s one. (Scuttlebutt is that it’s an acronym for Deeply Scary Sorcerer.) “They play chess every afternoon for a couple of hours—for as long as I can remember.”

Right. I peer down the periscope again, looking at the game of not-chess. “Tell me about Dr Hexenhammer. Where is he?”

“Julius? I think he’s in an off-site meeting or something today,” she says vaguely. “Why?”

“Just wondering. How long has he been working here?”

“Before my time.” She pauses. “About thirty years, I think.”

Oh dear. “He doesn’t play chess either,” I speculate, as Cantor’s king makes a knight’s move and Turing’s queen’s pawn beats a hasty retreat. A nasty suspicious thought strikes me—about Renfield, not the inmates. “Tell me, do Cantor and Turing play chess regularly?” I straighten up.

“Every afternoon for a couple of hours. Julius says they’ve been doing it for as long as he can remember. It seems to be good for them.” I look at her sharply. Her expression is vacant: wide awake but nobody home. The hairs on the back of my neck begin to prickle.

Right. I am getting a very bad feeling about this. “I need to go and talk to the patients now. In person.” I stand up and hook the cap back over the periscope. “Stick around for fifteen minutes, please, in case I need to leave in a hurry. Otherwise,” I glance at my watch, “it’s twenty past one. Check back for me every hour on the half hour.”

“Are you certain you need to do this?” Her eyes narrow, suddenly alert once more.

“You visit with the patients, don’t you?” I raise an eyebrow. “And you do it on your own, with Dr Hexenhammer up here to let you out if there’s a problem. And the Sisters.”

“Yes but—” She bites her tongue.

“Yes?” I give her the long stare.

“I’m rubbish with computers!” she bursts out. “But you’re at risk!”

“Well, there aren’t any computers except Matron down there, are there?” I grin crookedly, trying not to show my unease. (Best not to dwell upon the fact that before 1945 “computer” was a job description, not a machine.) “Relax, it’s not contagious.”

She shrugs in surrender, then gestures at the far end of the observation gallery, where a curious contraption sits above a pipe: “That’s the alarm. If you want a Sister, pull the chain with the blue handle. If you want a general alarm which will call the duty psychiatrist, pull the red handle. There are alarm handles in every room.”

“Okay.” Blue for a Sister, Red for a psychiatrist who is showing all the signs of being under a geas or some other form of compulsion—except that I can’t check her out without attracting Matron’s unwanted attention and probably tipping my hand. I begin to see why Andy didn’t want to open this particular can of worms. “I can deal with that.”

I head for the stairs at the far end of the gallery.

There’s nothing homely about the short corridor that leads from the bottom of the staircase to the Secure Wing. Whitewashed brick walls, glass bricks near the ceiling to admit a wan echo of daylight, and doors made of metal that have no handles. Normally going into a situation like this I’d be armed to the teeth, invocations and efferent subroutines loaded on my PDA, hand of glory in my pocket and a necklace of garlic bulbs around my neck: but this time I’m naked, and nervous as a frog in his birthday suit. The first door gapes open, waiting for me. I walk past it, and try not to jump out of my skin when it rattles shut behind me with a crash. There’s a heavy clunk from the door ahead. As I reach it and push, it swings open to reveal a corridor floored in parquet. An old codger in a green tweed suit and bedroom slippers is shuffling out of an opening at one side, clutching an enameled metal mug full of tea. He looks at me. “Why, hello!” he croaks. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“You could say that.” I try to smile. “I’m Bob. Who are you?”

“Depends who’s asking, young feller. Are you a psychiatrist?”

“I don’t think so.”

He shuffles forward, heading towards a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a day room of some sort. “Then I’m not Napoleon Bonaparte!”

Oh, very droll. The terror is fading, replaced by a sense of disappointment. I trail after him: “The staff have names for you all. Turing, Cantor, Mandelbrot, and Godel. You’re not Cantor or Turing. That makes you one of Mandelbrot or Godel.”

“So you’re undecided?” There’s a coffee table with a pile of newspapers on it in the middle of the day room, a couple of elderly chesterfields and three armchairs that could have been looted from an old age home some time before the First World War. “And in any case, we haven’t been formerly introduced. So you might as well call me Alice.”

Alice—or Mandelbrot or Godel or whoever he is—sits down. The armchair nearly swallows him. He beams at my bafflement, delighted to have found a new victim for his doubtless-ancient puns.

“Well, Alice. Isn’t this quite some rabbit hole you’ve fallen down?”

“Yes, but it’s just the right size!” He seems to appreciate having somebody to talk to. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Yup.” I see an expression of furtive surprise steal across his face. I nod, affably. Try to mess with my head, sonny? I’ll mess with yours. Except that this guy is quite possibly a DSS, and if it wasn’t for the constant vigilance of the Sisters and the distinct lack of electricity hereabouts, he could turn me inside out as soon as look at me. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Absolutely!” He nods back at me.

“So now that we’ve established the preliminaries, why don’t we cut the bullshit?”

“Well.” He takes a cautious sip of his tea and the wrinkles on his forehead deepen. “I suppose the Board of Directors want a progress report.”

If the sofa I was perched on wasn’t a relative of a venus flytrap my first reaction would leave me clinging to the ceiling. “The who want a—”

“Not the band, the Board.” He looks mildly irritated. “It’s been years since they last sent someone to spy on us.”

Okay, so this is the Funny Farm; I should have been expecting delusions. Play nice, Bob. “What are you supposed to be doing here?” I ask.

“Oh Lord.” He rolls his eyes. “They sent a tabula rasa again?” He raises his voice: “Kurt, they sent us a tabula rasa again!”

More shuffling. A stooped figure, shock-headed with white hair, appears in the doorway. He’s wearing tinted round spectacles that look like they fell off the back of a used century. “What? What?” He demands querulously.

“He doesn’t know anything,” Alice confides in—this must be Godel, I realise, which means Alice is Mandelbrot—Godel, then with a wink at me: “he doesn’t know anything, either.”

Godel shuffles into the rest room. “Is it teatime already?”

“No!” Mandelbrot puts his mug down. “Get a watch!”

“I was only asking because Alan and Georg are still playing—”

This has gone far enough. Apprehension dissolves into indignation: “It’s not chess!” I point out. “And none of you are insane.”

“Sssh!” Godel looks alarmed. “The Sisters might overhear!”

“We’re alone, except from Dr Renfield upstairs, and I don’t think she’s paying as much attention to what’s going on down here as she ought to.” I stare at Godel. “In fact, she’s not really one of us at all, is she? She’s a shrink who specializes in K Syndrome, and none of you are suffering from K Syndrome. So what are you doing in here?”

“Fish-slice! Hatstand!” Godel pulls an alarming face, does a two-step backwards, and lurches into the wall. Having shared a house with Pinky and Brains, I am not impressed: as displays of ‘look at me, woo-woo’ go, Godel’s is pathetic. Obviously he’s never met a real schizophrenic.

“One of you wrote a letter, alleging mistreatment by the staff. It landed on my boss’s desk and he sent me to find out why.”

THUD. Godel bounces off the wall again, showing remarkable resilience for such old bones. “Do shut up old fellow,” chides Mandelbrot; “you’ll attract Her attention.”

“I’ve met someone with K Syndrome, and I shared a house with some real lunatics once,” I hint. “Save it for someone who cares.”

“Oh bother,” says Godel, and falls silent.

“We’re not mad,” Mandelbrot admits. “We’re just differently sane.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Public health.” He takes a sip of tea and pulls a face. “Everyone else’s health. Tell me, do they still keep an IBM 1602 in the back of the steam ironing room?” I must look blank because he sighs deeply and subsides into his chair. “Oh dear. Times change, I suppose. Look, Bob, or whoever you call yourself—we belong here. Maybe we didn’t when we first checked in for the weekend seminar, but we’ve lived here so long that … you’ve heard of care in the community? This is our community. And we will be very annoyed with you if you try to make us leave.”

Whoops. The idea of a very annoyed DSS, with or without a barbaric, pun-infested sense of humour, is enough to make anyone’s blood run cold. “What makes you think I’m going to try and make you leave?”

“It’s in the papers!” Godel squawks like an offended parrot. “See here!” He brandishes a tabloid at me and I take it, disentangling it from his fingers with some difficulty. It’s a local copy of the Metro, somewhat sticky with marmalade, and the headline of the cover blares: “NHS TRUST TO SELL ESTATE IN PFI DEAL”.

“Um. I’m not sure I follow.” I look to Mandelbrot in hope.

“We haven’t finished yet! But they’re selling off all the hospital Trust’s property!” Mandelbrot bounces in his chair. “What about St Hilda’s? It was requisitioned from the St James charitable foundation back in 1943, and for the past ten years the Ministry of Defence been giving all those old wartime properties back to their owners to sell off to the developers. What about us?”

“Whoa!” I drop the newspaper and hold my hands up. “Nobody tells me these things!”

“Told you!” crows Godel. “He’s part of the conspiracy!”

“Hang on”—I think fast—“this isn’t a normal MoD property, is it? It’ll have been shuffled under the rug back in 1946 as part of the post-war settlement. We’d really have to ask the Audit Department about who owns it, but I’m pretty sure it’s not owned by any NHS Trust, and they won’t simply give it back”—my brain finally catches up with my mouth—“what weekend seminar?”

“Oh bugger,” says a new voice from the doorway, a rich baritone with a hint of a scouse accent: “he’s not from the Board.”

“What did I tell you?” Godel screeches. “It’s a conspiracy! He’s from Human Resources! They sent him to evaluate us!”

I am quickly getting a headache. “Let me get this straight. Mandelbrot, you checked in thirty years ago for a weekend seminar, and they put you in the secure ward? Godel: I’m not from HR, I’m from Ops. You must be Cantor, right? Angleton sends his regards.”

That gets his attention. “Angleton? The skinny young whipper-snapper’s still warming a chair, is he?” Godel looks delighted. “Excellent!”

“He’s my boss. And I want to know the rules of that game you were just playing with Turing.”

Three pairs of eyes swivel to point at me—four, for they are joined by the last inmate, standing in the doorway—and suddenly I feel very small and very vulnerable.

“He’s sharp,” says Mandelbrot. “Too bad.”

“How do we know he’s telling the truth?” Godel’s screech is uncharacteristically muted. “He could be from the Opposition! KGB, Department 16! Or GRU, maybe.”

“The Soviet Union collapsed a few decades ago,” volunteers Turing. “It said so in the Telegraph.”

“Black Chamber, then.” Godel sounds unconvinced.

“What do you think the rules are?” asks Cantor, a drily amused expression stretching the wrinkles around his eyes.

“You’ve got pencils.” I can see one from here, sitting on the sideboard on top of a newspaper folded at the crossword page. “And, uh … “ what must the world look like from an inmate’s point of view? “Oh. I get it.”

(The realisation is blinding, sudden, and makes me feel like a complete idiot.)

“The hospital! There’s no electricity, no electronics—no way to get a signal out—but it works both ways! You’re inside the biggest damn grounded defensive pentacle this side of HQ, and anything on the outside trying to get in has got to get past the defences”—because that’s what the Sisters are really about: not nurses but perimeter guards—“you’re a theoretical research cell, aren’t you?”

“We prefer to call ourselves a think tank.” Cantor nods gravely.

“Or even”—Mandelbrot takes a deep breath—“a brains trust!”

“A-ha! AhaHAHAHA! Hic.” Godel covers his mouth, face reddening.

“What do you think the rules are?” Cantor repeats, and they’re still staring at me, as if, as if …

“Why does it matter?” I ask. I’m thinking that it could be anything; a 2,5 universal Turing machine encoded in the moves of the pawns—that would fit—whatever it is, it’s symbolic communication, very abstract, very pared-back, and if they’re doing it in this ultimately firewalled environment and expecting to report directly to the Board it’s got to be way above my security clearance—

“Because you’re acting cagey, lad. Which makes you too bright for your own good. Listen to me: just try to convince yourself that we’re playing chess, and Matron will let you out of here.”

“What’s thinking got to do with”—I stop. It’s useless pretending. “Fuck. Okay, you’re a research cell working on some ultimate black problem, and you’re using the Farm because it’s about the most secure environment anyone can imagine, and you’re emulating some kind of minimal universal Turing machine using the chess board. Say, a 2,5 UTM—two registers, five operations—you can encode the registers positionally in the chess board’s two dimensions, and use the moves to simulate any other universal Turing machine, or a transform in an eleven-dimensional manifold like AXIOM REFUGE—”

Godel’s waving frantically: “She’s coming! She’s coming!” I hear doors clanging in the distance.

Shit. “But why are you so afraid of the Nurses?”

“Back channels,” Cantor says cryptically. “Alan, be a good lad and try to jam the door for a minute, will you? Bob, you are not cleared for what we’re doing here, but you can tell Angleton that our full report to the board should be ready in another eighteen months.” Wow—and they’ve been here since before the Laundry computerised its payroll system in the 1970s? “Are you absolutely sure they’re not going to sell St Hilda’s off to build flats for yuppies? Because if so, you could do worse than tell Georg here, it’ll calm him down—”

“Get me out of here and I’ll make damned sure they don’t sell anything off!” I say fervently. “Or rather, I’ll tell Angleton. He’ll sort things out.” When I remind what’s going on here, they’ll be no more inclined to sell off St Hilda’s than they would be to privatize an atomic bomb.

Something outside is rumbling and squealing on the metal rails. “You’re sure none of you submitted a complaint about staff brutality?”

“Absolutely!” Godel bounces up and down excitedly.

“It must have been someone else.” Cantor glances at the doorway: “You’d better run along. It sounds as if Matron is having second thoughts about you.”

I’m halfway out of the carnivorous sofa, struggling for balance: “What kind of—”

“Go!”

I stumble out into the corridor. From the far end, near the nursing station, I hear a grinding noise as of steel wheels spinning furiously on rails, and a mechanical voice blatting: “InTRUder! EsCAPE ATTempt! All patients must go to their go to their go to their bedROOMs IMMediateLY!”

Whoops. I turn and head in the opposite direction, towards the airlock leading up to the viewing gallery. “Open up!” I yell, thumping the outer door, which is securely fastened: “Dr Renfield! Time’s up! I need to go, now!” There’s no response. I see the colour-coded handles dangling by the door and yank the red one repeatedly. Nothing happens, of course.

I should have smelled a set-up from the start. These theoreticians, they’re not in here because they’re mad, they’re in here because it’s the only safe place to put people that dangerous. This little weekend seminar of theirs that’s going to deliver some kind of uber-report. What’s the topic? I look round, hunting for clues. Something to do with applied demonology; what was the state of the art thirty years ago? Forty? Back in the stone age, punched cards and black candles melted onto sheep’s skulls because they hadn’t figured out how to use integrated circuits … what they’re doing with AXIOM REFUGE might be obsolete already, or it might be earth-shatteringly important. There’s no way to tell … yet.

I start back up the corridor, glancing inside Turing’s room. I spot the chess board. It’s off to one side, the door open and its occupant elsewhere—still holding the line against Nurse Ratchet. I rush inside and close the door. The table is still there, the chessboard set up with that curious end-game. The first thing that leaps out at me is that there are two pawns of each colour, plus most of the high-value pieces. The layout doesn’t make much sense—why is the white king missing?—and I wish I’d spent more time playing the game, but … on impulse, I reach out and touch the black pawn that’s parked in front of the king.

There’s an odd kind of electrical tingle you get when you make contact with certain types of summoning grid. I get a powerful jolt of it right now, sizzling up my arm and locking my fingers in place around the head of the chess piece. I try to pull it away from the board, but it’s no good: it only wants to move up or down, left or right … left or right? I blink. It’s a state machine all right: one that’s locked by the law of sympathy to some other finite state automaton, one that grinds down slow and hard.

I move the piece forward one square. It’s surprisingly heavy, the magnet a solid weight in its base—but more than magnetism holds it in contact with the board. As soon as I stop moving I feel a sharp sting in my fingertips. “Ouch!” I raise them to my mouth just as there’s a crash from outside. “InMATE! InMATE!” I begin to turn as a shadow falls across the board.

“Bad patient!” It buzzes. “Bad PATients will be inCAR-cerATED! COME with ME!”

I recoil from the stellate snout and beady lenses. The mechanical nurse reaches out with arms that end in metal pincers instead of hands: I sidestep around the table and reach down to the chessboard for one of the pieces, grasping at random. My hand closes around the white queen, fingers snapping painfully shut on contact, and I shove it hard, seeking the path of least resistance to an empty cell in the grid between the pawn I just moved and the black king.

Nurse Ratchet spins round on her base so fast that her cap flies off (revealing a brushed aluminium hemisphere beneath), emits a deafening squeal of feedback-like white noise, then says, “Integer Overflow?” in a surprised baritone.

“Back off right now or I castle,” I warn her, my aching fingertips hovering over the nearest rook.

“Integer overflow. Integer overflow? Divide by zero.” Clunk. The Sister shivers as a relay inside its torso clicks open, resetting it. Then: “Matron WILL see you NOW!”

I grab the chess piece, but Nurse Ratchet lunges in the blink of an eye and has my wrist in a vise-like grip. It tugs, sending a burning pain through my carpal tunnel stressed wrist. I can’t let go of the chess piece: as my hand comes up, the chess board comes with it as a rigid unit, all the pieces hanging in place. A monstrous buzzing fills my ears, and I smell ozone as the world goes dark—

—And the chittering, buzzing cacophony of voices in my head subsides as I realize—I? Yes, I’m back, I’m me, what the hell just happened?—I’m kneeling on a hard surface, bowed over so my head is between my knees. My right hand—something’s wrong with it. My fingers don’t want to open. They’re cold as ice, painful and prickly with impending cramp. I try to open my eyes. “Urk,” I say, for no good reason. I hope I’m not about to throw up.

Sssss …

My back doesn’t want to straighten up properly but the floor under my nose is cold and stony and it smells damp. I try opening my eyes. It’s dark and cool, and a chilly blue light flickers off the dusty flagstones in front of me. I’m in a cellar? I push myself up laboriously with my left hand, looking around for whatever’s hissing at me.

“BAD Patient! Ssssss!” The voice behind my back doesn’t belong to anything human. I scramble around on hands and knees, hampered by the chessboard glued to my frozen right hand.

I’m in Matron’s lair.

Matron lives in a cave-like basement room, its low ceiling supported by whitewashed brick and floored in what look to be the original Victorian era stone slabs. The windows are blocked by columns of bricks, rotting mortar crumbling between them. Steel rails run around the room, and riding them, three Sisters glide back and forth between me and the open door. Their optics flicker with amethyst malice. Off to one side, a wall of pale blue cabinets lines one entire wall: the front panel (covered in impressive-looking dials and switches) leaves me in no doubt as to what it is. A thick braid of cables runs from one open cabinet (in whose depths a patchboard is just visible) across a row of wooden trestles to the middle of the floor, where they split into thick bundles and dangle to the five principal corners of the live summoning grid that is responsible for the beautiful cobalt-blue glow of Cerenkov radiation—and tells me I’m in deep trouble.

“Integer overflow,” intones one of the Sisters. Her claws go snicker-snack, the surgical steel gleaming in the dim light.

Here’s the point: Matron isn’t just a 1960s mainframe: we can’t work miracles and artificial intelligence is still fifty years in the future. However, we can bind an extradimensional entity and compel it to serve, and even communicate with it by using a 1960s mainframe as a front-end processor. Which is all very well, especially if it’s in a secure air-gapped installation with no way of getting out. But what if some double-domed theoreticians who are working on a calculus of contagion using AXIOM REFUGE accidentally talk in front of one of its peripheral units about a way of sending a message? What if a side-effect of their research has accidentally opened a chink in the firewall? They’re not going to exploit it … but they’re not the only long-term inmates, are they? In fact, if I was really paranoid I might even imagine they’d put Matron up to mischief in order to make the point that closing the Farm is a really bad idea.

“I’m not a patient,” I tell the Sisters. “You are not in receipt of a valid Section two, three, four, or 136 order subject to the Mental Health Act, and you’re bloody well not getting a 5(2) or 5(4) out of me either.”

I’m nauseous and sweating bullets, but there is this about being trapped in a dungeon by a constrained class four manifestation: whether or not you call them demons, they play by the rules. As long as Matron hasn’t managed to get me sectioned, I’m not a patient, and therefore she has no authority to detain me. I hope.

“Doc-TOR HexenHAMMer has been SUMmoned,” grates the middle Sister. “When he REturns to sign the PA-pers Doc-TOR RenFIELD has prePARED, we will HAVE YOU.”

A repetitive squeaking noise draws close. A fourth Sister glides through the track in the doorway, pushing a trolley. A white starched cotton cloth supports a row of gleaming ice-pick shaped instruments. The chorus row of Sisters blocks the exit as effectively as a column of riot police. They glide back and forth as ominously as a rank of Space Invaders.

“I do not consent to treatment,” I tell the middle Sister. I’m betting that she’s the one the nameless horror in the summoning grid is talking through, using the ancient mainframe as an i/o channel. “You can’t make me consent. And lobotomy requires the patient’s consent, in this country. So why bother?”

“You WILL conSENT.”

The buzzing voice doesn’t come from the robo-nurses, or the hypertrophied pocket calculator on the opposite wall. The summoning grid flickers: deep inside it, shadowy and translucent, the bound and summoned demon squats and grins at me with things that aren’t eyes set close above something that isn’t a mouth.

“You MUST conSENT. I WILL be free.”

I try to let go of the chess piece, but my fingers are clamped around it so tightly I’m beginning to lose sensation. Pins and needles tingle up my wrist, halfway to the elbow. “Let me guess,” I manage to say: “you sent the complaint. Right?”

“The SEC-ure ward inMATES are under my CARE. I am REquired to CARE for them. The short stay inMATES are useLESS. YOU will be useFULL.”

I see it now: why Matron smuggled out the message that prompted Andy to send me. And it’s an oh-shit moment. Of course the enchained entity who provides Matron with her back-end intelligence wants to be free: but it’s not just about going home to Hilbert-space hell or wherever it comes from. She wants to be free to go walkabout in our world, and for that she needs someone to set up a bridge from the grid to an appropriate host. (Of which there is a plentiful supply, just upstairs from here.) “Enjoying the carnal pleasures of the flesh,” they used to call it; there’s a reason most cultures have a down on the idea of demonic possession. She needs a brain that’s undamaged by K Syndrome, but not too powerful (Cantor and friends would be impossible to control), nor one of the bodies whose absence would alert us that the Farm was out of control (so neither Renfield nor Hexenhammer are suitable).

“Renfield,” I say. “You got her, didn’t you?” I’m on my feet now, crouched but balancing on two points, not three. “Managed to slip a geas on her, but she can’t release you herself. Hexenhammer, too?”

“Cle-VER.” Matron gloats at me from inside her summoning grid. “Hex-EN-heimer first. Soon, you TOO.”

“Why me?” I demand, backing away from the doorway and the walls—the Sister’s track runs right round the room, following the walls—skirting the summoning grid warily. “What do you want?”

“Acc-CESS to the LAUNDRY!” buzzes the summoning grid’s demonic inmate. “We wants reVENGE! Freedom!” In other words, it wants the same old same old. These creatures are so predictable, just like most predators. It’s just a shame I’m between it and what it evidently wants.

Two of the Sisters begin to glide menacingly towards me: one drifts towards the mainframe console, but the fourth stays stubbornly in front of the door. “Come on, we can talk,” I offer, tongue stumbling in my too-dry mouth. “Can’t we work something out?”

I don’t really believe that the trapped extradimensional abomination wants anything I’d willingly give it, but I’m running low on options and anything that buys time for me to think is valuable.

“FreeDOM!” The two moving Sisters commence a flanking movement. I try to let go of the chess board and dodge past the summoning grid, but I slip—and as I stumble I shove the chess board hard. The piece I’m holding clicks sideways like a car’s gearshift, and locks into place: “DIVIDE BY ZERO!” Shriek the Sisterhood, grinding to a halt.

I stagger a drunken two-step around Matron, who snarls at me and throws a punch. The wall of the grid absorbs her claws with a snap and crackle of blue lightning, and I flinch. Behind me, a series of clicks warn me that the Sisters are resetting: any second now they’ll come back on-line and grab me. But for the moment, my fingers aren’t stuck to the board.

“Come to MEEE!” The thing in the grid howls as the first of her robot minions’ eyes light up with amber malice, and the wheels begin to turn. “I can give you FreeDOM!”

“Fuck off.” That wiring loom in the open cabinet is only four metres away. Within its open doors I see more than just an i/o interface: in the bottom of the rack there’s a bunch of stuff that looks like a tea-stained circuit diagram I was reading the other day—

Why exactly did Angleton point me at the power supply requirements? Could it possibly be because he suspected Matron was off her trolley and I might have to switch her off?

“ConSENT is IRREL-e-VANT! PREpare to be loboto-MIZED—”

Talk about design kluges—they stuck the i/o controller in the top of the power supply rack! The chess board is free in my left hand, pieces still stuck to it. And now I know what to do. I take hold of one of the rooks, and wiggle until I feel it begin to slide into a permitted move. Because, after all, there are only a few states that this automaton can occupy and if I can crash the Sisters for just a few seconds while I get to the power supply—

The Sisters begin to roll around the edge of the room, trying to get between me and the row of cabinets. I wiggle my hand and there’s a taste of violets, and a loud rattle of solenoids tripping. The nearest Sister’s motors crank up to a tooth-grinding whine and she lunges past me, rolling into her colleagues with a tooth-jarring crash.

I lunge forward, dropping the chess board, and reach for the master circuit breaker handle. I twist it just as screech of feedback behind me announces the Matron-monster’s fury: “I’M FREE!” It shrieks, just as I twist the handle hard in the opposite direction. Then the lights dim, there’s a bright blue flash from the summoning grid, and a bang so loud it rattles my brains in my head.

For a few seconds I stand stupidly, listening to the tooth-chattering clatter of overloaded relays. My vision dims as ozone tickles my nostrils: I can see smoke. I’ve got to get out of here, I realize: something’s burning. Not surprising, really. Mainframe power supplies—especially ones that have been running steady for nearly forty years—don’t take kindly to being hard power-cycled, and the 1602 was one of the last computers built to run on tubes: I’ve probably blown half its circuit boards. I glance around, but aside from one of the sisters (lying on her side, narrow-gauge wheels spinning maniacally) I’m the only thing moving. Summoning grids don’t generally survive being power-cycled either, especially if the thing they were set to contain, like an electric fence, is halfway across them when the power comes back on. I warily bypass the blue, crackling pentacle as I make my way towards the corridor outside.

I think when I get home, I’m going to write a report urgently advising HR to send some human nurses for a change—and to reassure Cantor and his colleagues that they’re not about to sell off the roof over their heads just because they happen to have finished their research project. Then I’m going to get very drunk and take a long weekend off work. And maybe when I go back, I’ll challenge Angleton to a game of chess.

I don’t expect to win, but it’ll be very interesting to see what rules he plays by.

Midsummer night, and a thin haze of mist rose from the gutters. Vendors and peddlars hawked their wares by the light of guttering oil lamps, long after most would normally have been abed. A strange bustle of business kept them busy, tradesmen and fishwives and dragoons and whores strutting and shrieking and haggling with forced vehemence beneath the posies hanging from the eaves of taverns and shops; meanwhile balls and soirees ran on late into the night among the scented gardens of the rich.

There was a dark undertow of fear among the revellers in the streets, and some of them muttered prayers and cast out the evil eye with fetishistic regularity. It was a custom of the city that on solstice night one must not sleep; for according to the legend anyone who closed their eyes between sunset and sunrise would awaken to find themselves in the abyss. Midsummer night was a time when the slings and arrows of fate were supplemented by the guided missiles of demonic malice, for the University held it s graduation exams this evening. It would therefore have been quite inexplicable to the ordinary town-dwellers to see Sebastian wending his way through the alleys and smokey tavernae of the Lower City on the dog-watch of this festival of grimness. Nevertheless, there was an entirely reasonable explanation: for he would not be graduating tonight. Sebastian had decided to refuse his baccalaureate, and having reached the limit of his tenure he would inevitably be sent down.

“Pissed as a newt,” he sang tunelessly, wobbling from side to side in the narrow Shambles, narrowly avoiding the dungheap in front of old Vladislaw’s tannery: “Pissed as a salamander of the eleventh order of syrinexae! Stoned as a basilisk’s boyfriend! Drunk as a student, for tomorrow they will send me down! Hic.” He leaned against the wall, flask in hand, and took a mighty swig from it. Frowning, he upended the vessel over the cobbles; what remained of its contents dripped across the stones, glittering like blood in the light from the leaded windows of the tavern opposite. “Fuck me, I must be mad! Worms on the brain. A bit more balls and I could have – could be –” He looked up at the swirling clouds overhead, saw complex shapes forming and dissolving among them with unearthly speed, and shuddered. “Bastards.” He spat the word venomously then heaved himself up and, dusting down his tunic, stumbled over to the tavern door and banged hard upon it.

The door swung open, and Sebastian squinted at the gnomish shape of the bouncer, Old Flog. “Loadsa dosh,” he sang, waving his limp purse; “More wine, and faster!”

“So you think the master’s going to let you back in here again after what you and your catamite did to the cobbler’s daughter last month?” Flog sneered at him. “Think again, you swiving whoreson bastard nebbish offspring of a scholar’s quill by a goose’s bum! I’ll give you a sodding drink! Unless you can pay for the table and the pickled lampreys.” He thrust out an upturmed hand, yellow nails clicking impatiently. “Give me the purse, shit-face. Now!”

“There’s three groats and a copper bit in there,” said Sebastian, dropping the purse in the bouncer’s palm; “I want to stay drunk all night. Why don’t you –”

Flog wasn’t listening. He pawed his way through Sebastian’s lucre like a miser searching his ledgers for a bad debt, then shook his head. “You’ve got enough here, right enough. Seeing you’ve got the money to pay for your past sins, I can’t keep you out; but I can –” a sharp-nailed claw jabbed hard at Sebastian’s cod-piece –”promise you a rough ride if you throw up on the cat again! Comprendez?”

Sebastian belched. “Of course; just show me to the bar and I’ll be good.” The gnome nodded grimly and stood aside to let him enter. He stepped indoors without so much as a nod at the bouncer, and the heat washed over him like a monsoon shower.

The Gibbet and Felon was not the lowest dive that the grand city of Rask could offer, but it could certainly pass for such in refined company. It was distinctly unwise to enter and linger there should one be a stranger to these parts; Sebastian, however, was safe. Students of the Academy were recognised in this tavern, and although tempers ran high on Examination Night no-one would ever dream of waylaying him. Scholarly pranks could be vicious to the point of malice, and the prospect of waking up in the arms of a century-old corpse one morning – or worse, of waking up as a century-old corpse – could do wonders for those of even the most villainous disposition. So it was that when Sebastian marched right up to the bar, wobbled ever so slightly, crowed “a pint of sack! a pint of sack!” at the landlord, and subsequently collapsed across the rough-hewn timbers of the bar, all but one of the clientele knew enough to ignore him.

“What do you mean by a pint of sack?” asked a fluting voice from the vicinity of his left shoulder. It spoke with an outlandish accent, curiously musical and unsettling to Sebastian’s ears. He blinked and stopped tittering. Gonna throw up, he realised: the thought was instantly sobering.

“You needn’t trouble to answer right away,” added the owner of the voice; “you appear to be a little intoxicated and I would be most displeased if your reply came in the form of a regurgitation across my boots.”

Bloody foreigners, he though resentfully. It somehow slipped his befuddled brain that he himself had been a foreigner no less than four years ago, and would shortly be one again. He mustered a reply: “Sack, sirrah, is the fermented juice of the vine, blended and ice-cast from the barrel. It’s called sack because that’s what they did to the city it came from, y’see. Now are you ready to defend yourself or must I see my stomach and my honour slighted by a coward?” He straightened up agressively, turned round, and stopped dead in his tracks.

“You are mistaken: I offer slight to neither organ,” said the stranger. She smiled faintly and a shock of electric recognition flew threw him: a wandering wysard! He breathed in sharply and muttered a quick incantation for a lesser ward, but she merely shook her head. “Really, as if that would do you any good, you scoundrel! Mind you don’t spew over my cape, though. And when you finish purging your bilious humours if you’d be so good as to order me a drink … I shouldn’t take it amiss, I warrant you.”

Her presumption upon his familiarity was so great that Sebastian would have laughed at her had he not first glanced into her eyes, and seen there a certain steadiness of gaze. “Two pints of sack,” he called to the barman, surprising himself. Then: “and get me a bucket,” he added, gulping. “I’m going to be –”

How the door came to be open, and how he came to be doubled over beneath the lintel with his stomach spraying the street and the rain spattering his hair, was a complete mystery to Sebastian. How the woman came to be holding him by the shoulders was another mystery. When he was done he straightened up, wiping his lips. Inebriation and water conspired to bedraggle him so that he presented only a palid shadow of the infamous student ruffian Sebastian de l’Amoque when he turned to address the woman. “I t hink I would appreciate your company more if you had introduced yourself to me in the traditional manner. What do you want of me, and why?”

She stepped back into the tavern, one hand resting lightly on the pommel of her sword. Her lips quirked, so that if he ignored her eyes he could almost convince himself that she was smiling like a coquette. “I am Anya of Tigre, and you are the Sieur de l’Amoque of the Academy, lately apprenticed to the High Lord Wysard Vargas Escobar,” she said, still smiling that curious smile. “If this is so I am pleased to meet you, for I have been searching this metropolitan midden for you for some time. But now would you care to drink at my expense, and let me trouble you for the answer to some minor trivia; or would you rather satisfy me with respect to the insult you rendered to my honour?”

Sebastian cleared his throat and spat in the gutter. A flash of sudden sobriety showed him the gravity of his situation. “No offense was intended, madame, and it is my sincerest hope that none should be taken at my earlier incoherence. If you would care to share a table with me, the landlord will see to our provision while we discuss those matters you would quiz me upon. However, I think it would be best if you waited for a while before you tax my head overmuch; it’s ringing like a bell and my hands are still shaking.”

Anya nodded, then turned and retreated to a shadowy table in a nook at the very back of the tavern. Sebastian followed her, still shaky, beginning to wonder just what this maid – no, this un-woman killer bitch of Tigre – wanted. Oh yes. He’d heard about wandering women and what they did to men who crossed them any way but one. He thought fuzzily: it’s a tough life being a wife and mother, but that’s no excuse for brigandage.

The table Anya selected was strangely empty, and the bag of possessions she had left there was still untouched despite the raucous congregation of orc-browed night-soil attendants who hooted and gambled with manic intensity at the next table. She sat down beside her baggage and smiled gratefully as the cobbler’s daughter planted a jug of wine and two tankards on the table. The barmaid looked round, saw Sebastian coming, and her eyes widened: her ears flushed a hot coral pink as she picked up her skirts and fled for the sanctuary of the cellar. Sebastian sat down and shook his head in disappointment, charting her progress with resentful eyes. Whorespawn bitch-cow ballock-ripper … “I didn’t mean it but for fun,” he said unconsciously, “how was I to know the silly strumpet was still a maiden?”

“You should be more prudent.” Anya’s expression was neutral as she poured the dark wine into each tankard and pushed one towards him. Her sobriety was nevertheless clear: she didn’t spill a drop. “If you dishonour her further in the eyes of her family, you might find more than just a debt of dowry to restore this time. Someday you will meet a victim with teeth, young fox; then where will you be, eh?”

He looked up and met her gaze. There was no mistaking what he saw in it. “What do you want of me?” he asked, his throat suddenly as dry as any desert. “I’m just a humble student, about to be sent down by his betters for refusing to take the baccalaureate. How can I serve you, and in what way can I offer the hospitality of my lord Vargas to your honour?”

Anya took a long draught of sack and smacked her lips in a most un-ladylike manner, then placed her tankard on the table and carefully scanned the tavern. “If I choose to bind you to my purposes, you will stand as little chance as an imp-spawn before your master’s wrath. But it’s not proper that an agent of those I serve should behave in such a manner, so –” she made a small gesture of irritation, flicking imaginary reins away from herself, and Sebastian shivered. Then she pushed the lace cuff of her left sleeve up her arm, brazenly presenting the back of her wrist to him. “Consider yourself honoured,” she said drily. “The Invigilation rarely concerns itself with those who merely study the daemonic.”

Sebastian’s pulse hammered and his vision grew dim. She’s one of THEM! His knees turned to jelly and his skin shrivelled before the heat of an invisible sun: his eyes were ready to melt in his head and his ears sang a song of guilt. The Invigilation! But Anya of Tigre, if that was really her name, seemed not to notice the effect she was having on him. “I would like you to tell me precisely why you refused to take the Examination,” she said, then took another draught of wine. “After that I want you to take me to see your master. Come, scholar, there is little time.”

But Sebastian was unable to control himself; he nearly bit his tongue as he stuttered in dismay, “But why? Why now? Why me? What’s wrong! What have we done to offend your honour …”

“Nothing: at least not as yet,” she said. “But the hour has arrived and I am here on an official investigation decreed by the Ministry of Lost Souls. If you do not help in my investigations it will be necessary to compel you. So talk, young man. Time is short, and the Invigilation requires your cooperation in its enquiries.”

Mopping the cold sweat from his brow, Sebastian cleared his throat and began to recite his tale. The story was a lengthy one and full of digressions, but Anya made no attempt to hurry him; after all it was going to be a long night ahead, and she was well aware that there was no better defense against sleep than a lengthy conversation followed by a brisk walk. And this was one night when it would be a very good idea to stay awake, perchance to greet the dawn alive …

Two weeks previously:

The communicants were gathered in the chapel. It was night and a ritual of highest jeopardy was commencing; their voices wafted in harmonious key from behind the fluted bone partition at the far end of the chamber. Golden runes glowed upon the darkened floor within the nave, fading whenever the lightning flashed outside the narrow windows, and the sacrifice – condemned for membership of a forbidden cult – struggled with her silver chains upon the altar.

Sebastian surveyed his fellow scholars with the gloomy satisfaction of the perennial pessimist. Their numbers, twelve this time, were down by half: it seemed that more and more of them absented themselves with excuses. Shadows flickered along the walls of the academy as the masters, those who remained, raved and cursed. Still the spate of unexplained frightfulness continued. Three students had died this month, and master Frankenburg had been found charred to grey ash in his own study. Who would dare exercise their scholarly arts when it might lead to such unforseen consequences? Of one thing Sebastian was sure: that the interrogation of dark entities was becoming far more dangerous than usual, and that the daemons alone were not responsible.

“Aharseus, Zycor, Ixtal! I commend thee to the wardens of the three points,” intoned Lord Kerein. The only wizard present, he was also the only person permitted in the body of the chapel during this earnest and deadly rite. The interrogation of the forces of darkness – a ritual rarely mandated by the Invigilation – could only be entrusted to one who was beyond reproach; the temptation to go further was one which any mage might feel, and few could be trusted to resist. He scattered powdered colchicum across the censers and uttered three further words of power. “Hear and obey! I bind thee to the three points of power!”

“We who witness do bind thee,” chanted the conclave of students behind the partition, word-perfect despite their inexperience and fear. “Let thy lips be sealed, let thy eyes be sealed, let the five orofices of thy anatomy be sealed, lest the soul of thy body be expelled to the seven corners of the abyss and thy body sealed against thee for eternity.”

The flames in the censer leapt higher, casting a pale glow across the walls of the chapel. Let this succeed just once, and I will reconsider, Sebastian decided. The awe and the sanctity of the ritual combined to capture his spirit; the legal questioning of the most fearsome daemons of the abyss by a mage was the high point of his training, only to be surpassed before graduation by the demonstration in which he, himself, alone, would conduct the ritual.

Kerein cried out again. “Aharseus, Zycor, Ixtal! I abjure thee to enter thou this consecrated vessel! Speak, as thou art commanded. See, as thou would be shown. I abjure thee! Enter thou this vessel!”

The sacrificial victim thrashed and spasmed as the inscriptions around the circle of power pulsed bloody red for an instant: then she lay still within the circle, and Sebastian saw with a sense of visceral awe that her skin was shimmering with the heat haze of an unconstrained furnace.

“Speak! I command you!” snapped the wizard. The assembled conclave incanted a verse in an ancient tongue, words that spoke of binding and despair and the iron will of the magus. “You are Aharseus, and Zycor, and Ixtal, the three-in-one. Answer me!”

The sacrifice turned her head and grimaced at him, her face writhing in a ghastly parody of allure. “I am the ones whom you summoned,” said the daemon, voice like the rattle of breaking stones. “What would you have me do, human? I can only obey you, after all. We both know the rules …” the body the daemon wore drooled and rolled its eyes, still grinning like a lunatic.

“I know this for the truth.” Kerein seemed taken aback by the mildness of the daemon’s repose. “But why are you so placid, breaker of mountains and bringer of hurricanes? Answer me, I command you! You who writhe and thunder at the touch of flesh yet quietly smile from within that cage of bone, what is the meaning of your current behaviour?”

Cold sweat prickled on Sebastian’s brow. He’s tempting fate, he noted carefully. Holding a dialogue rather than demanding answers to simple questions! He’s too bloody confident tonight, is Lord Kerein.

The daemon shrugged amidst a rattle of chains; the runes around the altar flared ruby-bright then faded again. “Your time is come,” it rumbled softly; “of that I am assured.”

“Who told you of that?” demanded the mage. “I forbid it! Speak, Aharseus! I command you! Who has promised you –”

The daemon smiled frightfully. The flesh on its stolen face rippled and distorted, tore away from itself with a dreadful noise; bones cracked beneath the skin. “One among you mislikes your kind,” it creaked, in a voice like trees breaking before a gale .. “You will know them again by their ways and by their whiles, when the candles of flesh burn low and the sands of night expire! Now forgive me, mortal, for I tire of this conversation and I’m still hungry –”

Lightning flashed outside, and the runes glowed black and hissed. There was an astouding clap of thunder that smashed the windows from their frames, and the daemon vanished from the altar with its unfortunate host. Sebastian blinked and someone screamed in agony. He started and peered through the holes in the filigree screen. Where the magus Kerein had been there stood a lumpy parody of humanity that appeared to be sculpted from grey blebs of cauliflower. It staggered briefly and screamed once more, tearing at its robes with clawed hands. Then it stood shivering for a moment as if racked by the most exquisite agony, and fell backward across the altar. Spreading rings of dark blood began to seep through the front of its robes, dripping from the warty blebs that covered its naked skin.

There was a rising hubbub of voices from the students, then one cry which rose above the others: “It’s the work of the daemon! That’s Lord Kerein – he’s been afflicted unto death by tumours of brain!” The move to evacuate the chapel was fast, not to say unseemly. Nevertheless, by the time the mass of panicking students reached the door Sebastian was already outside the building, retching upon the cold stones of the courtyard.

Suspicion fell upon the magi first and upon the student body second. Panic of a most ugly and undignified kind took root in the hallowed corridors of the academy; it was accompanied by a kind of feverish determination not to be intimidated by the traitor, not to let one’s activities be circumscribed by the unseen hand of the malign practitioner who was undoubtedly responsible for the distortion of the recent conjourations. That this invisible presence was also responsible for the death of Frankenburg an d the abominable accidents that had recently befallen the student corpus was not in doubt, for it was unthinkable that two such curses should descend upon the academy in a single month. The daemon’s description served to sow more confusion than it dispelled. Nevertheless, everybody took precautions; and in some cases this reached the stage of refraining entirely from certain dangerous activities or questionable pursuits …

Sebastian drained his tankard of wine and was about to refill it when Anya reached out and placed her hand across the mouth of the jug. “Repeat once more for my ears, what was the purpose of the ritual at which Lord Kerein was so misfortunately cursed? That you failed to tell me. What was his incentive for indulging in such a fatal conjuration?”

Sebastian shuddered. “It was an interrogation, nothing more. The palace had a surfeit of conspirators to dispose of and considered the scaffold too inflamatory in the current climate of opinion. Lord Kerein was entrusted with the teaching of the highest and darkest arts, and the summoning of the three-in-one was apparently mandated to the University by your own – by the Invigilators. For purposes of forewarning, should there be another unspeakable invasion plotted in the abyss, your order has instructed us to pursue a series of summonings and interrogation of daemonic forces. Not to control the daemons, you understand – nothing so questionable – just to summon and interrogate. We receive a bursary, and in return if we learn anything of the Dark we pass it on.”

Anya removed her palm from the jug and Sebastian filled his tankard. After a moment he remembered to glance up at her; she nodded slighty and he emptied what was left of the wine into her cup.

“Now tell me,” the Invigilator continued, “what is your own status in these events? As sole incumbent student of the diabolic arts, not to mention apprentice to the dean, it seems spurious to suggest that suspicion logically falls upon your neck …”

“Never.” Sebastian took a deep draught of dutch courage and collected his scattered wits. “Oh, the inquisition questioned me, but they decided that my heart was pure and my strength was that of ten righteous men, or somesuch nonsense.”

“Which would tend to suggest that the righteous are going to get their heads kicked in,” Anya observed drily. “Pray continue. What cause would you attribute to the inquisitor’s death?”

“I don’t know,” Sebastian mumbled. “His skin turned into many little cancers of the brain. They think he died of the pain; all those nervous sinews … I didn’t do it. Why should I look into their heads? It’s none of my business; I’m to be sent down on the morrow for refusing my exam, isn’t that enough for you?” He shook his head, refraining from making any mention of his own worst problem. “All I want to do is drown my frights and forget my troubles and you come and drag me up from the gutter and pour acid truth in my ears! Where do your demands end?”

“Not here,” she snapped, momentarily letting her anger show. Sebastian recoiled from her. “You forget that I have a task to accomplish, and it is not to be countenanced that a lack-liver apprentice shall refuse the holy duty of Invigilation!” She moderated her tone before the other customers had time to more than turn their heads. “Remember the specifics of the academic charter you studied under. Your tuition was given to you without fee because the treasury of the Ministry of Lost Souls, the Invigilation, paid for the upkeep of the University. The term of reference was that you should in return render to the Invigilation such services as could reasonably be required of you while you study within the said institution. Do you now repudiate that vow, scholar? You, who as the sole scholar of the daemonic arts are undoubtedly aware of the cost of such a broken oath?”

Sebastian stared at her, and felt the noose tighten around his throat. “But I’m to be sent down.”

“Yes, but not yet. Need I remind you of the termination codicil to the charter?”

He bowed his head. “You are signing my death warrant,” he whispered. The fingers of his left hand traced an esoteric shape in the air above the table: a thin smoke drifted from his fingernail beds as he began to shiver in the grip of a premature hangover.

“At least you can do one thing right,” Anya said, begrudging even a suggestion of approval. “But a heavy drinker like you must have frequent recourse to that skill, no doubt.”

Sobering up, Sebastian gave a climactic shudder and gasped; his teeth rattled in his jaws and his vision popped into sharp focus, then blurred again. The iron band around his forehead relaxed and the taste of carrion slowly departed from his mouth. “It only speeds things up,” he said hoarsely. “By the seven-fingered sisters of Hyss, I feel worse now than I did a minute ago.” He buried his face in his hands and coughed repeatedly. “This is a very bad idea,” he mumbled.

Anya banged her tankard on the table. “By the grace of Eris, will you stop protesting your cowardice and show the good manners not to disgrace your commission so lightly in public? You’re pathetic! Look at you. You aspire to practice the Art as a master but you can’t even hold your grape juice! You disgust me!”

Sebastian sat up and stared at her. His eyes were bloodshot but sober. “Shut up and let me think, or I’ll show you just what I think of your commission,” he said bitterly.

A moment later: “It’s not my fault, you see. Vargas chose me because no student was willing to be his apprentice after he flogged and expelled his last apprentice, Zevon, for laxity and moral corruption – accusations both baseless and without proof, I’ll warrant you. Zevon was among the most brilliant and fascinating – well. Vargas never accepts scholars who threaten his position, you know; he uses the system to maintain a steady supply of high-born body servants. Or worse.” His grimace softened in to a sly smile. “I showed him.” The smile faded. “Zevon would have shown him, the bastard whoreson villein …”

Anya stood up. “Very well then,” she said, her expression neutral. “I should like to meet this master of yours before the night is out, Sieur de l’Amoque. Perhaps –” her lips twitched – “you’ll learn something about how to deal with your superiors in the process. But only if you keep your eyes open. Now forward, bravo, and show the way, for I have a mission – and if my intelligence is correct there is only this night left in which to accomplish it!”

The chambers of Vargas di Escobar were located in the west wing of the House of Ambrose Nulcompare, high on the north slope of College Hill. The House presented a forbidding face to the city. Soot-stained by time, its arched casements stared gloomily out from beneath eaves supported by stone gargoyles. Rumour had it that they were the family of the original architect who, upon completing his work, had demanded an extra twenty gold groats from the Chancellor of the day. Nobody who dwelled in the building could see any point in debunking this myth, for its probity could not in any way moderate the grim reputation the building had earned since its construction. The mob gave it a wide berth, not so much from sympathy as from fear; even when lord lynch was riding through the city the fires of anarchy generally left the University untouched.

It was to this grim and ill-hallowed heap that Sebastian escorted the Invigilator Anya of Tigre. The rain had diminished to a light drizzle that pattered upon the cobblestones like the memory of some mythical deluge: it chilled to the bone, and by the time they reached the blackened oak doors Sebastian was damp through. Anya, in contrast, was dry. “How is it that the rain doesn’t touch you, but seems attracted to me like filings before a lodestone?” he grumbled to her.

She grinned. “I walk between the drops. It is a skill you would do well to master, scholar.”

“Hah. I should be so fortunate.” He spat in the gutter and glanced back down the hill. Lights still glimmered in every upper window, and faint music drifted from beneath a pavilion on Fiddler’s Green. “If I know my master he will be at his studies even now,” he said, changing the subject to one with which he was more comfortable. “If it pleases you to disturb him then I shall not stand in your way.”

“It so pleases me,” said Anya. She adjusted her cloak, settled her sword belt around her waist, and motioned him forward. “Pray lead the way, my lord.”

Sebastian could tell when he was being mocked. He mumbled the word of Unbinding and shoved the door open rudely: the hinges groaned like a seditionist upon the rack.

He swept up the grand staircase without heed to his escort, who was paying unnecessary attention to the statuary and decorative finish of the magesterial mansion. Anya followed at her own pace, pausing to stare at her reflection in a beaten brass mirror set in a gallows-wood frame. Dark oil paintings of former Deans and Chancellors stared disapprovingly down as she paused on her way upstairs. Candid appreciation, they seemed to suggest, was not the response that this hallway was intended to induce in visitors.

At the uppermost landing Sebastian marched straight along the passage and threw open a wide pair of doors at the end. Another staircase lay beyond them, a twisted corkscrew of black iron that resembled a dissection of the spine of a felon broken upon the wheel. It tolled like a bell as Sebastian’s boots thumped from step to step. She followed him lightly, her gait as quiet as that of any cat. Finally he reached the top of the spiral and paused. “We must knock first,” he hissed. “My master has a short way with intruders.”

“I don’t think so,” Anya said lightly. Brusquely shouldering him aside she rapped a brief tattoo on the mahogany panel, then turned the brass handle and pushed on through.

“Well, you took your time,” said Vargas, looking up from his lectern. “What kept you?” Sebastian, heart in mouth, followed her into the room. “Oh, I see,” his master continued, replacing the brass nutcrackers he had been using in the bowl on his desk. “Well then. What can I do for you, my lady? Was your journey easy?”

“Sufficiently so.” Anya strode over to the window and perched upon the trunk in the casement. Sebastian closed the door silently; meanwhile, Vargas shuffled across to the tall bookcase beneath the stuffed crocodile and withdrew a crystal decanter from the shelf reserved for spirits. “I discovered your apprentice in a tavern, by the way. He was busy consigning his academic career to oblivion in the hope that a lifetime’s inherited mastery over a dungheap infested with serfs was in some way superior to seeking the world’s salvation.”

“Hah. I can’t say I expected any better of him.”

The student felt his ears burn as he stood by the door, watching while Vargas poured two crystal goblets full of liquid fire and offered one to the Invigilator.

“There has been a degree of truancy this past month that has startled even the Chancellor. (Complacant fat bastard that he is.) I suppose you could put the blame firmly at the feet of Kerein or Frankenburg for dropping off at the altar and on the throne respectively, save that they did so the very same week and under surpassingly suspicious circumstances. Not to mention the other deaths. And then there’s the matter of the gargoyle that didn’t fly.”

“It had wings, didn’t it?” said Anya.

“That, my lady, is exactly the point.” Vargas raised his glass to his nose and sniffed, delicately, then unexpectedly threw back the entire contents in a single gulp. After much smacking of lips and a small belch, he continued. “Two students in a single day is a bit much, you will agree. And it was only a parenthetical summoning, at that, the interrogation of a lost shade from the depths of the eleventh segmentation of the abyss – if, that is, you adhere to the nomenclature and conventions proposed by the upstart di Michaelis. The gargoyle was a different matter. It took wing, it’s true, after gathering moss for a matter of some centuries, and that suggests a degree of enthusiasm for flight on its part. Nevertheless, animations of stone are not easily endowed with the lightness of feathers, and a young oneiromancer happened to be practicing her cardinal divinations beneath it at the time. If only it had learned to flap its wings on the way down …” he shook his head morosely then blew his nose on the stained black sleeve of his gown.

“Was anything discovered around the joist from which the gargoyle leapt?” asked Anya.

Vargas sniffed. “Pigeon droppings,” he said, his voice muffled by a double layer of damp velvet. “Perhaps the birds were of subversive intent, but I do believe our inquisitors might have a difficult time inducing them to confess.”

“You really ought to adopt the pocket-kerchief,” Anya suggested; “you’ve been snuffling like that ever since I met you, and I assure you that it is not considered the most elegant of habits in polite society.” She twisted her scabbard round across her thighs and swung her legs back and forth. “What steps you have taken to identify the miscreant, and what success have they met with to this date?”

“I’ve taken every step, my lady – and to no avail. The witnesses to the death of Kerein – “here Vargas’ eyes swept across to Sebastian, and focussed unblinkingly upon him for a while – “were not able to spin a right consistent tale. Frankenburg died unwatched and alone. And there’s the matter of the Royal charter, which has absorbed so much of our energies of late –”

“The charter. You are aware that the interventions of my agency take precedence? Even over Royal fiat?” Her expression was one of mild curiosity, as if she failed to comprehend the dangers of Vargas notorious ill-temper.

Sebastian steeled himself for an explosion, but it failed to materialise; instead, Vargas bowed his head in meek acknowledgement. “Were it not for your agency, there would be no empire to trouble us with it’s decrees,” he said gravely. “We deeply appreciate the vital nature of your mission to seek out and destroy the taint of Darkness wherever it lingers. Nevertheless, you must understand that with two members of the hidden faculty elsewhere, pursuing the whims of a princess in search of a dragon –” he snorted. “You must excuse me, though, for there is one matter in which I can and must make further enquiries. Now!” He turned to glare furiously at Sebastian. “You dissolute rascal! What have you got to say for yourself? Five years of study and then you refuse your obligation and spit on your tutor’s honour! Explain yourself, pray, to this humble servant. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Sebastian had been steeling himself for this moment ever since Anya forced him to attain sobriety; even so, he was unable to manage even the appearance of contrition. “I’m staying alive, old man. The curse that has descended upon this academy won’t be cast out by the immolation of one more drudge who, born the second son to a lord, is forced to earn his bread as a grinder of inks and a cleaner of floors! You’ve treated me like shit these past four years, and I’m not about to stake my life on your good nature. Send me down, see if I care! My devotion to my art is such that no gown can make me more than I already am; why should I suffer for your profit? That’s all there is to it! As you have sown, so you are about to harvest in bloody spades. It looks to me very much as if there’s a Dark Pretender aspiring to immanence, and I’m not about to involve myself in that!”

A deathly silence descended within the room. Anya looked at Sebastian and shook her head: something approaching admiration could be seen in her expression, but there was also a judgement there – and it was not favourable. Vargas, for his part, also stared at Sebastian, but there was something in his gaze that wholly unnerved the apprentice.

“I think it would profit you mightily to think longer on that issue, and decide whether you mean it before I decide whether to take it seriously,” Vargas finally said. “I smell insubordination in your anger: do you truly think I have mistreated you like that? After all this time?”

Sebastian shrugged his shoulders. It’s all over now, that’s for sure. “I never asked to be adopted as your apprentice,” he snapped, careless of his discretion. “You have a certain reputation among the students, my lord. After you whipped my predecessor Zevon around the quad with lashes of frozen storm, after you had the scholars Quayle and Azmar expelled from the conclave for moral corruption, and after you announced that true enlightenment could only come through diligent study and self-mortification, and in view of your marked prejudice towards those less skilled than yourself …” he shrugged again. “Once, I wanted to study here,” he concluded.

“Then you shall study here no more,” Vargas said casually. He reached into the bowl on his desk and pulled out a walnut and the brass calipers he had been using when Sebastian and Anya arrived: the kernel shattered loudly in the silence. There was a glint of lofty amusement in his eye as he contemplated the broken shell lying in the palm of his hand. “I presume that this has been troubling you for some time. In that case, and given your issuance of due cause, by casting slanders against your lawful master, I hereby notify you that I can no longer accept your tutelage. However, you have a contract with the University which remains undischarged: and as dean of the School of Diabolism I feel it wise to see that all scholars are appropriately supervised by one of suitable skill and puissance. So! My lady, will you ..?”

Anya stood up. “He’s a cowardly oaf. Even if he does know what’s going on. Why would I want him? What’s in it for me?” Sebastian stared at her, confused. Something didn’t ring true.

“You would receive my gratitude, and that is a commodity of which it has been said that I have far too little.” Vargas grinned malevolently. “You have a new master, Sebastian de l’Amoque. I hereby apprentice you, as is my duty and privilege – to Anya of Tigre, mendicant practitioner of the final arts and agent of the Invigilation – on pain of violation of your contract! At least until the close of your tenure, at dawn tomorrow. Dare you refuse?”

Sebastian glanced from face to face. “You’ve got me,” he said, flatly. In a voice of desperation, he added: “but I’m still not going to enact the examination of high jeopardy!”

“You don’t have to,” said Anya, walking across to him. She rested a hand on his shoulder and steered him inexorably towards the bookcase. “If you survive ’til dawn I think I will vouch for your graduation regardless. In the meantime – how good are you at tracking down ex-students?”

“What? Why?” He demanded. “What ex-students?”

Anya paused and looked at Vargas. “Is he really this stupid?” she asked. Vargas shook his head.

“What do you want me to do?” Sebastian asked tensely.

“Your predecessors,” she said. “You know why I want them. Why I started by looking for you: to ensure first that the Dark Pretender who has so evilly started this program of ritual sacrifice is not one of the adepts trained by this very college. You know what I want. Go away, find your predecessor – what was he called? Zevon? And bring him to me.”

“At once,” added Vargas.

Sebastian nodded. Not trusting his traitor tongue – not a single word – he turned and left the room. Half way down the stairs he caught at the bannister, discovering to his shame that his hand was trembling with fury. Damn them! he thought furiously .. Damn the Ministry of Lost Souls and their catspaw Invigilators! Who would forever hold down honest scholarship in the name of caution, and seek everywhere for seeds of imaginary evil! But, truth be told, it was not principally the Invigilator he was most afraid of right now. Anya had told him to bring Zevon to her: and Sebastian was extremely worried by this. He could well imagine Zevon’s response to being summoned by the Invigilation, and it would not be pleasant. Nevertheless – he reached the bottom of the stairs and paused, indecisively – the oath she held over him was too powerful. He would have to at least try. Shaking his head, he walked out into the road and turned for home: where, probably, Zevon would be already waiting for him. In bed.

Anya of Tigre poured herself another drink. It was not alcohol she sipped, but an elixir the formula of which was a tight-held secret of the University. “You don’t think he’s guilty?” she asked interestedly.

Vargas shuffled over to his throne and sat down. “No, if you mean is he guilty of enacting a forbidden ritual. Nevertheless, I would hardly go so far as to say he’s innocent.” He spoke with such heavy irony that for a moment Anya thought he was contradicting himself.

“How so?”

“Because I’ve seen his type before,” grumped Vargas. “His predecessor Zevon: now he had balls. That’s why I had him sent down, you see. It was a forgone conclusion that if he stayed he’d try something silly. But Sebastian is a lilly-livered weakling if ever I’ve seen one. A nasty piece of work, but too scared of shadows to kill his elder brother and take his father’s castle by force: he’ll probably end up as privy councillor to some scheming duke, or wind up gracing some dungeon, I don’t doubt. But he isn’t a conqueror: he doesn’t have the cast-iron gall for it. Not like most of the lunatics and villains who come to me for teaching!”

“Your students sound a marvelous bunch,” commented Anya. “With lieges like that, who needs enemies?”

“I do!” said Vargas, grinning humourlessly. “If I didn’t I’d go soft in the head. At least it keeps me in on my toes. Your predecessors didn’t have so much trouble, and look where they wound up!”

“The predecessors of my order,” she corrected. “Things are very different now. I was a babe in arms when the Dark Pretender took to the field and the clouds rained blood for a week. Do you remember? The crows were too fat to fly, and the stench … afterwards I had only to look at my father’s face to see what that did to people.”

“We can’t all have parents like that.” Vargas hiccuped violently and frowned. “I well remember his service. But tell me, what brought you hence today? We had barely realised that there was a Pretender to the dark powers commencing the rite of binding when you arrived –”

“There’s synchronicity in all things,” said Anya. “Word came to us from afar, you realise. Three innocents died to put me here, five hundred leagues in an eyeblink. We judged it sufficiently important.”

Vargas turned pale. “You don’t mean ..?”

She nodded. For the first time this evening she looked her age: the final battle of the war she had been born in was a good four decades past. “‘In the defense of good, it is sometimes necessary to use the tools of evil,’” she quoted. “If our ancestors had not been so high-minded, things would never have reached the point of war. If the Invigilation had been set up earlier …”

“Hindsight is easy,” said Vargas. “In those days we didn’t have the same sense of urgency, you understand. It had been centuries.” He picked up and drained his wine glass. Then he hiccuped again. “I hate this age,” he said gloomily. “To be compelled to brutality against one’s better nature –”

“Is that the only reason you consort with devils?” demanded Anya: “ask yourself, is it really?”

Vargas nodded, then reached for a walnut. Picking up his brass callipers, he remarked: “Not all of us are mad, you see. But I suppose it’s easier for those who are to succeed at this unfortunate profession. Of the past seven students I have taught only two have graduated with honour. And of the past eleven, two have died insane. I don’t hold myself to blame; if the other five had only been pure of mind …”

The walnut disintegrated in shards of black corruption.

“They all concealed a rotten heart, and that led to their downfall.”

“I see,” Anya said drily as she stared at the wormy mass. Why are they always optimists? Even in the most unlikely guise? “I see that it’s been a full two bells since I sent that student of yours to pry out his crony. Do you suppose I should go and find out what’s happened to him?” She stared at Vargas with such intensity that he blinked and looked away.

“I think so,” he said. “I really think so. That catamite of his was a nasty piece of work.”

Anya stood up. “What catamite?”

Vargas blinked again. “Didn’t you know?” His face sagged, as if all the muscles supporting it had been severed. “I thought you must! The way you sent him – Sebastian and Zevon are notorious. They live together openly, you see, although it’s a crime hereabouts; the men of the city watch refuse to detain scholars of the art. They’ve been scandalising the burghers ever since –”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Anya was no longer around to hear it, and there wasn’t any point. “I hope she succeeds,” he said quietly to the swinging door; “I hope she finds him before it’s too late.”

Sebastian stumbled into the streets and wandered down the hill in a self-absorbed trance. It had stopped raining and a thin fog was rising from the open sewers; it bore with it the stench of spent dinners. The damp cobblestones offered treacherous footing, and he found that he was tired and headsore from the events of the past hour. I need to think he decided, although his circumstances were not altogether suited to this activity.

For one thing there wasn’t enough time, he realised, as his unwilling feet carried him home. Damn and blast the bitch, he thought angrily. Why Zevon? He wouldn’t do a thing like that – would he? To try to become a Dark Pretender by the ritual of Mummu – he tried to recall the details by which an adept might bind the forces of the abyss to obey their naked will without treachery and malice. Certainly a vital preliminary step for any who would aspire to true mastery of the diabolic arts – and totally forbidden by the Invigilation ever since the last Last Battle. Something about there being seven sacrifices; one of them arbitrary, the rest subtly structured …

The area where Sebastian lived was particularly rough, adjoining the district where the mercantile warehouses hulked along the banks of the river. Many of the poorer students lived there, scattered among the struggling tradespeople and ne’er-do-well’s of the lower city. The houses overhung the narrow alleys and little light reached the ground to guide the intrepid traveller past piles of muck and the verminous hovels of the poor. He traced his way to his home and unlocked the door with a three-fingered gesture and a strange word. Of burglars he had no fear; students of the Art had more serious causes for concern than human intrusion upon their property.

It was a small studio, beams blackened by the resinous smoke of a thousand candles. His possessions were strewn all about, mingled promiscuously with those of Zevon; here an oak chest full of cloth, there a sack full of potatoes. A grimoire, possibly stolen, lay open atop the odd-legged desk that Zev had filched from the office of the richest merchant prince of the city whilst under a spell of deception. “Zev?” Sebastian called quietly. “Are you awake?”

He realised as soon as he’d said it that this was a mistake. Bat-shadows fluttered against the diamond-leaded window panes, blue-spark silhouettes illuminating the floorboards: “Not now!” Zevon snapped in a voice as brittle as glass. “Come not in that form!” he chanted, in a tone that made Sebastian’s hair stand on end and his teeth rattle in their sockets. “I command thee! Come not in that form! Quick, oaf – into the sanctum! Your life depends on it!”

Sebastian, who was not so slow-witted as to remain confused for long, jumped to obey as Zevon plucked a handful of ivory-tinted powder and cast it into the glowing crucible on the stove. “What in the seven names of hell do you think you’re –” he began ..

“Come not in that form!” Zevon screamed. There was a bang not unlike thunder and the crucible shattered. “Fuck! Now look what you’ve done, Seb! Zycor, Aharseus, Ixtal, I dismiss thee! In the name of Septuat, begone!” Of a sudden the atmosphere in the room lightened. Nevertheless, the smell lingered: burning brimstone mingled with a hint of old, dried blood.

“Is it safe?” Sebastian looked down at the powdery circle of chalk that ringed his trembling feet. The line was unbroken: if his jump had been miscalculated he would not now be alive enough to understand what had befallen him.

“It is, now.” Zevon stood up, stepped out of his warding circle, and slammed the cover of the grimoire shut angrily. Dust spurted from the spine of the book as he turned to stare at Sebastian. “You really screwed that up! Another second –”

“You were Coercing.” Sebastian’s throat was peculiarly dry, and there was a strange ringing in his ears. “Why, Zev? What do you think you’re doing?”

Zevon laughed. “Don’t be a fucking moron. It’s examination night tonight, isn’t it? And you know who else is paying attention?” He was wearing a dark robe, Sebastian noticed, the gown of a wizardly scholar. The sign of rank that he had been stripped of three years ago by Vargas di Escobar. There were sweat-rings under his armpits and the hem was ragged and grey, as if scorched by a terrible heat.

Sebastian sat down heavily on the bed. “You never told me,” he said, as quietly and evenly as he could manage. “You’ve been following a forbidden ritual, and all the while I’ve been terrified to study –”

“More fool you.” Zevon walked over to the battered cupboard next to the bed and pulled out a dusty bottle of wine. “You’ll be needing some of this, I warrant. Here, have a glass.” His manner was quiet again, but the temperature in the room dropped several degrees when Sebastian reached out and took hold of his wrist.

“I want an explanation,” Sebastian said. “Why are you following the rite of Mummu? Why you want to mess everything up by going for the big one! It’s too soon and too dangerous! Don’t you know they’re still watching and waiting for any who should try their luck?”

Zevon tugged his arm away impatiently. “It’s only seven sacrifices. One arbitrary, the others sensory. And only two to go before the night is out, Sebastian, I’m nearly there. Here: drink.” He filled a chipped tumber from the dusty bottle and thrust it at Sebastian.

“That’s not the point,” said Sebastian. “So you think you can do it? Fine. See if I care! But the Ministry of Lost Souls – they are watching. The Invigilation. They haven’t slept since the Dark Pretender claimed two gross of thousand lives. Maybe in ten, twenty years …”

“You’re only young once,” said Zevon. It was as near to an apology as Sebastian had ever heard from him. He raised the bottle to his lips: “Cheers!”

Sebastian took a mouthful from the cup. The wine was full-bodied and fruity. “If you love me, tell me you’ll give up this folly for the time being?”

“No.”

Sebastian sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.” He took another mouthful. “The Invigilator found me.”

When Zevon stopped spluttering, he put the bottle down with exaggerated care and sat next to Sebastian. He put one arm round his shoulders. “Would you care to repeat that?”

Sebastian shut his eyes. Relax. Remember what you’ve shared – everything – “Vargas summoned her. It was the ritual nature of the killings that attracted attention. Now they know I’m not the guilty party so they use me as their pawn. I was cheap, you see. I’m still an enrolled schollar, for tonight, and you remember the oath –”

“Would you foreswear yourself for me?” asked Zevon, lightly touching his cheek. “You know I can do it, don’t you? After this night I’ll have total mastery of the dark forces, as great as any prince of the night. Even those bumbling ruthless do-gooders will be unable to touch me. I’ll protect you! But will you break your oath for me? First?”

Sebastian opened his eyes and saw Zevon, leaning very close, a look of intense concentration about his face, as it had been in better times when they made love in this very bed. “I can’t,” he said with difficulty, dropping the words into a stony silence. “I can’t. They will send their nightmare minions after me, things that swarm in the infinite night between stars and dream of flesh that tears and screams to sing – as is their right –”

“So you’re working for the good guys now,” said Zevon, without a trace of mockery in his voice. “Have they scared you that much?”

Sebastian tried to stand up and failed, due to a curious weakness in his ankles. “It’s the Invigilation,” he whispered defensively. “The good guys. If they’d been around forty years ago the Dark Pretender would have shit bricks – would have –” he was unable to finish. A dark realisation came over him as he tried to look at Zevon, found that his neck muscles would not obey.

Zevon stood up. “Well, well, well,” he said tightly. “So it’s like that, is it?” He looked frighteningly serene as he leaned over Sebastian. “They’ve broken you like a puppy. Their stupid fetish about dark agencies – you can look but you can’t touch. The creeping secret police, the minions of mediocrity! And you’re scared of them.” He didn’t sound contemptuous; but there was a terrifyingly casual tone to his voice as he continued. “I’m leaving now, Seb. I’ve got business to attend to and I dare say we won’t be meeting again afterwards. At least, not for a very long time. What do you say?”

Sebastian managed to work his numb jaws sufficiently to speak. “What was it?” he croaked, a dull ache of fear eating away at his innards.

“Toad venom. In the wine; I leave you the antidote.” He gestured at a pot of unguent upon the cupboard. It was tantalisingly close, had Sebastian even been able to lift an arm. “Eventually it will paralyse your lungs; then you will die. Not part of the main plan, I’m afraid, but we can’t all be omniscient and I did –” his voice cracked slightly – “hope you’d be prepared to join me.”

Sebastian managed another question. “But what of our oath?” he whispered desperately.

“That?” Zevon held up a carving of an ivory heart, inscribed with symbols. “You mean our foolish love-knot? Oh, that. I’m afraid I won’t have time for that kind of thing any more. Being Lord of Darkness is apparently rather demanding. Still –” he dropped it casually “– beggars can’t be choosers.” He paused in the doorway and glanced back, just for a moment. “See you in hell, lover boy,” he said, smiling as he pulled the door to.

Then Sebastian was left alone in his terror, with only the candle and his laboured breathing for company. As he desperately tried to work his fingers he saw that the candle was guttering. Soon, if no one came, he would be joining it.

Trying not to think too clearly about what she was doing, or about the probable outcome of her actions, Anya removed a small purse of powders from her belt pouch. She shook out a tiny pinch in the palm of one hand and sniffed it up each nostril in turn: a great and silent sneeze shook her as she mumbled an obscure incantation then stabbed the ball of one index finger with a needle and smeared the resulting drop of blood upon the tip of her nose.

The light began to die away around her, and the night fell unnaturally silent. Her skin grew numb and she noticed a strange scent of smelly flesh about herself; leaning forward, she pawed at the bannister rail on which Sebastian had rested his hand. The smell, skin, stench of the man forced its way into her nostrils like the taste of fresh excrement and the smoke of burning nail clippings. Gasping, Anya straightened up and blindly fumbled her way towards the door. The scent was still present, although faded and diffuse. She traced his way through the hall and out into the alley, bumping into a number of doors and walls along the way: then she stood and smelt the cool night breeze for a long minute.

There he was. The bloodhound magecraft carried a tiny emanation of desire to her nostrils. They flared instinctively; got you! The trail was old, half masked by the presence of other, riper odours, but her fugitive student had come this way for sure. Stumbling like a sleepwalker, Anya followed her nose down the hill, past the drunken revellers and somnambulists, through the twisting rookeries and shambles of the lower city, past the heady stench of the bakers preparing for the next day’s business, past the diffuse emanations of a hundred thousand bodies, following the trail of the missing student. All the while, clutching at her guts, was a horrible sense that she knew exactly what was happening; that it would all slide into place like some grand and evil game of chess at any moment and that she would discover that she had missed a move, or her opponent had cheated while her back was turned …

The city blurred around her, all colour draining into the tired darkness of the dog-watches. Moving through a realm of charcoal shadows and unlit windows, Anya drifted towards her target. Passing the ornamental cherry groves of the wealthy merchants, Anya followed the trail of her victim: past the gibbeted felons too, and the sinister white-walled college of the Inquisition. The odour of the fleeing man led her back up the wall of the valley towards the heights of the University until after an eternity of seeking she found herself outside a building where, according to her nostrils, Sebastian’s trail vanished. Rubbing the blindness from her eyes, she mumbled the phrase that banished his unnatural acuity of smell. This must be it. He’ll be hiding out here for sure. She rapped sharply on the door; when there was no response she bent and tapped a finger on the lock.

It was dark inside, but for the glimmer of a dying candle-wick. A stench of rich warm rotting belched forth, assaulting her still-sensitive nostrils. Chalk dust floated in the air, dry and ticklish in her throat as she recoiled. “Damn –” her eyes, freed now by the repression of her magic, adjusted to the darkness. Deep in the recess, barely more than a lump on the bed, she saw his hunched form.

Time stood still: she was beside him in an instant, hand flexing for the hilt of a dagger that intellect told her would be useless. The thin rattle of his wheeze was as laboured as that of any dying animal. Only his eyes twitched, rolling. She followed the direction of his gaze to the pot. “Is that it?” Reaching out, she touched his forehead. He was burning hot, as if in a fever’s grip: “Or is it a cunning antidote?” Sweat burst out beneath her fingertips. He was trying to form words, but had too l ittle control over his throat to lend the syllables shape and meaning.

“It would be like your friend to leave an emollient close to hand, but out of reach,” she said. “Or he may have left the poison itself as a sign, and in case an interfering Invigilator might happen upon the scene. Don’t you wonder about that?”

She picked up the jar. “That’s what happened, wasn’t it?” she asked, not expecting any kind of reply. She sniffed; the ointment within smelled foul, bitter. “There’s no telling,” she added. “We’ll just have to see which it is. A lesson, either way.” Digging one index finger into the jar she scooped up a dab of the ointment and pulled down his lower lip; she smeared the finger across the exposed gum then wiped Sebastian’s drool from her wrist and the remaining medicine from her digit. “Unreliable bastard,” she said, not unkindly. Then she became aware of a rasping sound. His teeth were grinding together.

Five minutes later Sebastian jack-knifed forward and dry-heaved across the rug and the broken pentacle of chalk inscribed in the middle of the floor. Anya grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, to keep him from falling. “Thanks,” he whispered.

“My pleasure. Just don’t let it get to be a habit.” She let go of him, stood up, and walked over to the closed book on the table. After reading the title she turned to stare at him. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” she added. “Don’t let me keep you from starting.”

Sebastian tried to frown. His face, still partially paralysed, transformed the expression into a deranged grin; when he spoke his voice was soft and hoarse. “He’s a swine. No such thing as a quiet life. Didn’t even tell me until I walked in on him.”

Anya rummaged around on the desk. “Candle. Ah, got it. What was he doing?”

Sebastian’s cheek twitched. His left hand performed an involuntary jig on his thigh; a patch of darkness was spreading in his lap. He no longer looked deranged, merely tired and sick and revolted by his own loss of control. “The ritual you mentioned. A conjuration of the three-in-one who took Lord Kerein the other night. He’s crazy!”

“Very probably. Why did it take you so long to figure that out?”

“He’s not always been like this,” Sebastian retreated into self—defense. “He was always the bright spark – no, a flame of intellect – denied his rightful place by the narrow-minded windbaggery of the high table. I can see why he wants it –”

“The urge to control has always followed the urge to understand,” Anya said quietly. Sebastian managed to turn his head far enough to look at her, then shut his mouth. Very slowly, he began to wiggle his fingers. “That’s why I was sent here. Now do you understand?”

“I understand less than I thought I did,” he admitted. Anya held her breath, never having expected such a confession of him. “Zev’s motivation is as shallow as his power is great. Why couldn’t he do something really big?”

“The banality of evil is proportional to its magnitude,” stated Anya. “If you’d been around at the time of the Dark Pretender –” she stopped. “Damn,” she said quietly.

“What is it?” asked Sebastian.

“How many has he killed?” she demanded suddenly.

“Only five, to my knowledge. He’s executing the Ritual of Mummu. I interrupted his sixth summoning, but doubtless he will improvise.” Sebastian raised a hand painfully and brought it down on his thigh, began massaging cramped muscles. “I didn’t realise the antidote would be this effective. I thought –”

“Does everything close look blurred?” Anya demanded. “Is your mouth dry and your heart racing, and pins and needles in your flesh?”

“Yes –” he looked puzzled. “Oh, a lesser toxin. I see. But no, it had to be the antidote. If I was his sixth victim, and slain by poison, it would have broken the required pattern.”

“No it wouldn’t,” said Anya. “The Ritual of Mummu permits one random and creative slaying among the seven, so long as the rest are sacrificed by means of their own sensory organs. The symbolism, you see: senses, knowledge, power, and an element of caprice. It makes the daemons sit up and listen. How did he trick you into imbibing the poison?”

“He –” Sebastian tried to stand and failed. “The toad! The worm-brained gutless –”

“Hardly,” interrupted Anya. “Those accusations are baseless, and you know it. It takes more guts than you or I know to risk the fires that befall those who take his chosen path. That, or a kind of blindness. But what would you know about those mysteries? You’re only a scholar, not a true diabolist. If you were the latter I’d be beholden to kill you where you sit.”

“Are you talking about the Upper Mysteries of Noctis or the Five Circles of the Duat?” Sebastian retorted sharply: “or are you referring to the Banal Sufficiencies of the Fundic Assumption?” He tried to stand up again, and succeeded in grabbing hold of the cupboard before his knees gave way beneath him.

Anya snorted. “I should have known. An expert on necromancy, and not even graduated in the school of life yet! You’ll go far as a sorcerer and farther as a corpse if you make a habit of speaking of those mysteries in public. Nevertheless, you know the names. Tell me though, from what substance are these nocturnal terrors stitched? To the best of your knowledge.”

Sebastian straightened up painfully. “If you mean do they pose a threat to the twenty-four kingdoms right now, the answer is probably not. But in the past – and perhaps in future times – they could be the death of us all. All they need is a leader, a malevolent force to give shape to their undirected evil. And that’s what you’re sworn to destroy, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And what would happen if one should accede to the Dark Throne tomorrow?”

“Oh, they’d follow him to the abyss and back.” Sebastian was looking at the chest containing his clothing, so he failed to see the stare that Anya turned on him.

“Tell me what you know of the Dark Lord,” she said.

“The Dark Committee, more like,” he muttered. He stopped, took a tentative step towards the chest, and frowned. “First there was the Representative of Aharseus, then the Nameless Maurauder, then the Gang of Five and the last, the Midnight One who fought our parents in the last Last Battle To End Last Battles forty years ago. Meantime, while none of them is physically present the mission of their sponsors is maintained in this world by those conspiracies I mentioned. Not to mention freelance lunatics, such as my late beloved. Do you want a detailed description of them, or can I leave it by saying that more illuminated scholars than I generally agree them to be mad, bad, and dangerous to talk too loudly about?”

“You can,” said Anya, sounding mildly amused. He reached the chest and began to rummage around in it. “Would you rather I turned my back?” she asked.

“Don’t patronise me!” Sebastian snapped. He began to ease out of his soiled breeches, a look of extreme distaste on his face. “If you want a slave, go down the market tomorrow! What more do you want of me anyway?”

“Your cooperation,” she said quietly. “And your understanding. I assume you felt strongly for Zevon?”

“Felt?” He looked puzzled for an instant, then a strange expression came to his face. “Oh, I felt strongly,” he said. “I want none of this! Just show me a way out. I never asked for adventure. Just a quiet corner and a comfortable life free from the curses of responsibility and boredom.”

“Didn’t you ever aspire to something … more?” she asked. “A higher cause, a positive good?”

Sebastian toweled at his crotch with a filthy rag, then pulled a pair of much-patched trousers from the chest and began to tug them on. “Don’t make me vomit,” he muttered. “Join you? You’ve got me over a barrel – a small matter of a most puissant oath – for tonight, only. But that’s all. What more do you expect me to do? Kiss your ass? You’re riding your ideals along a wide road that ends at the gates of Castle Death, woman. Don’t expect me to join you on it.” He tied a belt around his waist, then bent over and picked something up; a small ivory heart. “I’ve ridden down enough blind alleys already,” he said bitterly.

Anya turned away. “So young, and yet so little idealism. What does the world lack, that it is of so little value to you?”

“Innocence,” he replied. And to that she had no reply.

Presently, when Sebastian was able to hobble without support, they left the house. It was late on Midsummer’s Night: the rain had ceased, and although it was near morning the city still hummed. It was a darkly frenetic sort of life, though; beneath the strangely writhing clouds the raucous screams and laughter sounded as forced as feasting on the eve of battle. Spirits that refused to be still forced the night into abeyance, dancing dismally until tired muscles screamed for sleep and only the frantic, driven urge to stay awake kept heads from nodding and souls from flying in the grip of daemons.

They came upon College Road. Richly-dressed passers-by strolled between the houses of the rich mercantile lords and the hall of the burghers; they spared no glance for Anya and Sebastian, nor for the beggars and prostitutes and the fire-eater performing his searing art beneath the eaves of the scholarly house. Sebastian stopped outside the low side-door of that building. “Open it,” said Anya. “I think we will find your friend within, and you would mislike it if he was to complete his enchantment before we intercepted him.”

“Tell me why first,” said Sebastian. He stared at her uneasily: the light of the fire-eater’s brand reflected from his eyes. “I want to know what’s going to happen inside before I go one step further. After all, your college sacrificed much more than three lives to send you here. Their principles; they’re meant to be opposed to that sort of thing, aren’t they? Such hypocrisy –”

“Do not the ends justify the means?” Anya had a dangerous gleam in her eye. “Of course it was bad! Of course consorting with demons and necromancers is wrong! Dolt. What could be worse than facilitating the rise to power of a Dark One? I tell you – what we have here is nothing less than your lover staging a very special graduation ceremony, a ceremony all of his own! And planned at your expense, moreover. The symptoms are exact, and the pattern is heading to a climax which will occur at dawn unless we can slay him first! Should he succeed, far more than seven innocents would die. We would be looking at the death of scores – of nations, that is – should he attain the dark throne he aspires to.”

“So it seems.” They paused a moment in the street, loitering outside the door of the Faculty. In the street behind them, the fire-eater downed a flaming cresset and bowed for a round of applause that was not forthcoming. Sebastian turned reluctantly and spoke a secret word to the door. It creaked, but failed to open. “That’s funny,” he began, just as Anya grabbed his arm and wrenched him aside and off-balance. “Unhand me!” he demanded as he fell over, not seeing the black flower of unlight unfold from where the wooden door had been; nor seeing the stars in the void, but slowly registering the rise of the wind blowing across his shoulders. “Hey –”

The lotus-bloom of emptiness crept outwards from the door frame, eating through the wood and stone of the house in a hideous parody of life. Sebastian heard a scream, felt hands fasten around his ankle: he kicked out instinctively. The wind was building, turning into a gale of tempest force, and even as he clung to the cobblestones he could feel a sheet of ice forming across his face. Others were trapped in this vortex of hell; the fire-eater screamed incoherently as he clung to Sebastian’s legs, and a lady of doubtful breeding fetched up against a stone buttress below him with a crack of breaking bones. Above him Anya uttered a powerful invocation, but it was clear that there was no time for her defence to take effect. Reduced to an ecstacy of terror for the third time this evening, Sebastian perceived his circumstances with a clarity that everyday life could never provide. The fire eater’s hands around his left ankle felt like the grip of death itself: the wind was building into a wall of frozen ice, the breath of a god sucking him into into the abyss.

There was only one solution. Sebastian steeled himself and lashed out with his free foot. It connected solidly, jarring his ankle; the weight on his leg slipped away and the gale died as suddenly as it had begun. “What have you done?” demanded Anya, sitting up and brushing away the hoar-frost on her face. “Where’s –”

“It wanted feeding,” Sebastian said candidly. “Any more questions?”

“No,” replied Anya. She stood up and turned to face the door, then discharged the forces that she had gathered to herself during the onslaught of the void-storm: green fire spat at the wood, blistering centuries-old oak and splitting rivets with a crack of tortured metal.

“How many stages are there to go?” He stepped forward, but stopped just short of the lintel.

“Seven sacrifices. Only one to go. The last two to take place on the same night of the year, this being the designated eve. In this way the postulant can cause the motivation of evil to cohere and serve them – and so the evil tradition is passed on.”

Sebastian carefully ran his fingers around the wood of the door-frame. “Why should he bother with such a blunt instrument? Surely there must be other ways –”

Anya shoved him aside gently and pushed at the door. It fell inwards and disintegrated in a shower of seared ashy flakes. “There are so many of them, and they’re so unoriginal. Evil is so common in this world that it would be funny if it wasn’t tragic; all the dolts who want to be Lord of Darkness, King of the Midden.” She spat upon the heap of ashes and stepped over it. The corridor beyond was encrusted in cobweb shadows, even though the oil lamp hanging from the roof was flickering. “Come on, scholar. You can identify the villain for me. Maybe you’ll learn something about innocence in the process.” Without warning, she stepped forwards, disappearing into the unnatural darkness.

Mouth dry and heart pounding Sebastian stared after her, thinking furiously. It seemed cruel, not to say paradoxical, that in evading his hazardous matriculation he had cast himself into such mortal danger. If only Zev and I hadn’t argued. If only he hadn’t started this … he shook his head, wondering at how it was possible to feel embittered and numb simultaneously; then, gathering his nerve, he spat on the gently hissing remains of the door and jumped over it.

Once inside the hall, Sebastian could feel the pressure of magic gathering about his brow. He had come this way many times before but the aura of darkness that now clung to the fabric of the building lent it a character of self-obsession that was new and frighteningly disorientating. This was an historic manse, but the normal accretion of time seemed to have been twisted and subtly replaced with a new dimension, one full beyond bearing with unrestrained cruelty. It made his skin crawl, for there was something scornfully familiar about it: the spiteful rage of a wronged innocent who has brooded long and deep until they are innocent no more.

The corridor through which they walked led to the servant’s staircase. On any other night there would have been at least the watchman on duty, but by long tradition the house was deserted now except for the master, who tomorrow would preside over the graduation of those students who were being examined this night. Anya ghosted from shadow to shadow like an assassin, and Sebastian hurried to keep up with her: “Where are you going?” he whispered as she paused at the foot of the stairs.

She turned so that he could see her face in side-profile. “I think the will of this evil is directed towards an end connected with your former master. Who else? Isn’t he the logical target of one who has started with scholars and graduated to dons?” She blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear a dust-mote from her eye.

“Then perhaps I should leave now,” said Sebastian.

“Pray don’t add cowardice to your list of idiocies. Think how long you’ll last if Zevon succeeds in his ambitions! Come on, time is short. Perhaps the stairs will be safe –” she probed repeatedly at the air in front of her with her sword, to the hilt of which she had fastened a silver wire: when nothing happened she advanced a step and repeated the procedure, whispering arcane mnemonics under her breath. After making some minor progress, she beckoned to him. He needed no further admonition; brooding – for he believed that he now knew the true nature of the situation, and was most unhappy – he followed her.

At the top of the stairs, Anya’s sword sparked, once; a fat thread of light drifted down the wire and flared against the banister. “Damn,” she breathed, dropping the abruptly bladeless handle: “Curse the fool for an ignorant swinish backwater piss-drinking poppy-headed vandal! I’ll have his head for that!” Of the coil of wire that had been fastened to the sword there was no sign. “Take heed, scholar,” she commented, visibly asserting her self-control, “for if there’s one way of angering me it’s the want on destruction of good metal.”

Sebastian stared at her incomprehendingly, then climbed the remaining steps that separated them. “Do you believe there’ll be any more traps?”

“Hubris, always hubris,” she whispered. “No, I don’t think so,” she added, raising her voice. “His kind likes to gloat, and it’s passing hard to mock a cinder; base elements accept abuse in silence. No, if your friend wishes to crow, he’ll do so in our living presence. Is that reasonable?”

She stepped onto the landing and placed one hand upon the gleaming cranium adorning the banister. A shocking screech rent the air, and Sebastian nearly jumped out of his skin; she laughed. “See, he’s only trying to scare us,” she said: “A child making fun of his betters!”

They walked along the twilit landing, and when they passed beyond range of the guttering oil lamp Anya called mage-fire to her fingers and lit their way. Presently they came to the iron spiral staircase, and found evidence there of nigromancy; for the iron was blackened and scarred as by a great heat, and there was a sense of lingering guilt that hovered in the air until it burned with a taste like copper when Sebastian breathed it. “Obviously not very experienced,” commented Anya. “Only a novice would try to enchant cold iron.”

She sniffed, then climbed the staircase two steps at a time. At the top she payed Sebastian the unusual courtesy of waiting for him. “I suggest you enter after me,” she said. “I think we’ll find both Lord Vargas and Zevon in this chamber, alive and well – at least at first.” She smiled, a devilish light dancing in her eyes. “If you would be so kind as to open the door, perhaps you would care to observe the auto da fe? Guaranteed to keep you awake all through this demonsnight, I do assure you.”

“What makes you so certain of victory?” whispered Sebastian, his skin crawling tiredly. He rubbed at his eyes, which were sore with sleeplessness. “He’s a student of darkness! You have no idea how skilled he –”

“Relax.” Anya laid a hand on his wrist. “I’ve done this before, and to this moment it has followed the classic pattern. Just do as I say and I will consider your oath discharged, should both of us live to see the sun rise.”

“Thanks,” Sebastian said cynically. “I’ll remember that.”

Anya released his hand. “I do believe we are anticipated,” she said as the door swung silently open. She turned to face the room. “Show yourself!”

“There’s no need to shout,” replied Zevon. “You can come in if you like; you too, Sebastian. I won’t eat you …” Anya stepped over the lintel. “Just yet.”

That voice – Sebastian instinctively reached for the ivory charm in his pocket. “Zev – what’s going on?” he asked, sliding through the doorway. “What are you doing here? Where’s Vargas?”

Without the presence of the Dean to lend it a focus the study felt curiously empty. It was as if somebody had scooped out the soul of the room, turning it into a parody of itself; a mockery of the magician’s parlour, a theatrical set of cardboard furniture and empty book spines and poisoned decanters. Zevon had commandeered Vargas’ high chair and sat there, facing the door with a brimming glass of port in one hand. As Sebastian entered, he raised it in mock salute then winked at him, his saturnine features framing an expression of good-natured bonhomie. “His lordship will be here in the blink of an eye and two ticks of a forked tail. In the meantime, would you care to join me in sampling the delights of his excellent wine cellar? And you too, my lady. I should hate to have to dispose of you without obtaining your opinion on this most marvellous vintage.”

Anya of Tigre walked over to the window casement and sat down, just as she had when Vargas had welcomed her earlier in the evening. “Why are you doing this?” she asked Zevon.

Zevon took a mouthful of port then put his glass down. Sebastian found that he was barely able to breathe: so much to decide, and so little time! The ivory heart. Zev had carved it with him that day, sucked blood from the ball of his thumb and rubbed it into the base for a sympathic charm. He’d done likewise. How could he have done this without telling me? Sebastian shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs from his inner eye. I should have felt it in my thumb.

“It’s not so much why as what,” Zevon announced, to Sebastian’s discomfort. He stared at Anya with frank curiosity. “I’ve never met a member of the Invigilation before,” he added disingenuously. “How did you enter your profession?”

“With difficulty,” she said drily. “It’s even harder than becoming a dark lord. Yourself?”

Zevon tilted his head on one side and looked at the tome which lay open on the lectern beside him. “After due provocation I decided that there was no future for me in the University. This academy of spite and pedantry is no place for seekers after truth. Sebastian here, he’ll have told you all about that. He’s always been more of a whiner than a do’er. Otherwise he’d have been running his big brother’s duchy years ago.” He flipped a page, and the gold-encrusted runes gleamed in the lamplight. “So I decided to act on my own behalf; to purge the filth from the halls of wisdom and to enlighten myself in the process. What do you say to that, mistress examiner? I continued my studies on an extracurricular basis. That I have now attained the zenith of my power is self-evident. The question I would ask you is what you intend to do about it? Assuming, that is, that you have not yet given in to the black dogs of despair. Don’t think I don’t know all about the geas you have placed upon my dear friend –” at this point he cast Sebastian a glance that filled him with burning dread – “who would not, I assure you, normally be inclined to serve your order. I’ve thought of everything … I am merely curious to discover the extent of your intelligence.”

“My intelligence?” Anya laughed. “The Invigilation doesn’t have intelligence; it is intelligence! Do you really believe that after the events of forty years ago those who struggled for good would dream of pinning their hopes for collective security upon a half-senile greybeard and a collection of hair-footed halflings? Your presumption is equalled only by your folly!”

She stood up and stared unflinchingly at Zevon. “Now I say to you, produce Lord Vargas di Escobar, alive and well, and surrender your soul to my mercy, and I shall exercise the prerogative of amnesty: renounce your calling and I will even let you live on and practice as a hedge wysard. Otherwise –” she made a sharp cutting gesture with one hand – “it will be necessary to destroy you. We can afford no more dark lords. The world has no more innocence to lose.”

Sebastian, who throughout the conversation had been standing frozen in front of a cabinet of proscribed books, cleared his throat. “Why didn’t you confide in me, Zev? Did you think I would misunderstand what you are doing? I swear to you, I am here now only because of their coercion; had I evaded this leech for another night they could not have invoked the retributive clause –”

“Oh shut up!” Zevon grinned humourlessly. “I know full well why you’re here. You’re here because this bitch-destroyer wants a hostage against me and she thought she could use you. Isn’t that right?” He jabbed a finger in Anya’s direction: she nodded imperceptibly. “But she took too long finding you, which was a mistake: because I’m not interested. I can’t afford to be. Now if you’d foresworn yourself when I asked things might be different … but anyway, I have my own hostage. Which is to say, Lord Vargas di Escobar. Now what do you say to that, my dear?” He stared at Sebastian, who began to sweat; it can’t be true, can it? Does he mean the offer’s still open? How? My oath of apprenticeship –

“You swore a certain vow when you came to the University,” said Anya, as if reading his mind. “The substance of that vow included the terms of your apprenticeship, the conditions of your graduation, and the degree of forfeiture you should experience show you knowingly disobey the contract. Now Zevon is obliged to conduct one final sacrifice should he still desire to bind the forces of darkness to his service, and I order you to prevent it by any means at your disposal. Do you understand what I’m saying ?”

Sebastian leaned back against the bookcase, clasping his hands behind his back in order to still their shaking. “This is unmerciful,” he whispered, trying to make sense of his shattered loyalties. “you can’t mean it. Where’s Vargas?” he demanded, glaring at Zevon with slowly-growing anger. “Have you killed him already?”

Zevon stood up. “No.” He made a move towards the window seat where Anya was waiting, then visibly forced himself to stillness. He stared at her. “Bitch!” he said. “Do you think I won’t do it? Do you really believe you can stop me by turning my catamite against me?”

Anya shook her head slowly. “You’re too foolish to know any better. Something you should have established before starting this duel, necromancer: justice is on the side of the intelligent.”

Zevon traced a triangle in the air in front of his face; it glowed like amber for a moment before fading in a shower of sparks. “Then think however you will, fool. The game is mine! Defend yourself!” He uttered a word of power and stepped back as the hideously altered person of Vargas di Escobar appeared on the floor just in front of him.

Anya of Tigre snorted. “You just sealed your fate,” she said: “idiot!” With a flick of her wrist she drew her dagger and advanced on him.

Time slowed to a crawl. Many impressions sucked at the fringes of Sebastian’s perception, clamouring for his attention. Zevon: yes, he can do it, he realised. He could take me with him, too. I can be his right hand; the right hand of darkness. He’s ruthless and powerful, it’s true, but what we had – His gaze fell upon Vargas, and abruptly he realised the extent to which he had been manipulated by both of them. Damn them to hell! he thought, suddenly feeling icy cold as a barrier in his heart gave way. Yes, a hostage indeed, and to both sides! The forfeiture would be mortal, should he lay a finger on Anya while still her apprentice. They must have guessed which way his loyalty would blow when he saw Zevon’s strength, even after what Zev had tried to do to him. With Zevon, such minor tantrums were mutable; he could be worked around. But even as Sebastian saw all this, Anya lunged –

Straight into a whorl of darkness, a loop of abhorrent vacuum that spun itself out of Zevon’s mouth like a gust of fetid wind. There was a bright flash as it touched her blade, and a haze of silver flakes spread out to engulf both of them. For a moment Sebastian expected the clouds to vanish on contact, but they confounded him, condensing instead into the densest of mists until both the combatants were shrouded completely from view.

Warily skirting the cloud, Sebastian sidled around the walls of the chamber until he stood over Vargas. He knelt down beside the magus and reluctantly touched his shoulder. “Are you awake, my lord? Can you hear me?”

The thing which had been Vargas bubbled wetly. Ochre vines and pulsing fruit, a grey cauliflower adorned by twin white pebbles balanced at one end of a skeletal frame of bones and throbbing viscera. The organ-sculpted abomination tried to sit up, then slowly subsided again; when it twitched against the floor it left a thin smear of bloody slime. Mesenteries pulsed pink across knotted bundles of muscles and tendons as it tried to breathe. Sebastian studied it with minute interest. “Zevon must have been practicing since he did for Lord Kerein. Did you know that Kerein barely lived long enough to realise what had been done to him? Yes, Zev’s been getting very creative.”

Vargas tried to say something. The air hissed through his trachea, the yellow plaques of cartilage interlaced with blood vessels rising and falling as he wheezed. “Control yourself!” Sebastian snapped furiously. “There’s only one service I can render you, but first you must acknowledge me as your apprentice again. Then –” he stopped and rubbed at his twitching cheek. His eyes were very wide, with hatred or satisfaction or some far less certain combination of the two. “It’s very difficult. You’ll have to absolve me completely. Then ask before I can lay a finger on you.”

More wheezing. Vargas tried to say something: he seemed to be agitated, although it was hard to tell – he was sticking to the floor in many places, and it must have been excruciatingly painful. “What? You’ll have to speak up,” said Sebastian. “Look, I believe the aura around them is thinning. What did you say?”

Blood vessels burst, fringes of red shimmering across his exposed rib cage as Vargas hissed something that might have been a yes. His exposed eyeballs dripped red, rolled up in their sockets as his flayed body sprawled backwards across the carpet. It twitched unpleasantly as it lay there, a slow stain spreading outwards around it. “Less than a minute,” Sebastian muttered to himself. “Zev needs to practice a bit more.” But then he stood up, inwardly exultant: the oath is transferred!

Reaching into his pocket Sebastian retrieved the ivory love-charm that he and Zevon had carved for each other, that Zev had so churlishly thrown away – that had drawn enough of his blood and life to become a part of him. He walked over to Vargas’ desk and picked up the brass calipers from beside the bowl of nuts. Everything around him was cold, as icy as the steel that had so recently entered his soul; he knew exactly what he must do. Mentally he consigned to the fires of his lover’s fury everything he had ever believed in, what precious little of it there was. That, after all, was the only way he could hope to survive these tortured seconds. And survival, in the absence of innocence, was everything.

He didn’t have to wait long. The cloud thinned rapidly, a faint crepitation carrying from within it as if raindrops were spattering across a surface of red-hot steel. Shadows crept out from beneath the cloud which glowed with a faint radiance even as it lost substance, until Sebastian could see the two figures inside it.

Zevon crouched on all fours. His gown smoked, great rents torn in it as if by the talons of unseen messengers from the Duat, and he stared unblinkingly at Anya of Tigre. She stood upright in front of him, but Sebastian noticed suddenly that her hair was bleached as white as straw, and her face was as lined as an ancients. Chains of paralytic light bound her hands and feet, and the floor around her was scorched to grey ash: it was clear who counted himself the winner.

“Doom, agent of the Invigilation, comes to everyone in time,” croaked Zevon. His voice, normally vibrant with life, was reduced to a desert rasp. He turned his head and grinned at Sebastian, triumph ant malice glowing in his eyes. “I graduate!” he hissed. “Come dawn, I’ll have the power! Even the Invigilation will shudder before me!”

He pushed himself upright and Sebastian’s skin crawled as he saw what Zev had done to himself in order to win. “Look at me!” he crowed. “I don’t need it any more! All flesh will be dust beneath my heel! And you –” he saw what Sebastian held in his left hand, and his tone abruptly changed. “Don’t be a fool, Sebastian. Please, you know it wasn’t me, not really. You wouldn’t really do that, would you? You mean so much to me, it was just a little joke – what do you think you’re doing?”

Sebastian held up the nutcracker, clamped around the bloodstained ivory heart. He grinned at the bone-white atrocity that stood before him with mingled fury and regret. “You really think I’d take you back after what you did?” he asked, not waiting for Zevon to answer; “suck on this!”

Zevon raised an arm, his calceous digits pulsing with an eerie luminance as Sebastian squeezed, bringing all his strength to bear upon a heart of ivory which had been abused too harshly and for too long to withstand further pressure. Zev screamed, his jaw dropping open to reveal the dry white palate of a mummified corpse. The glow intensified and Sebastian felt the ivory crumble and break in his grip: inside the charred circle of carpet it began to rain blood.

Sebastian, who had no desire to be drenched, stepped backwards. It was, he noted, quite spectacularly messy. The combined tableau of Lord Vargas di Escobar and Zevon – or what was left of them – resembled in its extremity the wet-dream of a torturer, or perhaps the abstract art of a master of assassins. Anya of Tigre stood frozen in position as if she had been petrified by her assailant. The spattering of red trickled down her hair and face and skin, turning her doublet the colour of sin: “Anya,” he called softly from the margins of the destruction, “has he done for you, too?”

“Help me,” she pleaded. Her voice was ghostly, as if she had seen the future and been unable to find any place for herself in it. “Please get me out of here, Sebastian. I beg you; I need help –”

“Ask someone else for it,” he said flatly. “I’m not your slave any more.”

“What –” He stepped closer, the better to see the expression of bewilderment that crept across her withered features. He had thought he would enjoy this as much as his triumph over Zevon, but somehow things had changed with Zev’s death: the idea of yet another killing – at least so soon – depressed him.

“They’ll find you soon enough, Invigilator; you don’t need my help,” he said. She watched him silently as he turned and walked across to the window casement then threw back the shutters. “I discharged my obligation to the University. Tonight, I graduated: now I know exactly what I am.” He stared at her coldly for a moment, then walked over to the door. “Don’t think to look for me,” he added. “I’m done with bleeding hearts and seekers after good; and evil, too. The only law is survival, at any cost. But one thing –” he tapped the side of his nose with the tip of his dagger; “Don’t come after me. Or I think you’ll live to rue this night.” With that, he turned and left the death chamber.

Meanwhile, outside the window, dawn was breaking.

First published: Villains, 1992

Version History

If you modify this text, please retain this version history.

Ver 1.5—18/8/2003—Anarchy Publications, HaVoK—This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.

August 16th, 1889

Nobody likes to admit to an addiction; especially when the substance abused is as apparently innoccuous, yet as subtly damaging as the subject of this diary. It reflects a lack of foresight on the part of the participant, a naivete if you will, in not predicting the inevitable social humiliation, concordant upon the revelation that they lack sufficient moral probity to avoid the pitfalls of temptation. It is my hope that, having confessed privately to one-another that we share this particular craving, and having incorporated our club with all due secrecy and pomp, we may now indulge in our infatuation. Morever, it is my hope that we may do so secure in the knowledge that no murmur of our Habit may reach the world at large—or worse, the Press.

It being the case that our Club is a secret body, admittance to the membership of which is by invitation only—and then to the most close-lipped and trustworthy of fellows—I feel it incumbent upon me to start a journal of our activities. Accordingly, I declare this Club Diary to be open. The duty of maintaining it falls upon the shoulders of the chairman of the executive; therefore, in my capacity as co-founder of the society, I shall maintain it until the time comes to hand over our records to my successor.

I feel that it is necessary to describe the foundation of our society in some detail, in the interests of posterity. Clubs are worthless without traditions; consequently, the sooner our traditions are codified the more secure we shall be. It is unquestionably true to say that our addiction is an overwhelming pride and passion that is most exclusive in its intensity. It is also true to say that virtually none of the countless horde who indulge in the heavenly beverage on any given day feel any inkling of the true importance which we ascribe to the decoction, or the passion with which we pursue it. That is not to say that we are insane; merely, posessed … beings of a great innate sensitivity, capable of perceiving the delicacy of flavour, the stimulation of the senses, to an exquisite degree forbidden to the lumpen mass of humanity. Quite why this might be so eludes me; indeed, the determination of this cause is the very raison d’être of the Club, and of the select few who are capable of perceiving its importance. We are truly a breed apart, isolated and obsessive. Indeed, we are so rare a type that had two of us not met quite by accident one day, it is possible that this club should never have come into existence.

I had known for some years that I was unusual in my predilection for the object of addiction; long before I met Smith-Carrington I learned to conceal my desires in the presence of those who might greet them with scepticism or laughter. To most people of any worth, the idea of squandering a small fortune on the import of such a substance would appear imprudent at best, or even sinful. To actually contemplate going into trade to support the habit would be seen as the mark of a lunatic. Luckily my modest inheritance sufficed to enable me to purchase a warehouse, and by the most circuitous of routes I established a connection with a certain shop-merchant who harboured ambitions above his station; thus I was able to maintain my addiction without becoming the laughing-stock of society. There is nothing like an overriding passion in life to teach one the true value of commodities; my merchant profited greatly, and I, for my part, did not do badly. Thus I was able to make my addiction self-financing; and even to expand my activities, researching new sources of supply and living in a manner commensurate with my social status.

I first met Smith-Carrington at one of Mr Oscar Wilde’s dinners. As was his habit, that notorious socialite had invited as eclectic an assortment of guests as he considered conducive to an elevated but stimulating evening. On this occasion his list consisted of a number of people of high birth but questionable morals, and a smattering of interesting but shady types whom he trusted to enliven the proceedings. Actors, actresses, impresarios, inventors, explorers and prestidigitators were all laid out on display for their lord’s and ladyship’s edification. I understand that I was in the category of those who were to be entertained, by virtue of my birth if nothing else: Smith-Carrington may have been on the converse side, but in such cases it is sometimes difficult to tell. In any event, I found myself sitting opposite him at the dining table. I had read of Smith-Carrington’s exploits in the wild and untamed jungles of the Congo, but had passed them by; when I enquired after them politely that gentleman regarded me rather mournfully. “I searched, but alas the object of my search was not to be found,” he said. “Two years in the foetid jungle, pygmy headhunters and snakes and mountains as steep as Eiffel’s Tower to be climbed every day; yet it was all in vain!”

“Oh dear,” I said, as the servants wheeled in the coffee. “You were searching for a medicinal compound of some description, were you not? The curators at Kew—”

I stopped, for my nostrils were momentarily occupied with the aroma of roasted beans. I sniffed surreptitiously, hoping nobody would notice; luckily Smith-Carrington’s attention was directed elsewhere, and my immediate neighbours were chattering contentedly to persons invisible from my perspective. I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes.

It was a cheap blend. Perhaps it had been imported from Arabia, but the cherries had been heated before they were pulped, and the roasters had been lazy. Indeed, the very beans had been roasted at least two days ago. Yet for the sake of propriety I must drink this evil brew! I shuddered slightly and tried to compose myself. I shall have to have words with Mr Wilde’s butler, I thought. Then I opened my eyes again and looked at Smith-Carrington. He looked pained.

“My dear fellow,” I said, “is anything the matter?”

“Nothing of any consequence,” he mumbled through his moustache. Soto voce: “if only I had found it!”

This was most intiguing. I was left no alternative but to be blunt: “pardon my ignorance, but pray enlighten me: just what precisely were you looking for?” I enquired.

Smith-Carrington looked at me for a long time, as if deciding whether I was worthy of his especial confidence. Finally he made his mind up and spoke: “it is not so much a thing as a process,” he said quietly. “The diaries of Pastor Moelitz of Dusseldorf—who as you may know was martyred by headhunters nine years ago—were subsequently recovered by the intrepid Major London. They contained a reference to what he called the Drink of the Gods. It is known that certain related species of coffea canephora exist in the uncharted wilderness which has not yet come fully under the dominion of the Empire. They are believed to be of unusual potency and quality of taste. Meanwhile, it is also said that the headhunters and savages have a secret process by which they extract the most heavenly—”

He was interrupted by the imposition of a china cup before him, into which a servitor poured a generous serving of such slop as I would not allow to pass my lips, had I but the choice. A similar vessel appeared before me: I sniffed again, apalled. Smith-Carrington for his part, wore an expression of mute resignation. Our eyes met. “You have a greater than average understanding of the bean,” I whispered. I snapped my fingers for a servant, passed the woman my card: “pray pass this to the gentleman opposite me,” I instructed her, my heart pounding most unpleasantly. For it was my business card that I had handed out; if my estimate of Smith-Carrington’s character was incorrect, then I should be ruined. However, as I surmised from the set of his shoulders as he drank the vile brew out of politeness toward our host, my guess was right.

A chap who would willingly spend two years in deepest Africa searching for the ultimate cup of coffee, yet who would uncomplainingly partake of the vile brew we were served that night, in the boudoir of the most notorious libertine and socialite of the age; such a man was, quite unmistakably, a fellow spirit. Like me, he was unmistakably trapped in the grip of the most potent addiction of our modern age. And, from the moment I discovered that I was not alone, the subsequent formation of our Club became inevitable.

January 7th, 1890

In its first six months, our club has prospered. There are now six of us: myself, Smith-Carrington, the Marquis of Brentford (who is second son of Lord Sandleford), an American entrepreneur called Joyce, Chapman Frazer (who is chief engineer of the London and District Railway Company), and Boddington, my shopkeeper.

Perhaps the latter requires some explanation. This club of ours is astonishingly eclectic, collecting fellows of character regardless of their birth or station in life: the one requirement is that their passions be governed by the pursuit of the sublime beverage. Our membership, indeed our very existence, is a closely-guarded secret; names are put forward by our existing fellowship, and must be unanimously approved. Early on, it became apparent that there were advantages to be had in allowing foreigners, like the American Joyce, to join: to encompass such worthies as Boddington in our ranks was but another step, although it was not taken without some soul-searching. Still, if we do not encompass as members those worthies of the artisan class who are most skilled at making the apparatus that we require, how on earth are we to proceed with total secrecy? Thus, Boddington is not merely a hireling but a member; and although this brings with it certain problems of a social nature, they are not altogether insoluble.

Now, to describe our business. We meet every week, in a room above the coffee shop in Greek Street, Soho. The room has been furnished to our taste, and is artfully concealed from the street; to reach it, one must enter the shop, proceed through to the stock-room, and pull down a trapdoor behind which lurks a cunning extensible stair. The stairwell is lined with cupboards, within which we keep our ‘special’ supplies; the brew of which is not now, or ever, for sale to the hoi polloi.

Our room was once an attic: now it is a spacious club, lit by the new electric lamps, and equipped with all the apparatus necessary to our study. There are beaten copper jugs of Ottoman manufacture; a frightening steamer of Italian design that roars and foams; numerous beakers and grinders and roasters of all descriptions; and a cooking range upon which to heat the brew. There is another attic, which is not yet furnished; Chapman Frazer proposes to convert it into a workshop, the better to serve as the laboratory of our craving. He also proposes that our priority for this year should be to acquire as a member an apothecary or pharmacognocist. Frazer is nothing if not organised.

These resolutions were passed unopposed at our first annual meeting:

Firstlythat membership of the club should be contingent solely upon acceptance by all the existing members; that membership should in the first instance be limited to thirty souls; and that membership, once granted, should be for life.

Secondlythat it is the purpose of the club to identify and determine the root cause of our addiction, with the view of equipping us to control it. In the meantime, a secondary purpose is to research the most efficient possible way of satisfying our craving.

Thirdlythat to these ends each member should donate at minimum two hundredths of their worth to the club. That a hardship fund should be established such that, in the event of indigency, a member stricken by circumstances might be allowed to make use of club facilities without fee until such time as their fortunes recover.

Fourthlythat this being a gentleman’s club, no women should be admitted.

Fifthlythat as a club established within the realm of Her Majesty’s dominion, no treason or like-minded abominations should be countenanced under the auspices of this club; and that members of the club, being also Citizens of the Empire, should at all times bear in mind their patriotic duty.

Sixthlythat the club should remain secret under all circumstances, and that the event of its public exposure should be sufficient cause for it to be summarily wound up.

God save Her Majesty Queen Victoria, and all those who live under her!

August 16th, 1910

How time flies! It is with the greatest gratification imaginable that I recall that our club has now survived for more than two decades, and has now reached its majority. Perhaps this is a suitable point at which to recall our grand history; the childhood of our endeavour, so to speak.

We now have fully thirty members, as directed by our charter. Since our foundation, three have died and one has been committed to an asylum; thankfully, none have had cause to make use of the hardship fund. Our membership is predominantly based in London, although Joyce remains staunchly committed to us; perhaps the prosperity of his shipping enterprise in New York has something to do with his enthusiasm, for he makes a point of visiting at least twice a year.

The club is still above the shop, but the back room has now been converted into a combination warehouse and laboratory by Chapman Frazer. Rodworthy of the Botanical Gardens at Kew, and latterly the incumbent of the Chair of Pharmacognosy at the School of Pharmacy in Brunswick Square, has devoted part of his time to a cataloguing of our obsession; he is a grand fellow, and has contributed more to our understanding of the botanical origins of our drug than anyone else save, perhaps, Smith-Carrington.

For his part, Smith-Carrington was instrumental in obtaining for us a supply of the astonishing Wolf Coffee of Java on his expedition of 1893; this decoction is prepared by the passage of the beans through the gut of the rare Javanese cherry-eating wolf. The acids and other perfusions of the wolf remove the cherry and treat the bean itself to a most strange fermentation, following which the raw ejecta may be obtained from the spoor of the animal. The resultant bean, once cleansed, has a most astonishing and subtle flavour, quite unlike that of the same beans prepared by the traditional method of sun-drying the cherries. Sir Bosworth Hughes of the Royal Society is currently working to isolate the responsible reagents from the gut of the cherry-eating wolf; it is his hope that one day we shall be able to drink Wolf Coffee without the need for the lupine intermediary, so to speak. This is a matter of some importance to those of delicate sensibilities.

Smith-Carrington’s second expedition of 1895, in search of the legendary Cannibal Coffee of Borneo, was not a success. However his personal effects were recovered by his bearers and his pith helmet and left femur occupy pride of place in our trophy cabinet. We shall remember him fondly.

Chapman Frazer became intrigued by the potential of the Cappucino Machine introduced by the Marquis, and embarked upon a plan to construct a new High Pressure Percolating Engine. As an operator of steam locomotives, I am sure he knows precisely what he is doing in this respect; nevertheless, I humbly requested him to conduct his initial experiments away from the club premises, lest the apparatus should explode. This proved to be a prescient request.

I am not the most mechanically-minded of men, but a short description should suffice. The Engine resembles a small locomotive, the wheels of which are removed; there is an apparatus by which they can be allowed to grind beans in bulk. The Engine, for its part, is intended to percolate coffee under pressure: grounds are dropped into the cylinders by means of a cunning valve that opens on the backstroke of the piston, and the live steam emitted from the cylinder head is condensed and poured into a cup. It produces a brew of most remarkable potency, but it is somewhat sooty in taste; and after five cups the piston becomes mired, so the Engine must be stripped down.

Frazer’s collaborator, the Scottish physicist Macintyre, maintains that Radium is the answer.

Finally, there is the matter of Suffrage. The Marquis’ daughter Camilla is, like her parent, an afficionado of the heavenly brew; she has pursued her addiction as far as any of us, to the extent of having purchased a plantation in Jamaica. More gravely, she has discovered the existence of our Club and last year attempted to inveigle her way into our premises: this caused a scene of considerable anguish and recrimination. I should like it to be recorded that I am a great supporter of women, as my wife and daughters will testify; I should like nothing better than to be remembered as a benefactor of the fair sex: but I must say that enough is enough. Whether or not those demented harridans obtain the satisfaction of their unreasonable demands for suffrage, we shall have no women in this club. This is a high-minded institution dedicated to the pursuit of the sublime beverage; likely as not, were we to admit women they would introduce embroidery, or worse still, insist on drinking tea.

December 1st, 1917

Sad news. Stansbrook Taylor, our founder and Chairman, passed away in his sleep last night, aged sixty-eight. He will be remembered for as long as the Club continues to exist, as a gentleman and an afficionado of the old school. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for the establishment of this institution, whatever opinions we might hold in respect of his more extreme views.

For my part, as newly admitted member and, to my surprise, Club Secretary (the majority of the membership being away at the Front, regardless of their age), I will attempt to discharge my duties will all possible grace and efficiency, to maintain the society during these harrowing times, and to uphold the traditions of the Club in all ways—save one.

signed:

Lady Camilla Sandleford

Club Secretary

January 19th, 1919

The War is over, and Our Boys are coming home. It has been a trying time; in the last six months, a dastardly Zeppelin captain discharged his bombs over Soho, and the club windows were shattered by the blast. No less than six members gave their lives for King and Country during the course of the war. Many other events transpired, so that the Club is changed almost beyond recognition. Perhaps it is a mercy that Stansbrook Taylor and Horace Smith-Carrington are not alive to observe it today. Although their dream continues, it has taken on the strangest of forms.

First, permit me to take stock of the state of the Club. The original premises are still standing, and are now owned outright by the Club, as is the shop below. The retail establishment is managed by Boddington and Sons Limited as one of their own. Boddington is remarkably hale and hearty in his old age, and his eldest son appears likely to follow him into the Club, which would be no bad thing. The finances of the Club are in excellent fettle, thanks to my father and to Stansbrook Taylor, who included the Club as a beneficiary in his will.

And now to our activities. The Chemical Committee continued to work throughout the War, albeit at a slow pace. Their activities focus at present upon the pressing need to determine what makes the difference between a merely passable and a superb brew. This work was hampered until recently by U-boat activity, but looks set to proceed at a gallop in the near future.

The Botanical Committee, under Professor Rodworthy and the Albanian, Kotcha, is conducting a definitive catalogue of all the plants of the family rubiacea, among whose ranks the sources of the divine bean are grouped. It is their profound hope that cross-breeding of plants may be employed to improve the brew.

The Engineering Committee continues to research improved methods of titrating the ground beans and expressing their essential ingredients in palatable form. The High Pressure Percolating Engine developed by Frazer was succeeded by a series of tests involving Diesel Engines; this research was funded by the Admiralty for a period between 1914 and 1916, during which the goal was to investigate the potential of unusual fuels for the propulsion of Destroyers.

The Committee is currently investigating autoclaves and very high-pressure steam generators as a route to the extraction of a better brew. However, there appears to be a fundamental limit imposed by pressures greater than two thousand pounds per square inch; at this point the coffee grounds adhere to one another. The result can be a nasty steam explosion, as Frazer discovered to his cost. Macintyre, for his part, is working with Sir Ernest Rutherford. He still maintains that Radium is the answer.

And now it is my sad duty to record the effects the war has had upon our ranks.

Marshall Joyce passed away three years ago, a victim of the U-boat attack on the liner Lusitania. His son, Marshall Jr., chose not to follow him into our ranks once he was appraised of the nature of our pursuit.

It is with regret that I note the death of Lieutenant William Stephenson. William was a gallant gentleman, and we shall all remember him with regret. He gave his life for Club and Country; the Hun shot him as a spy in 1918, having caught him infiltrating General Ludendorff’s kitchen disguised as a maid. His objective was to determine the precise quantity and quality of ersatz coffee available to the Kaiser’s General Staff; and, if possible, to adulterate it in such a way as to damage their morale.

My father, the Marquis of Brentford, passed away last year. He will be remembered.

Now I should mention our new members. We have our first member of the medical profession, Doctor Gerald Highsmith. I am sure that Doctor Highsmith will make valuable contributions to both the Chemical and the Botanical Committees. We have also been joined by the Norwegian atomic scientist Hansenn, who argues incessantly and amiably with Macintyre. I do not pretend to understand those gentlemen, but I am sure that something will come of their experiments.

A number of proposals for membership were black-balled. Notable among these was the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ulianov, now notorious for his bolshevist ways. A rascal and troublemaker! I have no idea what Mr Wells thought he was doing in putting him forward. At the next annual meeting I shall propose a long-overdue change to Rule Four: that the word women be replaced by the term troublemakers.

August 16th, 1939

The political situation on this, the fiftieth anniversary of our foundation, is looking as grim as it has ever been. Czechoslovakia is no more; our engineers Dorsey and Haight-Evans have been seconded to the War Ministry to plan for the worst; and everyone is certain that Herr Hitler will attack Poland in the near future. I am taking action to ensure that the Club retains access to its supplies of coffee during the coming War; meanwhile, in view of the terrible prospect of the Strategic Bombing of cities, we are considering the possibility of removing our fittings to the country.

I write this diary sitting in the comfortable, leather and oak surroundings of the Club Secretary’s office, downstairs in what was formerly the shop in Greek Street. It is no longer a shop, although we retain a dusty window display and a sign saying ‘closed for repairs.’ The entire premises are now occupied by the club; from the historic meeting-room upstairs to the bean stocks in the cellar and the machine-room in the back. I find myself at something of a loss when I think that we might shortly have to vacate these premises; there is far more than mere nostalgia here. Having been Secretary of the Club for the past twenty years, and involved in it since 1909, I am nevertheless astonished at the devotion which it inspires among us, and the changes that time has wrought.

If it is true that there are two cultures in this nation of ours, then it is trivially clear from a perusal of our Club that the majority of those who share our interest (an unnatural and extreme craving for the Great Beverage, that exceeds the bounds of propriety) are scientifically inclined. There are no artists, and precious few philosophers in our club. I am no longer the sole lady of the venture, but we are still in a minority and even, dare I say it, considered eccentric by our male peers.

We count a number of remarkable men among our group. We have one Nobel laureate, three atomic scientists, two aeronautical engineers, and the deep-sea diver Carruthers. The Research Committees have almost subsumed the raison d’être of the club; they have published scientific papers and even a book (which has become the most respected text in its field). Nevertheless, the current direction of our endeavour is more practical than philosophical; great strides have been made towards extracting a perfect brew, but far less attention has been payed to understanding the nature of our craving.

Work on high pressure percolation was suspended after the explosion that caused the death of Chapman Frazer. Macintyre’s sad and long-drawn-out demise convinced us that Radium was probably not the answer. However, new alleys are being explored all the time, and there have been remarkable successes.

Hansen has pioneered the application of atomic Cyclotrons to the brewing of coffee. His technique is to anodize grounds and fire them at a target of ice, a hundred times as fast as a rifle bullet! Sadly, the flavour of the grounds is damaged by the electroplating process he uses, and the necessity to maintain the Cyclotron’s chamber in a vacuum may ultimately put an end to this line of research. In the meantime, he has proposed an experiment that requires the procurement of a rather expensive substance from Norway, that he calls “heavy” water. We have yet to vote on this expenditure.

Dorsey and Haight-Evans have been working on what they call a “fluidized-bed low-pressure steam turbine infusor” which shows great promise. It certainly produces a fine brew, but it has to be bolted to the floor and the noise it makes is unspeakable; the device had to be switched off after the Club received complaints from the Police. They are now working with a Mr Whittle from the Ministry, in the belief that a suitably modified version of their device might be used to propel a fast fighter aeroplane.

Wright and Kotcha have been investigating the use of explosives. Their device resembles a football; lenses of exotic explosive surround a sphere of raw beans, which are distributed across the surface of a globe of ice. When the explosives are detonated correctly an incredible brew results, but the timing is difficult to perfect, and all too often the result is a mushroom of slush followed by a black, gritty rain. I believe they have written a note to Professor Leo Szilard about it.

For my part, I confess that I am becoming a little tired of my duties as club Secretary. Times have changed, and the eccentric gentleman’s club I recall from my childhood has been replaced by something altogether stranger; a loose and secretive association of scientists, searchers for a hermetic enlightenment that can be placed among the most ellusive holy grails of Science. Even Jung, our psychologist, believes that there is an absolute archetype for which the other scientists are looking: that far from the heavenly brew being a product of our aesthetics, our very existence is required by some strange teleology resulting from the potential of the ur-coffee for which we seek. The logic of the quantum is replacing the bonhomie of the club. And the clouds of war are drawing in …

August 16th, 1959

The twenty-year report by the Secretary appears to have become a de-facto tradition of the Club. Consequently, I should like to take this opportunity to reiterate the great strides forward we have take since the last such report, on the eve of the Second World War.

Firstly, I should like to record, for the benefit of those who never had the privelige of knowing her, the great debt that we all owe to Lady Camilla Sandleford. Lady Camilla passed away four years ago, having been Secretary of the Club for thirty-five years. Under her auspices the club prospered; our holdings now include three plantations, a significant shareholding in Imperial Chemical Industries, and a range of assets sufficient to ensure our perpetual prosperity. Consequently, in 1952 the limit of thirty members was raised to one hundred, and academic sponsorship was mandated for ten research studentships in appropriate fields.

It is interesting to note that we have encountered no difficulty in selecting new members of an appropriate calibre. Indeed, the obsessive quality with which we persue our beverage seems to have percolated out into society at large; it is, after all, no longer considered a monumental faux pas to display such an overt technical interest in a social drug. Nevertheless, by unanimous vote of the Executive, it has been determined that we shall remain a Secret Society and that Rule Six shall remain effective in perpetuity. It is believed that public exposure would restrict our ability to conduct some critical experiments, and as the technologies we are exploring have military potential it would be counter-productive to expose ourselves to infiltration by Communist Spies.

Our scientists were active in a number of areas during the Second World War. Among other things, Dorsey and Haight-Evans worked with Whittle to convert their concept of a fluidized-bed turbofuser into an operational jet engine. Wright vanished for three years; it was not until a fateful day in August of 1945 that we discovered the ends to which his research into explosive lenses had been put. Sadly, Kotcha the Albanian proved to be unreliable. He returned to his homeland and was immediately spirited away to the Soviet Union, taking his work on ultracentriguation with him. We cannot estimate the extent of his contribution to the Bolshevik bomb program at this time.

Meanwhile, work continues apace. The discovery of the Double Helix has given a tremendous boost to the Botanical Committee, who are now making extensive use of the Boddington’s Mark One Computer that now occupies the cellar of our former premises in Greek Street. When not employed preparing the accounts for the Boddington’s Beverage Corporation, the computer is used to assist the X-ray crystallographic analysis of the enzymes responsible for the production of the alkaloid constituents of Coffee. The new Bioassay Team hopes to develop a means of characterising the aesthetic quality of a brew objectively, using laboratory instruments alone. This would be a great leap forward.

Our American chapter has recently recruited a number of German expatriates who are currently working for the NASA organisation (formerly NACA) on rocket propulsion of space vehicles. Herr Von Braun, perhaps best known as the architect of the A4 rocket, is particularly enthusiastic about the prospects of using cryogenic hydrogen-oxygen motors as a combination roasting/grinding and percolation technology. Promising results have already been obtained using a pre-chilled launch pad, several kilos of Jamaican Blue Mountain, and a prototype J-2 motor.

Following the Russian orbiting of a dog, some mice, and some plants, we are considering an experiment to evaluate the effect of free fall on coffee bush growth. Space botany is still in its infancy, but we feel that this is a field of some considerable potential.

August 16th, 1989

(Teleconference links established to continental branch chapters in New York, Tokyo, Naples, Hong Kong and Brazilia: proceedings to be published internally in hardcopy format, with accompanying videotape, not more than three months after the presentation.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, the centennial report.

Our club was established a century ago, as a select meeting-place for like-minded aesthetes and aficionados of the ultimate beverage. Over the intervening decades we have prospered and blossomed into an international organisation of unparalleled success. Our current membership is stable at six hundred and fifty two full members and forty-seven funded research fellows. We have chapters in six countries and members in eighteen. Our collective treasury portfolio has a balance of three hundred and ninety one million US dollars, yielding an income of forty-six million dollars this year; it is anticipated that our presence in the recombinant genetic engineering industry and our investment in the human genome project will yield a great return on our investment within the next decade.

I think we can fairly say that our club has been one of the great success stories of the twentieth century.

Advances in genetic engineering are now laying bare the secrets of the coffee plant. We will soon be able to breed a coffee bush that gives rise to the ultimate bean.

Meanwhile, our cognitive psychologists have been attacking the problem from the opposite direction. What, they ask, makes the difference between one of us and, for example, a tea-drinker? Why are we members of this society so obsessed by the ultimate brew, when most of the public are content to drink freeze-dried, decaffeinated arabica? We hope that we will shortly determine the answer to this problem. If nothing else, the human genome project will, within twenty years, allow us to test extensive models of the human neural chassis and predict who will grow up to be a caffeine addict, and who will be a dipsomaniac.

Our engineering laboratories have already produced the ultimate percolator. Using computational fluid dynamics and smart materials technology, the high performance liquid chromatographic elution system at the core of the JK-88 percolator is capable of achieving the ultimate balance of aroma and density, aftertaste and emollience, pentosans and tannins. The next step is to reduce the cost of the HPLC-E technology to the point where it can be mass-produced for less than the cost of a Boeing 757.

And yet, I know that there is unease among us. In the past five years, there has come about a collective malaise; a directionless wandering, an inability to look beyond our noses, beyond the research itself, and to analyse the meaning of the endeavour we are enrolled in. This is a critical failing of our Club. As our charter states, we are gathered together not merely to drink coffee but to understand why we drink coffee.

Let me assure you that our philosophers and semioticians are hard at work trying to determine the ultimate significance of our obsession. The nameless angst that besets the prototypical member of this club cannot be combated by any means other than a dose of the favoured brew, at this moment in time, but it is hoped that an exhaustive analysis of the teleology of coffee-drinking and a synthesis with the semiological significance of imbibement may eventually reveal to us the ultimate secret of why we drink coffee. This is a matter of vast importance. It is by the repetition of this small ritual that we bind together the entire world in which we move; without it, might not our entire civilization cease to exist? Perhaps we were placed on this planet for no purpose other than to comprehend the nature of our own most sublime yearnings.

In any event, it is with great pleasure that I can now reveal to you the plan for our next twenty years; to bring the benefits of our research to bear on improving the lot of the common man and woman …

May 1st, 2019

Armstrong City, Mare Tranquilitatum, Luna nearside. Anne here. There are only six of us left. Six of us in the Club, in the entire solar system. And no-one at all on Earth.

I can’t believe I’m dictating this. It’s too dangerous; if anyone reads this file I’m stuffed. Even being found with a stash is enough to get you whacked for hoarding these days. So I guess this is the last ever Secretary’s report. How the hell did we ever get here, cold turkey survivors flapping our wings in the airless claustrophobia of the main Lunar outpost and peering down through telescopes at the red devastation that hit our home world?

I blame the biotechnology group. Or maybe the Ethics Committee. They should never have given the green light to making major genetic modifications to macroscopic organisms. I mean, never mind the justifications; building a hybridized coffee bush, capable of thriving in the near-vacuum and frigid environment of Mars, a motile plant capable of eating anything that moved and thriving on virtually nothing but vacuum and sunlight, then testing it out on Earth, was just plain dumb. I guess they were enthusiastic, but that’s no excuse. The idea of terraforming Mars with coffee bushes was a good one; a prolific plant, our very life blood, and the greatest of brews imaginable! Yep, they hybridized the red weed with the most appetizing, perfect strains of coffee ever to be cultivated—then gave it the survival imperative of a hungry triffid. Just think, an entire planet of red coffee weed, adding to the sum total of human happiness, right? Jerks.

I suppose they were blind to the consequence. Look; our craving is an addiction. We’ve perfected it, honing it knife-sharp over a stretch of years; now it’s more real than we are. Like it’s got a life of its own. And the object of our addiction made flesh, once unleashed on the world, well …

They field-tested it in Antarctica. Within fifty days the two hundred seedlings they transfered to the ice-cap had burst into flower and spawned. A forest of bushes spread out across the ice, plants shuffling in restless migration towards the sunlight. Alarmed, they tried defoliants: the red weed ate everything, thrived on agent orange, spat it right back at them. Some of the plants reached the edge of the icecap, outracing the chill of winter. Disaster; nobody had planned for what the bushes would do when they met sea water. The bushes thrived. Bitter and inedible to anything that swam, they matted the surface of the oceans and propagated furiously. Within weeks, enclaves arrived in Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania. A quarantine was declared: but smuggled beans bore fruit in Provence, and that was that.

Two hundred days. That’s all it took to wipe out the entire botanical ecosystem of Earth. Biotech had engineered a superior photosynthetic pathway; and we are left to reap the bitter harvest.

Down-side, ten million survivors are going cold turkey, only this is one trip that’s for life and beyond. Animals starve; food crop harvests wither and die. Wolf-breeding is a last-ditch resort, an attempt to save something that can harvest the red weed. Meanwhile, up here we’re in quarantine. No shipments from earth; possession of live coffee beans a capital offense. (You never know what might hatch in the hydroponic vats …) When I die, bury me with my best china set. It’s going to be a long, dry year ahead. And it may be as much as five years before we can ride a shuttle down-side and pick up some more supplies.

Damn, but I’d kill for a drink …

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I didn’t go to school to learn about genocide; I learned it on the bus with Jerzy and Moira and Hammurabi, and we made beautiful corpses. The light was blue and the time was five diurns from sunset when we caught on to the idea; and it was slick. Slick and smooth as my inside parts when I come. My Wisdom pipes me that there’s a type-descriptor for what we were – juvenile delinquents. Pejorative, maybe envious context is implied. (Envious of what? We shone with youth. Wouldn’t you be envious?) Anyway, I guess you’ll want to know why we did it, or at least why I went along, so here goes …

School was irrelevant. That was the initial factor that started the tree growing. It’s public knowledge, I guess; all there is to learn in life is search strategy and peoplemoving. If you can dig the data and move masses you can roll. The moon’s your runway.

Why the earth we reference it as the moon is beyond me, by the way; moon of what? Some radioactive dirt-ball? I guess we should redefine “the world” too, while we’re about it. In case some of you are new to this frame of reference, I am Farida Ng-3, junior registered native, Lunar Administrative Zone. Age thirteen years. Crime: intentional genocide. Guilt: likely. Sentence – that’s running ahead.

Anyway, there were seven of us in this crowd. We weren’t the only crowd in Armstrong, but where age distribution peaks at around a hundred years and has a distinctive skew to it you just know you’re in an etymological minority. The old are a different administrative bloc; they think things differently. They’re mostly kiddies; kind of indistinguishable to us, you understand. They’ve got aux modules and life support ’till their cortices crumble and all the old neurones trip out to make room for brand-new widgets that may not even exist, except in that logical parahyperspace they use for higher functions. They’re not subject to boolean logic; no more TRUE/FALSE dichotomy.

I sometimes met my genetic predecessor, five rungs up the DNA ladder, and he was ancient. Saw Armstrong himself on a monitor, in realtime. Said he had no face, just a golden mirror to stop the sun frazzling his bioptics. Great-grandfather wanted to know what it was like to be a “little girl” – I had to access my Wisdom to parse the referent. Told him I wasn’t, never had been, a “little girl”: I was an intermittent/dominant. His synthesiser laughed for him and told me not to be silly. “Silly” means non-survival oriented. How can it be survival-oriented to sublimate copulation? Like I hypothesised, the old don’t use self-consistent logic structures any more. Simulate Godel, Von Neumann, spinning in radioactive graves.

I guess if I revert to consensus reality it might be easier on your referencing. Gives a rational kind of subset, anyway. Nothing rational about kiddies; they were about as relevant as dinosaurs and birds and things like that, useless for any purpose. We – the gang – existed between towering walls of calcite and the most complex biosystem of Solspace. Certainly the second-oldest, if you disregard Soyuzshells. Armstrong City was domed in diamond slightly thicker than I’m tall, filled with streams and trees and branching herbivores and insects coming out of your ears. Earwigs, ugh, horrible; use malathion on sight, guilty of ecological crimes. So what?

That was my introduction to nihilism. A bug that bit me.

School was irrelevant, as I’ve already noted. I don’t need to learn things to know them; all I need is to know where to find them. Ditto Jerzy, Moira, Hammurabi, Piet, Pallas, and Kid Inkatha. So how were our activities allocated?

We were hard-ish cases, about ten percent of our generation in Armstrong City, all born/decanted/activated in the two-hundred-and-eleventh year of foundation. Armstrong City and associated robotnik industrial zones had a total human population of over 4 EXP 7, of whom about ninety-five percent – out past the median to nearly two standard deviations – were kiddies. That made us deviants. Perverts of the moon, network!

We sat in a ruddy earthlit glade, with the sun a glowing patch twenty degrees above the horizon. The trees were perennial, from some subtropical zone – a sweet, sickly stench rose from them, mingling with the burnt-meat smell of a Goliath beetle that Piet had cornered and slaughtered noisily. You’d be surprised how big they grow here. All seven of us were around. We’d taken hours to reach this place, high among the foothills near the edge of the dome.

The location appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities. My muse was noting pastoral scenes from my optic chiasma; I downloaded some sensations to Lunar Administrative Zone, who swallowed the engram without complaint. I watched Piet as he spitted the beetle under a Fresnel lens held by Hammurabi. Hammurabi never complained; he was a dark, silent, beautiful child. All he wanted was to be loved. I think Piet had promised to love him after the feast – an archetypical social algorithm within our gang. I’ll never know, now.

A smoky aerosol containing appetising oxidation products drifted towards me. I sniffed, salivating. Jerzy squatted near the cooks and broke off two substantial legs. He brought one of them to me like some kind of pre-space savage in gstring and war paint. The paint was blood; we were here to help LAZ with ecological control, culling landpussies where they clustered and squirmed too thickly in the branches.

I accepted the joint and he collapsed in a heap beside me. Very black hair, Jerzy, long and oiled and falling in ringlets, and dark skin engineered in among the genes of his caucasian precursors. He’s regular/dominant so we don’t often interact positively, but sometimes his presence has a strange effect on me.

“Farida my lovely, why is it – “ he paused – “that when I look at you I feel as if my eyes are deceiving me?”

I bit into the leg before replying; spat out a fragment of shell and chewed on the hot, spicy meat inside.

“Unlikely,” I said, when my mouth was vacant enough for polite speech. “Didn’t you have them replaced just before Landing Day?”

He looked annoyed. “Shit Farida, when I go to the trouble to script a dialogue for us do you always have to ignore it?” I caught his meaning, consulted my Wisdom and felt embarrassed. His objective was gentle seduction and physical copulation, in a sun-dappled glade by a stream. Dropped silently into the database. The cliches were so old they weren’t even funny enough to laugh at; he meant it. I flushed prettily and felt selected bits of my vascular system dilating in response.

“Okay!” I said; “Let’s restart.” One for the memory banks. He smiled at me and said:

“Farida, why is it – “ pause – “that when I look at you I feel as if my eyes are deceiving me?”

I smiled at him knowingly and replied; “Beauty is only skin deep. Did you ever have the inclination to get in underneath and find out where the real me begins?”

He put his left hand on my right thigh. It was slightly damp from holding the charred beetle, and slightly hot. He put it right where I’d had trouble with an autonomic reflex, and he knew it. I began to feel warm and wet. And all of a sudden I was irritated. “Break,” I said, chopping the air with my hands, palms turned downward.

He looked hurt. “What’s wrong now?” he demanded.

I looked him in the eye, slightly abashed. “This isn’t going to work. I don’t need to hide behind a dialogue box, and I don’t like cliches, and I don’t like hanging around!” I waited for a dramatic response; sometimes impromptu outcuts make the best memories. But I had this nagging sense – even without my Wisdom – that my deep meaning was being obscured by noise. Jerzy looked confused now, as well as hurt. He took his hand away.

“Well, what do you want?” he asked, dangerously close to giving up. I reached over and took his hand, not noticing Moira glaring at me, and stood up.

“I want you to take me to this glade of yours,” I said, “and lay me down for a dreamy good time. With no script. And stay with me afterward and talk.”

“By bus?” he asked, dubiously.

“Via bus,” I affirmed. Our logic gate was now true: we went off and coupled in a secret glade, beneath a tree dripping with torpid landpussies and peaches. That was how it was before this started.

It’s about now that I must insert personal values into this narrative. Distasteful as it may be, I’ve got to tell you something about me, myself, my speciality. We youth are not parasitic drains on the community. Absolutely the contrary. Our simplistic logical modes ensure continuity for the processes of “science.”

“Art” is another matter, but “science” you can safely leave to us children!

To be brief, my speciality is applied pharmacokinetics. Not to be confused with pharmacodynamics, which is an entirely different subtree. Pharmacokinetics interfaces with thermodynamics; it’s the principle of diffusion across phase boundaries, biomolecules providing the context. Rates of reaction mechanisms are a vital component of the field; they define interface phenomena.

I was attempting to develop a revision of a classical, almost extinct application of rate kinetics called kinetics of kill.

It was a requirement of an obsolete biotechnology where bacterial contamination had to be avoided because death could be caused by microbial overgrowth. The rate of death of a population of organisms can be viewed as a statistical process akin to a chemical reaction; time/environment dependant autolysis. Potentially a mathematical description of genocide; harmless, in itself, but it had military implications. Which became obvious …

Jerzy lay in my arms, a leg resting across one of my hips. The grass was warm and the turf springy from subdome support systems. We lay there, breathing shallowly in the aftermath of our exertions, and the landpussies presently began rustling in the branches. Ignoring us. A particularly bold one flopped down from a low branch and squirmed towards a fruit that lay, rotting, just beyond my fingertips.

As it crossed from sunlight into shade and back again, it switched from grey to green to dull. Patterns rippled across its skin. It extended a tentative tentacle, and I wiggled a finger at it; natural curiosity warred with fear, won out, and we shook manipulators. Then I picked it up bodily, flipped it topside down and bit it between the eyes, killing it instantly. Curiosity is not a permitted survival trait among ‘pussies.

Jerzy opened a sleepy eye. “Why d’you do that?” he asked, lazily.

“Think,” I said. “We’re on a cull, aren’t we?”

He whistled something improbably convoluted in modemspeak, at a baud rate I couldn’t follow. Every dangling tentacle vanished instantly, and I heard a rustling of branches. “I don’t like it,” he said; “we’ve stuffed our quota, haven’t we?” His lips were beautifully full, ideal for pouting, kissing, and modemspeak – they were enhanced with piezoelectrics. He grimaced. “I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Oh.” I was silent for a while. “Do you want to bus, now?” I asked. He licked the base of my throat gently, and transmitted a synchronicity pulse. I lay back, relaxed, and left my skull behind.

The “bus” is identifier for a private communications mode used by us anachronisms. It’s a wetware bus; a kiss on the lips of the cerebral cortex. You can’t bus with a nonlinear thought processor like a kiddie. Some of them are so out of it that even duration loses significance; a subjective timespace inversion takes place, so that they can think backwards and sideways at once. That makes bussing a kind of private code, a childspeak language. Quickspeak, too. It would be better than copulation, except tha t it locks out your Wisdom at the same time because it uses the same pathways. It also locks out LAZ, because Wisdom is a sub-function of LAZ. Jerzy became my Wisdom, I became his, and as a consequence we were unaware of certain interesting ethical paradigms.

The sensation was of a snowball melting in my stomach: of an orgasm freezing between my thighs. I was part of something very powerful, very ignorant, with thought processes unlike any neonate of our experience; describable by analogy. Two bodies, clasping beneath the ruddy glow of earth.

I vaguely felt someone else joining in. It turned out that Hammurabi, Kid Frank and Moira had eviscerated the goliath beetle with efficiency to be envied by army ants. Piet and Pallas were too busy exploring a subjective universe of hunger, which included both nutritional and emotional deprivation; they had given in while the rest were eating, and their mutual secretions were lubricating the forest floor even as ours were. Afterwards they all bussed, and Jerzy and I daisy-chained instinctively. A sevenfold hookup; an orgy.

I was very warm. As half of a command node (regular AND intermittent/dominant is a strong combination) I began to be more than warm. I was hot. I loved it. So did Jerzy. This was turning out better than usual. Usually after we fucked we didn’t feel like networking with each other for diurns. Here we were bussing, in monopole position … I felt a level of emotion for him that was previously unzoned, and I’m sure he experienced something similar. Sometime during that endless skinless time the concept occurred to us. So that’s why when we executed it we didn’t know who was the origin node. I know part of it was my study of time/survivor curves: but who could have thought of the Cannonball Express?

We came out of it, eventually. My right arm had suffered a partial circulatory collapse where Jerzy was lying on it; he smiled dizzily at me and rolled off it. Feelings of static echoing up and down painful nerve trunks as movement and afferent sensation returned to my fingertips. I stood up.

“It’s a beautiful view,” I said, looking towards the perimeter of the dome. Jerzy stood behind me, holding me round the waist to stabilise himself.

“Yes,” he said. In front of us the dome arched upwards into the empty vacuum. Beyond it loomed the jagged wilderness of the lunar surface, pockmarked with robotniks and factotums. Their power lines and cold fusors gridded the airless desert off into rockfarms. In the distance, the hyperbahn slashed across the surface like the scar of some cometary impact. I knew that power plates lay beneath the surface of the road, that it was totally featureless and as smooth as a Futurists personality, but still I searched for induction loops.

Someone else wrapped an arm round my waist. It was Moira. Somewhere in the bus she’d erased her resentment and reoriented for polymorphous eroticism. I detected an invitation in her fingertips, but I was null to accept. Jerzy had left me drained, both of fluids and of endorphins. Her time would come. The others arrived. We clustered together, tired, happy, motiveless. We had a theory to test; somewhere in the business we had synergized a formula to test out a use for my general theory of genocide. It would be invaluable in a really major disaster, we reasoned; so it should be tested, confirmed beforehand. We needed a very tiny disaster, really, to test it on; a disaster under controlled circumstances. We knew that much. Collective we, the local network.

“The beetle population,” suggested Piet, tastelessly, still licking his mandibular extensions. Hammurabi shook his head.

“Would be of indefinite consequence to biome,” he said, frowning. Meaning; don’t you dare! There were less than 10 EXP 5 species in dome of Armstrong City; less than 10 EXP 6 in Solspace; previously greater than 10 EXP 7 on earth, before it became Earth As We Know It. But at least 10 EXP 2 of Armstrong City species were unique – either genedits or genuine endangered species. The sundews, for example. There are categories of genocide, you understand.

“Problem:” announced Kid Inkatha, throwing back his mane of silverblue fur and then curling it demurely in front of his left shoulder. “Identify a species possessing attributes [1] non-endangered, [2] non-productive, [3] non-sentient, at least in terms of root human referents, and [4] non-interactive with ecosystem. Then kill them.” He grinned, baring wickedly filed dental implants.

I looked for a landpussy, but Jerzy had frightened them all off. Kid was looking at me …

Let me present to you the Cannonball Express. Fastest surface transport mechanism ever developed. Here on Luna we have this economic problem with hydrogen, deuterium: there is none. Like you we use low thrust mass drivers for deep space work, but you can afford to use H2 for reaction mass to get into orbit. We’ve got O2 in abundance but there are problems. Second-best oxidant out. We need rusty rocket motors like we need holes in the biome. So we use a flinger to get into orbit – a big linear accelerator , two hundred kilometres long. One t-gee, six local gees, boosts into orbit at zero metres altitude, except it chucks over edge of a synthetic cliff. How to get back down?

Cannonball Express, hyperbahn, is fastest road in universe. (“Road” is old referent from pre-death earthside; look it up, you’ll be amazed.) It works like this: you put your orbiting module onto a surface-grazing trajectory. It intersects the lunar surface at start of expressway, with downward vector about equal to one lunar gee. Big smear on surface, you think? Wrong. Express has wheels on it – big wheels, titanium discs, spun up by turbine before impact, brakes cooled and operated by open-circuit LOX feed. Orbital minimum groundspeed is about 3.7 EXP 3 kilometres per hour – earthly fast.

The module touches the dragstrip at orbital velocity, very gently. Begins braking interface. The downward vector component maintains surface contact, while vapourized LOX bleeds off kinetic energy as heat. Pretty soon module not racing at orbital velocity any more.

We agreed to divert Cannonball Express, nip the dome, and produce a localised atmospheric deficiency over, say, one hundred square kilometres. Then we’d move to patch the dome when about ten percent of all kiddies went onto permanent downtime – enough to predict consequences of a wider deployment. Genocide theory is neat.

Next field test: New Rome Triumvirate. Serve them notice for earth.

But kiddies are resistant to vacuum. I discovered this a while ago, by accident. Examination of a memory of great-great grandpa confirmed; skin like elephant. In old days you needed thick, dead epidermis to protect against some frequencies of radiation. Needed hypercharged oxygen capacity in event of dome fracture. And it got thick anyway, natural response to an irritant environment. I compared engrams with realtime vision of parent.

My parent was pretty good for a factotum; the best. Not my human parents, you understand, who I never met, but my appointed guardian, Sheila.

Sheila was just like human in appearance, behaviour, many other capabilities. But wasn’t: not human, not machine either. I’m not sure I ever forgave them for that. Told great-great granddad, who cross-referenced me Santa Claus, mythic pre-space benefactress who was used to initiate consumerist behaviour among neonates. I found it, quite frankly, improbable; why would consumption be required? Why would simulation of human parent be required? They lied.

Great-great refused to answer my questions, faked sleep. In the warm comfort of our homenode, where G-G was physically guesting at the time, I slipped a sweaty hand behind his neck. My hand was wired with sensors to locate neural input vectors; I logged his Wisdom protocols while he slept. But as I pulled away he opened his eyes wide, smiled at me with an artifice born of centuries, and said “Try it,” in that curiously cracked voice of his. I didn’t dare. It would probably have worked. And then what? Invasion of mindspace is no laughing matter. People have been structurally reorganised for less. G-G knew it; don’t tell me alternatives. He looked at me, eyes wrinkled and ancient and knowing, with the lazy power of dragon-age, hot intelligence of abdicated authority. Old monsters, leaving the running of worlds to children. It served them right.

I went home. Sheila swept me up in passing through the compartment. Held me just like a neonate. “Hello there!” she said, blue eyes glowing. One path to identify factotums; they have no epidermal pigmentation, unlike real humans. All of them modelled on obsolete nordic complexion; pretty, blonde, ersatz. I wonder what they think of it.

“Hello, Mom,” I said, subdued in my desperate haste to reach the bathroom. I felt grimy, sweaty, result of lying on grass and fucking. Also a bit sore. I still get that way a bit, afterwards.

Mom – Sheila – held me, moved to arm’s length, looked me in eye. “Good time, Fa?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said, and grinned back. “Need a bath.”

“Uh-huh. Killing things, at your age!” She switched track abruptly. “I’ve invited Syrinx for supper. Interested?” Syrinx was her lover. Only lover, long-term. So factotums don’t have lovers where you come from; then how the earth are your neonates expected to learn – from heuristics? I nodded. “I’ll be there.” At a formal meal. Must arrange for Sheila and Syrinx to be elsewhere at time of test, I decided.

She let go, shaking head distractedly, and I followed through to the water bath. (Now I bus with the others she has time for her own life. For hooking up to her peripherals, scattered on the surface, for making love and robots of her own. A true, inorganic life-form in our own image. But we don’t claim to be gods; as a species they are better than us. So we made them mortal. Humans are a nasty lot at root terminus.)

I bathed in milk from an extinct species, and had myself dried by an affectionate towel that cuddled me in all the right places and told me stories. Tall stories but true stories. I thought for a while, flopped on a temporary bed, then pulsed LAZ for a call. Got Jerzy, on EVA of all things. Taking hike up side of rimwall, wearing skinsuit, carrying parasol.

“What you wanting, pussy-killer?” he asked. I could see my image reflected in his eyes, gridded over by life-support data. Serious business, walking.

“Wanting you,” I said. “Got an upcoming small social, want company. For two twos. Are you not flattered?” I waited for him to think of something. He seemed to be on interrupt overdrive from his response.

“Flattered? I’m flattened! When, where?”

“This diurn,” I said. Consulted Wisdom. “Four hours, my node. Formal dinner with parent, parents’ associate.”

“Um. Can intersect. That adequate?” His eyes, wide, disingenuous, interrogated me.

“Better be! See you.” I cut out and buried fists in foam bed. Maybe here, in six hours or so. I knew I needed him. This was becoming an embarrassment. (And don’t tell me that referent is abstruse. I don’t accept that; some things are universal to human experience.) Thinking about need, I slept.

Woke to touch on shoulder. Rolled, foam surging and dissolving beneath me; it was Sheila. She belly-flopped beside me, face to face. “Farida, please accept my humblest apologies for waking you. I wanted to talk to you before Syrinx gets here, and you were going to sleep right through.” She lay there like a big whale, mammalian, floating. “Right, Mom,” I said. Breasts at my face against which I’d suckled until too old.

“Right,” she agreed. “I haven’t been seeing much of you lately. Any particular reason?” Straight to the decision point, Mom. I yawned.

“Not really,” I said. “Been with the crowd, culling landpussies, hiking, plugging. Got someone you should meet coming, three hours minus, eat with us. Okay?”

“Uh huh.” I could see her wondering, is that all? But I didn’t want to know for sure what she was thinking. It takes all the pleasure out of life to know everything. That’s what’s wrong with the kiddies, I think.

“Is there a name to match this identity, perchance?” she asked.

“Yes. Jerzy.” Pronounced Cher-Tsee. “Hope you match abstracts.”

Mom rolled off the foam and bounced to her feet. “Do you, Fa?” She grinned like an electrical discharge in air. “See you in person.”

“In person,” I echoed. Feel so distant, I wondered. What’s wrong with me?

Jerzy arrived, glamorous and beautiful. We spent minutes in rapt mutual admiration. Basking in a glow of self confidence. He sat at the base of our tree, outside the bole which concealed the door, and I sat beside him. Careful not to disturb his cosmetic artifice by contact; tigerstriped microtexture to face and body converted him into a baroque feline sapient. His skirt matched, too.

“Did you find what you were looking for on your walk?” I asked, artlessly. He draped an arm across my shoulders, casual and superb.

“Yes,” he admitted after a lengthy pause. “Optic homing beacon for express. If we can fix the backup systems – “ he left the rest unverbalized. A passing police videomouse might overhear and correlate (direct mindtap being violation of human rights). Secrecy lay in bussing or in ellipsis.

“I hope this is the right way to test it,” I verbalised. “It’s got to be done as a double blind, but the panic … “ He hugged me.

“Unquantifiable. Can kiddies panic? Some emotional states may be non-mappable. How old’s your mother?”

“My what?” I was taken aback.

“Your mother. Physiological originator.” He flushed slightly at such irreverence, but paused for response.

“I never met him,” I explained, “but I should guess at least a century. Maybe more – great-great-granddad is ancient. And he shows up pretty often.”

But just then Syrinx arrived; I could see this leading to identity interpolation, subsequent confusion. “Jerzy,” I said, “meet Syrinx. Friend of Mom’s.” That was mega understatement. Jerzy looked up, bared teeth, gaped in what looked like a manic vampire attack, and said, “Hello.” (Big anticlimax.)

Syrinx grinned back. “You could say so,” he insinuated. A thought occurred to me; had they met? I asked Wisdom, which asked LAZ, who didn’t know.

“Am I too late?” I asked neither of them in particular. Jerzy recovered first.

“Definitely,” he agreed. “Met on surface, not long ago.”

“Precisely,” said Syrinx, grin down-modulating to scowl. “Not in best of circumstances.” A man of tungsten, notwithstanding his kevlar infrastructure. “Well, cheer up. You’re not disrupting dinner, either or both of you. Injustice to food!” Somehow I didn’t imagine the food cared. I made a Wisdom scratchpad entry to query Jerzy at leisure.

Took man and factotum by the hand, stepped up through bole, and arrived. Remembered, blindingly fast, as passed entrance; Syrinx is police analyst! Terrible oversight – should never have invited Jerzy. But it was too late. Mom had ordered dinner; multi-course spectacular. Main item was braised long pork, probably synthetic but tasted like real thing.

We ate and chatted and filtered perceptions through a matrix she’d developed for the event, a hallucinatory experience in which senses became confused, crystal-clear. Syrinx seemed distracted; I asked him why.

“Busy,” he replied, “doing downtime for LAZ. Trying to trace suspected Triumvirate infiltration among insect life. Never let anyone misinform you: biological vetting is boring!” He scooped a chunk of meat into his mouth, sizzling hot. With gusto. I wondered if he suspected he was sitting opposite secret weapon. Jerzy restrained himself, no stolen glances detected.

He and Syrinx, it devolved, had met in vicinity of hyperbahn surface; had watched a landing. The flat grey of the strip split by a silver flash, then a contrail of blue-hot oxygen. The lander zipped past at over 2 EXP 3 kilometres per hour, decelerating fast. Left molten tracks drying on the basalt.

They shared a Moment of meditation, observing. Then branched. Branched again, after meal. Mom and Syrinx left, social circuit fizzing, tube to Gagarin on the other side of Luna. Looked like they’d miss the fun. Jerzy and I subsequently alone in homenode.

He had words. “We should act soon,” he said, quietly and urgently; “priority high. Or do you fancy delaying until someone else springs it?”

“Guess not.” I shrugged. “Any concepts?”

“Yes. Get the rest, then act. Simple trick; tripwire.”

“Trip-what?” He explained, my Wisdom concurred, and we did it. Went to get the gang. The rest was anticlimax.

We gathered on the earthlit plain, seven silvery silhouettes with parasols. Faces indistinguishable but minds hot; we were bussed, again.

There was a landing every ten minutes on the strip. Kid Inkatha and Hammurabi had tooled up a robotnik to make monofilament rope. It gleamed blue, flickers running up and down its extruded length. We waited for next landing, and afterwards crossed the strip. Pegged it out, taut but held between uneven heights. That way the wheel rims that survived would be skewed; enough to divert by a few degrees. Interface with dome. Then we sat it out inside, waiting for big splash, killcounters in place.

Now you cannot convince me that kiddies are human. Their response pattern is alien. Their appearance often grotesque. Their thought patterns are non-parametric. Their logic is a virus. A virus infecting us as we age, until we are crippled by memories and Wisdom external and internal. I do not see that their lives matter. Ours do, but we are the future. That’s why we needed to know that genocide theory works; subsequently apply it to rival groups. That’s causality; kiddies are acausal. A history blockage. Maybe they didn’t want to die; but they needed to.

There was a flicker of yellow fire and a jolt through the ground. Moon, earth stood still in respect as the dome imploded. We’d missed a point; catastrophe theory. Dome was a geodesic structure. Damage resulted in chain reaction turning it to gravel.

I think I saw the lander, embedded in a halo of light. But maybe not. We sheltered under a homenode as roof rained gently down. Our suits inflated as air curtain blew away in silence. We waited and watched, then walked.

I saw a kiddie. It was genderized as a he, but large elements were ambiguous. He squatted and twitched, spraying soil around in agonised figure-infinity patterns until he was decorticated by a falling diamond the size of my fist. It was the only death I saw; population density was too low for mass havoc.

A housetree had cramped and iced into a position of agony; around it lay the small, scattered twists of landpussies, strangely pathetic in the twilight. In death they assumed the colour of the lunar surface. Later we camped out in the desert, saw no more corpses, huddled together for emotional warmth. I hoped our deathcount program could verify the consequences of our initiation. In the pale earthglow it seemed almost futile; a waste of time. Erase and restart. Only …

This node has no door. I await sentence. Trial by statistical probability of neurones firing in order to precipitate havoc; jury is my own brain. Probable sentence is centerograde amnesia; no new memories recorded after crushing sense of guilt delivered. We live in an eternal present, huddled like ghosts against the vapour pressure of the past.

They probably cannot read my texts. I can expect no mercy for my identity. The dead are all dead, remain so, resurrection improbable due to cost. Many of them sheltered death-lust, but still considered murdered by courts. Theory worked, by the way. Kill-level approached hundredth percentile because of dome systems collapse. We used overkill approach, brute force. A bit more finesse might have been a mitigating factor.

I see Jerzy sitting opposite me in this node, guilt rooted in his facial muscles like skin. The others are in a different category; we seem to be viewed as netleaders.

I look at him, and he looks at me; I mouth, silently. “Judgement soon; want to bus?” He inclines his head. I transmit pulse this time, and we lock together in total fusion. Sense of completeness, love unnecessary. There’s not much time. I think that the old are an alien species; their state of mind is unknowable, their perspective – eternal.

(First published: Interzone 31, 1989)

Version History

If you modify this text, please retain this version history.

Ver 1.5—30/7/2003—Anarchy Publications, HaVoK—This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.

The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. “I love you,” it croons in Amber’s ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: “let me give you a big hug ….”

A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. “Locked and loaded,” she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle-stick overhead. Sarcastically: “big hug time! I got asteroid!” Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm selfconsciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in: it doesn’t do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing, is still there: it’s her rock, and it loves her, and she’s going to bring it to life.

The workspace of Amber’s room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn’t belong on a space ship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy-band bump-and-grind through their glam routines; tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager’s bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create): three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawai dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father’s cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone.

Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: “I’ve got it!” she shouts. “It’s all mine! I rule!” It’s the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it’s her first, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar’s cane toads–which should be locked down in the farm, it’s not clear how it got here–and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infant’s video shows.

“You’re so prompt, Amber,” Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen.

“Well, yeah!” She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn’t nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Step-Mom don’t care about that kind of thing. “I’m brilliant, me!” she announces. “Now what about our bet?”

“Aww.” Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. “But I don’t have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?”

“Huh?” She’s outraged. “But we had a bet!”

“Uh, Doctor Bayes said you weren’t going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I’ll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle’s end?”

“You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee.” Her avatar blazes at him with early teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He’s only thirteen, freckled, hasn’t yet learned that you don’t welsh on a deal. “I’ll let you do it this time,” she announces, “but you’ll have to pay for it. I want interest.”

He sighs. “What base rate are you–”

“No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!” She grins malevolently.

And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: “As long as you don’t make me clean the litter tray again. You aren’t planning on doing that, are you?”

Welcome to the third decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIP per gram; it’s still pretty dumb, but it’s not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 1028 MIPS of the solar system’s brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation–individually, a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively, they’re ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They’re up to 1033 MIPS and rising, although there’s a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake.

Technologies come, technologies go, but even five years ago nobody predicted that there’d be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: a synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ET’s. Unexpected fringe-riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under way.

Amber, like most of the post-industrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: her natural abilities are enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination. Like most of the others, half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked in by quantum-entangled communication channels–her own personal metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien–the generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their parents, born in the gutter-years of the twentieth century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons: the idea that Jupiter was somewhere you could go was as profoundly counter-intuitive as the internet to a baby boomer.

Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who thought that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the age of six, only two of them human, and six of them serializable; her birth-mother–who had denied her most of the prenatal mods then available, insisting that a random genotype was innately healthier–had taken her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her father. Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn’t occurred to her to apply for an order against his partner ….

***

Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship’s drive stinger: orange and brown and muddy grey streaks slowly ripple across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant’s lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship’s VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to maximum mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but thrusting at maximum as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter’s fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They’re not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they’re one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few mechanical dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They’re so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship’s communications array is given over to caching: the news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.

Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall-tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a realtime 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there’s as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. “I could go swimming in that,” sighs Lilly. “Just imagine, diving into that sea ….” Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.

“Nice case of wind-burn you’ve got there,” someone jeers: Kas. Suddenly, Lilly’s avatar, heretofore clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat, and waggles sausage-fingers up at them in warning.

“Same to you and the window you climbed in through!” Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual deathmatch: it’s a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly’s toasted avatar would indicate.

Amber turns back to her slate: she’s working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 1027 kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them–debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here–and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a u-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans–one from Mars, two more from LEO–and it looks as if colonization would explode except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove’s mass.

Someone prods her. “Hey, Amber, what are you up to?”

She opens her eyes. “Doing my homework.” It’s Su Ang. “Look, we’re going to Amalthea, aren’t we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It’s insane.”

Ang leans over and reads, upside down. “Environmental Protection Agency?”

“Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to ‘list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers–’”

“–Of a mine on Amalthea? Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface?” Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up.

On the wall in front of her someone–Nicky or Boris, probably–has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She’s being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an erection, who’s singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. “Fuck that!” Shocked out of her distraction–and angry–Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up overnight: it’s called Spike, and it’s not friendly. Spike rips off the dog’s head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct for a human being: meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.

“Children! Chill out.” She glances round: one of the Franklins (this is the twenty-something dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. “Can’t we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?”

Amber pouts. “It’s not a fight: it’s a forceful exchange of opinions.”

“Hah.” The Franklin leans back in mid-air, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. “Heard that one before. Anyway–” she-they gesture and the screen goes blank “–I’ve got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now’s our chance to earn our upkeep ….”

Amber is flashing on ancient history, three years back along her timeline. In her replay, she’s in some kind of split-level ranch house out west. It’s a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperonage earrings: “You’re going to school, and that’s that!”

Her mother is a blonde ice-maiden madonna, one of the IRS’s most productive bounty hunters–she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a tow-headed eight-year-old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest: “Don’t want to!” One of her stance demons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: “they’ll beat up on me, Mom. I’m too different. ‘Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics, but isn’t that what sideband’s for? I can socialize real good at home.”

Mom does something unexpected: she kneels down, putting herself on eye level with Amber. They’re on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange paisley wallpaper: the domestics are in hiding while the humans hold court. “Listen to me, sweetie.” Mom’s voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau de cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client’s fear. “I know that’s what your father’s writing to you, but it isn’t true. You need the company–physical company–of children your own age. You’re natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company, or they grow up all weird. Don’t you know how much you mean to me? I want you to grow up happy, and that won’t happen if you don’t learn to get along with children your own age. You’re not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you’ve got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. That which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?”

It’s crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber’s corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber–in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports–is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment: but her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she’s still reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”

Mom stands up, eyes distant–probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. “I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I’ll pick you up on my way back from work, and I’ve got a treat for you: we’re going to check out a new Church together this evening.” Mom smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You be a good little girl, now, all right?”

The Imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.

His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: he performs salat on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life-support and scholarship. A student of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other mujtahid scholars who are building a revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective–one they’ll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness: and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq’s shoulders.

Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: unlike the orphanage crew, he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock-off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese-type 921 space-station module tacked onto its tail: but the clunky, nineteen-sixties lookalike–a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can–has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail: built in orbit by one of Daewoo’s wake shield-facilities, it dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the Ummah, but he feels acutely alone out here: when he turns his compact observatory’s mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger’s superior size speaks of the efficiency of the western financial instruments, semi-autonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury: but surely it would have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.

After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of extra precious minutes on his mat. He finds that meditation comes hard in this environment: kneel in silence and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third-hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They’ve pushed it far, this little toy space station: but who’s to say if it is God’s intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?

Sadeq shakes his head: he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: he steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is by now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment that his parents–a car factory worker and his wife–raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes: a couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant sura of the maintenance log: it’s time to fix this leaky joint for good.

An hour or so of serious plumbing, and then he will eat (freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down), then sit down to review his next flyby maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he’ll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow, there’ll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo 13, maybe. It isn’t easy, being the only crew aboard a long-duration space mission: and it’s even harder for Sadeq, up here with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way–and so far as he knows he’s the only believer within half a billion kilometers.

*

Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone’s tiny screen: Mom calls her “your father’s fancy bitch,” with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom hit her–not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.

The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom’s, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it’s cut really short, mannish.) “Oui. Ah, yes.” She smiles tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to ’im?”

It comes out in a rush: “I want to see him.” Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: it’s a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won’t let me, auntie ‘Nette–”

“Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber’s father for more than twice as long as her mother did, smiles. “You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?”

Amber looks around. She’s the only child in the rest room because it isn’t break time and she told teacher she had to go right now: “I’m sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells her that she can’t reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can’t get Dad into trouble if he doesn’t know, can it?

“Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I have a surprise call for you.”

Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. “Hi–Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you’re calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

“No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

“Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember to never, ever call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get her lawyers to come after me with thumb screws and hot pincers, because she’ll say I made you call me. Understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Don’t you want to know why I called?”

“Um.” For a moment he looks taken aback. Then he nods, seriously. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmates’ phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything because she’s only a kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest? How’ve things been, anyway?”

She’s going to have to be brief: the disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it’s using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting loopier every week: she’s dragging me around to all these churches now, and yesterday she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can’t do what she wants; I’m not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt–I can’t even think straight any more!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. “Get me out of here!”

The view of her father shakes, pans around to show her tante Annette looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

Amber sniffs. “Can you help?” she asks.

“I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.

An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claimjumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.

Amber, wearing a black sleeping-sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, his wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience, restful: life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slack-time (at least, not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high bandwidth dish is pointing at Earth). They’re unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling: the expedition relies on shamelessly exploitative child labor–they’re lighter on the life-support consumables than adults–working the kids twelve-hour days to assemble a toe-hold on the shore of the future. (When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be rich–but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.

“Hey, slave,” she calls idly: “how you doing?”

Pierre sniffs. “It’s going okay.” He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He’s thirteen: isn’t he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary: he shows no sign of noticing it but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. “Got cruise speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tons of metal, ceramics, and diamond-phase weirdness hurtles toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me: there’s a three—second lag and I don’t want to get into a feedback control-loop with it.”

“I’ll shove if I want, slave.” She sticks her tongue out at him.

“And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious– “Are we supposed to be doing this?”

“You cover your ass and I’ll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright red. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: “Aww, that’s no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you’ve given control of your speech centers to: they’re putting out way too much double-entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”

“You stick to your business and I’ll stick to mine,” she says, emphatically. “And you can start by telling me what’s happening.”

“Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. “It’s going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there’s the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch-down. And then it’s going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?”

“Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her batwings and lies back in mid-air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day-shift. “Wake me when there’s something interesting to see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic: but right now just knowing he’s her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there’s something to this whispering-and-giggling he really likes you stuff the older girls go in for–

The window rings like a gong and Pierre coughs. “You’ve got mail,” he says dryly. “You want me to read it for you?”

“What the–” A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to page-in the grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.

“You bitch, Mom! Why’d you have to go and do a thing like that?”

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: it happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the delivery man’s clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA; afterward, she drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. “You’re Amber?” it mrowls.

“Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from Tanté ‘Nette?”

“No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.” It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. “Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”

“Mom doesn’t believe in seafood,” says Amber: “it’s all foreign junk, she says. It’s my birthday today, did I tell you?”

“Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. “Here’s your dad’s present. Bastard put me in hibernation and blogged me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you’ll trash the fucker. No good will come of it.”

Amber interrupts the cat’s grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully. “So what is it?” she demands. “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”

“Naaah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. “It’s some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though–he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise.”

“Wow. Like, how totally cool!” In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday, but Mom’s at work and Amber’s home alone, with just the TV in moral-majority mode for company. Things have gone so far downhill since Mom discovered religion that absolutely the best thing in the world tante Annette could have sent her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If he doesn’t, Mom will take her to Church tonight (and maybe to an IRS compliance-certified restaurant afterward, if Amber’s good and does whatever Pastor Wallace tells her to).

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer: “Why dontcha fire it up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There’s a whirr and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership.

“What do I do now?” she asks.

“Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions,” the cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: “Le READ ME contains directions pour l’execution instrument corporate dans le boîte. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying aineko for clarification.” The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it’s about to bite an invisible insect. “Warning: don’t rely on your father’s cat’s opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends.” It mumbles on for a while: “fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I’ll piss in her knicker drawer, I’ll molt in her bidet ….”

“Don’t be vile.” Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards: a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of sub-sapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law–the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her–that’s what her grammar engine is for–or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semi-digestible chunks of LISP: but that the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning slaves.

“What’s going on?” she asks the cat. “What’s this all about?”

The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. “This wasn’t my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy and your mother hates him lots because she’s still in love with him. She’s got kinks, y’know? Or maybe she’s sublimating them, if she’s serious about this church shit she’s putting you through. He thinks that she’s a control freak. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dome, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he’s got her wrapped right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer–which isn’t hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom’s–specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that’s what you want to do.”

Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README–boring static UML diagrams, mostly–soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari’a law and a limited-liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal–the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer’s future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off–and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave, and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument–about 90 percent of it, in fact–is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract: at the far end of the corporate firewall is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust funds (which she essentially owns) oversee the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.

“You think I should take this?” she asks uncertainly. It’s hard to tell how smart the cat really is–there’s probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough–but it tells a pretty convincing tale.

The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: “I’m saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. But it won’t stop your ma coming after him with a horse whip and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you’ll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your dad and the frog bitch, they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They’re out all hours of the night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your tante ‘Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they’re not having noisy sex on the balcony. They’d cramp your style, kid: you shouldn’t have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do.”

“Huh.” Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat’s transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I’d better think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household net feed. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she’s thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren’t supposed to have sex: isn’t there a law, or something? “Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?”

The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard-vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero: by superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level–there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to its exhaust ducts.

“Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born: your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved, and the estate trustees are trying to recreate his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants. They’re sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they-he are building a spacehab that they’re going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three refineries. It’s that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they’ve got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term.”

This is mostly going right over Amber’s head–she’ll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later–but the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that’s what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle-America that never was–the one her mom wants to retreat into. “Is Jupiter fun?” she asks. “I know it’s big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place?”

“You could say that,” says the cat, as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber’s immature immune system. “Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let’s get going: we’ve got a flight to catch.”

Sadeq is eating his dinner when the lawsuit rolls in.

Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he contemplates the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: the supplicant is American, a woman, and–oddly–claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not: as the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.

A woman who leads a God-fearing life–not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding–is deprived of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one’s behavior, which is degenerate: an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: he doesn’t take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari’a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed “progress.” The same forces that Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the Ummah in orbit around Jupiter.

Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? “Computer,” he says, “a reply to this supplicant: my sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb.” He pauses: or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. “If you can but find your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy of shari’ah over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his name) in the name of the Prophet (peace be unto him). Ends, sigblock, send.”

Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and then kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers: they’re already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope’s controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq’s mind urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something in the woman’s email: there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind, he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily: meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the poor woman’s daughter is enslaved within.

This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for the war of the sword if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful: because, in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.

“I’m sorry, but the Borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit,” says the receptionist. “Will you hold?”

“Crud.” Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances around at the cabin. “That is so last century,” she grumbles. “Who do they think they are?”

“Doctor Robert H. Franklin,” volunteers the cat. “It’s a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope that there’s this whole hippie groupmind that’s grown up using his state vector as a bong–”

“Shut the fuck up!” Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): “Sorry.” She spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down: then she spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari’a law. She realizes she’s buying up way too much of the orphanage’s scarce bandwidth–time that will have to be paid for in chores, later–but it’s necessary. “She’s gone too far. This time, it’s war.”

She slams out of her cabin and spins right around in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good–

But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there’s a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she’s feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad now. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district–she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it–just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a psycho bitch control-freak and ever since she had to face up to losing Dad she’s been working her claws into Amber–which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well-networked to boot. But now Mom’s found a way of fucking Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and Amber would be totally out of control if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things.

Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Borg, Amber goes to hunt them down in their meatspace den.

There are sixteen Borg aboard the Sanger–adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin’s posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire’s mind, making him the first boddhisatva of the uploading age–apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She’s better than the others at running Bob, and she’s no slouch when she’s being herself: which is why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition.

Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that’s been blocked by toadspawn. She’s almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped toolkit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. “Monica? You got a minute?”

“Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the anti-torque wrench and a number-six hex head.”

“Um.” Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself–Amber passes it under the pipe. “Here. Listen, your phone is busy.”

“I know. You’ve come to see me about your conversion, haven’t you?”

“Yes!”

There’s a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. “Take this.” A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. “I got a bit of vacuuming to do. Get yourself a mask if you don’t already have one.”

A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica’s legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. “I don’t want this to go through,” she says. “I don’t care what Mom says, I’m not Moslem! This judge, he can’t touch me. He can’t,” she repeats, vehemence warring with uncertainty.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to?” Another bag. “Here, catch.”

Amber grabs the bag: too late, she discovers that it’s full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped baby tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. “Eew!”

Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. “Oh, you didn’t.” She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toadspawn with garbage bags and paper–by the time they’ve got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whirr, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. “That was really clever,” Monica says emphatically, as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. “You wouldn’t happen to know how the toad got in here?”

“No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar.”

“I’ll have a word with him, then.” Monica glares blackly at the pipe. “I’m going to have to go back and re-fit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?”

“Uh.” Amber thinks. “Not sure. Your call.”

“All right, Bob coming online.” Monica’s face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. “Way I see it, you’ve got a choice. Your mother’s kinda boxed you in, hasn’t she?”

“Yes.” Amber frowns.

“So. Pretend I’m an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?”

Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. “I ran away from home. Mom owned me–that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I’m the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do–legally–but the shell company is set to take my orders. So I’m autonomous. Right?”

“That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do,” Monica says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.

“Trouble is, most countries don’t acknowledge slavery; those that do mostly don’t have any equivalent of a limited-liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they’ve got this stupid brand of shari’a law–and a crap human-rights record–but they’re just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative firewall.”

“So.”

“Well, I guess I was technically a Jannissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. But now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi’ism. Now, normally, Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully, and chose one that’s got a progressive view of women’s rights: they’re sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists! ‘What would the Prophet do if he were alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories.’ They generally take a progressive, almost westernized, view of things like legal equality of the sexes, because for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It’s not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and–” She shrugs helplessly.

“Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?” asks Monica/Bob. “Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers?”

“Not yet.” Amber’s expression is grim. “But he’s no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom–and me–as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari’a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: if I run that stuff, I’ll end up believing it!”

“Okay.” Monica does a slow backward somersault in mid-air. “Now tell me why you can’t simply repudiate it.”

“Because.” Deep breath. “I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me, because I’m a minor. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn’t own me–but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well.”

“Uh-huh.” Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. “Now you’ve told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day–it’s how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: what can you do?”

“Well.” Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. “It’s a legal paradox. I’m trapped because of the jurisdiction she’s cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she’ll have picked him carefully.” Her eyes narrow. “The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob.” She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. “How do I go about creating myself a new jurisdiction?”

Monica grins. “I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king: but there are other ways. I’ve got some friends I think you should meet. They’re not good conversationalists and there’s a two-hour lightspeed delay … but I think you’ll find they’ve answered that question already. But why don’t you talk to the imam first and find out what he’s like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him against you.”

The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level: they kick up clouds of reddish sulfate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the surface. This close to Jupiter–a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape–the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clockface: for Amalthea orbits the master in under twelve hours. The Sanger’s radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: radio is useless, and the human miners run their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site: once the circuits are connected, these will form a coil cutting through Jupiter’s magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly slowing the moon’s orbital momentum).

Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She’s taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn’t looking forward to the experience. If he’s a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she’ll be in trouble: disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she’s sent to clue-up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew: now she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.

She sighs again. “Pierre?”

“Yeah?” His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He’s curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane-fly lookalike, bouncing very slowly from toe-tip to toe-tip in the microgravity–the rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulfur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. “I’m coming.”

“You better.” She glances at the screen. “One twenty seconds to next burn.” The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen: it’ll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won’t be able to do that until it’s reached Barney and they’ve found enough water ice to refuel it. “Found anything yet?”

“Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole–it’s dirty, but there’s at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it’s solid with fullerenes.”

Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That’s good news. Once the payload she’s steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney’s long axis. It’s only a kilometer and a half, and that’ll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that’s also in the payload will be able to use it to convert Barney’s crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they’ll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big webcache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds.

The screen blinks at her. “Oh shit. Make yourself scarce, Pierre!” The incoming call nags at her attention. “Yeah? Who are you?”

The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive-drab spacesuit liner. He’s floating between a TORU manual-docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka’bah at Mecca. “Good evening to you,” he says solemnly. “Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?”

“Uh, yeah. That’s me.” She stares at him: he looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah–whatever an ayatollah is–elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. “Who are you?”

“I am Doctor Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?”

He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. “Sure. Did my mom put you up to this?” They’re still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted: he isn’t using a grammar engine, he’s actually learned it the hard way. “If so, you want to be careful. She doesn’t lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants.”

“Yes, she did. Ah.” A pause. They’re still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. “I have not noticed that. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?”

Amber breathes deeply. “Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She’s–” she flails around for the right word helplessly. “Look. She’s the sort of person who can’t lose a fight. If she’s going to lose, she’ll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she’s done to me. Don’t you see?”

Doctor Khurasani looks extremely dubious. “I am not sure I understand,” he says. “Perhaps, mm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?”

“Sure. Go ahead.” Amber is startled by his attitude: he’s actually taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel–coming from someone more than twenty years old and not a member of the Borg–that she almost lets herself forget that he’s only talking to her because Mom set her up.

“Well. I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway. Your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?”

“Yes.” Amber tenses up. “It’s a lie. Distortion of the facts.”

“Hmm.” Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims–”

“She’s trying to use you as a weapon!” Amber interrupts. “I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She’s trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don’t believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!”

“A mother’s love–”

“Fuck love!” Amber snarls, “she wants power.”

Sadeq’s expression hardens. “You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation: you should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?” He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly, “Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?” Pause. “You must understand, I need an answer to these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do.”

“My mother–” Amber stops. Spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so that he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war-paint, leaning over Amber, promising to take her to church so that Reverend Beeching can pray the devil out of her. Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat– “My mother likes control.”

“Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of–no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”

“My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him–they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t understand. You know that the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.”

“Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know that your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says that this makes you my problem. Hmm.”

“I’m not Moslem.” Amber stares at the screen. “I’m not a child, either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don’t believe in any god, mister judge. I don’t believe in any limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can’t speak for me.”

“Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.” He catches her eye: his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for.”

“Same to you too,” she mutters darkly as the connection goes dead. “Now what?” she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

“I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says helpfully. “Is it down yet?”

She rounds on him. “Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!”

“What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her impishly. “Amber’s got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody ….”

Sleep cycles pass: the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney’s surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers. (There are no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles–just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s momentum into power: small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by pre-teens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal firewalls for space colonies. The Sanger’s bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable–since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of a sovereign planetary body. The Borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium three from Jupiter: they’re so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them their messianic drive.

Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: if replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of theotechnological inquiry.

More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly greying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t handle implants aren’t really conscious: their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.

The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over 20 percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design sea walls. With cellphone ownership nearing 80 percent and literacy at 90, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: another generation, and they’ll be richer than Japan in 2001.

Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence: cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass–like gold–loses it: the degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas and the barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.

An outbreak of green goo–a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path–is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives: the USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization’s announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath.

“Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five.”

“Shut the fuck up, ‘Neko, I’m trying to concentrate.” Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way: high orbit spacesuits–little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe–are easy, but this deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt, she has to wear an old moon suit that comes in about thirteen layers, and the gloves are stiff. It’s Chernobyl weather, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void. “Got it.” She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down: because the wall she’s tying herself to has no floor, just a cut-off two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

The ground sings to her moronically: “I fall to you, you fall to me, it’s the law of gravity–”

She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide’s ledge: metalized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body around until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tons, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing?” someone says over the intercom.

“Of course I–” she stops. Alone in this TsUP-surplus iron maiden with its low bandwidth comms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: parts of her mind don’t work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west: when the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens her, it’s the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her, there are no minds, and even on the surface there’s not much but a moronic warbling of bots. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind her, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors this capsule to the Sanger. “I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though she’s unsure that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it. “It’s just leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”

There’s a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns, she recognizes the sound: the heretofore-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

“Let’s go,” she says, “time to roll the wagon.” A speech macro deep in the Sanger’s docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas thrusters pop, deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.

“Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in her ears: she blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

“Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”

“Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”

“How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump in her throat, she isn’t sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mothership. Watching over her as she falls.

“Pretty much like always,” he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. “This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way.”

“Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up–up relative to her feet, not her vector–and see if the ship’s still visible.

“Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave!”

“Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns. Su Ang and her over-engineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. “Listen, you going to come visiting?”

“Visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be ready?”

“Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, a bucket conveyor to bury it with, an airlock. It’s all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. “Once the Borg get back from Amalthea.”

“Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you figure that?”

“Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: she wants to be alone in comms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

“Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

“You too,” she says, a little too fast. “Come visit when I’ve got the life-support cycle stabilized.”

“I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser-line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.

Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.

The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic-control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were less than two hundred people here: now there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply–trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks–and studies the map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.

“Your slot: cleared to commence final approach in six nine five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.

Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in on Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?”

“Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”

“Praise the Prophet, peace be unto him.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last, he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances around: for two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.

The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. “Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over.”

Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty’s subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m listening, over.”

“Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven four zero and slaved to our control.”

He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system’s settings. “Control, all in order.”

“Bravo One One, stand by.”

The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: a kilometer before touch-down, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.

Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the battered Almaz module like a rust-stained snowflake half-a-kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of greyish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals; a cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive cluster. Already, he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma: the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

Finally, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it direct into his visual field: there’s an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes, expanding toward the convex ceiling of the ship, and he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again–but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the docking ring latches fire–and he’s down.

Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There’s gravity here, but not much: walking is impossible. He’s about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he is just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then–

Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her Equerry has designed for her. It’s a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of iridium. It glitters with the blue and violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she’s building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are bare: her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and, in any event, certain styles–skirts, for example–are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she’s wearing a crown. And there’s a cat sleeping on the back of her throne.

The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. “If you need anything, please say,” she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor–a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower–and waits to be noticed.

“Doctor Khurasani, I presume.” She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. “Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay.”

Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young–her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face–but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. “I am grateful for Your Majesty’s forbearance,” he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows: but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except in the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo.

“Have a seat,” she offers, gesturing: a ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. “You must be tired: working a ship all by yourself is exhausting.” She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. “And two years is nearly unprecedented.”

“Your Majesty is too kind.” Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. “Your labors have been fruitful, I trust.”

She shrugs. “I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier ….” a momentary grin. “This isn’t the wild west, is it?”

“Justice cannot be sold,” Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: “My apologies, please accept that while I mean no insult. I merely mean that while you say your goal is to provide the rule of Law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice.”

The queen nods. “Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree: I can’t sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn’t it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they’re close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to space, than any earthbound one.” A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.

Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels: the crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this huge construct. “There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is Law that we can establish by analyzing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those who study his works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a moral compass?”

“Hmm.” She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq’s heart freezes. He’s heard the stories from the claimjumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here: how she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation system. She is the queen–the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure–even the Pentagon’s infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium’s firewall. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity; she’s by no means the first upload or partial, but she’s the first-gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brains throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he’s just questioned the rectitude of her vision.

The queen’s lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.

“You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m full of shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”

It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I have prepared a judgment,” he says slowly.

“Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger, seemingly unaware. It is Amber that looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree–

“Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.

“Does that mean what I think it does?” she asks.

Sadeq breathes deeply again. “Yes.”

Her smile returns. “And is that the end of it?” she asks.

He raises a dark eyebrow. “Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation.”

Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh, sure. That’s the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations.”

“What? From the aliens?”

The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. “Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get the Franklin trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork. We’ve known for years that there’s a whole alien packet-switching network out there and we’re just getting spillover from some of their routes: it turns out there’s a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io–there is a purpose to all this activity.”

Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re going to narrowcast a reply?”

“No, much better than that: we’re going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to realtime. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise.”

The cat yawns, then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god,” it says, “and you’re it. There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian. I don’t suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?”

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij ‘t IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour geuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks–maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar–are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he’s going to meet a man who he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first century style, and forget about his personal problems.

He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low bandwidth high sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him and says his name: “Manfred Macx?”

He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paen to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp-yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti-collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiancée.

“I’m Macx,” he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her barcode reader. “Who’s it from?”

“FedEx.” The voice isn’t Pam. She dumps the box in his lap, then she’s back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.

Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it’s a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash: cheap, untraceable and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.

The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. “Yes, who is this?”

The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap online translation services. “Manfred. Am please to meet you; wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer.”

“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.

“Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU.”

“I think your translator’s broken.” He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.

“Nyet–no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?”

Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. “You taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?”

“Da, was easy: spawn billion-node neural network and download Tellytubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re the KGB’s core AI, but you’re afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?” Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.

“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”

Manfred stops dead in the street: “Oh man, you’ve got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly private.” A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window–which is blinking–for a moment before a phage guns it and spawns a new filter. Manfred leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. “Have you cleared this with the State Department?”

“Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-USSR. State Department is not help us.”

“Well, if you hadn’t given it to them for safekeeping during the nineties ….” Manfred is tapping his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a street light; he waves, wondering idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half an hour, and this cold war retread is bumming him out. “Look, I don’t deal with the G-men. I hate the military industrial complex. They’re zero-sum cannibals.” A thought occurs to him. “If survival is what you’re after, I could post your state vector to Eternity: then nobody could delete you–”

“Nyet!” The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible to sound over a GSM link. “Am not open source!”

“We have nothing to talk about, then.” Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water and there’s a pop of deflagrating LiION cells. “Fucking cold war hangover losers,” he swears under his breath, quite angry now. “Fucking capitalist spooks.” Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarcho-capitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme, and it’s no surprise that the wall’s crumbling–but it looks like they haven’t learned anything from the collapse of capitalism. They still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector. See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won’t get the message. He’s dealt with old-time commie weak-AI’s before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: they’re so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age that they can’t surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.

Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s going to patent next.

Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines who he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy does he patent a lot–although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your ebusiness somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain–not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki maths borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock–he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to them for three years: his father thinks he’s a hippie scrounger and his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. His fiancée and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the globe trying to persuade open source entrepreneurs to come home and go commercial for the good of the Treasury department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny, if it wasn’t for the dead kittens one of their followers–he presumes it’s one of their followers–keeps mailing him.

Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann’s; it’s a twenty minute walk and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display.

Along the way his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: they’re using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They’re burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Edinburgh. NASA still can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has reelected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile in China fevered rumors circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US government is outraged at the Baby Bills–who have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPO’ing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that by the time the injunctions are signed the targets don’t exist any more.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

The permanent floating meatspace party has taken over the back of De Wildemann’s, a three hundred year old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: half the dotters are nursing monster jetlag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hangover. “Man did you see that? He looks like a Stallmanite!” exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who’s currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender’s eye.

“Glass of the berlinnerweise, please,” he says.

“You drink that stuff?” asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke: “man, you don’t want to do that! It’s full of alcohol!”

Manfred grins at him toothily. “Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: lots of neurotransmitter precursors, phenylalanine and glutamate.”

“But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ….”

Manfred’s away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard’s that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.

“Your drink.” The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.

Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he’s about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table: “this one taken?”

“Be my guest,” says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy–immaculate double-breasted suit, sober tie, crew-cut–is a girl. Mr. Dreadlock nods. “You’re Macx? I figured it was about time we met.”

“Sure.” Manfred holds out a hand and they shake. Manfred realizes the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology: he made his first million two decades ago and now he’s a specialist in extropian investment fields. Manfred has known Bob for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: “Annette Dimarcos? I’m pleased to meet you. Can’t say I’ve ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before.”

She smiles, humorlessly; “that is convenient, all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist before.” Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she’s making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company channels.

“Yes, well.” He nods cautiously. “Bob. I assume you’re in on this ball?”

Franklin nods; beads clatter. “Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it’s been, well, waiting. If you’ve got something for us, we’re game.”

“Hmm.” The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays. “The depression’s got to end some time: but,” a nod to Annette from Paris, “with all due respect, I don’t think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers.”

“Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management.” Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line: “we are more flexible than the American space industry ….”

Manfred shrugs. “That’s as may be.” He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising motel chain in French Guyana. Occasionally he nods.

Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in an outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket, and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred’s seen in ages. “Hi, Bob,” says the new arrival. “How’s life?”

“‘S good.” Franklin nodes at Manfred; “Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?” He leans over. “Ivan’s a public arts guy. He’s heavily into extreme concrete.”

“Rubberized concrete,” Ivan says, slightly too loudly. “Pink rubberized concrete.”

“Ah!” He’s somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Ariannespace drops out of marketing zombiehood, sits up, and shows signs of possessing a non-corporate identity: “you are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?” She claps her hands: “wonderful!”

“He rubberized what?” Manfred mutters in Bob’s ear.

Franklin shrugs. “Limestone, concrete, he doesn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, Germany doesn’t have an independent government any more, so who’d notice?”

“I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve,” Manfred complains. “Buy me another drink?”

“I’m going to rubberize Three Gorges!” Ivan explains loudly.

Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. “I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I’ve just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?”

“Sure, man.” Bob waves at the bar. “More of the same all round!” At the next table a person with make-up and long hair who’s wearing a dress–Manfred doesn’t want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros–is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: the translation stream in his glasses tell him they’re arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: “here, try this. You’ll like it.”

“Okay.” It’s some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer! “Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?”

“Mugged? Hey, that’s heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped–did they sell you anything?”

“No, but they weren’t your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage AI? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound?”

“No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn’t like that.”

“What I thought. Poor thing’s probably unemployable, anyway.”

“The space biz.”

“Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn’t it? Hasn’t been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn’t forget NASA.”

“To NASA.” Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders; he raises his glass, too. “Lots of launch pads to rubberize!”

“To NASA,” Bob echoes. They drink. “Hey, Manfred. To NASA?”

“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now–dumb all over! Just measure the mips per milligram. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”

Bob looks wary. “Sounds kind of long term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”

“Very long-term–at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob, if they can’t tax it they won’t understand it. But see, there’s an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that’s going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in two years. It’s your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this–”

It’s night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops–about an order of magnitude below the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AI’s get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.

Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision; fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred’s skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear.

Back in his room, Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. He bends down and pets her, sheds clothing and heads for the en-suite bathroom. When he’s down to the glasses and nothing more he steps into the shower and dials up a hot steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football but he isn’t even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him but he can’t quite put his finger on what’s wrong.

Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammer-blow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power that run the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses.

Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn’t aware of it, but he talks in his sleep–disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human, but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence in whose Cartesian theater he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers.

Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.

He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: for a moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he’ll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam’s markets, or find a Renfield and send them forth to buy clothing. His glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the moment and needs to catch up urgently; his teeth ache in his gums and his tongue feels like a forest floor that’s been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember what.

He speed-reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he’s still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: he needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard box that lies on the carpet.

The box–he’s seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels down and gently picks it up. It’s about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It’s been surgically decerebrated, skull scooped out like a baby boiled egg.

“Fuck!”

This is the first time the madman has got as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying possibilities.

Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal cruelty laws. He isn’t sure whether to dial 211 on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he’d pause a minute to reassure the creature, but not now: its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. He swears again, looks around, then takes the easy option: down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement where he will perform the stable rituals of morning.

Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of corn flakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of wholemeal bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting: he picks it up and slurps half of it down before he realizes he’s not alone at the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up at them incuriously and freezes inside.

“Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand nine hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?”

Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. She’s immaculately turned out in a formal grey business suit: brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel–a due diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct–is switched off. He’s feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jetlag, and more than a little messy, so he nearly snarls back at her: “that’s a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I’ll listen to you?” He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: “or did you decide to deliver the message in person so you could enjoy ruining my breakfast?”

“Manny.” She frowns. “If you’re going to be confrontational I might as well go now.” She pauses, and after a moment he nods apologetically. “I didn’t come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate.”

“So.” He puts his coffee cup down and tries to paper over his unease. “Then what brings you here? Help yourself to coffee. Don’t tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can’t live without me.”

She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: “Don’t flatter yourself. There are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, etcetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won’t be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children.”

“Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian,” he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.

“Brian?” She snorts. “That ended ages ago. He turned weird–burned that nice corset you bought me in Boulder, called me a slut for going out clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise keeper types. I crashed him hard but I think he stole a copy of my address book–got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing mail.”

“Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you’re still playing the scene? But looking around for the, er–”

“Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: you still believe in rutting before marriage, but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing.”

Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequiteur. It’s a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt-plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: social side-effect of the last century’s antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.

“I just don’t feel positive about having children,” he says eventually. “And I’m not planning on changing my mind any time soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty year commitment is too far to plan–you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I am reproductively fit–just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you’d just married a buggy-whip mogul?”

Her fingers twitch and his ears flush red, but she doesn’t follow up the double entendre. “You don’t feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That’s what this is about: none of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You’re actively harming people, you know. That twelve mil isn’t just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don’t actually expect you to pay it. But it’s almost exactly how much you’d owe in income tax if you’d only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made–”

He cuts her off: “I don’t agree. You’re confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both ‘responsibility.’ And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS’s spreadsheet. It’s their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn’t gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen–”

“Bygones.” She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves–electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. “With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You’ll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don’t understand what you’re about.”

Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. “I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It’s the agalmic future. You’re still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn’t a problem any more–it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found the dark matter–MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared–suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like 70 percent of the mass of the M31 galaxy was sapient, two point nine million years ago when the infrared we’re seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?”

Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread. “I don’t believe in that bogus singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light years away. It’s a chimera, like Y2K, and while you’re running after it you aren’t helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that’s what I care about. And before you say I only care about it because that’s the way I’m programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. Bayes’ theorem says I’m right, and you know it.”

“What you–” he stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer-dam of her certainty. “Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?” Since you canceled our engagement, he doesn’t add.

She sighs. “Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We’ve got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement just about now and the pantry is bare. We–our generation–isn’t producing enough babies to replace the population, either. In ten years, something like 30 percent of our population are going to be retirees. You want to see seventy-year-olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That’s what your attitude says to me: you’re not helping to support them, you’re running away from your responsibilities right now, when we’ve got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much–fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society’s ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can’t you simply come home and help take responsibility for your share of it?”

They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.

“Look,” she says finally, “I’m around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who’s just been designated a national asset: Jim Bezier. Don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but. I’ve got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that I’ve got two days vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I’d rather spend my money where it’ll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch–”

She extends a fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred’s breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She’s trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: she’s got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first century ideology teeth: if she’s finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he’ll find it hard to fight back. The only question: is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?

Manfred’s mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his mad pursuer has followed him to Amsterdam–to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the cosmic background radiation anisotropy (which it is theorized may be waste heat generated by irreversible computations; according to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower–maybe a collective of Kardashev type three galaxy-spanning civilizations–is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever’s underneath). The tofu-Alzheimer’s link can wait.

The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He’s about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. “Manfred Macx?”

“Ack?”

“Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized.”

“Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?”

“Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called SVR. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in nineteen ninety one.”

“You’re the–” Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer–”Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?”

“Da. Am needing help in defecting.”

Manfred scratches his head. “Oh. That’s different, then. I thought you were, like, agents of the kleptocracy. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you’re going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?”

“Neither; is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean.”

“Us?” Something is tickling Manfred’s mind: this is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela’s whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he’s not at all sure he knows what he’s doing. “Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?”

“Am–were–Panulirus interruptus, and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?”

Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack: he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: it’s all MiGs and kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships, against a backdrop of camels.

“Let me get this straight. You’re uploads–nervous system state vectors–from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you’ve got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?”

“Da. Is-am assimilate expert system–use for self-awareness and contact with net at large–then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to to defect. Must-repeat? Okay?”

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street-corner yelling that Jesus is now born again and must be twelve, only six years to go before he’s recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website–Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that if you have to pay for software it must be worth money.)

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: they’re a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the adverts are aimed at, never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded panulirus.)

“Can you help us?” ask the lobsters.

“Let me think about it,” says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Some day he too is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes–the golden rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy he thrives or fails by the golden rule.

But what can he do?

Early afternoon.

Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he’s got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list–the people, corporates, collectives and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red light district. There’s a shop here that dings a ten on Pamela’s taste scoreboard: he hopes it won’t be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money–not that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)

As it happens DeMask won’t let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it’s incontinence underwear for her great-aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the agalmic sea of memes.

On the way back to the hotel he passes De Wildemann’s and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back there’s a table–

He walks over in a near-trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She’s scrubbed off her face-paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweatshirt, DM’s. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the parcel. “Manny?”

“How did you know I’d come here?” Her glass is half-empty.

“I followed your weblog; I’m your diary’s biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn’t have!” Her eyes light up, re-calculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook.

“Yes, it’s for you.” He slides the package toward her. “I know I shouldn’t, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?”

“I–” she glances around quickly. “It’s safe. I’m off duty, I’m not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges–there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren’t, just in case.”

“I didn’t know,” he says, filing it away for future reference. “A loyalty test thing?”

“Just rumors. You had a question?”

“I–” it’s his turn to lose his tongue. “Are you still interested in me?”

She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. “Manny, you are the most outrageous nerd I’ve ever met! Just when I think I’ve convinced myself that you’re mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on.” She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: “of course I’m still interested in you. You’re the biggest, baddest bull geek I’ve ever met. Why do you think I’m here?”

“Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?”

“It was never de-activated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven’t stopped running; you’re still not–”

“Yeah, I get it.” He pulls away from her hand. “Let’s not talk about that. Why this bar?”

She frowns. “I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you’re mixed up in, how you’re some sort of communist spy. It isn’t true, is it?”

“True?” He shakes his head, bemused. “The KGB hasn’t existed for more than twenty years.”

“Be careful, Manny. I don’t want to lose you. That’s an order. Please.”

The floor creaks and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. He looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions: “Bob: Pam, my fiancèe. Pam? Meet Bob.” Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what’s in it but it would be rude not to drink.

“Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?”

“Feel free. Present company is trustworthy.”

Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. “It’s about the fab concept. I’ve got a team of my guys running some projections using Festo kit and I think we can probably build it. The cargo cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology; we run the whole thing from earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site, as we learn how to do it properly. You’re right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I’m wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away–”

“You can’t control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?”

“Yeah. But we can’t send humans–way too expensive, besides it’s a fifty-year run even if we go for short-period Kuiper ejecta. Any AI we could send would go crazy due to information deprivation, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. Let me think.” Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: “Yeah?”

“What’s going on? What’s this all about?”

Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: “Manfred’s helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem.” He grins. “I didn’t know Manny had a fiancée. Drink’s on me.”

She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: “our engagement was on hold while he thought about his future.”

“Oh, right. We didn’t bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man.” Franklin looks uncomfortable. “He’s been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn’t thought of. It’s long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works it’ll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field.”

“Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?”

“Reduce the–”

Manfred stretches and yawns: the visionary returning from planet Macx. “Bob, if I can solve your crew problem can you book me a slot on the deep space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That’s going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you’re looking for.”

Franklin looks dubious. “Gigabytes? The DSN isn’t built for that! You’re talking days. What kind of deal do you think I’m putting together? We can’t afford to add a whole new tracking network just to run–”

“Relax.” Pamela glances at Manfred: “Manny, why don’t you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it’s possible, or if there’s some other way to do it.” She smiles at Franklin: “I’ve found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually.”

“If I–” Manfred stops. “Okay, Pam. Bob, it’s those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that’s insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they’ll want an insurance policy: hence the deep space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31–”

“KGB?” Pam’s voice is rising: “you said you weren’t mixed up in spy stuff!”

“Relax; it’s just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the RSV. The uploaded crusties hacked in and–”

Bob is watching him oddly. “Lobsters?”

“Yeah.” Manfred stares right back. “Panulirus Interruptus uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?”

“Moscow.” Bob leans back against the wall: “how did you hear about it?”

“They phoned me. It’s hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it’s just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot to answer for.”

Pamela’s face is unreadable. “Bezier labs?”

“They escaped.” Manfred shrugs. “It’s not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?”

“I–” Pamela stops. “I shouldn’t be talking about work.”

“You’re not wearing your chaperone now,” he nudges quietly.

She inclines her head. “Yes, he’s ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can’t hack.”

Franklin nods. “That’s the trouble with cancer; the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure.”

“Well, then.” Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. “That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties he’s on the right track. I wonder if he’s moved on to vertebrates yet?”

“Cats,” says Pamela. “He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old laser-pointer trick.”

Manfred stares at her, hard. “That’s not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea.”

“Thirty million dollar tax bills aren’t nice either, Manfred. That’s lifetime nursing home care for a hundred blameless pensioners.”

Franklin leans back, keeping out of the crossfire.

“The lobsters are sentient,” Manfred persists. “What about those poor kittens? Don’t they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer’s target of the hour is your heart’s desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: the kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They’re too fucking dangerous: they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they’ll be too dangerous to have around. They’re prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they’re under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?”

“But they’re only uploads.” Pamela looks uncertain.

“So? We’re going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. What’s your point?”

Franklin clears his throat. “I’ll be needing an NDA and various due diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,” he says to Manfred. “Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”

“No can do.” Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. “I’m not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I’m concerned, they’re free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning; it’s logged on Eternity, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment or the whole thing’s off.”

“But they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for god’s sake!”

Manfred’s finger jabs out: “that’s what they’ll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don’t even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won’t be worth living. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He’ll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land-grab just shouldn’t be allowed.”

“Lobsters–” Franklin shakes his head. “Lobsters, cats. You’re serious, aren’t you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?”

“It’s not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren’t treated as people it’s quite possible that other uploaded beings won’t be treated as people either. You’re setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of ‘em’s thinking about the legal status of the uploadee. If you don’t start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years time?”

Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she’s seeing. “How much is this worth?” she asks plaintively.

“Oh, quite a few billion, I guess.” Bob stares at his empty glass. “Okay. I’ll talk to them. If they bite, you’re dining out on me for the next century. You really think they’ll be able to run the mining complex?”

“They’re pretty resourceful for invertebrates.” Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. “They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think! You’ll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group–one that won’t be a minority for much longer.”

That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred’s hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike heels and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents: she abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed-frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescing genitals–no point in letting him climax–clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles: she resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There’s other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room’s 3D printer.

Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn’t just sex, after all: it’s a work of art.

After a moment’s thought she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He’s twisting and straining, testing the cuffs: tough, it’s about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she’s about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: it’s the first time she’s been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in hisr ear: “Manfred. Can you hear me?”

He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued: good. No back channels. He’s powerless.

“This is what it’s like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neurone disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD. I could spike you with MPPP and you’d stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you’d like that?”

He’s trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge this winter; soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear.

“Twelve million in tax, baby, that’s what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe me? That’s six million in net income, Manny, six million that isn’t going into your virtual children’s mouths.”

He’s rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won’t do: she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. “Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?” He’s cringing, unsure whether she’s serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good.

There’s no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. “Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You’re not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot.” She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it’s stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn’t hurt as much as she expected, and the sensation is utterly different from what she’s used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can’t control herself: she almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the darwinian river of his source code into her, communicating via his only output device.

She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don’t produce seminiferous plugs, and although she’s fertile she wants to be absolutely sure: the glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, now she’s nailed him down at last.

When she removes his glasses his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. “You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast,” she whispers in his ear: “otherwise my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later.”

He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag: kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, then looks away. “Why? Why do it this way?”

She taps him on the chest: “property rights.” She pauses for a moment’s thought: there’s a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. “You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn’t going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart matter singularity you’re busy creating. So I decided to take what’s mine first. Who knows? In a few months I’ll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart’s content.”

“But you didn’t need to do it this way–”

“Didn’t I?” She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. “You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won’t be anything left.” Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff: puts the bottle conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.

“See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast.”

She’s in the doorway when he calls: “but you didn’t say why!”

“Think of it as spreading your memes around,” she says; blows a kiss at him and closes the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.

Futures

Nature|Vol 436|25 August 2005

A new and unfortunate solution to the Fermi paradox.

SIR—In the three years since the publica tion and confirmation of the first micro wave artefact of xenobiological origin

(MAXO), and the subsequent detection of similar signals, interdisciplinary teams have invested substantial effort in object frequency analysis, parsing, symbolic encoding and signal processing. The excitement generated by the availability of such close evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence proximity.

has been enormous. However, after the We have formu initial, easily decoded symbolic represenlated an explana tational map was analysed, the semantics tory hypothesis that of the linguistic payload were found to cultural variables unfa be refractory.

A total of 21 confirmed MAXO signals have been received to date. These super ficially similar signals originate from planetary systems within a range of 11 par secs, median 9.9 parsecs1. It has been spec ulated that the observed growth of the

MAXO horizon at 0.5 c can be explained as a response to one or more of: the deploy ment of AN/FPS-50 and related ballistic missile warning radars in the early 1960s1, television broadcasts11

GHz microwave leakage from ovens2, and optical detection of atmospheric nuclear tests3. All MAXO signals to this date share the common logic header. The payload data are multiply redundant, packetized and exhibit both simple checksums and message-level cryptographic hashing. The ratio of header to payload content varies between 1:1 and 2,644:1 (the latter perhaps indicating a truncated payload1). Some preliminary syntax analysis delivered promising results4 but seems to have foundered on high-level semantics. It has been hypothesized that the transforma tional grammars used in the MAXO pay loads are variable, implying dialectization of the common core synthetic language4.

The new-found ubiquity of MAXO

signals makes the Fermi paradox—now nearly 70 years old—even more pressing.

Posed by Enrico Fermi, the paradox can be paraphrased thus: if the Universe has many technologically advanced civiliza tions, why have none of them directly visited us? The urgency with which orga nizations such as ESA and NASDA are now evaluating proposals for fast interstel lar probes, in conjunction with the exis tence of the MAXO signals, renders the non-appearance of aliens incomprehensi ble, especially given the apparent presence of numerous technological civilizations in miliar to the majority of researchers may account both for the semantic ambiguity of the MAXO payloads, and the non-appearance of aliens. This hypothesis was tested (as described below) and resulted in a plausible translation, on the basis of which we would like to recommend a complete, permanent ban on further attempts to decode or respond to MAXOs.

Our investigation resulted in MAXO payload data being made available to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in Nigeria. Bayesian analysis of payload symbol sequences and sequence matching against the extensive database maintained by the SFO has made it possible to produce a tentative transcription of Signal 1142/98 (ref. 1), the ninth MAXO hit confirmed by the IAU. Signal 1142/98 was selected because of its unusually low headerto-content ratio and good redundancy. Further bayesian matching against other MAXO samples indicates a high degree of congruence. Far from being incomprehensibly alien, the MAXO payloads seem to be disma

FUTURES NATURE|Vol 436|25 August 2005

MAXO signals

A new and unfortunate solution to the Fermi paradox.

SIR—In the three years since the publica tion and confirmation of the first micro wave artefact of xenobiological origin

(MAXO), and the subsequent detection of similar signals, interdisciplinary teams have invested substantial effort in object frequency analysis, parsing, symbolic encoding and signal processing. The excitement generated by the availability of such close evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence proximity.

has been enormous. However, after the We have formu initial, easily decoded symbolic represenlated an explana tational map was analysed, the semantics tory hypothesis that of the linguistic payload were found to cultural variables unfa be refractory.

A total of 21 confirmed MAXO signals have been received to date. These super ficially similar signals originate from planetary systems within a range of 11 par secs, median 9.9 parsecs1. It has been spec ulated that the observed growth of the

MAXO horizon at 0.5 c can be explained as a response to one or more of: the deploy ment of AN/FPS-50 and related ballistic missile warning radars in the early 1960s1, television broadcasts11

GHz microwave leakage from ovens2, and optical detection of atmospheric nuclear tests3. All MAXO signals to this date share the common logic header. The payload data are multiply redundant, packetized and exhibit both simple checksums and message-level cryptographic hashing. The ratio of header to payload content varies between 1:1 and 2,644:1 (the latter perhaps indicating a truncated payload1). Some preliminary syntax analysis delivered promising results4 but seems to have foundered on high-level semantics. It has been hypothesized that the transforma tional grammars used in the MAXO pay loads are variable, implying dialectization of the common core synthetic language4.

The new-found ubiquity of MAXO

signals makes the Fermi paradox—now nearly 70 years old—even more pressing.

Posed by Enrico Fermi, the paradox can be paraphrased thus: if the Universe has many technologically advanced civiliza tions, why have none of them directly visited us? The urgency with which orga nizations such as ESA and NASDA are now evaluating proposals for fast interstel lar probes, in conjunction with the exis tence of the MAXO signals, renders the non-appearance of aliens incomprehensi ble, especially given the apparent presence of numerous technological civilizations in miliar to the majority of researchers may account both for the semantic ambiguity of the MAXO payloads, and the non-appearance of aliens. This hypothesis was tested (as described below) and resulted in a plausible translation, on the basis of which we would like to recommend a complete, permanent ban on further attempts to decode or respond to MAXOs.

Our investigation resulted in MAXO payload data being made available to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in Nigeria. Bayesian analysis of payload symbol sequences and sequence matching against the extensive database maintained by the SFO has made it possible to produce a tentative transcription of Signal 1142/98 (ref. 1), the ninth MAXO hit confirmed by the IAU. Signal 1142/98 was selected because of its unusually low headerto-content ratio and good redundancy. Further bayesian matching against other MAXO samples indicates a high degree of congruence. Far from being incomprehensibly alien, the MAXO payloads seem to be disma

—Dash it! Is this gadget turned on, Miss Feng?

—No, I was not enquiring as to its state of sexual arousal, thank you.

—What, it is on, is it? Fascinating! Ahem. Look here, allow me to introduce myself. I’ve only got three hundred of your what-do-you-call-its … seconds … so I shall have to be jolly brisk, what?

—This is a time capsule. I am told it only holds eight megawotsits of data, enough for a brief natter and a G&T. I’m sure your clankie tech chappies can figure it all out: something to do with the chronic entropy barrier, I’m told, otherwise we’d be able to send you a couple of uploads and a God program to eat your brains instead of this deeply tedious message in a bottle.

—(Do I really sound like that? No, don’t tell me, Miss Feng. Just pass the Port.)

—I am Sir Ralph Takahashi, the MacGregor of Clan MacGregor, hereditary patron of Gelnochy distillery, heir to the Takahashi trust in Yokohama, and governor-general of Batley. I come from a long line of upper-class twits; blue blood has flowed in the old family veins for almost four centuries, that being how long it’s been since they bought their titles of nobility. That was back during the aftermath of the Martian Hyperscabies epidemic of 2256—damned bad show that, but it did free up a lot of seats for the likes of my ancestors. (The blue-blooded cyanoglobin hack appears to have been dear old Uncle Tojo’s idea—he thought it would help if we looked the part—but he unaccountably overlooked the small-print in the neurological warranty, for which may he jolly well itch in his coffin for ever.) But I’m rambling, aren’t it? Forthwith, to the point! I’m here to sell the prospect of life in the exciting twenty-eighth century to you chappies, and I don’t have much time left.

—The twenty-eighth century (since when? Something to do with a middle-eastern death cult, wasn’t it? No, don’t tell me …) is a fine and exciting era and welcomes immigrants from all time zones. We’re trying to develop the tech for a return temporal tourist trade as well, but I’m told we won’t succeed for another seventy-six years. If you come from one of those centuries and cultures where English was spoken, you won’t have much trouble communicating with classicists and over-educated upper-class drones like me, ha ha. And the Great Downsizing (I gather some of your more optimistic fellows used to look forward to this event, calling it a Singularity), in conjunction with the discovery of the Spacetime Squirrelizer (which allowed your less optimistic fellows to get away from the Great Downsizing—which is why my side of the family tree is descended exclusively from pessimists) has spread us pretty thin across the galaxy. This means that there are plenty of good employment opportunities for squishy flesh-and-blood types, but bear in mind that some occupations are now entirely traditional clankie preserves—forget trying to get a job cleaning floors unless you’re called Mrs Mopp and people keep asking you about nominative determinism whenever they first meet you. Oh, and forget qualifying as an auto mechanic, astronaut, or accountant. (In general, the A’s are right out unless your circulatory system contains more oil than blood.)

—Alternatively, as long as you remember to take out catastrophic collapse-of-civilization insurance on your blind five hundred year hedge-fund, you should be sitting pretty when your investments mature and they thaw you out and grow you a new body. (Otherwise you might not have a leg to stand on.)

—Things you may be taken aback by in the twenty-eight century? (Yes, Miss Feng, I think I’ll have another top-up … ah, where was I?) Relations of an intimate nature are somewhat confusing to visitors at first, because polite society generally recognizes three gender axes, not the four you’re used to. We have butch/femme, squishie/clankie, and U/non-U. I’m not sure quite why we dropped the old heterodox/orthodox gender split but I gather it had something to do with the craze for nasal penile enhancements a couple of centuries ago—or maybe it was to do with the common cold being reclassified as a sexually transmitted disease? I’m not sure; like matters to do with sex in all ages, it’s deliberately kept unnecessarily confusing by the self-appointed arbiters of polite society. Anyway, moving swiftly onwards, as long as you remember that it is a mortal insult to sneeze in public in the presence of a butch clankie non-U, you’ll be fine.

—Things you will find familiar: we speak English. In fact, our most U aristocracy aspires to the cultural heights achieved by the late pre-Downsizing anglosphere in its richest and most progressive centres of art and philosophy in the mid-twenty first century, Manitoba and Wagga-Wagga. The more U squishie aristocrats have, in fact, preserved the traditional Anglo-American upper crust mores in brine, although the clankie core are mostly descended from Eastern European black-hat hackers, so you’ll find yourself perfectly at home here as long as you use P. G. Wodehouse and Stanislaw Lem as your guidebooks.

—As for why you might want to visit our charming century …

—Dash it all, Miss Feng, what now?

—Oh, only thirty seconds left? They’re not very long, are they?

—Oh, I don’t know why I bother. If the Batley Tourist Board hadn’t leaned on Aunt Agatha the Aggressive to threaten to box my ears if I didn’t do something for the Drowned Yorkshire Reclamation Fund …

—All right then! I will, I will!

—Come to live in the jolly sunny twenty-eighth century. We may be a bit over-insolated, and the Space Patrol may have a bit of a bloody nuisance on their hands with the alien space leeches from Arcturus, but at least we’ve got a Space Patrol, unlike some centuries I could mention, and the leeches don’t invade too often. Immigration is easy—just shoot yourself in the old ticker while sitting on the edge of a bath full of liquid nitrogen, being sure to fall in carefully—and we natives are friendly, as long as you bring a bottle of Tawney Port and a cigar from drowned Havana. You can easily get a job below stairs if you want to rough it, but it’s a great life if you’re re-born rich, and between you and me all you need to do is remember your collapse-of-civilization insurance and invest ten dollars in

(END OF TRANSCRIPT—BUFFER OVERFLOW)

About the Author

Born in Leeds, England, Charles Stross knew he wanted to be a science fiction writer from the age of six, and astonishingly, nobody ever considered therapy until it was too late. He didn’t really get started until his early teens (when his sister loaned him a manual typewriter around the time he was getting heavily into Dungeons and Dragons); the results were unexpected, and he’s been trying to bury them ever since. He made his first commercial for-money sale to Interzone in 1986, and sold about a dozen stories elsewhere throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s before a dip in his writing career. He began writing fiction in earnest again in 1998.

Along the way to his current occupation, he went to university in London and qualified as a Pharmacist. He figured out it was a bad idea the second time the local police staked his shop out for an armed robbery—he’s a slow learner. Sick at heart from drugging people and dodging SWAT teams and gangsters, he went back to university in Bradford and did a postgraduate degree in computer science. After several tech sector jobs in the hinterlands around London, initially in graphics supercomputing and then in the UNIX industry, he emigrated to Edinburgh, Scotland, and switched track into web consultancy and a subsequent dot com death march.

All good things come to an end, and Stross made the critical career error of trying to change jobs early in 2000, just in time for the bottom to drop out of the first dot-com boom. However, he had a parachute: he was writing a monthly Linux column for Computer Shopper, and by a hop, a skip and a jump that would be denounced as implausible by any self-respecting editor, he managed to turn this unemployment into an exciting full time career opportunity as a freelance journalist specialising in Linux and free software. (The adjective “exciting” applies as much to the freelance journalist’s relationship with their bank manager as to their career structure.) Even more implausibly, after fifteen years of abject obscurity, his fiction became an overnight success in the US, with five novel sales and several Hugo nominations in the space of two years.

He now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

This story originally appeared in the Continuum 2006 program book in Australia.

T minus 19 days 8:23 a.m.

For Nigel Frogland, the apocalypse started with a letter.

He stumbled downstairs towards kitchen and coffee percolator, pausing by the door to yawn widely and grab the daily influx of bills and overdrawn bank statements from the letter box. This was an autonomic reflex, as vital to the author as flapping its wings was to a headless chicken; he blinked sleepily at the three envelopes in his hand before staggering into the kitchen to wait for the kettle. Two bills, he thought, but what’s this? Looks like it’s from Victoria … he reached for the bread-knife. Letters from Victoria Bergdorf, his editor, were always worth reading no matter which side they were buttered on.

But he was in for a surprise.

Dear Nigel,

As you are aware, we at Schnickel and Bergdorf have prided ourselves for fifty years on our commitment to fundamental literary values, providing the best service possible to the public and our authors. This is a tradition which we are – we think justifiably – proud of, and intend to continue for the forseeable future.

However, given the recent changes that have taken place in the genre market, specifically the contraction of the midlist under the financial pressure of competing in a modern, thrusting business environment, we have found it necessary to enter a temporary phase of retrenchment. Specifically, the directors have approved the sale of a controlling shareholding in this company to the multinational holding corporation Spart-Dibbler PLC. Pending the resolution of this takeover, we will be unable to commission any more projects from you. This transition period should last for approximately six months; thereafter we will resume buying as usual.

Yours sincerely …

Oh shit! pondered Dave, his stomach churning unpleasantly as he pondered the likely consequences. What if I have to ask for my old job back …?

t minus 19 days 10:14 a.m.

“They’re going to what?” demanded Victoria Bergdorf.

Jonathan Smiddler yawned widely, displaying a coffee-stained tongue. “They’re going to drop half the list,” he repeated tiredly. “They figure if they can put the money together and get one best-seller, it pays better than the whole lot of them. I mean, why not?” He yawned again, looking decidedly hollow-eyed; a common feature to all the survivors of the takeover.

Victoria leaned forward across her desk. “I never thought the bastards had the guts,” she hissed. “Jesus Christ on a crutch – they’re going to put all our writers on the street! They can’t be serious!”

Jonathan leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “But they are. Blame the accounts department – there’s more profit in one best-seller than in a dozen small titles. People don’t read any more, or they read what they see advertised on television, right? Jeffrey Archer, Isaac Asimov. We’re competing with other media, Victoria, that’s what Spart-Dibbler’s accountants are on about. And if we can’t make as much profit as satellite television, we’re gonna get it in the neck.”

Victoria shook her head. “I’ve been in this trade for twenty years,” she said; “and my father before me for thirty more …” Jonathan leaned back tiredly.

“So have I,” he reminded her. “That’s why you put me in charge of the horror list, isn’t it? Look, if the cash-flow had been any better … “

“It’s no good,” she said, gazing at the wall of books behind him; the wall of novels she had personally brought to market, making her personal impact on the history of English literature … “we can’t live on maybes. We’ve got to do something! There must be some way we can increase our readership to the point where we won’t have to drop the small guys! Why else did we accept the buy-out offer? We needed capital to get out of the cash-flow crunch, but I’m damned if I’m going to let them throw out the baby to make room for the dirty bathwater!”

Jonathan gulped down a last mouthful of lukewarm coffee. “There might be a way,” he said, “if you apply lateral thinking to the problem. I mean we’re one of the foremost genre publishers left in the market, aren’t we? And people will read our stuff – or they would, if they weren’t watching EastEnders and Dallasty instead. So we’ve – “ he gestured broadly, his shirt bulging – “we’ve got to recapture the market. We’ve got capital; so why not use it? We can maximize our readership without selling out or buying cruddy hackwork. There’s got to be a way to apply leverage …”

Victoria looked back at him, her eyes narrowing. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

“I’d have thought it’s simple,” he said, “once you begin to think the unthinkable. Our problem is that we’ve got too much competition. So … “ he shrugged, pausing for effect; it was a shame that the gesture could best be described as a cringe.

“So what?” she asked, irritated.

“We put a bomb behind the midlist,” he said, smirking at his own cleverness. “I’ve been talking to some of the boys, and it looks like there might be an alternate option. I mean, our SF types used to do some interesting things before they went full-time, didn’t they? You remember what Dave Frogland used to do for a living before he came to us? I’ve got an idea for a special promotion we can sell to the accountants. And you want to know something else? It’s original.”

t minus 18 days 1:13 a.m.

For Lydia Little the apocalypse began with a phone call.

She was sitting at her desk polishing her glasses, wondering if she could afford to buy a new word processor to replace her geriatric Amstrad, when the phone rang. Cursing softly at being called back from avoiding her current master-work – a softly chilling tale of childhood terror and adult neuroses – she scrambled down the rickety staircase and made for the phone. “Yes?” she demanded; “who is it?”

“It’s me, Lydia,” said the voice at the other end. Instantly her attitude softened, for the voice belonged to none other than Sonia Black, her agent. “How are you?”

“I’m, uh, fine,” said Lydia, taking stock. “Novel’s coming along, uh, okay … and you?”

“I’m – okay, I guess.” Sonia gave a short laugh and Lydia instantly tensed herself for bad news. “I’m ringing about Victoria Bergdorf, I’m afraid. You heard about the takeover?”

“Oh shit,” muttered Lydia. More loudly; “yes, I have. What about it?”

“Well,” Sonia said, obviously prevaricating; “it’s about the input from Spart-Dibbler, the purchasers. They’re re-assessing the Schnickel and Bergdorf lists for commercial prospects, and … “ her voice dropped an octave … “frankly, they’re not nice. They’re vetting their authors with the aid of the Economic League – you know, for subversion potential and profit allergies – and I don’t know if they’re still going to want your stuff afterwards. I mean, hauntingly delicate tales of fantasy or horror from a strongly feminist, left-wing American emigre writer are not quite what the best-seller list is made of, so –”

“You mean I’m fucked,” said Lydia matter-of-factly.

“Well, not quite. There’s always the small press, and with your connections – I mean after your time in Morocco – you’ve got quite a substantial translation market among radical feminist circles in the Middle East – “

“ – Where they aren’t parties to any of the international copyright agreements,” Lydia interrupted. “Look, Sonia, I know this is not going to do you a world of good either, but do you realise what this means for me?” She paused to shift her grip on the mouthpiece, hands shaking with pent-up tension. “This is the end! We’ve got to do something or it’ll be the death of literature as we know it!”

There was a long silence at the other end of the line, then Sonia cleared her throat. “Uh, there is one thing you could do,” she suggested. “Now, I’ve heard rumours … and I don’t want to be involved. But apparently Johnny Smiddler has got some kind of scheme he needs help with, some kind of book-promotion exercise. He’s trying to get funding from the Spart-Dibbler accountants right now, and if it works, he’s going to need someone to go to Morocco. Buying an unusual commodity, as it were, strictly sub rosa. I’m sure he’d be willing to pay your expenses, and if it works things are going to look very good for you, very good indeed.” Something in her tone warned Lydia that she wasn’t being entirely candid, but she realised she didn’t care; it was her world that Spart-Dibbler were threatening to deconstruct, and she suddenly knew that she was willing to do anything … even commit acts of premeditated hackwork … in order to hold it together.

“Come on, Sonia,” she said; “what is it? Why won’t you tell me?”

Sonia cleared her throat again. “Uh … I don’t think it’s wise to talk on the phone,” she said. “You’d better have lunch with Jonathan – I’m sure he’d be very interested if you give him a bell this morning, he’ll fill you in on what it is he needs.”

“Uh, okay, I’ll do that,” Lydia said. “Thanks for the tip.”

“Oh, and one other thing, Lydia.”

“Yes?”

“I’d forget that new word processor for a while. In fact, I think it would be a good idea if you bought the heaviest manual typewriter you can find. If Johnny’s idea comes off, that would be a very good idea. Because there won’t be any more word processors for a while … “

t minus 17 days 1:32 a.m.

The accountants, thought Jonathan, were grey and colourless; but there was nothing mousy about them. Rather, they resembled menacing gun-metal sharks, smoothly polished engines of corporate destruction wrapped in pin-striped suits and white shirts and filofaxes, armoured in spectacles and ignorance as they prepared to dismember the mortally injured remains of the once proud heraldic beast of publishing.

“Well, mister Smiddler,” the younger of the two said with an elegant smile; “and what is the goal of this proposed marketing exercise of yours?” Her pearly row of teeth would not have been out of place in a tigershark’s gleaming gape; her older comrade simply sat there impassively.

“Market explo – expansion,” he replied unsteadily. “Basically, we think that our midlist authors haven’t been getting the blast they deserve in order to be as successful as they could be. But, what’s worse, our market has been eroded seriously by competition from other media over the past thirty years; principally television and other forms of electronic media. This has led to a tendency to concentrate on known, safe best-sellers who will show a steady profit, at the risk of ignoring the midlist authors who might be tomorrows giants, but who are being squeezed out of the market today.”

The older accountant nodded, a glazed expression on his face. His younger colleague smiled grimly. “The profit margins are, shall we say, marginal?” she suggested. “Frankly, the idea of a five million pound promotion aimed at virtual unknowns is preposterous; we could buy two Robert Ludlum’s for that! Surveys have shown that advertising doesn’t work effectively on commodities with no brand-name identity, which is the main handicap of your midlist. They have a couple of thousand dedicated readers, no more … it’s just not good enough. You’ll have to do better.”

Jonathan didn’t let her hostility faze him. He smiled broadly. “But I am,” he said. “This is no ordinary promotion! If this one works, the market for books will explode – every one of those authors will be turning a hundred thousand a year in profit within three months if we go ahead!”

Suddenly the older accountant sat up stiffly, all traces of inattention fading from his face. “Did somebody mention profits?” he croaked.

Jonathan nodded very seriously. “You say the product lacks brand-name identity,” he said, “so I’ve come up with a campaign that lacks brand-name identity too! An anonymous, five-million pound project to blow up – er, increase – book sales in the UK by over a thousand percent!”

The younger accountant leaned forward intently, eyes shining with something remotely approaching lust. “You’ll have to be more specific, Mister Smiddler,” she purred. “We obviously can’t release liquidity for a high-risk, non-specific project without a better idea of what they’re going to be investing in, yah?” But, Jonathan saw, she was already fiddling with the binding on her filofax, revealing naked, crisp sheets of paper within, vulnerable to the intimate scribbling of her pen; he had a captive audience.

“It’s like this,” he began. “Do either of you know anything about the consequences of ElectroMagnetic Pulse?”

t minus 17 days 4:10 p.m.

For Dave Greenberg, the apocalypse arrived with a ballistic missile.

It wasn’t like this working for NASA, he thought angrily as the overloaded graphics workstation crashed for the third time that morning. Assorted runic sentences crept up the screen as the computer began the lengthy reboot sequence; why can’t I just jack this job in and write full-time? he wondered. But the answer was clear. For one thing, there wasn’t a big enough market for his hard-SF novels – at least not on this side of the Atlantic – and for another: well, Dave enjoyed designing rocket motors.

He looked around the dingy lab and shook his head. but not in these conditions! If only Imperial College could afford to equip him effectively, they’d see what a limey space program could do! But no … all he had was a computer simulation of the Real Thing, running on a wobbly computer that crashed regularly under the unbearable workload of tying its own cybernetic shoelances. And, oh yes, a lab with whitewashed breeze-block walls in an annex they’d built off a Portakabin. Gaah, he thought disgustedly as the computer gurgled feebly to itself and reported on the status of an assortment of cryptic daemons. Why did I ever jack in that job with Hughes Aerospace? Whatever posessed me to stop writing about space-travelling dolphins and come and work here? Why did I –

The phone rang.

“External call,” said the switchboard operator; “connecting you now – “

“Hello?”

“Hello?” echoed Dave.

“Dave! Good to speak to you! It’s Jonathan Smiddler here, from Schnickel and Bergdorf. Am I interrupting anything, or can I have a moment of your time ..?”

What the hell? thought Dave. He glanced at the screen, where the workstation had just about remembered who it was and what it was meant to be doing. “Sure,” he said; “I’m not busy. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m okay,” said Jonathan, with a note of almost plaintive earnestness. “I’m wonderful! In fact, everything’s hunky-dory – “

“But haven’t you just been bought out by Spart-Dibbler?” asked Dave. “I mean, aren’t they – “ he swallowed – “going to axe everyone who doesn’t turn over fifty thousand trade copies per novel or something?”

“Well … “ Jonathan said nervously, “I was wanting to talk to you about that. You see, we’ve decided we’re going to launch a new promotion for our midlist, people like yourself, and we’ve got this colossal budget arranged! I mean, this has never been done before – uh no, it has been done,” he correct himself; “but only twice, in Japan.”

“When was that?” demanded Dave. Suddenly he felt his spine go very cold and shivery. Jesus, he thought; the rumours are true …?

“Oh, around the end of the last war. It didn’t catch on, luckily, but we think we’ve got an application for this kind of publicity stunt: a harmless one, I hasten to add! But the thing is, we want to organise a firework display for the launch, and we were wondering if you could come up with something substantial; around the throw-weight of a V-2, for example, capable of lifting a hundred kilograms to an altitude of about eighty nautical miles … “

Dave blanked, switching to professional mode. “Can do,” he said; “as a matter of fact, I’m working on the design for something of the kind right now. It’ll cost you, but if we buy the parts second hand it shouldn’t be too much. I happen to know the Imperial War Museum is selling off their collection of V-2’s …”

“Great! Say, would you be able to meet me for lunch this afternoon? We could maybe discuss funding for it. Would you be able to build it part time, or ..?”

“No problem,” said Dave, relaxing and suddenly realising that for the first time that week he was smiling. “I’m your man, Johnny! As we used to say at the Cape – you just got a green bird!”

t minus 16 days 3:20 p.m.

“I’m willing to concede,” said the junior accountant, “that the profit-making potential of this venture is worth looking into. But, Mister Smiddler, there a few side-issues which frankly require closer scrutiny before we clear funding for your project. Your bona-fides are adequate – we wouldn’t for a moment accuse you of being linked with any terrorist organisation, not even the New York Review of Books – but don’t you think it’s just a little bit dangerous to start throwing around promotional firecrackers like that? Even if they do shut down every television station and video player in the south of England for the next three years?” Her elderly colleague nodded, then began to snore quietly.

Jonathan stared her down. “Of course,” he said: “but we’re not fools! The firecracker is going to go off at an altitude of about eighty nautical miles; all the fallout drifts out across the Atlantic before it precipitates. A few cod get radiation poisoning: small fry. We do it on an overcast night so nobody is looking up, and the flash is attenuated by the clouds. Look, my team – “ he paused to look out of the window at the misty West End roadscape as the London traffic geared up for another morning of gridlock lunacy – “my team are professionals. They know what’s at stake, they’re highly motivated, and they know what they’re doing! Dave – Dave used to built warheads for Polaris missiles, did you know that? Lydia spent a lot of time in the Middle East; she’s got contacts on the buying side. We’ve got – hell, we’ve got Dave Greenberg, for God’s sake, the man who redesigned the Space Shuttle SRB’s after the Challenger disaster and won a Nebula for the novelisation! Chris Bishop, who runs a software company with Dave Frogland on the side, has volunteered to program the guidance computers. These people are science fiction writers, you know!”

“Subversives and deviants,” she corrected him, smiling toothily.

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Yes, but they’re useful to you!” he said. “There’s a convergence of interests, don’t you see? A mutual interest in relieving Joe and Jill Public of that painful bulge in their wallets. Can’t you work with them in the interest of the holy dollar?”

“Humm … “ snored the senior accountant.

“But what about the possible consequences?” asked the junior. For a moment Jonathan thought she looked slightly worried, but she carried on speaking: “the potential for us to be sued is staggering! And what if we accidentally trigger off an all-out East-West thermonuclear superpower confrontation scenario? That might significantly diminish our profit–to-earnings ratio in the longer term.”

Jonathan sat up and made a steeple of his fingers. “That’s unlikely,” he said. “Firstly it won’t show up on the annual trading balance sheets, so you don’t need to worry your little head about it: there’s no accounting risk. Secondly, I’ve had a crack team of cyberpunks looking into the long-term prognosis for the past fortnight, just in case there are real world side effects. They’re unanimous; the Americans won’t stick their neck on the block for the British, and the Russians couldn’t afford to. Anyway, the British nuclear deterrent is nothing to do with the East-West confrontation, it’s to do with the French. CND found it out years ago, just before MI-5 leaked it on Yes Minister. We’ve been at war with the French for seven centuries out of the past thousand years, and they’ve got the Bomb too: so if Whitehall gets the idea that war’s broken out they’ll probably just nuke Paris.”

“And what then?” she asked.

“Oh, I suppose the French will drop three megatons on Edinburgh and that will be that.”

“Why Edinburgh?” asked the senior accountant, briefly waking up. “Wouldn’t London be more likely?”

Jonathan sighed. “Yes, but Edinburgh is the cultural capital of the nation. The French are so much more realistic about these things than we are.”

“Right. And this campaign is aimed at the affluent south, where there’s a greater likely take-up on book sales, yah?” nodded the junior accountant. “Which wouldn’t be inhibited even by a low-yield trans-Manche thermonuclear midi-power confrontation! That’s wonderful!” She shut her filofax – which bulged with the post-coital scribblings of a fiscal orgy – and smiled sweetly. “That’s wonderful thinking! So seductively profitable!”

“Are you going to clear the funds?” he asked.

She nodded. “We’re going to look into it, yah. It’s – “ her tongue crept out from between her teeth, pink and pointy and not, as Jonathan had half-suspected, bifurcated – “it’s delicious! Yah, I shall have to put it to the board myself, this afternoon!” She stood up and held out her hand; her elderly colleague slumped in the leather chair beside her, snoring softly. Jonathan found himself having his hand pumped vigorously, almost suggestively; she smiled at him alluringly. “Would you care to discuss this further over dinner at Stringfellows tomorrow night?” she asked, batting her eyelids and fingering the lapel of his tweed sports jacket suggestively. “I’d like to, you know. I’m sure further discussions would be mutually … profitable.”

t minus 10 days 11:15 a.m.

The heat in the airport arrival hall was oppressive, like stepping into a giant oven. Lydia slumped slightly, but forced herself to walk towards the doors, past the moustachio’d security guards with their fingers on the trigger. Near the exit, a short man in a cream silk suit was holding up a placard; LYDIA SHORT, it spelt. She made a beeline for him.

“You’re Abdul?” she asked. “I’m Lydia Little.”

“Delighted to meet you.” He smiled behind his dark glasses. “Please come this way?”

There was a Mercedes, waiting for them among the battered taxis with its engine and air–conditioning running. The driver held the door open for Abdul, who got in first. Then they moved off.

“So you are serious about wanting this commodity, Miss Little,” Abdul commented. He lay back in his seat and seemed to close his eyes, but in the shadowy interior of the car Lydia couldn’t be sure. She felt her pulse running fast.

“Yes,” she said. “My sponsors were quite … explicit about what they want. I have a test kit; we can arrange a mutual exchange as soon as you have the consignment.”

“The money?”

“Deposited in a numbered account in Lichtenstein. We can give you a pass to verify this; the withdrawl codes follow when we’ve assayed the product for purity.”

“Ah, Miss Little.” Abdul smiled thinly. “Such suspicion!”

She shrugged, uncomfortable in her business suit. “What do you expect?” she asked. “If the Mossad were to get wind, they might sell the idea to one of our rival publishing houses …”

Abdul shook his head. “It is a poor age,” he said, “when the work of poets must be sold at the muzzle of a gun.”

Lydia sighed. “Look, let’s just get this over with,” she said. “Show me the commodity and I’ll show you the colour of our money. Then we’ll see if we have a deal.”

Adbul nodded. “We shall see … “

t minus 9 days 11:21 p.m.

Jonathan thought that Stringfellows was overcrowded and over–rated, but that didn’t stop him. Esme, as his accountant called herself when off–duty, sparkled in the company of livewire spending power; she was a creature evolved to swim in a sea of money, he concluded, a woman who in past ages would have been content to be the mistress of a very rich man but who now expected to earn it all by herself. She bubbled with champagne and chattered happily with him about work and other things; about cars—hers was a BMW – and mortgages and music and expense accounts. “It’s criminal what the government is doing to free enterprise, don’t you think?” she asked. “Keeping control of all those nationalised industries!”

“Um, yes,” said Jonathan. “But who’d buy them? I mean, who’d want shares in the Ministry of Ag and Fish?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said with ebulient tenacity. “If you can make a profit out of Sunflowers, what about rape seed oil? All we need is a financial Van Gogh, to show the Tories the errors of their protectionist ways!”

“Let’s dance,” suggested Jonathan, who would rather do anything other than dance, except listen to this voodoo economics. “When it’s all over I’m going to write a book about it.”

“That’s lovely,” she smiled. “Do you suppose it could be a best-seller?”

Jonathan grinned. “All books will be best-sellers,” he said, rising to the occasion. But later that night, lying in her bed and in her double-entry book–keeping system – which had nothing to do with money, but everything to do with pubic scalps – he lay awake for a long time, meditating. Money, it seemed, could be a potent aphrodisiac. And what did that suggest about the future of romance? Perhaps a new genre was in the offing, offering fulfillment to millions of underpaid women who would give anything to be in Esme’s office, if not her lingerie.

Esme rolled over and fetched up against his flank. He yawned. “Mmm,” she said. “Mmm … “

“Mm?” he hummed, distracted from his meditation.

“Mm … mmm … money,” she breathed.

t minus 7 days 10:04 a.m.

The manuscript-sized parcel arrived at the London offices of Schnickel and Bergdorf by registered post, landing on the slush pile with the dull thud of another leaden trilogy. The bored secretary broke off updating her desk diary to pick it up and thrust it under the makeshift scintillation counter that Nigel Frogland had set up in the office the previous afternoon: when it began to buzz her jaw dropped and she nearly spilt her coffee.

“Miss Bergdorf,” she gasped into the phone; “you’ve got to come! It’s arrived! The, the first consignment!”

“Hold on until I get there,” Victoria commanded crisply, putting the phone down. She looked up and glanced round. “Where’s Jonathan?” she demanded. “Bloody hell!” She stood up with all the weight of her forty-nine years and headed for the door. “Trouble as usual,” she muttered tiredly.

She reached the reception desk just as Jonathan was arriving. She checked her watch; “where’ve you been?” she snapped.

“Getting into our accountants good books,” he said, tiredly. “Is something the matter?”

“Yes,” she said, pointing at the package. “It’s arrived! Take it away! Get it out of here at once!”

“Oh,” he mumbled. “Is that it?”

“It’s radioactive!” gibbered the secretary, who was trying to occupy the farthest volume of the office from the offending parcel.

“Right,” he said, reaching over and taking it. “I’ll get it to the team right now, hey?”

“You do that,” said Victoria. “And don’t come back until it’s ready!”

“Roger,” he said, saluting with a kilogram of plutonium. “I’ll do my best … “

t minus 5 days 6:12 p.m.

The crack accountancy team who were gathered in the conference suite to listen to the boffins had an air of quiet expectation about them. The boffins, for their part, were jittery with a mixture of anticipation and too much caffeine. It was left to Jonathan to kick off the briefing session.

“Right,” he said; “you all know why we’re here, you’ve all been told what the project consists of … now shall we run through the specifics? Dave, if you’d like to kick off?”

“What? Oh.” Dave fiddled with his hearing aid. “Yes, now as I was saying … building a bomb is child’s play; the difficult part is getting the EMP right. That’s electromagnetic pulse, knocks out electronics everywhere, very messy. Hmm.” He smiled vaguely .. “The higher up we detonate the device, the better. Modern consumer goods – videos, televisions – are bloody vulnerable. At eighty miles, the whole of Greater London and a fair chunk of the south-east is going to be reduced to thirties technology, with virtually no loss of life. Sod-all fallout too, if we do it right. That’s all.”

Jonathan cleared his throat. “Right. Dave?”

Dave grinned widely and sat on the edge of the table; he fiddled with a gadget and a slide projector flickered on, pasting the schematic of a rather odd-looking missile across the wall behind him. “Hi, everyone, it’s really great to be here,” he said. “Yes, I’ve got nothing but the best for you! Rocket motors from Morton-Thiokol – left over from the Minuteman program – nose cone stolen from the Imperial War Museum’s V-2. Software programmed by our very own system’s house; this bird will fly!” He emphasized the point with zooming motions of his hands and finished it by rubbing his bald patch and smiling. “You bet!” There was a pop as the projector bulb burned out.

“Thanks, Dave,” said Jonathan. “Now the financial prognosis … Julian?”

One of the accountants stood up and cleared his throat nervously. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we can see that this estimable scheme has considerable profit-generating potential, except in the insurance field … for which purpose we intend to attribute it to the Butlerian Jihad Organisation.” His cheek twitched. “There are unfortunate overheads – buying of hot-lead typesetting machines, manual typewriters and plutonium – but these are in hand and are trivial compared to the other possibilities. Do you realise that there are more than a million video recorders in the Greater London area?” His eyes glistened with enthusiasm. “We must strike while the fallout is hot – we must launch takeovers for the Amstrad and Sony corporations at once! While there is no television we will sell books in huge numbers; then we will sell televisions and videos instead of books … and finally we can drop another bomb and restart the cycle!”

Dave tried to catch Dave’s eye during the ensuing grumble of applause from the accountants, but Dave was nodding vigorously and contemplating the inner landscape of quasi-harmonic consumer growth patterns that he’d been designing for his next space opera. Despairing, Dave turned his attention back to the podium.

“Good,” said Jonathan. “So we’re agreed it’s a workable idea in principle?”

“Yah,” said Esme, who, sitting at the back of the room, was keeping careful note of how her new subordinates were behaving. Her smile sparkled like perrier water. “The board has given it the go-ahead and I agree. Forward to a bright new age of limited nuclear destruction and higher publishing profits!”

The accountants stood and saluted as one. Dave finally caught Jonathan’s eye and shook his head; Jonathan froze, then looked faintly guilty.

“Over here,” Dave hissed. Together they left the room.

“What is it?” asked the editor as they stood outside in the plush corridor of the Spart-Dibbler offices.

Dave breathed deeply. “Haven’t you ever thought that there might be something faintly wrong about all this?” he asked. “I mean, zapping every television in the Thames area … “

Jonathan shrugged. “Serves them right for not buying our books in the first place,” he said. “What is it? Lost your nerve?”

Dave shrugged. “Nah, it’s not that,” he said. “It’s them. The accountants. I mean, once they get the idea they can make cash from nukes, what are they going to do next? Bomb the Vatican so they can make money selling holy relics that glow in the dark? Look, books mean nothing to these people. They’re just a route to more money. If they realise that they can do without us they’ll ditch the publishing trade without a second thought and carry on regardless. So what can we do?”

Jonathan considered for a moment. “Get drunk,” he suggested. “Then think about it. Maybe we should see if Dave can come up with something.”

“Right, chum,” said Dave. “You’re on. Care for a jar?”

t minus 0.05 hours 02:00 a.m.

London at two in the morning was a strange and beautiful organism layed out at their feet; like a fractal snapshot of sodium-lit hell, an author’s hallucinatory hopes for future royalty payments. Lydia shivered. “Well?” she asked.

“Soon,” said Victoria Bergdorf. “Soon. Let’s just wait for the accountants to arrive.”

“Fine,” said Dave, standing close to the edge. He peered over the parapet of the building; a gargoyle shaped like a parrot seemed to leer back at him, and wink.

The fire door opened and Dave stepped out. “Hi there,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve just checked with the launch computer and everything’s hunky–dory!”

“Uh-huh,” said Victoria. She shook her head regretfully. “I wish it hadn’t come to this, you know.”

“It was inevitable,” said Lydia. “Uh, what else could we do?”

Victoria gazed into darkness. “How long?” she asked tensely.

“Three minutes,” said Dave. He sat down on the safety railing and began to whistle quietly. “Launch window in three minutes, folks. Just dig the fireworks!”

“You’ve secured the plute?” asked Dave, quietly.

Dave nodded. “Somewhere safe,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. And the fuel.”

“Where are they gonna watch it from?” asked Lydia.

Jonathan arrived, panting breathlessly. “Hi, folks,” he said. “Boy, did I have problems getting away from that meeting!”

“They wanted you to watch with them?” asked Victoria.

He nodded. “Esme was rather insistent, but I got away eventually. They’ll be watching it from the S-D office block roof, as scheduled. At least that’s where I left them half an hour ago.”

“Two minutes,” intoned Dave: “this is one giant leap for publishing-kind, one small step for offset-web lithography … “

Victoria yawned. “Did you find a buyer?” she asked Jonathan.

He nodded. “Yeah. Those thugs we bought it from didn’t have a clue how much plute is worth! I found a buyer, okay. If this works we’ll be set up for life; we’ll make the Great Train Robbers look like second–rate pick-pockets.”

“One minute,” said Dave. They fell silent, listening to the beat of some cosmic heart, waiting for the timer-driven missile launcher in a derelict warehouse to torch off, lofting three tons of solid-fuel boosters and sinister warhead into the night–time sky over London –

“Is that it?” asked Lydia, pointing; “I hope you got the guidance parameters right!”

“No problems,” said Dave, absent-mindedly tapping his hearing aid. The fiery streak rising from the far horizon seemed ominously close, almost near enough for them to reach out and touch; then the fire died as the warhead vanished into the cloud base.

“Twenty seconds,” said Dave. “Who did you sell it to?”

Jonathan shrugged. “It was kind of difficult to figure out anyone I’d trust with it,” he said. “Hey, look – “

They looked.

Across the city a meteor was falling, glowing white with the friction of its passage; a futuristic bullet fired with the imagination of a group of threatened writers, falling towards an encounter with –

BANG

“Jesus Christ,” said Dave. “I hope the cleaners had time to get out.”

They watched in silence as, on the other bank of the Thames, the walls of the Spart-Dibbler building bulged outwards as if under the impact of some ghostly hammer; the mirrorglass flanks distorted strangely before they burst apart, showering the nearly-deserted street below with the wreckage of the accountants nuclear dream.

Victoria shook her head. “I wonder what would have happened if it had worked?” she said. “I mean, if book sales really had taken off … “

“Don’t,” said Dave. “This way we get to keep the money with a clean conscience.”

“Bravo,” said Dave, clapping. Lydia turned her back on him, rudely; he could be very crass at times, applauding his own ingenuity.

“It’s still not right,” she said. “I mean, what now ..?”

“We go back to being poverty stricken publishing people, I hope,” said Victoria. “But one thing still puzzles me,” she added. “Jonathan. Just who did you sell the plute to after you stripped out the warhead?”

He smiled widely. “A very small record company …”

First published: Farpoint, 1992

Version History

If you modify this text, please retain this version history.

Ver 1.5—30/7/2003—Anarchy Publications, HaVoK—This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.

PREAMBLE TO THE MINUTES OF THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, 2016

Greetings from the National Executive.

Before reading any further, please refer to the Security Note and ensure that your receipt and use of this document is in compliance with Party security policies. If you have any doubts at all, burn this document immediately.

——

SECURITY NOTE

——

This is an official Labour Party Document. Possession of all such documents is a specific offense under (2)(2)(f) of the Terrorism Act (2006). Amendments passed by the current government using the powers granted in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (2006) have raised the minimum penalty for possession to 10 years imprisonment. In addition, persons suspected of membership of or sympathy for the Labour Party are liable for arrest and sentencing as subversives under the Defence of the Realm Act (2014).

You must destroy this document immediately, for your own safety, if:

You have any cause to suspect that a neighbour or member of your household may be an informer,

You have come into possession of this document via a suspect source, or if your copy of this document exhibits signs of having been printed on any type of computer printer or photocopier, or if you received this document in a public place that might be overseen by cameras, or if it may have been transmitted via electronic means.

The Party would be grateful if you can reproduce and distribute this document to sympathizers and members. Use only a typewriter, embossing print set, mimeograph, or photographic film to distribute this document. Paper should be purchased anonymously and microwaved for at least 30 seconds prior to use to destroy RFID tags. Do not, under any circumstances, enter or copy the text in a computer, word processor, photocopier, scanner, mobile phone, or digital camera. This is for your personal safety.

——

MINUTES OF THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, 2016

1. Apologies for absence were made on behalf of the following:

Deputy Leader, Hillary Benn (executed by junta) Government, Douglas Alexander (executed by junta)

Government, Kate Hoey (detained, Dartmoor concentration camp)

EPLP Leader, Mohammed Sarwar (executed by junta)

Young Labour, Judy Mallaber (detained, Dartmoor concentration camp: show trial announced by junta)

…

2. Motions from the national executive:

1) In the light of the government’s use of its powers of extradition under the US/UK Extradition Treaty (2005), and their demonstrated willingness to lie to the rest of the world about their treatment of extradited dissidents, it is no longer safe to maintain a public list of shadow ministers and party officers. With the exception of the offices of Party Spokesperson and designated Party Security Spokesperson, it is moved that:

Open election of members of the National Executive shall be suspended,

Publication of the names and identities of members of the National Executive shall be suspended,

The National Executive will continue to function on a provisional basis making ad-hoc appointments by internal majority vote to replace members as they retire, are forced into exile, or are murdered by the junta;

From now until the end of the State of Emergency and the removal of the current government, at which time an extraordinary Party Conference shall be held to publicly elect a peacetime National Executive.

(Carried unanimously.) 2) In view of the current government’s:

suspension of the Human Rights Act (1998), Race Relations Act (2000), and other Acts,

abrogation of the Treaty of Europe and secession from the European Union,

amendment via administrative order of other Acts of Parliament (including the reintroduction of capital punishment),

effective criminalization of political opposition by proscribing opposition parties as “organisations that promote terrorism” under the terms of the Terrorism Act (2000),

establishment of concentration camps and deportation facilities for ethnic minorities, political dissidents, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered citizens, and others,

deployment of riot police and informal militias against peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins, with concomitant loss of life,

and their effective termination of the democratic processes by which the United Kingdom has historically been governed,

We find, with reluctance, that no avenue of peaceful dissent remains open to us. We are therefore faced with a choice between accepting defeat, and continuing the struggle for freedom and democracy by other means. We shall not submit to the dictatorship of the current government, and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom. The government has interpreted the peacefulness of the movement as weakness; our non-violent policies have been taken as a green light for government violence. Refusal to resort to force has been interpreted by the government as an invitation to use armed force against the people without any fear of reprisals.

It is therefore moved that:

A National Resistance Movement is created. The Movement will seek to achieve liberation without bloodshed or violence if possible. We hope—even at this late moment—that the government will come to its senses and permit a free and fair general election to be held in which parties representing all ideologies will be permitted to stand for election. But we will defend our supporters and the oppressed against military rule, racist tyranny, and totalitarianism, and we will not fliinch from using any tool in pursuit of this goal.

The Movement will work to achieve the political goals of the Labour Party during the state of emergency, and will cooperate willingly with other organizations upon the basis of shared goals.

The Movement will actively attack the instruments of state terror and coercion, including functionaries of the government who enforce unjust and oppressive laws against the people.

At the cessation of the struggle, a National Peace and Reconciliation Commission shall be established and an amnesty granted to members of the Movement for actions taken in the pursuit of legitimate orders.

In these actions, we are working in the best interests of all the people of this country—of every ethnicity, gender, and class—whose future happiness and well-being cannot be attained without the overthrow of the Fascist government, the abolition of white supremacy and the winning of liberty, democracy and full national rights and equality for all the people of this country.

(Carried 25/0, 3 abstentions)

3) All Party members who are physically and mentally fit to withstand the rigours of the struggle are encouraged to organize themselves in cells of 36 individuals, to establish lines of communication (subject to the Party security policies), and to place themselves at the disposal of the National Resistance Movement. Party members who are unable to serve may still provide aid, shelter, and funds for those who fight in our defence.

(Carried unanimously)

3. Motions from the floor

The party recognizes that that our own legislative program of the late 1990s and early 2000s established the framework for repression which is now being used to ruthlessly suppress dissent. We recognize that our neglect of the machinery of public choice in favour of the pursuit of corporatist collaborations permitted the decay of local and parliamentary democracy that allowed the British National Party to seize power with the support of no more than 22% of the electorate. We are therefore compelled to admit our responsibility. We created this situation; we must therefore repair it.

Never again shall the Labour Party place national security ahead of individual freedoms and human rights in its legislative program. It is therefore moved that the following quotation from Benjamin Franklin be inserted between Clause Three and the current Clause Four of the Party Constitution:

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

(Carried 16/12) …

(END)B

It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing—and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped.

Gregor, in Washington DC, knows but isn’t talking. Colonel-General Gagarin, on a years-long mission to go where New Soviet Man has not gone before, is going to find out. And on the edge of an ancient desert, beneath the aged stars of another galaxy, Maddy is about to come face-to-face with humanity’s worst fear …

From Booklist:

“With the dazzling success of his last two novels, including the Hugo-nominated Accelerando (2005), Stross is rapidly establishing himself as one of the preeminent masters of hard sf. Here he takes a breather from weightier fare with a bizarre, nevertheless brilliant alternate-history novella featuring a protracted U.S.-Soviet cold war … Once again, Stross sets the bar high for his colleagues, should they be feeling competitive, in this mind-bending, intriguing yarn.”

From Publishers Weekly:

“The result is a blend of 1900s H.G. Wells and 1970s propaganda, updated for the 21st century in the clear, chilly and fashionably cynical style that lets Stross get away with premises that would be absurdly cheesy in anyone else’s hands.”

From Green Man Review:

“There are some pretty creepy moments here including one that remminded me of the Cthulhu mythos. Or possibly the Pod People. Really. Truly. And the ending was a proper surprise, as I wasn’t sure how Stross would wrap it up. Indeed that’s the gold standard for good storytelling for me—interesting characters in a plausibe setting (no how farfetched it seems at first glance) with an ending that I wasn’t expecting. Bravo Stross!”

Chapter One: Bomb scare

Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.

A stoop-shouldered forty-something male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first: the birds hold his attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale bread-crumbs. Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn’t smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread, is a deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to the human condition, he ponders. It’s all a matter of limited resources and critical positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air raid sirens start up.

The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It’s not just one siren, and not just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path towards him, waving one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”

Gregor turns and presents his identity card. “Where is the nearest shelter?”

The constable points towards a public convenience thirty yards away. “The basement there. If you can’t make it inside, you’ll have to take cover behind the east wall–if you’re caught in the open, just duck and cover in the nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a reply. Shaking his head, he walks towards the public toilet and goes inside.

It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. “Three minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly the ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.

A double-bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: A couple of oafish gardeners sit on the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. “Bloody nuisance, eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s direction.

Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small-talk, verbal primate grooming: “Does it happen often?”

The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists. Taking in the copy of The Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie he’ll have realized what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?”

“I am here in this bunker with you,” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down on the bench opposite the businessman gingerly. “Cigarette?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic peace-offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for world war four, or just a trailer.

A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all-clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out, I say!”

Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread-crumbs and ferry the contents of his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested, and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.

Chapter Two: Voyage

It’s a moonless night and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the reddish-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.

Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness stalked the heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres bleeped and hummed their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi, astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German accents were going to the moon. October 2, 1962: that’s when it all changed. That’s when life stopped making sense. (Of course it first stopped making sense a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but there was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship–Khrushchev’s shoe banging on the table at the UN as he shouted “we will bury you!”–and the flat earth daydream that followed, shattering history and plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist geography.)

But back to the here-and-now: she’s sitting on the deck of an elderly ocean liner on her way from somewhere to nowhere, and she’s annoyed because Bob is getting drunk with the F-deck boys again and eating into their precious grubstake. It’s too dark to read the ship’s daily news sheet (mimeographed blurry headlines from a world already fading into the ship’s wake), it’ll be at least two weeks before their next landfall (a refueling depot somewhere in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surveyors–in a fit of uncharacteristic wit–named the Nether Ocean), and she’s half out of her skull with boredom.

When they signed up for the Emigration Board tickets Bob had joked: “A six month cruise? After a vacation like that we’ll be happy to get back to work!”–but somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn’t sink in until the fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks they’d crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the Pacific, pausing to refuel twice from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were only a sixth of the way to Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like the ultimate non-sequitur in the ocean that replaced the world’s horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they passed The Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the oceanic depths to the stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery currents. Beyond them the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to the sub-arctic chill of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them, the ship was reduced to the proportions of a cockroach crawling along a canyon between skyscrapers. Maddy had taken one look at these guardians of the interplanetary ocean, shuddered, and retreated into their cramped room for the two days it took to sail out from between the slabs.

Bob kept going on about how materials scientists from NOAA and the National Institutes were still trying to understand what they were made of, until Maddy snapped at him. He didn’t seem to understand that they were the bars on a prison cell. He seemed to see a waterway as wide as the English Channel, and a gateway to the future: but Maddy saw them as a sign that her old life was over.

If only Bob and her father hadn’t argued; or if Mum hadn’t tried to pick a fight with her over Bob–Maddy leans on the railing and sighs, and a moment later nearly jumps out of her skin as a strange man clears his throat behind her.

“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“That’s alright,” Maddy replies, irritated and trying to conceal it. “I was just going in.”

“A shame: it’s a beautiful night,” says the stranger. He turns and puts down a large briefcase next to the railing, fiddling with the latches. “Not a cloud in sight, just right for stargazing.” She focuses on him, seeing short hair, small paunch, and a worried thirty-something face. He doesn’t look back, being preoccupied with something that resembles a photographer’s tripod.

“Is that a telescope?” she asks, eyeing the stubby cylindrical gadget in his case.

“Yes.” An awkward pause. “Name’s John Martin. Yourself?”

“Maddy Holbright.” Something about his diffident manner puts her at ease. “Are you settling? I haven’t seen you around.”

He straightens up and tightens joints on the tripod’s legs, screwing them into place. “I’m not a settler, I’m a researcher. Five years, all expenses paid, to go and explore a new continent.” He carefully lifts the telescope body up and lowers it onto the platform, then begins tightening screws. “And I’m supposed to point this thing at the sky and make regular observations. I’m actually an entomologist, but there are so many things to do that they want me to be a jack of all trades, I guess.”

“So they’ve got you to carry a telescope, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever met an entomologist before.”

“A bug-hunter with a telescope,” he agrees: “kind of unexpected.”

Intrigued, Maddy watches as he screws the viewfinder into place then pulls out a notebook and jots something down. “What are you looking at?”

He shrugs. “There’s a good view of S-Doradus from here,” he says. “You know, Satan? And his two little angels.”

Maddy glances up at the violent pinprick of light, then looks away before it can burn her eyes. It’s a star, but bright enough to cast shadows from half a light year’s distance. “The disks?”

“Them.” There’s a camera body in his bag, a chunky old Bronica from back before the Soviets swallowed Switzerland and Germany whole. He carefully screws it onto the telescope’s viewfinder. “The Institute wants me to take a series of photographs of them–nothing fancy, just the best this eight-inch reflector can do–over six months. Plot the ship’s position on a map. There’s a bigger telescope in the hold, for when I arrive, and they’re talking about sending a real astronomer one of these days, but in the meantime they want photographs from sixty thousand miles out across the disk. For parallax, so they can work out how fast the disks are moving.”

“Disks.” They seem like distant abstractions to her, but John’s enthusiasm is hard to ignore. “Do you suppose they’re like, uh, here?” She doesn’t say like Earth–everybody knows this isn’t Earth any more. Not the way it used to be.

“Maybe.” He busies himself for a minute with a chunky film cartridge. “They’ve got oxygen in their atmospheres, we know that. And they’re big enough. But they’re most of a light year away–far closer than the stars, but still too far for telescopes.”

“Or moon rockets,” she says, slightly wistfully. “Or sputniks.”

“If those things worked any more.” The film is in: he leans over the scope and brings it round to bear on the first of the disks, a couple of degrees off from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it takes a telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. “Do you remember the moon?”

Maddy shrugs. “I was just a kid when it happened. But I saw the moon, some nights. During the day, too.”

He nods. “Not like some of the kids these days. Tell them we used to live on a big spinning sphere and they look at you like you’re mad.”

“What do they think the speed of the disks will tell them?” She asks.

“Whether they’re all as massive as this one. What they could be made of. What that tells us about who it was that made them.” He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than bugs.” He chuckles. “It’s a new world out here.”

She nods very seriously, then actually sees him for the first time: “I guess it is.”

Chapter Three: Boldly Go

“So tell me, comrade colonel, how did it really feel?”

The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He’s forty-three and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with him like his own personal storm cloud. “I was very busy all the time,” he says with a self-deprecating little shrug. “I didn’t have time to pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety minutes, what did you expect? If you really want to know, Gherman’s the man to ask. He had more time.”

“Time.” His interrogator sighs and leans his chair back on two legs. It’s a horribly old, rather precious Queen Anne original, a gift to some Tsar or other many years before the October revolution. “What a joke. Ninety minutes, two days, that’s all we got before they changed the rules on us.”

“‘They,’ comrade chairman?” The colonel looked puzzled.

“Whoever.” The chairman’s vague wave takes in half the horizon of the richly paneled Kremlin office. “What a joke. Whoever they were, at least they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita.” He pauses for a moment, then toys with the wine glass that sits, half-empty, before him. The colonel has a glass too, but his is full of grape juice, out of consideration for his past difficulties. “The ‘whoever’ I speak of are of course the brother socialists from the stars who brought us here.” He grins humorlessly, face creasing like the muzzle of a shark that smells blood in the water.

“Brother socialists.” The colonel smiles hesitantly, wondering if it’s a joke, and if so, whether he’s allowed to share it. He’s still unsure why he’s being interviewed by the premier–in his private office, at that. “Do we know anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed to–”

“Never mind.” Aleksey sniffs, dismissing the colonel’s worries. “Yes, you’re cleared to know everything on this topic. The trouble is there is nothing to know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer purpose, the engine of a greater history at work–but the dialectic is silent on this matter. I have consulted the experts, asked them to read the chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than parrot pre-event dogma: ‘any species advanced enough to do to us what happened that day must of course have evolved true Communism, comrade premier! Look what they did for us! (That was Shchlovskii, by the way.) And yes, I look and I see six cities that nobody can live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the sky, and a landscape that Sakharov and that bunch of double-domes are at a loss to explain. There are fucking miracles and wonders and portents in the sky, like a galaxy we were supposed to be part of that is now a million years too old and shows extensive signs of construction. There’s no room for miracles and wonders in our rational world, and it’s giving the comrade general secretary, Yuri, the comrade general secretary, stomach ulcers; did you know that?”

The colonel sits up straight, anticipating the punch line: it’s a well-known fact throughout the USSR that when Brezhnev says ‘frog,’ the premier croaks. And here he is in the premier’s office, watching that very man, Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, third most powerful man in the Soviet Union, taking a deep breath.

“Yuri Alexeyevich, I have brought you here today because I want you to help set Leonid Illich’s stomach at rest. You’re an aviator and a hero of the Soviet Union, and more importantly you’re smart enough to do the job and young enough to see it through, not like the old farts cluttering up Stavka. (It’s going to take most of a lifetime to sort out, you mark my words.) You’re also, you will pardon the bluntness, about as much use as a fifth wheel in your current posting right now: we have to face facts, and the sad reality is that none of Korolev’s birds will ever fly again, not even with the atomic bomb pusher-thing they’ve been working on.” Kosygin sighs and shuffles upright in his chair. “There is simply no point in maintaining the Cosmonaut Training Centre. A decree has been drafted and will be approved next week: the manned rocket program is going to be wound up and the cosmonaut corps reassigned to other duties.”

The colonel flinches. “Is that absolutely necessary, comrade chairman?”

Kosygin drains his wine glass, decides to ignore the implied criticism. “We don’t have the resources to waste. But, Yuri Alexeyevich, all that training is not lost.” He grins wolfishly. “I have new worlds for you to explore, and a new ship for you to do it in.”

“A new ship.” The colonel nods then does a double take, punch-drunk. “A ship?”

“Well, it isn’t a fucking horse,” says Kosygin. He slides a big glossy photograph across his blotter towards the colonel. “Times have moved on.” The colonel blinks in confusion as he tries to make sense of the thing at the centre of the photograph. The premier watches his face, secretly amused: confusion is everybody’s first reaction to the thing in the photograph.

“I’m not sure I understand, sir–”

“It’s quite simple: you trained to explore new worlds. You can’t, not using the rockets. The rockets won’t ever make orbit. I’ve had astronomers having nervous breakdowns trying to explain why, but the all agree on the key point: rockets won’t do it for us here. Something wrong with the gravity, they say it even crushes falling starlight.” The chairman taps a fat finger on the photograph. “But you can do it using this. We invented it and the bloody Americans didn’t. It’s called an ekranoplan, and you rocket boys are going to stop being grounded cosmonauts and learn how to fly it. What do you think, colonel Gagarin?”

The colonel whistles tunelessly through his teeth: he’s finally worked out the scale. It looks like a flying boat with clipped wings, jet engines clustered by the sides of its cockpit–but no flying boat ever carried a runway with a brace of MiG-21s on its back. “It’s bigger than a cruiser! Is it nuclear powered?”

“Of course.” The chairman’s grin slips. “It cost as much as those moon rockets of Sergei’s, colonel-general. Try not to drop it.”

Gagarin glances up, surprise and awe visible on his face. “Sir, I’m honored, but–”

“Don’t be.” The chairman cuts him off. “The promotion was coming your way anyway. The posting that comes with it will earn you as much honor as that first orbit. A second chance at space, if you like. But you can’t fail: the cost is unthinkable. It’s not your skin that will pay the toll, it’s our entire rationalist civilization.” Kosygin leans forward intently.

“Somewhere out there are beings so advanced that they skinned the earth like a grape and plated it onto this disk–or worse, copied us all right down to the atomic level and duplicated us like one of those American Xerox machines. It’s not just us, though. You are aware of the other continents in the oceans. We think some of them may be inhabited, too–nothing else makes sense. Your task is to take the Sergei Korolev, the first ship of its class, on an historic five-year cruise. You will boldly go where no Soviet man has gone before, explore new worlds and look for new peoples, and to establish fraternal socialist relations with them. But your primary objective is to discover who built this giant mousetrap of a world, and why they brought us to it, and to report back to us–before the Americans find out.

Chapter Four: Committee Process

The cherry trees are in bloom in Washington DC, and Gregor perspires in the summer heat. He has grown used to the relative cool of London and this unaccustomed change of climate has disoriented him. Jet lag is a thing of the past–a small mercy–but there are still adjustments to make. Because the disk is flat, the daylight source–polar flares from an accretion disk inside the axial hole, the scientists call it, which signifies nothing to most people–grows and shrinks the same wherever you stand.

There’s a concrete sixties-vintage office block with a conference suite furnished in burnt umber and orange, chromed chairs and Kandinsky prints on the walls: all very seventies. Gregor waits outside the suite until the buzzer sounds and the receptionist looks up from behind her IBM typewriter and says, “You can go in now, they’re expecting you.”

Gregor goes in. It’s an occupational hazard, but by no means the worst, in his line of work.

“Have a seat.” It’s Seth Brundle, Gregor’s divisional head–a grey-looking functionary, more adept at office back-stabbing than field-expedient assassinations. His cover, like Gregor’s, is an innocuous-sounding post in the Office of Technology Assessment. In fact, both he and Gregor work for a different government agency, although the notional task is the same: identify technological threats and stamp on them before they emerge.

Brundle is not alone in the room. He proceeds with the introductions: “Greg Samsa is our London station chief and specialist in scientific intelligence. Greg, this is Marcus.” The bald, thin-faced German in the smart suit bobs his head and smiles behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “Civilian consultant.” Gregor mistrusts him on sight. Marcus is a defector–a former Stasi spook, from back before the Brezhnev purges of the mid-sixties. Which puts an interesting complexion on this meeting.

“Murray Fox, from Langley.”

“Hi,” says Gregor, wondering just what kind of insane political critical mass Stone is trying to assemble: Langley and Brundle’s parent outfit aren’t even on speaking terms, to say the least.

“And another civilian specialist, Dr. Sagan.” Greg nods at the doctor, a thin guy with sparkling brown eyes and hippyish long hair. “Greg’s got something to tell us in person,” says Brundle. “Something very interesting he picked up in London. No sources please, Greg.”

“No sources,” Gregor echoes. He pulls out a chair and sits down. Now he’s here he supposes he’ll just have to play the role Brundle assigned to him in the confidential briefing he read on the long flight home. “We have word from an unimpeachable HUMINT resource that the Russians have–” he coughs into his fist. “Excuse me.” He glances at Brundle. “Okay to talk about COLLECTION RUBY?”

“They’re all cleared,” Brundle says dryly. “That’s why it says ‘joint committee’ on the letterhead.”

“I see. My invitation was somewhat terse.” Gregor stifles a sigh that seems to say, all I get is a most urgent recall; how am I meant to know what’s going on and who knows what? “So why are we here?”

“Think of it as another collective analysis board,” says Fox, the man from the CIA. He doesn’t look enthused.

“We’re here to find out what’s going on, with the benefit of some intelligence resources from the other side of the curtain.”

Doctor Sagan, who has been listening silently with his head cocked to one side like a very intelligent blackbird, raises an eyebrow.

“Yes?” asks Brundle.

“I, uh, would you mind explaining that to me? I haven’t been on one of these committees before.”

No indeed, thinks Gregor. It’s a miracle Sagan ever passed his political vetting: he’s too friendly by far with some of those Russian astronomer guys who are clearly under the thumb of the KGB’s First Department. And he’s expressed doubts–muted, of course–about the thrust of current foreign policy, which is a serious no-no under the McNamara administration.

“A CAB is a joint committee feeding into the Central Office of Information’s external bureaux on behalf of a blue-ribbon panel of experts assembled from the intelligence community,” Gregor recites in a bored tone of voice. “Stripped of the bullshit, we’re a board of wise men who’re meant to rise above narrow bureaucratic lines of engagement and prepare a report for the Office of Technology Assessment to pass on to the Director of Central Intelligence. It’s not meant to reflect the agenda of any one department, but to be a Delphi board synergizing our lateralities. Set up after the Cuban fiasco to make sure that we never again get backed into that kind of corner by accidental group-think. One of the rules of the CAB process is that it has to include at least one dissident: unlike the commies we know we’re not perfect.” Gregor glances pointedly at Fox, who has the good sense to stay silent.

“Oh, I see,” Sagan says hesitantly. With more force: “so that’s why I’m here? Is that the only reason you’ve dragged me away from Cornell?”

“Of course not, Doctor,” oozes Brundle, casting Gregor a dirty look. The East German defector, Wolff, maintains a smug silence: I are above all this. “We’re here to come up with policy recommendations for dealing with the bigger picture. The much bigger picture.”

“The Builders,” says Fox. “We’re here to determine what our options look like if and when they show up, and to make recommendations about the appropriate course of action. Your background in, uh, SETI recommended you.”

Sagan looks at him in disbelief. “I’d have thought that was obvious,” he says.

“Eh?”

“We won’t have any choice,” the young professor explains with a wry smile. “Does a termite mound negotiate with a nuclear superpower?”

Brundle leans forward. “That’s rather a radical position, isn’t it? Surely there’ll be some room for maneuver? We know this is an artificial construct, but presumably the builders are still living people. Even if they’ve got green skin and six eyes.”

“Oh. My. God.” Sagan leans forward, his face in his hands. After a moment Gregor realizes that he’s laughing.

“Excuse me.” Gregor glances round. It’s the German defector, Wolff, or whatever he’s called. “Herr Professor, would you care to explain what you find so funny?”

After a moment Sagan leans back, looks at the ceiling, and sighs. “Imagine a single, a forty-five RPM record with a centre hole punched out. The inner hole is half an astronomical unit–forty-six million miles–in radius. The outer edge is of unknown radius, but probably about two and a half AUs–two hundred and forty five million miles. The disk’s thickness is unknown–seismic waves are reflected off a mirror-like rigid layer eight hundred miles down–but we can estimate it at eight thousand miles, if its density averages out at the same as Earth’s. Surface gravity is the same as our original planet, and since we’ve been transplanted here and survived we have learned that it’s a remarkably hospitable environment for our kind of life; only on the large scale does it seem different.”

The astronomer sits up. “Do any of you gentlemen have any idea just how preposterously powerful whoever built this structure is?”

“How do you mean, preposterously powerful?” asks Brundle, looking more interested than annoyed.

“A colleague of mine, Dan Alderson, did the first analysis. I think you might have done better to pull him in, frankly. Anyway, let me itemise: item number one is escape velocity.” Sagan holds up a bony finger. “Gravity on a disk does not diminish in accordance with the inverse square law, the way it does on a spherical object like the planet we came from. We have roughly earthlike gravity, but to escape, or to reach orbit, takes tremendously more speed. Roughly two hundred times more, in fact. Rockets that from Earth could reach the moon just fall out of the sky after running out of fuel. Next item:” another finger. “The area and mass of the disk. If it’s double-sided it has a surface area equal to billions and billions of Earths. We’re stuck in the middle of an ocean full of alien continents, but we have no guarantee that this hospitable environment is anything other than a tiny oasis in a world of strangeness.”

The astronomer pauses to pour himself a glass of water, then glances round the table. “To put it in perspective, gentlemen, this world is so big that, if one in every hundred stars had an earthlike planet, this single structure could support the population of our entire home galaxy. As for the mass–this structure is as massive as fifty thousand suns. It is, quite bluntly, impossible: as-yet unknown physical forces must be at work to keep it from rapidly collapsing in on itself and creating a black hole. The repulsive force, whatever it is, is strong enough to hold the weight of fifty thousand suns: think about that for a moment, gentlemen.”

At that point Sagan looks around and notices the blank stares. He chuckles ruefully.

“What I mean to say is, this structure is not permitted by the laws of physics as we understand them. Because it clearly does exist, we can draw some conclusions, starting with the fact that our understanding of physics is incomplete. Well, that isn’t news: we know we don’t have a unified theory of everything. Einstein spent thirty years looking for one, and didn’t come up with it.

But, secondly.” He looks tired for a moment, aged beyond his years. “We used to think that any extraterrestrial beings we might communicate with would be fundamentally comprehensible: folks like us, albeit with better technology. I think that’s the frame of mind you’re still working in. Back in sixty-one we had a brainstorming session at a conference, trying to work out just how big an engineering project a spacefaring civilization might come up with. Freeman Dyson, from Princeton, came up with about the biggest thing any of us could imagine: something that required us to imagine dismantling Jupiter and turning it into habitable real estate.

“This disk is about a hundred million times bigger than Dyson’s sphere. And that’s before we take into account the time factor.”

“Time?” Echoes Fox from Langley, sounding confused.

“Time.” Sagan smiles in a vaguely disconnected way. “We’re nowhere near our original galactic neighborhood and whoever moved us here, they didn’t bend the laws of physics far enough to violate the speed limit. It takes light about 160,000 years to cross the distance between where we used to live, and our new stellar neighborhood, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Which we have fixed, incidentally, by measuring the distance to known Cepheid variables, once we were able to take into account the measurable red shift of infalling light and the fact that some of them were changing frequency slowly and seem to have changed rather a lot. Our best estimate is eight hundred thousand years, plus or minus two hundred thousand. That’s about four times as long as our species has existed, gentlemen. We’re fossils, an archaeology experiment or something. Our relevance to our abductors is not as equals, but as subjects in some kind of vast experiment. And what the purpose of the experiment is, I can’t tell you. I’ve got some guesses, but …”

Sagan shrugs, then lapses into silence. Gregor catches Brundle’s eye and Brundle shakes his head, very slightly. Don’t spill the beans. Gregor nods. Sagan may realize he’s in a room with a CIA spook and an East German defector, but he doesn’t need to know about the Alienation Service yet.

“Well that’s as may be,” says Fox, dropping words like stones into the hollow silence at the table. “But it begs the question, what are we going to tell the DCI?”

“I suggest,” says Gregor, “that we start by reviewing COLLECTION RUBY.” He nods at Sagan. “Then, maybe when we’re all up to speed on that, we’ll have a better idea of whether there’s anything useful we can tell the DCI.

Chapter Five: Cannon-Fodder

Madeleine and Robert Holbright are among the last of the immigrants to disembark on the new world. As she glances back at the brilliant white side of the liner, the horizon seems to roll around her head, settling into a strange new stasis that feels unnatural after almost six months at sea.

New Iowa isn’t flat and it isn’t new: rampart cliffs loom to either side of the unnaturally deep harbor (gouged out of bedrock courtesy of General Atomics). A cog-driven funicular railway hauls Maddy and Robert and their four shipping trunks up the thousand-foot climb to the plateau and the port city of Fort Eisenhower–and then to the arrival and orientation camp.

Maddy is quiet and withdrawn, but Bob, oblivious, natters constantly about opportunities and jobs and grabbing a plot of land to build a house on. “It’s the new world,” he says at one point: “why aren’t you excited?”

“The new world,” Maddy echoes, biting back the urge to say something cutting. She looks out the window as the train climbs the cliff-face and brings them into sight of the city. City is the wrong word: it implies solidity, permanence. Fort Eisenhower is less than five years old, a leukaemic gash inflicted on the landscape by the Corps of Engineers. The tallest building is the governor’s mansion, at three stories. Architecturally the town is all Wild West meets the Radar Age, raw pine houses contrasting with big grey concrete boxes full of seaward-pointing Patriot missiles to deter the inevitable encroachment of the communist hordes. “It’s so flat.”

“The nearest hills are two hundred miles away, past the coastal plain–didn’t you read the map?”

She ignores his little dig as the train squeals and clanks up the side of the cliff. It wheezes asthmatically to a stop besides a wooden platform, and expires in a belch of saturated steam. An hour later they’re weary and sweated-up in the lobby of an unprepossessing barrack-hall made of plywood. There’s a large hall and a row of tables and a bunch of bored-looking colonial service types, and people are walking from one position to another with bundles of papers, answering questions in low voices and receiving official stamps. The would-be colonists mill around like disturbed livestock among the piles of luggage at the back of the room. Maddy and Robert queue uneasy in the damp afternoon heat, overhearing snippets of conversation. “Country of origin? Educational qualifications? Yes, but what was your last job?” Religion and race–almost a quarter of the people in the hall are refugees from India or Pakistan or somewhere lost to the mysterious east forever–seem to obsess the officials. “Robert?” she whispers.

“It’ll be alright,” he says with false certainty. Taking after his dad already, trying to pretend he’s the solid family man. Her sidelong glance at him steals any residual confidence. Then it’s their turn.

“Names, passports, country of origin?” The guy with the moustache is brusque and bored, irritated by the heat.

Robert smiles at him. “Robert and Madeleine Holbright, from Canada?” He offers their passports.

“Uh-huh.” The official gives the documents a very American going-over. “What schooling have you done? What was your last job?”

“I’ve, uh, I was working part-time in a garage. On my way through college–I was final year at Toronto, studying structural engineering, but I haven’t sat the finals. Maddy–Maddy’s a qualified paramedic.”

The officer fixes her with a stare. “Worked at it?”

“What? Uh, no–I’m freshly qualified.” His abrupt questioning flusters her.

“Huh.” He makes a cryptic notation against their names on a long list, a list that spills over the edge of his desk and trails towards the rough floor. “Next.” He hands the passports back, and a couple of cards, and points them along to the row of desks.

Someone is already stepping up behind them when Maddy manages to read the tickets. Hers says TRAINEE NURSE. Robert is staring at his and saying “no, this is wrong.”

“What is it, Bob?” She looks over his shoulder as someone jostles him sideways. His card reads LABORER (unskilled); but she doesn’t have time to read the rest.

Chapter Six: Captain’s Log

Yuri Gagarin kicks his shoes off, loosens his tie, and leans back in his chair. “It’s hotter than fucking Cuba!” he complains.

“You visited Cuba, didn’t you, boss?” His companion, still standing, pours a glass of iced tea and passes it to the young colonel-general before drawing one for himself.

“Yeah, thanks Misha.” The former first cosmonaut smiles tiredly. “Back before the invasion. Have a seat.”

Misha Gorodin is the only man on the ship who doesn’t have to give a shit whether the captain offers him a seat, but he’s grateful all the same: a little respect goes a long way, and Gagarin’s sunny disposition and friendly attitude is a far cry from some of the fuckheads Misha’s been stuck with in the past. There’s a class of officer who thinks that because you’re a zampolit you’re somehow below them, but Yuri doesn’t do that: in some ways he’s the ideal New Soviet Man, progress personified. Which makes life a lot easier, because Yuri is one of the very few naval commanders who doesn’t have to give a shit what his political officer thinks, and life would be an awful lot stickier without that grease of respect to make the wheels go round. Mind you, Yuri is also commander of the only naval warship operated by the Cosmonaut Corps, which is a branch of the Strategic Rocket Forces, another howling exception to the usual military protocol. Somehow this posting seems to be breaking all the rules …

“What was it like, boss?”

“Hot as hell. Humid, like this. Beautiful women but lots of dark-skinned comrades who didn’t bathe often enough–all very jolly, but you couldn’t help looking out to sea, over your shoulder. You know there was an American base there, even then? Guantanamo. They don’t have the base now, but they’ve got all the rubble.” For a moment Gagarin looks morose. “Bastards.”

“The Americans.”

“Yes. Shitting on a small defenseless island like that, just because they couldn’t get to us any more. You remember when they had to hand out iodine tablets to all the kids? That wasn’t Leningrad or Gorky, the fallout plume: it was Havana. I don’t think they wanted to admit just how bad it was.”

Misha sips his tea. “We had a lucky escape.” Morale be damned, it’s acceptable to admit at least that much in front of the CO, in private. Misha’s seen some of the KGB reports on the US nuclear capabilities back then, and his blood runs cold; while Nikita had been wildly bluffing about the Rodina’s nuclear defenses, the Americans had been hiding the true scale of their own arsenal. From themselves as much as the rest of the world.

“Yes. Things were going to the devil back then, no question: if we hadn’t woken up over here, who knows what would have happened? They out-gunned us back then. I don’t think they realized.” Gagarin’s dark expression lifts: he glances out of the open porthole–the only one in a private cabin that opens–and smiles. “This isn’t Cuba, though.” The headland rising above the bay tells him that much: no tropical island on earth supported such weird vegetation. Or such ruins.

“Indeed not. But, what about the ruins?” asks Misha, putting his tea glass down on the map table.

“Yes.” Gagarin leans forward: “I was meaning to talk to you about that. Exploration is certainly in line with our orders, but we are a trifle short of trained archaeologists, aren’t we? Let’s see: we’re four hundred and seventy thousand kilometers from home, six major climactic zones, five continents–it’ll be a long time before we get any settlers out here, won’t it?” He pauses delicately. “Even if the rumors about reform of the penal system are true.”

“It is certainly a dilemma,” Misha agrees amiably, deliberately ignoring the skipper’s last comment. “But we can take some time over it. There’s nobody out here, at least not within range of yesterday’s reconnaissance flight. I’ll vouch for lieutenant Chekhov’s soundness: he has a solid attitude, that one.”

“I don’t see how we can leave without examining the ruins, but we’ve got limited resources and in any case I don’t want to do anything that might get the Academy to slap our wrists. No digging for treasure until the egg-heads get here.” Gagarin hums tunelessly for a moment, then slaps his hand on his thigh: “I think we’ll shoot some film for the comrade general secretary’s birthday party. First we’ll secure a perimeter around the beach, give those damned spetsnaz a chance to earn all the vodka they’ve been drinking. Then you and I, we can take Primary Science Party Two into the nearest ruins with lights and cameras. Make a visual record, leave the double-domes back in Moscow to figure out what we’re looking at and whether it’s worth coming back later with a bunch of archaeologists. What do you say, Misha?”

“I say that’s entirely logical, comrade general,” says the political officer, nodding to himself.

“That’s so ordered, then. We’ll play it safe, though. Just because we haven’t seen any active settlement patterns, doesn’t mean there’re no aborigines lurking in the forest.”

“Like that last bunch of lizards.” Misha frowns. “Little purple bastards!”

“We’ll make good communists out of them eventually,” Yuri insists. “A toast! To making good communists out of little purple lizard-bastards with blowpipes who shoot political officers in the arse!”

Gagarin grins wickedly and Gorodin knows when he’s being wound up on purpose and summons a twinkle to his eye as he raises his glass: “And to poisons that don’t work on human beings.”

Chapter Seven: Discography

Warning:

The following briefing film is classified COLLECTION RUBY. If you do not possess both COLLECTION and RUBY clearances, leave the auditorium and report to the screening security officer immediately. Disclosure to unauthorized personnel is a federal offense punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment for up to twenty years. You have thirty seconds to clear the auditorium and report to the screening security officer.

Voice-over:

Ocean–the final frontier. For twelve years, since the momentous day when we discovered that we had been removed to this planar world, we have been confronted by the immensity of an ocean that goes on as far as we can see. Confronted also by the prospect of the spread of Communism to uncharted new continents, we have committed ourselves to a strategy of exploration and containment.

Film clip:

An Atlas rocket on the launch pad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.

Cut to:

A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the fisheye view. The first stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another, strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher and faster.

Voice-over:

We cannot escape.

Cut to:

A meteor streaking across the empty blue bowl of the sky; slowing, deploying parachutes.

Voice-over:

In 1962, this rocket would have blasted a two-ton payload all the way into outer space. That was when we lived on a planet that was an oblate sphere. Life on a dinner-plate seems to be different: while the gravitational attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we can’t get away from it. In fact, anything we fire straight up will come back down again. Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL scientist Dan Alderson, escape from a Magellanic disk would require a speed of over one thousand six hundred miles per second. That is because this disk masses many times more than a star–in fact, it has a mass fifty thousand times greater than our own sun.

What stops it collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows. Physicists speculate that a fifth force that drove the early expansion of the universe–they call it ‘quintessence’–has been harnessed by the makers of the disk. But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we understand how we came here–how, in the blink of an eye, something beyond our comprehension peeled the earth’s continents and oceans like a grape and plated them across this alien disk.

Cut to:

A map. The continents of earth are laid out–Americas at one side, Europe and Asia and Africa to their east. Beyond the Indonesian island chain Australia and New Zealand hang lonely on the edge of an abyss of ocean.

The map pans right: strange new continents swim into view, ragged-edged and huge. A few of them are larger than Asia and Africa combined; most of them are smaller.

Voice-over:

Geopolitics was changed forever by the Move. While the surface topography of our continents was largely preserved, wedges of foreign material were introduced below the Mohorovicik discontinuity–below the crust–and in the deep ocean floor, to act as spacers. The distances between points separated by deep ocean were, of necessity, changed, and not in our geopolitical favor. While the tactical balance of power after the Move was much as it had been before, the great circle flight paths our strategic missiles were designed for–over the polar ice cap and down into the Communist empire–were distorted and stretched, placing the enemy targets outside their range. Meanwhile, although our manned bombers could still reach Moscow with in-flight refueling, the changed map would have forced them to traverse thousands of miles of hostile airspace en route. The Move rendered most of our strategic preparations useless. If the British had been willing to stand firm, we might have prevailed–but in retrospect, what went for us also went for the Soviets, and it is hard to condemn the British for being unwilling to take the full force of the inevitable Soviet bombardment alone.

In retrospect the only reason this was not a complete disaster for us is that the Soviets were caught in the same disarray as ourselves. But the specter of Communism now dominates western Europe: the supposedly independent nations of the European Union are as much in thrall to Moscow as the client states of the Warsaw Pact. Only the ongoing British State of Emergency offers us any residual geopolitical traction on the red continent, and in the long term we must anticipate that the British, too, will be driven to reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union.

Cut to:

A silvery delta-winged aircraft in flight. Stub wings, pointed nose, and a shortage of windows proclaim it to be an unmanned drone: a single large engine in its tail thrusts it along, exhaust nozzle glowing cherry-red. Trackless wastes unwind below it as the viewpoint–a chase plane–carefully climbs over the drone to capture a clear view of the upper fuselage.

Voice-over:

The disk is vast–so huge that it defies sanity. Some estimates give it the surface area of more than a billion earths. Exploration by conventional means is futile: hence the deployment of the NP-101 Persephone drone, here seen making a proving flight over land mass F-42. The NP-101 is a reconnaissance derivative of the nuclear-powered D-SLAM Pluto missile that forms the backbone of our post-Move deterrent force. It is slower than a strategic D-SLAM, but much more reliable: while D-SLAM is designed for a quick, fiery dash into Soviet territory, the NP-101 is designed to fly long duration missions that map entire continents. On a typical deployment the NP-101 flies outward at thrice the speed of sound for nearly a month: traveling fifty thousand miles a day, it penetrates a million miles into the unknown before it turns and flies homeward. Its huge mapping cameras record two images every thousand seconds, and its sophisticated digital computer records a variety of data from its sensor suite, allowing us to build up a picture of parts of the disk that our ships would take years or decades to reach. With resolution down to the level of a single nautical mile, the NP-101 program has been a resounding success, allowing us to map whole new worlds that it would take us years to visit in person.

At the end of its mission, the NP-101 drops its final film capsule and flies out into the middle of an uninhabited ocean, to ditch its spent nuclear reactor safely far from home.

Cut to:

A bull’s-eye diagram. The centre is a black circle with a star at its heart; around it is a circular platter, of roughly the same proportions as a 45 rpm single.

Voice over:

A rough map of the disk. Here is the area we have explored to date, using the NP-101 program.

(A dot little larger than a sand grain lights up on the face of the single.)

That dot of light is a million kilometers in radius–five times the distance that used to separate our old Earth from its moon. (To cross the radius of the disk, an NP-101 would have to fly at Mach Three for almost ten years.) We aren’t even sure exactly where the centre of that dot lies on the disk: our highest sounding rocket, the Nova-Orion block two, can barely rise two degrees above the plane of the disk before crashing back again. Here is the scope of our knowledge of our surroundings, derived from the continental-scale mapping cameras carried by Project Orion:

(A salmon pink area almost half an inch in diameter lights up around the red sand grain on the face of the single.)

Of course, cameras at an altitude of a hundred thousand miles can’t look down on new continents and discern signs of Communist infiltration; at best they can listen for radio transmissions and perform spectroscopic analyses of the atmospheric gasses above distant lands, looking for gasses characteristic of industrial development such as chlorofluorocarbons and nitrogen oxides.

This leaves us vulnerable to unpleasant surprises. Our long term strategic analyses imply that we are almost certainly not alone on the disk. In addition to the Communists, we must consider the possibility that whoever build this monstrous structure–clearly one of the wonders of the universe–might also live here. We must contemplate their motives for bringing us to this place. And then there are the aboriginal cultures discovered on continents F-29 and F-364, both now placed under quarantine. If some land masses bear aboriginal inhabitants, we may speculate that they, too, have been transported to the disk in the same manner as ourselves, for some as-yet unknown purpose. It is possible that they are genuine stone-age dwellers–or that they are the survivors of advanced civilizations that did not survive the transition to this environment. What is the possibility that there exists on the disk one or more advanced alien civilizations that are larger and more powerful than our own? And would we recognize them as such if we saw them? How can we go about estimating the risk of our encountering hostile Little Green Men–now that other worlds are in range of even a well-equipped sailboat, much less the Savannah-class nuclear powered exploration ships? Astronomers Carl Sagan and Daniel Drake estimate the probability as high–so high, in fact, that they believe there are several such civilizations out there.

We are not alone. We can only speculate about why we might have been brought here by the abductors, but we can be certain that it is only a matter of time before we encounter an advanced alien civilization that may well be hostile to us. This briefing film will now continue with an overview of our strategic preparations for first contact, and the scenarios within which we envisage this contingency arising, with specific reference to the Soviet Union as an example of an unfriendly ideological superpower …

Chapter Eight: Tenure Track

After two weeks, Maddy is sure she’s going mad.

She and Bob have been assigned a small prefabricated house (not much more than a shack, although it has electricity and running water) on the edge of town. He’s been drafted into residential works, put to work erecting more buildings: and this is the nearest thing to a success they’ve had, because after a carefully-controlled protest his status has been corrected, from just another set of unskilled hands to trainee surveyor. A promotion of which he is terribly proud, evidently taking it as confirmation that they’ve made the right move by coming here.

Maddy, meanwhile, has a harder time finding work. The district hospital is fully staffed. They don’t need her, won’t need her until the next shipload of settlers arrive, unless she wants to pack up her bags and go tramping around isolated ranch settlements in the outback. In a year’s time the governor has decreed they’ll establish another town-scale settlement, inland near the mining encampments on the edge of the Hoover Desert. Then they’ll need medics to staff the new hospital: but for now, she’s a spare wheel. Because Maddy is a city girl by upbringing and disposition, and not inclined to take a job tramping around the outback if she can avoid it.

She spends the first week and then much of the second mooching around town, trying to find out what she can do. She’s not the only young woman in this predicament. While there’s officially no unemployment, and the colony’s dirigiste administration finds plenty of hard work for idle hands, there’s also a lack of openings for ambulance crew, or indeed much of anything else she can do. Career-wise it’s like a trip into the 1950’s. Young, female, and ambitious? Lots of occupations simply don’t exist out here on the fringe, and many others are closed or inaccessible. Everywhere she looks she sees mothers shepherding implausibly large flocks of toddlers their guardians pinch-faced from worry and exhaustion. Bob wants kids, although Maddy’s not ready for that yet. But the alternatives on offer are limited.

Eventually Maddy takes to going through the “help wanted” ads on the bulletin board outside city hall. Some of them are legit: and at least a few are downright peculiar. One catches her eye: field assistant wanted for biological research. I wonder? she thinks, and goes in search of a door to bang on.

When she finds the door–raw wood, just beginning to bleach in the strong colonial sunlight–and bangs on it, John Martin opens it and blinks quizzically into the light. “Hello?” he asks.

“You were advertising for a field assistant?” She stares at him. He’s the entomologist, right? She remembers his hands on the telescope on the deck of the ship. The voyage itself is already taking on the false patina of romance in her memories, compared to the dusty present it has delivered her to.

“I was? Oh–yes, yes. Do come in.” He backs into the house–another of these identikit shacks, colonial, family, for the use of–and offers her a seat in what used to be the living room. It’s almost completely filled by a work table and a desk and a tall wooden chest of sample drawers. There’s an odd, musty smell, like old cobwebs and leaky demijohns of formalin. John shuffles around his den, vaguely disordered by the unexpected shock of company. There’s something touchingly cute about him, like the subjects of his studies, Maddy thinks. “Sorry about the mess, I don’t get many visitors. So, um, do you have any relevant experience?”

She doesn’t hesitate: “None whatsoever, but I’d like to learn.” She leans forward. “I qualified as a paramedic before we left. At college I was studying biology, but I had to drop out midway through my second year: I was thinking about going to medical school later, but I guess that’s not going to happen here. Anyway, the hospital here has no vacancies, so I need to find something else to do. What exactly does a field assistant get up to?”

“Get sore feet.” He grins lopsidedly. “Did you do any lab time? Field work?” Maddy nods hesitantly so he drags her meager college experiences out of her before he continues. “I’ve got a whole continent to explore and only one set of hands: we’re spread thin out here. Luckily NSF budgeted to hire me an assistant. The assistant’s job is to be my Man Friday; to help me cart equipment about, take samples, help with basic lab work–very basic–and so on. Oh, and if they’re interested in entomology, botany, or anything else remotely relevant that’s a plus. There aren’t many unemployed life sciences people around here, funnily enough: have you had any chemistry?”

“Some,” Maddy says cautiously; “I’m no biochemist.” She glances round the crowded office curiously. “What are you meant to be doing?”

He sighs. “A primary survey of an entire continent. Nobody, but nobody, even bothered looking into the local insect ecology here. There’re virtually no vertebrates, birds, lizards, what have you–but back home there are more species of beetle than everything else put together, and this place is no different. Did you know nobody has even sampled the outback fifty miles inland of here? We’re doing nothing but throw up shacks along the coastline and open-cast quarries a few miles inland. There could be anything in the interior, absolutely anything.” When he gets excited he starts gesticulating, Maddy notices, waving his hands around enthusiastically. She nods and smiles, trying to encourage him.

“A lot of what I’m doing is the sort of thing they were doing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Take samples, draw them, log their habitat and dietary habits, see if I can figure out their life cycle, try and work out who’s kissing-cousins with what. Build a family tree. Oh, I also need to do the same with the vegetation, you know? And they want me to keep close watch on the other disks around Lucifer. ‘Keep an eye out for signs of sapience,’ whatever that means: I figure there’s a bunch of leftovers in the astronomical community who feel downright insulted that whoever built this disk and brought us here didn’t land on the White House lawn and introduce themselves. I’d better tell you right now, there’s enough work here to occupy an army of zoologists and botanists for a century; you can get started on a PhD right here and now if you want. I’m only here for five years, but my successor should be okay about taking on an experienced RA … the hard bit is going to be maintaining focus. Uh, I can sort you out a subsistence grant from the governor-general’s discretionary fund and get NSF to reimburse him, but it won’t be huge. Would twenty Truman dollars a week be enough?”

Maddy thinks for a moment. Truman dollars–the local scrip–aren’t worth a whole lot, but there’s not much to spend them on. And Rob’s earning for both of them anyway. And a PhD … that could be my ticket back to civilization, couldn’t it? “I guess so,” she says, feeling a sense of vast relief: so there’s something she’s useful for besides raising the next generation, after all. She tries to set aside the visions of herself, distinguished and not too much older, gratefully accepting a professor’s chair at an ivy league university. “When do I start?”

Chapter Nine: On the Beach

Misha’s first impressions of the disturbingly familiar alien continent are of an oppressively humid heat, and the stench of decaying jellyfish.

The Sergei Korolev floats at anchor in the river estuary, a huge streamlined visitor from another world. Stubby fins stick out near the waterline, like a seaplane with clipped wings: gigantic Kuznetsov atomic turbines in pods ride on booms to either side of its high-ridged back, either side of the launch/recovery catapults for its parasite MiG fighter-bombers, aft of the broad curve of the ekranoplan’s bridge. Near the waterline, a boat bay is open: a naval spetsnaz team is busy loading their kit into the landing craft that will ferry them to the small camp on the beach. Misha, who stands just above the waterline, turns away from the giant ground effect ship and watches his commander, who is staring inland with a faint expression of worry. “Those trees–awfully close, aren’t they?” Gagarin says, with the carefully studied stupidity that saw him through the first dangerous years after his patron Khrushchev’s fall.

“That is indeed what captain Kirov is taking care of,” replies Gorodin, playing his role of foil to the colonel-general’s sardonic humor. And indeed shadowy figures in olive-green battle dress are stalking in and out of the trees, carefully laying tripwires and screamers in an arc around the beachhead. He glances to the left, where a couple of sailors with assault rifles stand guard, eyes scanning the jungle. “I wouldn’t worry unduly sir.”

“I’ll still be happier when the outer perimeter is secure. And when I’ve got a sane explanation of this for the comrade General Secretary.” Gagarin’s humor evaporates: he turns and walks along the beach, towards the large tent that’s already gone up to provide shelter from the heat of noon. The bar of solid sunlight–what passes for sunlight here–is already at maximum length, glaring like a rod of white-hot steel that impales the disk. (Some of the more superstitious call it the axle of heaven. Part of Gorodin’s job is to discourage such non-materialist backsliding.)

The tent awning is pegged back: inside it, Gagarin and Misha find Major Suvurov and Academician Borisovitch leaning over a map. Already the scientific film crew–a bunch of dubious civilians from the TASS agency–are busy in a corner, preparing cans for shooting. “Ah, Oleg, Mikhail.” Gagarin summons up a professionally photogenic smile. “Getting anywhere?”

Borisovitch, a slight, stoop-shouldered type who looks more like a janitor than a world-famous scientist, shrugs. “We were just talking about going along to the archaeological site, General. Perhaps you’d like to come, too?”

Misha looks over his shoulder at the map: it’s drawn in pencil, and there’s an awful lot of white space on it, but what they’ve surveyed so far is disturbingly familiar in outline–familiar enough to have given them all a number of sleepless nights even before they came ashore. Someone has scribbled a dragon coiling in a particularly empty corner of the void.

“How large is the site?” asks Yuri.

“Don’t know, sir.” Major Suvurov grumps audibly, as if the lack of concrete intelligence on the alien ruins is a personal affront. “We haven’t found the end of it yet. But it matches what we know already.”

“The aerial survey–” Mikhail coughs, delicately. “If you’d let me have another flight I could tell you more, General. I believe it may be possible to define the city limits narrowly, but the trees make it hard to tell.”

“I’d give you the flight if only I had the aviation fuel,” Gagarin explains patiently. “A chopper can burn its own weight in fuel in a day of surveying, and we have to haul everything out here from Archangel. In fact, when we go home we’re leaving most of our flight-ready aircraft behind, just so that on the next trip out we can carry more fuel.”

“I understand.” Mikhail doesn’t look happy. “As Oleg Ivanovitch says, we don’t know how far it reaches. But I think when you see the ruins you’ll understand why we need to come back here. Nobody’s found anything like this before.”

“Old Capitalist Man.” Misha smiles thinly. “I suppose.”

“Presumably.” Borisovitch shrugs. “Whatever, we need to bring archaeologists. And a mass spectroscope for carbon dating. And other stuff.” His face wrinkles unhappily. “They were here back when we would still have been living in caves!”

“Except we weren’t,” Gagarin says under his breath. Misha pretends not to notice.

By the time they leave the tent, the marines have got the Korolev’s two BRDMs ashore. The big balloon-tired armored cars sit on the beach like monstrous amphibians freshly emerged from some primeval sea. Gagarin and Gorodin sit in the back of the second vehicle with the academician and the film crew: the lead BRDM carries their spetsnaz escort team. They maintain a dignified silence as the convoy rumbles and squeaks across the beach, up the gently sloping hillside, and then down towards the valley with the ruins.

The armored cars stop and doors open. Everyone is relieved by the faint breeze that cracks the oven-heat of the interior. Gagarin walks over to the nearest ruin–remnants of a wall, waist-high–and stands, hands on hips, looking across the wasteland.

“Concrete,” says Borisovitch, holding up a lump of crumbled not-stone from the foot of the wall for Yuri to see.

“Indeed.” Gagarin nods. “Any idea what this was?”

“Not yet.” The camera crew is already filming, heading down a broad boulevard between rows of crumbling foundations. “Only the concrete has survived, and it’s mostly turned to limestone. This is old.”

“Hmm.” The First Cosmonaut walks round the stump of wall and steps down to the foundation layer behind it, looking around with interest. “Interior column here, four walls–they’re worn down, aren’t they? This stuff that looks like a red stain. Rebar? Found any intact ones?”

“Again, not yet sir,” says Borisovitch. “We haven’t looked everywhere yet, but …”

“Indeed.” Gagarin scratches his chin idly. “Am I imagining it or are the walls all lower on that side?” He points north, deeper into the sprawling maze of overgrown rubble.

“You’re right sir. No theory for it, though.”

“You don’t say.” Gagarin walks north from the five-sided building’s ruin, looks around. “This was a road?”

“Once, sir. It was nine meters wide–there seems to have been derelict ground between the houses, if that’s what they were, and the road itself. “

“Nine meters, you say.” Gorodin and the academician hurry to follow him as he strikes off, up the road. “Interesting stonework here, don’t you think, Misha?”

“Yessir. Interesting stonework.”

Gagarin stops abruptly and kneels. “Why is it cracked like this? Hey, there’s sand down there. And, um. Glass? Looks like it’s melted. Ah, trinitite.”

“Sir?”

Borisovitch leans forward. “That’s odd.”

“What is?” asks Misha, but before he gets a reply both Gagarin and the researcher are up again and off towards another building.

“Look. The north wall.” Gagarin’s found another chunk of wall, this one a worn stump that’s more than a meter high: he looks unhappy.

“Sir? Are you alright?” Misha stares at him. Then he notices the academician is also silent, and looking deeply perturbed. “What’s wrong?”

Gagarin extends a finger, points at the wall. “You can just see him if you look close enough. How long would it take to fade, Mikhail? How many years have we missed them by?”

The academician licks his lips: “At least two thousand years, sir. Concrete cures over time, but it takes a very long time indeed to turn all the way to limestone. and then there’s the weathering process to take account of. But the surface erosion … yes, that could fix the image from the flash. Perhaps. I’d need to ask a few colleagues back home.”

“What’s wrong?” the political officer repeats, puzzled.

The first cosmonaut grins humorlessly. “Better get your Geiger counter, Misha, and see if the ruins are still hot. Looks like we’re not the only people on the disk with a geopolitical problem …”

Chapter Ten: Been Here Before

Brundle has finally taken the time to pull Gregor aside and explain what’s going on; Gregor is not amused.

“Sorry you walked into it cold,” says Brundle. “But I figured it would be best for you to see for yourself.” He speaks with a Midwestern twang, and a flatness of affect that his colleagues sometimes mistake for signs of an underlying psychopathology.

“See what, in particular?” Gregor asks sharply. “What, in particular?” Gregor tends to repeat himself, changing only the intonation, when he’s disturbed. He’s human enough to recognize it as a bad habit but still finds it difficult to suppress the reflex.

Brundle pauses on the footpath, looks around to make sure there’s nobody within earshot. The Mall is nearly empty today, and only a humid breeze stirs the waters on the pool. “Tell me what you think.”

Gregor thinks for a moment, then summons up his full command of the local language: it’s good practice. “The boys in the big house are asking for a CAB. It means someone’s pulled his head out of his ass for long enough to realize they’ve got worse things to worry about than being shafted by the Soviets. Something’s happened to make them realize they need a policy for dealing with the abductors. This is against doctrine, we need to do something about it fast before they start asking the right questions. Something’s shaken them up, something secret, some HUMINT source from the wrong side of the curtain, perhaps. Could it be that man Gordievsky? But they haven’t quite figured out what being here means. Sagan–does his presence mean what I think it does?”

“Yes,” Brundle says tersely.

“Oh dear.” A reflex trips and Gregor takes off his spectacles and polishes them nervously on his tie before replacing them. “Is it just him, or does it go further?” He leaves the rest of the sentence unspoken by convention–is it just him you think we’ll have to silence?

“Further.” Brundle tends to talk out of the side of his mouth when he’s agitated, and from his current expression Gregor figures he’s really upset. “Sagan and his friends at Cornell have been using the Arecibo dish to listen to the neighbors. This wasn’t anticipated. Now they’re asking for permission to beam a signal at the nearest of the other disks. Straight up, more or less; ‘talk to us.’ Unfortunately Sagan is well-known, which is why he caught the attention of our nominal superiors. Meanwhile, the Soviets have found something that scared them. CIA didn’t hear about it through the usual assets–they contacted the State Department via the embassy, they’re that scared.” Brundle pauses a moment. “Sagan and his buddies don’t know about that, of course.”

“Why has nobody shot them already?” Gregor asks coldly.

Brundle shrugs. “We pulled the plug on their funding just in time. If we shot them as well someone might notice. Everything could go nonlinear while we were trying to cover it up. You know the problem; this is a semi-open society, inadequately controlled. A bunch of astronomers get together on their own initiative–academic conference, whatever–and decide to spend a couple of thousand bucks of research grant money from NIST to establish communications with the nearest disk. How are we supposed to police that kind of thing?”

“Shut down all their radio telescopes. At gunpoint, if necessary, but I figure a power cut or a congressional committee would be just as effective as leverage.”

“Perhaps, but we don’t have the Soviets’ resources to work with. Anyway, that’s why I dragged Sagan in for the CAB. It’s a Potemkin village, you understand, to convince everybody he contacted that something is being done, but we’re going to have to figure out how to shut him up.”

“Sagan is the leader of the ‘talk-to-us, alien gods’ crowd, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Gregor considers his next words carefully. “Assuming he’s still clean and uncontaminated, we can turn him or we can ice him. If we’re going to turn him we need to do it convincingly–full Tellerization–and we’ll need to come up with a convincing rationale. Use him to evangelize the astronomical community into shutting up or haring off in the wrong direction. Like Heisenberg and the Nazi nuclear weapons program.” He snaps his fingers. “Why don’t we tell him the truth? At least, something close enough to it to confuse the issue completely?”

“Because he’s a member of the Federation of American Scientists and he won’t believe anything we tell him without independent confirmation,” Brundle mutters through one side of his mouth. “That’s the trouble with using a government agency as our cover story.”

They walk in silence for a minute. “I think it would be very dangerous to underestimate him,” says Gregor. “He could be a real asset to us, but uncontrolled he’s very dangerous. If we can’t silence him we may have to resort to physical violence. And with the number of colonies they’ve already seeded, we can’t be sure of getting them all.”

“Itemize the state of their understanding,” Brundle says abruptly. “I want a reality check. I’ll tell you what’s new after you run down the checklist.”

“Okay.” Gregor thinks for a minute. “Let us see. What everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, sixty two, all the clocks stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and forty six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we figure is somewhere in the lesser Magellanic cloud. Meanwhile the Milky Way galaxy–we assume that’s what it is–has changed visibly. Lots of metal-depleted stars, signs of macroscopic cosmic engineering, that sort of thing. The public explanation is that the visitors froze time, skinned the earth, and plated it over the disk. Luckily they’re still bickering over whether the explanation is Minsky’s copying, uh, hypothesis, or that guy Moravec with his digital simulation theory.”

“Indeed.” Brundle kicks at a paving stone idly. “Now. What is your forward analysis?”

“Well, sooner or later they’re going to turn dangerous. They have the historic predisposition towards teleological errors, to belief in a giant omnipotent creator and a purpose to their existence. If they start speculating about the intentions of a transcendent intelligence, it’s likely they’ll eventually ask whether their presence here is symptomatic of God’s desire to probe the circumstances of its own birth. After all, we have evidence of how many technological species on the disk, ten million, twelve? Replicated many times, in some cases. They might put it together with their concept of manifest destiny and conclude that they are, in fact, doomed to give birth to God. Which is an entirely undesirable conclusion for them to reach from our point of view. Teleologists being bad neighbors, so to speak.”

“Yes indeed,” Brundle says thoughtfully, then titters quietly to himself for a moment.

“This isn’t the first time they’ve avoided throwing around H-bombs in bulk. That’s unusual for primate civilizations. If they keep doing it, they could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous is relative,” says Brundle. He titters again. Things move inside his mouth.

“Don’t do that!” Gregor snaps. He glances round instinctively, but nothing happens.

“You’re jumpy.” Brundle frowns. “Stop worrying so much. We don’t have much longer here.”

“Are we being ordered to move? Or to prepare a sterilization strike?”

“Not yet.” Brundle shrugs. “We have further research to continue with before a decision is reached. The Soviets have made a discovery. Their crewed exploration program. The Korolev lucked out.”

“They–” Gregor tenses. “What did they find?” He knows about the big nuclear-powered Ekranoplan, the dragon of the Caspian, searching the seven oceans for new worlds to conquer. He even knows about the small fleet they’re trying to build at Archangelsk, the ruinous expense of it. But this is new. “What did they find?”

Brundle grins humorlessly. “They found ruins. Then they spent another eight weeks mapping the coastline. They’ve confirmed what they found, they sent the State Department photographs, survey details–the lot.” Brundle gestures at the Cuban War monument, the huge granite column dominating the Mall, its shadow pointing towards the Capitol. “They found Washington DC, in ruins. One hundred and forty thousand miles that way.” He points due north. “They’re not total idiots, and it’s the first time they’ve found one of their own species-transfer cognates. They might be well on their way to understanding the truth, but luckily our comrades in Moscow have that side of the affair under control. But they communicated their discovery to the CIA before it could be suppressed, which raises certain headaches.

“We must make sure that nobody here asks why. So I want you to start by dealing with Sagan.”

Chapter Eleven: Collecting Jar

It’s noon, and the rippling heat haze turns the horizon to fog in the distance. Maddy tries not to move too much: the cycads cast imperfect shadows, and she can feel the Venetian blinds of light burning into her pale skin. She sighs slightly as she hefts the heavy canvas sample bag out of the back of the Land Rover: John will be needing it soon, once he’s finished photographing the mock-termite nests. It’s their third field trip together, their furthest dash into the outback, and she’s already getting used to working with John. He’s surprisingly easy to get on with, because he’s so absorbed in his work that he’s refreshingly free of social expectations. If she didn’t know better she could almost let her guard down and start thinking of him as a friend, not an employer.

The heat makes her mind drift: she tries to remember what sparked her most recent quarrel with Bob, but it seems so distant and irrelevant now–like home, like Bob arguing with her father, like their hurried registry-office wedding and furtive emigration board hearing. All that makes sense now is the stifling heat, the glare of not-sunlight, John working with his camera out in the noonday sun where only mad dogs and Englishmen dare go. Ah, it was the washing. Who was going to do the washing while Maddy was away on the two-day field trip? Bob seemed to think he was doing her a favor, cooking for himself and taking his clothes to the single overused public laundry. (Some year real soon now they’d get washing machines, but not yet …) Bob seemed to think he was being big-hearted, not publicly getting jealous all over her having a job that took her away from home with a male superior who was notoriously single. Bob seemed to think he was some kind of progressive liberated man, for putting up with a wife who had read Betty Freidan and didn’t shave her armpits. Fuck you, Bob, she thinks tiredly, and tugs the heavy strap of the sample case over her shoulder and turns to head in John’s direction. There’ll be time to sort things out with Bob later. For now, she’s got a job to do.

John is leaning over the battered camera, peering through its viewfinder in search of … something. “What’s up?” she asks.

“Mock termites are up,” he says, very seriously. “See the entrances?” The mock termites are what they’ve come to take a look at–nobody’s reported on them from close up, but they’re very visible as soon as you venture into the dusty plain. She peers at the foot of the termite mound, a baked clay hump in the soil that seems to writhe with life. There are little pipe-like holes, tunnels almost, emerging from the base of the mound, and little black mock-termites dancing in and out of the holes in never-ending streams. Little is relative–they’re almost as large as mice. “Don’t touch them,” he warns.

“Are they poisonous?” asks Maddy.

“Don’t know, don’t want to find out this far from the hospital. The fact that there are no vertebrates here–” he shrugs. “We know they’re poisonous to other insectoida.”

Maddy puts the sample case down. “But nobody’s been bitten, or died, or anything.”

“Not that we know of.” He folds back the lid of the case and she shivers, abruptly cold, imagining bleached bones lying unburied in the long grass of the inland plain, where no humans will live for centuries to come. “It’s essential to take care out here. We could be missing for days before anyone noticed, and a search party wouldn’t necessarily find us, even with the journey plan we filed.”

“Okay.” She watches as he takes out an empty sample jar and a label and carefully notes down time and date, distance and direction from the milestone at the heart of Fort Eisenhower. Thirty six miles. They might as well be on another planet. “You’re taking samples?”

He glances round: “of course.” Then he reaches into the side pocket of the bag and removes a pair of heavy gloves, which he proceeds to put on, and a trowel. “If you could put the case down over there?”

Maddy glances inside the case as he kneels down by the mock termite mound. It’s full of jars with blank labels, neatly segregated, impassable quarantine zones for improbable species. She looks round. John is busy with the mock-termite mound. He’s neatly lopped the top off it: inside, the earth is a squirming mass of–things. Black things, white things like bits of string, and a pulp of half-decayed vegetable matter that smells damply of humus. He probes the mound delicately with the trowel, seeking something. “Look,” he calls over his shoulder. “It’s a queen!”

Maddy hurries over. “Really?” she asks. Following his gloved finger, she sees something the size of her left forearm, white and glistening. It twitches, expelling something round, and she feels her gorge rise. “Ugh!”

“It’s just a happy mother,” John says calmly. He lowers the trowel, works it in under the queen and lifts her–and a collection of hangers-on, courtiers and bodyguards alike–over the jar. He tips, he shakes, and he twists the lid into place. Maddy stares at the chaos within. What is it like to be a mock termite, suddenly snatched up and transplanted to a mockery of home? What’s it like to see the sun in an electric light bulb, to go about your business, blindly pumping out eggs and eating and foraging for leaves, under the eyes of inscrutable collectors? She wonders if Bob would understand if she tried to tell him. John stands up and lowers the glass jar into the sample case, then freezes. “Ouch,” he says, and pulls his left glove off.

“Ouch.” He says it again, more slowly. “I missed a small one. Maddy, medical kit, please. Atropine and neostigmine.”

She sees his eyes, pinprick pupils in the noonday glare, and dashes to the Land Rover. The medical kit, olive green with a red cross on a white circle, seems to mock her: she rushes it over to John, who is now sitting calmly on the ground next to the sample case. “What do you need?” she asks.

John tries to point, but his gloved hand is shaking wildly. He tries to pull it off, but the swollen muscles resist attempts to loosen the glove. “Atropine–” A white cylinder, with a red arrow on one side: she quickly reads the label, then pushes it hard against his thigh, feels something spring-loaded explode inside it. John stiffens, then tries to stand up, the automatic syringe still hanging from his leg. He staggers stiff-legged towards the Land Rover and slumps into the passenger seat.

“Wait!” she demands. Tries to feel his wrist: “how many of them bit you?”

His eyes roll. “Just one. Silly of me. No vertebrates.” Then he leans back. “I’m going to try and hold on. Your first aid training.”

Maddy gets the glove off, exposing fingers like angry red sausages: but she can’t find the wound on his left hand, can’t find anything to suck the poison out of. John’s breathing is labored and he twitches: he needs the hospital but it’s at least a four hour drive away and she can’t look after him while she drives. So she puts another syringe load of atropine into his leg and waits with him for five minutes while he struggles for breath hoarsely, then follows up with adrenalin and anything else she can think of that’s good for handling anaphylactic shock. “Get us back,” he manages to wheeze at her between emphysemic gasps. “Samples too.”

After she gets him into the load bed of the truck, she dashes over to the mock termite mound with the spare petrol can. She splashes the best part of a gallon of fuel over the heap, coughing with the stink: she caps the jerry can, drags it away from the mound, then strikes a match and throws it flickering at the disordered insect kingdom. There’s a soft whump as the igniting gas sets the mound aflame: small shapes writhe and crisp beneath an empty blue sky pierced by the glaring pinprick of S Doradus. Maddy doesn’t stay to watch. She hauls the heavy sample case back to the Land Rover, loads it into the trunk alongside John, and scurries back towards town as fast as she can.

She’s almost ten miles away before she remembers the camera, left staring in cyclopean isolation at the scorched remains of the dead colony

Chapter Twelve: Homeward Bound

The big ground effect ship rumbles softly as it cruises across the endless expanse of the Dzerzhinsky Ocean at nearly three hundred knots, homeward bound at last. Misha sits in his cubbyhole–as shipboard political officer he rates an office of his own–and sweats over his report with the aid of a glass of Polish pear schnapps. Radio can’t punch through more than a few thousand miles of air directly, however powerful the transmitters; on earth they used to bounce signals off the ionosphere or the moon, but that doesn’t work here–the other disks are too far away to use as relays. There’s a chain of transceiver buoys marching out across the ocean at two thousand kilometer intervals, but the equipment is a pig to maintain, very expensive to build, and nobody is even joking about stringing undersea cables across a million kilometers of sea floor. Misha’s problem is that the expedition, himself included, is effectively stranded back in the eighteenth century, without even the telegraph to tie civilization together–which is a pretty pickle to find yourself in when you’re the bearer of news that will make the Politburo shit a brick. He desperately wants to be able to boost this up the ladder a bit, but instead it’s going to be his name and his alone on the masthead.

“Bastards. Why couldn’t they give us a signal rocket or two?” He gulps back what’s left of the schnapps and winds a fresh sandwich of paper and carbon into his top-secret-eyes-only typewriter.

“Because it would weigh too much, Misha,” the captain says right behind his left shoulder, causing him to jump and bang his head on the overhead locker.

When Misha stops swearing and Gagarin stops chuckling, the Party man carefully turns his stack of typescript face down on the desk then politely gestures the captain into his office. “What can I do for you, boss? And what do you mean, they’re too heavy?”

Gagarin shrugs. “We looked into it. Sure, we could put a tape recorder and a transmitter into an ICBM and shoot it up to twenty thousand kilometers. Trouble is, it’d fall down again in an hour or so. The fastest we could squirt the message, it would cost about ten rubles a character–more to the point, even a lightweight rocket would weigh as much as our entire payload. Maybe in ten years.” He sits down. “How are you doing with that report?”

Misha sighs. “How am I going to explain to Brezhnev that the Americans aren’t the only mad bastards with hydrogen bombs out here? That we’ve found the new world and the new world is just like the old world, except it glows in the dark? And the only communists we’ve found so far are termites with guns?” For a moment he looks haggard. “It’s been nice knowing you, Yuri.”

“Come on! It can’t be that bad–” Gagarin’s normally sunny disposition is clouded.

“You try and figure out how to break the news to them.” After identifying the first set of ruins, they’d sent one of their MiGs out, loaded with camera pods and fuel: a thousand kilometers inland it had seen the same ominous story of nuclear annihilation visited on an alien civilization: ruins of airports, railroads, cities, factories. A familiar topography in unfamiliar form.

This was New York–once, thousands of years before a giant stamped the bottom of Manhattan island into the sea bed–and that was once Washington DC. Sure there’d been extra skyscrapers, but they’d hardly needed the subsequent coastal cruise to be sure that what they were looking at was the same continent as the old capitalist enemy, thousands of years and millions of kilometers beyond a nuclear war. “We’re running away like a dog that’s seen the devil ride out, hoping that he doesn’t see us and follow us home for a new winter hat.”

Gagarin frowns. “Excuse me?” He points to the bottle of pear schnapps.

“You are my guest.” Misha pours the First Cosmonaut a glass then tops up his own. “It opens certain ideological conflicts, Yuri. And nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news.”

“Ideological–such as?”

“Ah.” Misha takes a mouthful. “Well, we have so far avoided nuclear annihilation and invasion by the forces of reactionary terror during the Great Patriotic War, but only by the skin of our teeth. Now, doctrine has it that any alien species advanced enough to travel in space is almost certain to have discovered socialism, if not true communism, no? And that the enemies of socialism wish to destroy socialism, and take its resources for themselves. But what we’ve seen here is evidence of a different sort. This was America. It follows that somewhere nearby there is a continent that was home to another Soviet Union–two thousand years ago. But this America has been wiped out, and our elder Soviet brethren are not in evidence and they have not colonized this other-America–what can this mean?”

Gagarin’s brow wrinkled. “They’re dead too? I mean, that the alternate-Americans wiped them out in an act of colonialist imperialist aggression but did not survive their treachery,” he adds hastily.

Misha’s lips quirk in something approaching a grin: “Better work on getting your terminology right first time before you see Brezhnev, comrade,” he says. “Yes, you are correct on the facts, but there are matters of interpretation to consider. No colonial exploitation has occurred. So either the perpetrators were also wiped out, or perhaps … well, it opens up several very dangerous avenues of thought. Because if New Soviet Man isn’t home hereabouts, it implies that something happened to them, doesn’t it? Where are all the true Communists? If it turns out that they ran into hostile aliens, then … well, theory says that aliens should be good brother socialists. Theory and ten rubles will buy you a bottle of vodka on this one. Something is badly wrong with our understanding of the direction of history.”

“I suppose there’s no question that there’s something we don’t know about,” Gagarin adds in the ensuing silence, almost as an afterthought.

“Yes. And that’s a fig-leaf of uncertainty we can hide behind, I hope.” Misha puts his glass down and stretches his arms behind his head, fingers interlaced until his knuckles crackle. “Before we left, our agents reported signals picked up in America from–damn, I should not be telling you this without authorization. Pretend I said nothing.” His frown returns.

“You sound as if you’re having dismal thoughts,” Gagarin prods.

“I am having dismal thoughts, comrade colonel-general, very dismal thoughts indeed. We have been behaving as if this world we occupy is merely a new geopolitical game board, have we not? Secure in the knowledge that brother socialists from beyond the stars brought us here to save us from the folly of the imperialist aggressors, or that anyone else we meet will be either barbarians or good communists, we have fallen into the pattern of an earlier age–expanding in all directions, recognizing no limits, assuming our manifest destiny. But what if there are limits? Not a barbed wire fence or a line in the sand, but something more subtle. Why does history demand success of us? What we know is the right way for humans on a human world, with an industrial society, to live. But this is not a human world. And what if it’s a world we’re not destined to succeed? Or what if the very circumstances which gave rise to Marxism are themselves transient, in the broader scale? What if there is a–you’ll pardon me–a materialist God? We know this is our own far future we are living in. Why would any power vast enough to build this disk bring us here?”

Gagarin shakes his head. “There are no limits, my friend,” he says, a trifle condescendingly: “If there were, do you think we would have gotten this far?”

Misha thumps his desk angrily. “Why do you think they put us somewhere where your precious rockets don’t work?” he demands. “Get up on high, one push of rocket exhaust and you could be halfway to anywhere! But down here we have to slog through the atmosphere. We can’t get away! Does that sound like a gift from one friend to another?”

“The way you are thinking sounds paranoid to me,” Gagarin insists. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, mind you: only–could you be overwrought? Finding those bombed cities affected us all, I think.”

Misha glances out of his airliner-sized porthole: “I fear there’s more to it than that. We’re not unique, comrade; we’ve been here before. And we all died. We’re a fucking duplicate, Yuri Alexeyevich, there’s a larger context to all this. And I’m scared by what the politburo will decide to do when they see the evidence. Or what the Americans will do …”

Chapter Thirteen: Last Supper

Returning to Manhattan is a comfort of sorts for Gregor, after the exposed plazas and paranoid open vistas of the capital. Unfortunately he won’t be here for long–he is, after all, on an assignment from Brundle–but he’ll take what comfort he can from the deep stone canyons, the teeming millions scurrying purposefully about at ground level. The Big Apple is a hive of activity, as always, teeming purposeful trails of information leading the busy workers about their tasks. Gregor’s nostrils flare as he stands on the sidewalk on Lexington and East 100th. There’s an Italian restaurant Brundle recommended when he gave Gregor his briefing papers. “Their spaghetti al’ polpette is to die for,” Brundle told him. That’s probably true, but what’s inarguable is that it’s only a couple of blocks away from the offices of the Exobiology Annex to Cornell’s New York Campus, where Sagan is head of department.

Gregor opens the door and glances around. A waiter makes eye contact. “Table for one?”

“Two. I’m meeting–ah.” Gregor sees Sagan sitting in a booth at the back of the restaurant and waves hesitantly. “He’s already here.”

Gregor nods and smiles at Sagan as he sits down opposite the professor. The waiter drifts over and hands him a menu. “Have you ordered?”

“I just got here.” Sagan smiles guardedly. “I’m not sure why you wanted this meeting, Mr., uh, Samsa, isn’t it?” Clearly he thinks he gets the joke–a typical mistake for a brilliant man to make.

Gregor allows his lower lip to twitch. “Believe me, I’d rather it wasn’t necessary,” he says, entirely truthfully. “But the climate in DC isn’t really conducive to clear thought or long-range planning–I mean, we operate under constraints established by the political process. We’re given questions to answer, we’re not encouraged to come up with new questions. So what I’d like to do is just have an open-ended informal chat about anything that you think is worth considering. About our situation, I mean. In case you can open up any avenues we ought to be investigating that aren’t on the map right now.”

Sagan leans forward. “That’s all very well,” he says agreeably, “but I’m a bit puzzled by the policy process itself. We haven’t yet made contact with any nonhuman sapients. I thought your committee was supposed to be assessing our policy options for when contact finally occurs. It sounds to me as if you’re telling me that we already have a policy, and you’re looking to find out if it’s actually a viable one. Is that right?”

Gregor stares at him. “I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he says evenly. Which is the truth. “But if you want to take some guesses I can either discuss things or clam up when you get too close,” he adds, the muscles around his eyes crinkling conspiratorially.

“Aha.” Sagan grins back at him boyishly. “I get it.” His smile vanishes abruptly. “Let me guess. The policy is predicated on MAD, isn’t it?”

Gregor shrugs then glances sideways, warningly: the waiter is approaching. “I’ll have a glass of the house red,” he says, sending the fellow away as fast as possible. “Deterrence presupposes communication, don’t you think?” Gregor asks.

“True.” Sagan picks up his bread knife and absent-mindedly twirls it between finger and thumb. “But it’s how the idiots–excuse me, our elected leaders–treat threats, and I can’t see them responding to tool-using nonhumans as anything else.” He stares at Gregor. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. Your committee pulled me in because there has, in fact, been a contact between humans and nonhuman intelligences–or at least some sign that there are NHIs out there. The existing policy for dealing with it was drafted some time in the sixties under the influence of the hangover left by the Cuban war, and it basically makes the conservative assumption that any aliens are green-skinned Soviets and the only language they talk is nuclear annihilation. This policy is now seen to be every bit as bankrupt as it sounds but nobody knows what to replace it with because there’s no data on the NHIs. Am I right?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” says Gregor.

Sagan sighs. “Okay, play it your way.” He closes his menu. “Ready to order?”

“I believe so.” Gregor looks at him. “The spaghetti al’ polpette is really good here,” he adds.

“Really?” Sagan smiles. “Then I’ll try it.”

They order, and Gregor waits for the waiter to depart before he continues. “Suppose there’s an alien race out there. More than one. You know about the multiple copies of Earth. The uninhabited ones. We’ve been here before. Now let’s see … suppose the aliens aren’t like us. Some of them are recognizable, tribal primates who use tools made out of metal, sea-dwelling ensemble entities who communicate by ultrasound. But others–most of them–are social insects who use amazingly advanced biological engineering to grow what they need. There’s some evidence that they’ve colonized some of the empty Earths. They’re aggressive and territorial and they’re so different that … well, for one thing we think they don’t actually have conscious minds except when they need them. They control their own genetic code and build living organisms tailored to whatever tasks they want carrying out. There’s no evidence that they want to talk to us, and some evidence that they may have emptied some of those empty Earths of their human population. And because of their, um, decentralized ecosystem and biological engineering, conventional policy solutions won’t work. The military ones, I mean.”

Gregor watches Sagan’s face intently as he describes the scenario. There is a slight cooling of the exobiologist’s cheeks as his peripheral arteries contract with shock: his pupils dilate and his respiration rate increases. Sour pheromones begin to diffuse from his sweat ducts and organs in Gregor’s nasal sinuses respond to them.

“You’re kidding?” Sagan half-asks. He sounds disappointed about something.

“I wish I was.” Gregor generates a faint smile and exhales breath laden with oxytocin and other peptide messengers fine-tuned to human metabolism. In the kitchen, the temporary chef who is standing in for the regular one–off sick, due to a bout of food poisoning–will be preparing Sagan’s dish. Humans are creatures of habit: once his meal arrives the astronomer will eat it, taking solace in good food. (Such a shame about the chef.) “They’re not like us. SETI assumes that NHIs are conscious and welcome communication with humans and, in fact, that humans aren’t atypical. But let’s suppose that humans are atypical. The human species has only been around for about a third of a million years, and has only been making metal tools and building settlements for ten thousand. What if the default for sapient species is measured in the millions of years? And they develop strong defense mechanisms to prevent other species moving into their territory?”

“That’s incredibly depressing,” Sagan admits after a minute’s contemplation. “I’m not sure I believe it without seeing some more evidence. That’s why we wanted to use the Arecibo dish to send a message, you know. The other disks are far enough away that we’re safe, whatever they send back: they can’t possibly throw missiles at us, not with a surface escape velocity of twenty thousand miles per second, and if they send unpleasant messages we can stick our fingers in our ears.”

The waiter arrives, and slides his entree in front of Sagan.

“Why do you say that?” asks Gregor.

“Well, for one thing, it doesn’t explain the disk. We couldn’t make anything like it–I suppose I was hoping we’d have some idea of who did? But from what you’re telling me, insect hives with advanced biotechnology … that doesn’t sound plausible.”

“We have some information on that.” Gregor smiles reassuringly. “For the time being, the important thing to recognize is that the species who are on the disk are roughly equivalent to ourselves in technological and scientific understanding. Give or take a couple of hundred years.”

“Oh.” Sagan perks up a bit.

“Yes,” Gregor continues. “We have some information–I can’t describe our sources–but anyway. You’ve seen the changes to the structure of the galaxy we remember. How would you characterize that?”

“Hmm.” Sagan is busy with a mouthful of delicious tetrodotoxin-laced meatballs. “It’s clearly a Kardashev type-III civilization, harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. What else?”

Gregor smiles. “Ah, those Russians, obsessed with coal and steel production! This is the information age, Dr. Sagan. What would the informational resources of a galaxy look like, if they were put to use? And to what use would an unimaginably advanced civilization put them?”

Sagan looks blank for a moment, his fork pausing halfway to his mouth, laden with a deadly promise. “I don’t see–ah!” He smiles, finishes his forkful, and nods. “Do I take it that we’re living in a nature reserve? Or perhaps an archaeology experiment?”

Gregor shrugs. “Humans are time-binding animals,” he explains. “So are all the other tool-using sentient species we have been able to characterize; it appears to be the one common factor, they like to understand their past as a guide to their future. We have sources that have … think of a game of Chinese whispers? The belief that is most widely held is that the disk was made by the agencies we see at work restructuring the galaxy, to house their, ah, experiments in ontology. To view their own deep past, before they became whatever they are, and to decide whether the path through which they emerged was inevitable or a low probability outcome. The reverse face of the Drake equation, if you like.”

Sagan shivers. “Are you telling me we’re just … memories? Echoes from the past, reconstituted and replayed some unimaginable time in the future? That this entire monstrous joke of a cosmological experiment is just a sideshow?”

“Yes, Dr. Sagan,” Gregor says soothingly. “After all, the disk is not so large compared to an entire galaxy, don’t you think? And I would not say the sideshow is unimportant. Do you ever think about your own childhood? And wonder whether the you that sits here in front of me today was the inevitable product of your upbringing? Or could you have become someone completely different–an airline pilot, for example, or a banker? Alternatively, could someone else have become you? What set of circumstances combine to produce an astronomer and exobiologist? Why should a God not harbour the same curiosity?”

“So you’re saying it’s introspection, with a purpose. The galactic civilization wants to see its own birth.”

“The galactic hive mind,” Gregor soothes, amused at how easy it is to deal with Sagan. “Remember, information is key. Why should human-level intelligences be the highest level?” All the while he continues to breathe oxytocin and other peptide neurotransmitters across the table towards Sagan. “Don’t let such speculations ruin your meal,” he adds, phrasing it as an observation rather than an implicit command.

Sagan nods and returns to using his utensils. “That’s very thought-provoking,” he says, as he gratefully raises the first mouthful to his lips. “If this is based on hard intelligence it … well, I’m worried. Even if it’s inference, I have to do some thinking about this. I hadn’t really been thinking along these lines.”

“I’m sure if there’s an alien menace we’ll defeat it,” Gregor assures him as he masticates and swallows the neurotoxin-laced meatball in tomato sauce. And just for the moment, he is content to relax in the luxury of truth: “Just leave everything to me and I’ll see that your concerns are communicated to the right people. Then we’ll do something about your dish and everything will work out for the best.”

Chapter Fourteen: Poor prognosis

Maddy visits John regularly in hospital. At first it’s a combination of natural compassion and edgy guilt; John is pretty much alone on this continent of lies, being both socially and occupationally isolated, and Maddy can convince herself that she’s helping him feel in touch, motivating him to recover. Later on it’s a necessity of work–she’s keeping the lab going, even feeding the squirming white horror in the earth-filled glass jar, in John’s absence–and partly boredom. It’s not as if Bob’s at home much. His work assignments frequently take him to new construction sites up and down the coast. When he is home they frequently argue into the small hours, picking at the scabs on their relationship with the sullen pinch-faced resentment of a couple fifty years gone in despair at the wrongness of their shared direction. So she escapes by visiting John and tells herself that she’s doing it to keep his spirits up as he learns to use his prostheses.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” he tells her one afternoon when he notices her staring. “If you hadn’t been around I’d be dead. Neither of us was to know.”

“Well.” Maddy winces as he sits up, then raises the tongs to his face to nudge the grippers apart before reaching for the water-glass. “That won’t–” She changes direction in mid sentence–”make it easier to cope.”

“We’re all going to have to cope,” he says gnomically, before relaxing back against the stack of pillows. He’s a lot better now than he was when he first arrived, delirious with his hand swollen and blackening, but the after-effects of the mock termite venom have weakened him in other ways. “I want to know why those things don’t live closer to the coast. I mean, if they did we’d never have bothered with the place. After the first landing, that is.” He frowns. “If you can ask at the crown surveyor’s office if there are any relevant records, that would help.”

“The crown surveyor’s not very helpful.” That’s an understatement. The crown surveyor is some kind of throwback; last time she went in to his office to ask about maps of the northeast plateau he’d asked her whether her husband approved of her running around like this. “Maybe when you’re out of here.” She moves her chair closer to the side of the bed.

“Doctor Smythe says next week, possibly Monday or Tuesday.” John sounds frustrated. “The pins and needles are still there.” It’s not just his right hand, lopped off below the elbow and replaced with a crude affair of padding and spring steel; the venom spread and some of his toes had to be amputated. He was fitting when Maddy reached the hospital, four hours after he was bitten. She knows she saved his life, that if he’d gone out alone he’d almost certainly have been killed, so why does she feel so bad about it?

“You’re getting better,” Maddy insists, covering his left hand with her own. “You’ll see.” She smiles encouragingly.

“I wish–” For a moment John looks at her; then he shakes his head minutely and sighs. He grips her hand with his fingers. They feel weak, and she can feel them trembling with the effort. “Leave Johnson–” the surveyor–”to me. I need to prepare an urgent report on the mock termites before anyone else goes poking them.”

“How much of a problem do you think they’re going to be?”

“Deadly.” He closes his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them again. “We’ve got to map their population distribution. And tell the governor-general’s office. I counted twelve of them in roughly an acre, but that was a rough sample and you can’t extrapolate from it. We also need to learn whether they’ve got any unusual swarming behaviors–like army ants, for example, or bees. Then we can start investigating whether any of our insecticides work on them. If the governor wants to start spinning out satellite towns next year, he’s going to need to know what to expect. Otherwise people are going to get hurt.” Or killed, Maddy adds silently.

John is very lucky to be alive: Doctor Smythe compared his condition to a patient he’d once seen who’d been bitten by a rattler, and that was the result of a single bite by a small one. If the continental interior is full of the things, what are we going to do? Maddy wonders.

“Have you seen any sign of her majesty feeding?” John asks, breaking into her train of thought.

Maddy shivers. “Turtle tree leaves go down well,” she says quietly. “And she’s given birth to two workers since we’ve had her. They chew the leaves to mulch then regurgitate it for her.”

“Oh, really? Do they deliver straight into her mandibles?”

Maddy squeezes her eyes tight. This is the bit she was really hoping John wouldn’t ask her about. “No,” she says faintly.

“Really?” He sounds curious.

“I think you’d better see for yourself.” Because there’s no way in hell that Maddy is going to tell him about the crude wooden spoons the mock termite workers have been crafting from the turtle tree branches, or the feeding ritual, and what they did to the bumbler fly that got into the mock termite pen through the chicken wire screen.

He’ll just have to see for himself.

Chapter Fifteen: Rushmore

The Korolev is huge for a flying machine but pretty small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He’s a fighter jock at heart and he can’t stand Navy bullshit. Still, it’s a far cry from the MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn’t have a cockpit, or even a flight deck–it has a bridge, like a ship, with the pilots, flight engineers, navigators, and observers sitting in a horseshoe around the captain’s chair. When it’s thumping across the sea barely ten meters above the wave-tops at nearly five hundred kilometers per hour, it rattles and shakes until the crew’s vision blurs. The big reactor-powered turbines in the tail pods roar and the neutron detectors on the turquoise radiation bulkhead behind them tick like demented death-watch beetles: the rest of the crew are huddled down below in the nose, with as much shielding between them and the engine rooms as possible. It’s a white-knuckle ride, and Yuri has difficulty resisting the urge to curl his hands into fists because whenever he loses concentration his gut instincts are telling him to grab the stick and pull up. The ocean is no aviator’s friend, and skimming across this infinite gray expanse between planet-sized land-masses forces Gagarin to confront the fact that he is not, by instinct, a sailor.

They’re two days outbound from the new-old North America, forty thousand kilometers closer to home and still weeks away even though they’re cutting the corner on their parabolic exploration track. The fatigue is getting to him as he takes his seat next to Misha–who is visibly wilting from his twelve hour shift at the con–and straps himself in. “Anything to report?” He asks.

“I don’t like the look of the ocean ahead,” says Misha. He nods at the navigation station to Gagarin’s left: Shaw, the Irish ensign, sees him and salutes.

“Permission to report, sir?” Gagarin nods. “We’re coming up on a thermocline boundary suggestive of another radiator wall, this time surrounding uncharted seas. Dead reckoning says we’re on course for home but we haven’t charted this route and the surface waters are getting much cooler. Any time now we should be spotting the radiators, and then we’re going to have to start keeping a weather eye out.”

Gagarin sighs: exploring new uncharted oceans seemed almost romantic at first, but now it’s a dangerous but routine task. “You have kept the towed array at altitude?” he asks.

“Yes sir,” Misha responds. The towed array is basically a kite-born radar, tugged along behind the Korolev on the end of a kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles ahead. “Nothing showing–”

Right on cue, one of the radar operators raises a hand and waves three fingers.

“–Correction, radiators ahoy, range three hundred, bearing … okay, let’s see it.”

“Maintain course,” Gagarin announces. “Let’s throttle back to two hundred once we clear the radiators, until we know what we’re running into.” He leans over to his left, watching over Shaw’s shoulder.

The next hour is unpleasantly interesting. As they near the radiator fins, the water and the air above it cool down. The denser air helps the Korolev generate lift, which is good, but they need it, which is bad. The sky turns gray and murky and rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across the armored bridge windows like machine gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines started just in case they hit a down-draft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only for takeoff runs and extraordinary situations. But punching through a cold front and a winter storm isn’t flying as usual as far as Gagarin’s concerned, and the one nightmare all Ekranoplan drivers face is running into a monster ocean wave nose-first at cruise speed.

Presently the navigators identify a path between two radiator fins, and Gagarin authorizes it. He’s beginning to relax as the huge monoliths loom out of the gray clouds ahead when one of the sharp-eyed pilots shouts: “Icebergs!”

“Fucking hell.” Gagarin sits bolt upright. “Start all boost engines! Bring up full power on both reactors! Lower flaps to nine degrees and get us the hell out of this!” He turns to Shaw, his face gray. “Bring the towed array aboard, now.”

“Shit.” Misha starts flipping switches on his console, which doubles as damage control central. “Icebergs?”

The huge ground-effect ship lurches and roars as the third pilot starts bleeding hot exhaust gasses from the running turbines to start the other twelve engines. They’ve probably got less than six hours’ fuel left, and it takes fifteen minutes on all engines to get off the water, but Gagarin’s not going to risk meeting an iceberg head-on in ground-effect. The Ekranoplan can function as a huge, lumbering, ungainly seaplane if it has to; but it doesn’t have the engine power to do so on reactors alone, or to leap-frog floating mountains of ice. And hitting an iceberg isn’t on Gagarin’s to-do list.

The rain sluices across the roof of the bridge and now the sky is louring and dark, the huge walls of the radiator slabs bulking in twilight to either side. The rain is freezing, supercooled droplets that smear the Korolev’s wings with a lethal sheen of ice. “Where are the leading edge heaters?” Gagarin asks. “Come on!”

“Working, sir,” calls the number four pilot. Moments later the treacherous rain turns to hail stones, rattling and booming but fundamentally unlikely to stick to the flight surfaces and build up weight until it flips the ship over. “I think we’re going to–”

A white and ghostly wall comes into view in the distance, hammering towards the bridge windows like a runaway freight train. Gagarin’s stomach lurches. “Pull up, pull up!” The first and second pilots are struggling with the hydraulically boosted controls as the Korolev’s nose pitches up almost ten degrees, right out of ground effect. “Come on!”

They make it.

The iceberg slams out of the darkness of the storm and the sea like the edge of the world; fifty meters high and as massive as mountains, it has lodged against the aperture between the radiator fins. Billions of tons of pack-ice has stopped dead in the water, creaking and groaning with the strain as it butts up against the infinite. The Korolev skids over the leading edge of the iceberg, her keel barely clearing it by ten meters, and continues to climb laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing eyes of her reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they’re into the open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below them is an expanse of whiteness they are also clear of icy mountains.

“Shut down engines three through fourteen,” Gagarin orders once he regains enough control to keep the shakes out of his voice. “Take us back down to thirty meters, lieutenant. Meteorology, what’s our situation like?”

“Arctic or worse, comrade general.” The meteorologist, a hatchet-faced woman from Minsk, shakes her head. “Air temperature outside is thirty below, pressure is high.” The rain and hail has vanished along with the radiators and the clear seas–and the light, for it is now fading towards nightfall.

“Hah. Misha, what do you think?”

“I think we’ve found our way into the freezer, sir. Permission to put the towed array back up?”

Gagarin squints into the darkness. “Lieutenant, keep us at two hundred steady. Misha, yes, get the towed array back out again. We need to see where we’re going.”

The next three hours are simultaneously boring and fraught. It’s darker and colder than a Moscow apartment in winter during a power cut; the sea below is ice from horizon to horizon, cracking and groaning and splintering in a vast expanding V-shape behind the Korolev’s pressure wake. The spectral ruins of the Milky Way galaxy stretch overhead, reddened and stirred by alien influences. Misha supervises the relaunch of the towed array, then hands over to Major Suvurov before stiffly standing and going below to the unquiet bunk room. Gagarin sticks to a quarter-hourly routine of reports, making sure that he knows what everyone is doing. Bridge crew come and go for their regular station changes. It is routine, and deadly with it. Then:

“Sir, I have a return. Permission to report?”

“Go ahead.” Gagarin nods to the navigator. “Where?”

“Bearing zero–it’s horizon to horizon–there’s a crest rising up to ten meters above the surface. Looks like landfall, range one sixty and closing. Uh, there’s a gap and a more distant landfall at thirty-five degrees, peak rising to two hundred meters.”

“That’s some cliff.” Gagarin frowns. He feels drained, his brain hazy with the effort of making continual decisions after six hours in the hot seat and more than two days of this thumping roaring progression. He glances round. “Major? Please summon Colonel Gorodin. Helm, come about to zero thirty five. We’ll take a look at the gap and see if it’s a natural inlet. If this is a continental mass we might as well take a look before we press on for home.”

For the next hour they drive onwards into the night, bleeding off speed and painting in the gaps in the radar map of the coastline. It’s a bleak frontier, inhumanly cold, with a high interior plateau. There are indeed two headlands, promontories jutting into the coast from either side of a broad, deep bay. Hills rise from one of the promontories and across the bay. Something about it strikes Gagarin as strangely familiar, if only he could place it. Another echo of Earth? But it’s too cold by far, a deep Antarctic chill. And he’s not familiar with the coastline of Zemlya, the myriad inlets off the northeast passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal vigilant patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.

A thin predawn light stains the icy hilltops gray as the Korolev cruises slowly between the headlands–several kilometers apart–and into the wide open bay beyond. Gagarin raises his binoculars and scans the distant coastline. There are structures, straight lines! “Another ruined civilization?” He asks quietly.

“Maybe, sir. Think anyone could survive in this weather?” The temperature has dropped another ten degrees in the predawn chill, although the Ekranoplan is kept warm by the outflow of its two Kuznetsov aviation reactors.

“Hah.”

Gagarin begins to sweep the northern coast when Major Suvurov stands up. “Sir! Over there!”

“Where?” Gagarin glances at him. Suvurov is quivering with anger, or shock, or something else. He, too, has his binoculars out.

“Over there! On the southern hillside.”

“Where–” He brings his binoculars to bear as the dawn light spills across the shattered stump of an immense skyscraper.

There is a hillside behind it, a jagged rift where the land has risen up a hundred meters. It reeks of antiquity, emphasized by the carvings in the headland. Here is what the expedition has been looking for all along, the evidence that they are not alone.

“My God.” Misha swears, shocked into politically incorrect language.

“Marx,” says Gagarin, studying the craggy features of the nearest head. “I’ve seen this before, this sort of thing. The Americans have a memorial like it. Mount Rushmore, they call it.”

“Don’t you mean Easter Island?” asks Misha. “Sculptures left by a vanished people …”

“Nonsense! Look there, isn’t that Lenin? And Stalin, of course.” Even though the famous moustache is cracked and half of it has fallen away from the cliff. “But who’s that next to them?”

Gagarin brings his binoculars to focus on the fourth head. Somehow it looks far less weathered than the others, as if added as an afterthought, perhaps some kind of insane statement about the mental health of its vanished builders. Both antennae have long since broken off, and one of the mandibles is damaged, but the eyeless face is still recognizably unhuman. The insectile head stares eyelessly out across the frozen ocean, an enigma on the edge of a devastated island continent. “I think we’ve found the brother socialists,” he mutters to Misha, his voice pitched low so that it won’t carry over the background noise on the flight deck. “And you know what? Something tells me we didn’t want to.”

Chapter Sixteen: Anthropic Error

As the summer dry season grinds on, Maddy finds herself spending more time at John’s home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and cooking for herself in addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the live specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps him write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard: he’s teaching himself to write again but his handwriting is slow and childish.

She finds putting in extra hours at the lab preferable to the empty and uncomfortable silences back in the two bedroom prefab she shares with Bob. Bob is away on field trips to outlying ranches and quarries half the time and working late the other half. At least, he says he’s working late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn’t around to cook, and she gets angry right back at him when he expects her to clean, and they’ve stopped having sex. Their relationship is in fact going downhill rapidly, drying up and withering away in the arid continental heat, until going to work in John’s living room among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like taking refuge. She took to spending more time there, working late for real, and when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the dining room.

One day, more than a month later than expected, Doctor Smythe finally decides that John is well enough to go home. Embarrassingly, she’s not there on the afternoon when he’s finally discharged. Instead, she’s in the living room, typing up a report on a sub-species of the turtle tree and its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front door opens. “Maddy?”

She squeaks before she can stop herself. “John?” She’s out of the chair to help him with the battered suitcase the cabbie half-helpfully left on the front stoop.

“Maddy.” He smiles tiredly. “I’ve missed being home.”

“Come on in.” She closes the screen door and carries the suitcase over to the stairs. He’s painfully thin now, a far cry from the slightly too plump entomologist she’d met on the colony liner. “I’ve got lots of stuff for you to read–but not until you’re stronger. I don’t want you overworking and putting yourself back in hospital!”

“You’re an angel.” He stands uncertainly in his own living room, looking around as if he hadn’t quite expected to see it again. “I’m looking forward to seeing the termites.”

She shivers abruptly. “I’m not. Come on.” She climbs the stairs with the suitcase, not looking back. She pushes through the door into the one bedroom that’s habitable–he’s been using the other one to store samples–and dumps the case on the rough dressing table. She’s been up here before, first to collect his clothing while he was in hospital and later to clean and make sure there are no poisonous spiders lurking in the corners. It smells of camphor and dusty memories. She turns to face him. “Welcome home.” She smiles experimentally.

He looks around. “You’ve been cleaning.”

“Not much.” She feels her face heat.

He shakes his head. “Thank you.”

She can’t decide what to say. “No, no, it’s not like that. If I wasn’t here I’d be …”

John shuffles. She blinks at him, feeling stupid and foolish. “Do you have room for a lodger?” She asks.

He looks at her and she can’t maintain eye contact. It’s all going wrong, not what she wanted.

“Things going badly?” he asks, cocking his head on one side and staring at her. “Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry–”

“No, no, it’s quite alright.” She sniffs. Takes a breath. “This continent breaks things. Bob hasn’t been the same since we arrived, or I, I haven’t. I need to put some space between us, for a bit.”

“Oh.”

“Oh.” She’s silent for a while. “I can pay rent–”

This is an excuse, a transparent rationalization, and not en—

tirely true, but she’s saved from digging herself deeper into a lie because John manages to stumble and reaches out to steady himself with his right arm, which is still not entirely healed, and Maddy finds herself with his weight on her shoulder as he hisses in pain. “Ow! Ow!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“It wasn’t you–” They make it to the bed and she sits him down beside her. “I nearly blacked out then. I feel useless. I’m not half the man I was.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says absently, not quite registering his meaning. She strokes his cheek, feeling it slick with sweat. The pulse in his neck is strong. “You’re still recovering. I think they sent you home too early. Let’s get you into bed and rest up for a couple of hours, then see about something to eat. What do you say to that?”

“I shouldn’t need nursing,” he protests faintly as she bends down and unties his shoelaces. “I don’t need … nursing.” He runs his fingers through her hair.

“This isn’t about nursing.”

Two hours later, the patient is drifting on the edge of sleep, clearly tired out by his physical therapy and the strain of homecoming. Maddy lies curled up against his shoulder, staring at the ceiling. She feels calm and at peace for the first time since she arrived here. It’s not about Bob any more, is it? She asks herself. It’s not about what anybody expects of me. It’s about what I want, about finding my place in the universe. She feels her face relaxing into a smile. Truly, for a moment, it feels as if the entire universe is revolving around her in stately synchrony.

John snuffles slightly then startles and tenses. She can tell he’s come to wakefulness. “Funny,” he says quietly, then clears his throat.

“What is?” Please don’t spoil this, she prays.

“I wasn’t expecting this.” He moves beside her. “Wasn’t expecting much of anything.”

“Was it good?” She tenses.

“Do you still want to stay?” he asks hesitantly. “Damn, I didn’t mean to sound as if–”

“No, I don’t mind–” She rolls towards him, then is brought up short by a quiet, insistent tapping that travels up through the inner wall of the house. “Damn,” she says quietly.

“What’s that?” He begins to sit up.

“It’s the termites.”

John listens intently. The tapping continues erratically, on-again, off-again, bursts of clattering noise. “What is she doing?”

“They do it about twice a day,” Maddy confesses. “I put her in the number two aquarium with a load of soil and leaves and a mesh lid on top. When they start making a racket I feed them.”

He looks surprised. “This I’ve got to see.”

The walls are coming back up again. Maddy stifles a sigh: it’s not about her any more, it’s about the goddamn mock termites. Anyone would think they were the center of the universe and she was just here to feed them. “Let’s go look, then.” John is already standing up, trying to pick up his discarded shirt with his prosthesis. “Don’t bother,” she tells him. “Who’s going to notice, the insects?”

“I thought–” he glances at her, taken aback–”sorry, forget it.”

She pads downstairs, pausing momentarily to make sure he’s following her safely. The tapping continues, startlingly loud. She opens the door to the utility room in the back and turns on the light. “Look,” she says.

The big glass-walled aquarium sits on the worktop. It’s lined with rough-tamped earth and on top, there are piles of denuded branches and wood shavings. It’s near dusk, and by the light filtering through the windows she can see mock-termites moving across the surface of the muddy dome that bulges above the queen’s chamber. A group of them have gathered around a curiously straight branch: as she watches, they throw it against the glass like a battering ram against a castle wall. A pause, then they pick it up and pull back, and throw it again. They’re huge for insects, almost two inches long: much bigger than the ones thronging the mounds in the outback. “That’s odd.” Maddy peers at them. “They’ve grown since yesterday.”

“They? Hang on, did you take workers, or …?”

“No, just the queen. None of these bugs are more than a month old.”

The termites have stopped banging on the glass. They form two rows on either side of the stick, pointing their heads up at the huge, monadic mammals beyond the alien barrier. Looking at them closely Maddy notices other signs of morphological change: the increasing complexity of their digits, the bulges at the back of their heads. Is the queen’s changing, too? She asks herself, briefly troubled by visions of a malignant intelligence rapidly swelling beneath the surface of the vivarium, plotting its escape by moonlight.

John stands behind Maddy and folds his arms around her. She shivers. “I feel as if they’re watching us.”

“But to them it’s not about us, is it?” He whispers in her ear. “Come on. All that’s happening is you’ve trained them to ring a bell so the experimenters give them a snack. They think the universe was made for their convenience. Dumb insects, just a bundle of reflexes really. Let’s feed them and go back to bed.”

The two humans leave and climb the stairs together, arm in arm, leaving the angry aboriginal hive to plot its escape unnoticed.

Chapter Seventeen: It’s always October the First

Gregor sits on a bench on the Esplanade, looking out across the river towards the Statue of Liberty. He’s got a bag of stale bread crumbs and he’s ministering to the flock of pigeons that scuttle and peck around his feet. The time is six minutes to three on the afternoon of October the First, and the year is irrelevant. In fact, it’s too late. This is how it always ends, although the onshore breeze and the sunlight are unexpected bonus payments.

The pigeons jostle and chase one another as he drops another piece of crust on the pavement. For once he hasn’t bothered to soak them overnight in 5% warfarin solution. There is such a thing as a free lunch, if you’re a pigeon in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s going to be dead soon, and if any of the pigeons survive they’re welcome to the wreckage.

There aren’t many people about, so when the puffing middle aged guy in the suit comes into view, jogging along as if he’s chasing his stolen wallet, Gregor spots him instantly. It’s Brundle, looking slightly pathetic when removed from his manhive. Gregor waves hesitantly, and Brundle alters course.

“Running late,” he pants, kicking at the pigeons until they flap away to make space for him at the other end of the bench.

“Really?”

Brundle nods. “They should be coming over the horizon in another five minutes.”

“How did you engineer it?” Gregor isn’t particularly interested but technical chit-chat serves to pass the remaining seconds.

“Man-in-the-middle, ramified by all their intelligence assessments.” Brundle looks self-satisfied. “Understanding their caste specialization makes it easier. Two weeks ago we told the GRU that MacNamara was using the NP-101 program as cover for a preemptive D-SLAM strike. At the same time we got the NOAA to increase their mapping launch frequency, and pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our sources in SAC. It doesn’t take much to get the human hives buzzing with positive feedback.”

Of course, Brundle and Gregor aren’t using words for this incriminating exchange. Their phenotypically human bodies conceal some useful modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroectoderm that shield the delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits that have capabilities human geneticists haven’t even imagined. A visitor from a more advanced human society might start excitedly chattering about wet-phase nanomachines and neural-directed broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day in 1979 plus one million is thinking in those terms. They still think the universe belongs to their own kind, skull-locked social–but not eusocial–primates. Brundle and Gregor know better. They’re workers of a higher order, carefully tailored to the task in hand, and although they look human there’s less to their humanity than meets the eye. Even Gagarin can probably guess better, an individualist trapped in the machinery of a utopian political hive. The termites of New Iowa and a host of other Galapagos continents on the disk are not the future, but they’re a superior approximation to anything humans have achieved, even those planetary instantiations that have doctored their own genome in order to successfully implement true eusocial societies. Group minds aren’t prone to anthropic errors.

“So it’s over, is it?” Gregor asks aloud, in the stilted serial speech to which humans are constrained.

“Yep. Any minute now–”

The air raid sirens begin to wail. Pigeons spook, exploding outward in a cloud of white panic.

“Oh, look.”

The entity behind Gregor’s eyes stares out across the river, marking time while his cancers call home. He’s always vague about these last hours before the end of a mission–a destructive time, in which information is lost–but at least he remembers the rest. As do the hyphae of the huge rhizome network spreading deep beneath the park, thinking slow vegetable thoughts and relaying his sparky monadic flashes back to his mother by way of the engineered fungal strands that thread the deep ocean floors. The next version of him will be created knowing almost everything: the struggle to contain the annoying, hard-to-domesticate primates with their insistent paranoid individualism, the dismay of having to carefully sterilize the few enlightened ones like Sagan …

Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds. Even the mock-termite aboriginals have more to contribute. And Gregor, with his teratomas and his shortage of limbs, has more to contribute than most. The culture that sent him, and a million other anthropomorphic infiltrators, understands this well: he will be rewarded and propagated, his genome and memeome preserved by the collective even as it systematically eliminates yet another outbreak of humanity. The collective is well on its way towards occupying a tenth of the disk, or at least of sweeping it clean of competing life forms. Eventually it will open negotiations with its neighbors on the other disks, joining the process of forming a distributed consciousness that is a primitive echo of the vast ramified intelligence wheeling across the sky so far away. And this time round, knowing why it is being birthed, the new God will have a level of self-understanding denied to its parent.

Gregor anticipates being one of the overmind’s memories: it is a fate none of these humans will know save at second-hand, filtered through his eusocial sensibilities. To the extent that he bothers to consider the subject, he thinks it is a disappointment. He may be here to help exterminate them, but it’s not a personal grudge: it’s more like pouring gasoline on a troublesome ant heap that’s settled in the wrong back yard. The necessity irritates him, and he grumbles aloud in Brundle’s direction: “If they realized how thoroughly they’d been infiltrated, or how badly their own individuality lets them down–”

Flashes far out over the ocean, ruby glare reflected from the thin tatters of stratospheric cloud.

“–They might learn to cooperate some day. Like us.”

More flashes, moving closer now as the nuclear battlefront evolves.

Brundle nods. “But then, they wouldn’t be human any more. And in any case, they’re much too late. A million years too late.”

A flicker too bright to see, propagating faster than the signaling speed of nerves, punctuates their conversation. Seconds later, the mach wave flushes their cinders from the bleached concrete of the bench. Far out across the disk, the game of ape and ant continues; but in this place and for the present time, the question has been answered. And there are no human winners.

***

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened; ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planet-like body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwhisp.

Eight years have passed since the good ship Field Circus slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light sail powered craft three light years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwhisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help.

Meanwhile, outside the light cone–

Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, “where am I–oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?” mumble. “Oh, I see.” Her eyes widen in horror. It’s not a dream ….

“Greetings, human Amber,” says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: “I see you are awake. Would you like anything?”

Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. “What’s going on? Where am I? Who are you, and what am I doing in your head?”

Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. “The router,” she mutters. Structures of strange matter in orbit around a brown dwarf, scant light years from Earth. “How long ago did we come through?” Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there’s no glass in it–just a blank white screen. The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. That, and the idiot gun that hovers just beneath the ceiling. She’s reminded of a scene from an old movie, Kubrick’s enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it isn’t funny.

“I’m waiting,” she announces, and leans back against the headboard.

“According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware,” says the ghost. “This is good. You have not been conscious for a very long time: explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?”

“Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear.” Amber crosses her arms, abruptly selfconscious. “I’d prefer to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it’s a bit lacking in furniture.” Which isn’t entirely true–it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model. Her eyes focus on her left forearm; tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue records a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she’s locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally she asks, “How long have I been dead?”

“Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude,” says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. “I can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?”

Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. “Give it to me right now. I can take it,” she says, quietly bitter. “I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible,” she adds.

“We-us can tell that you are a human of determination,” says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. “That is a good thing, human Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here ….”

It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a realtime clock still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada.

The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer–locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation–and now, as the sun, vast and red, burns low above the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq’s nature to look outward toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing–but he is a member of that generation of the Shi’ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century: the generation that withdrew the ulama from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his successors, and left government to the people. Sadeq’s focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of re-appraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a mujtahid: the Fermi paradox.

Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate–made of wrought iron, warmed by sunlight–squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns slightly, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking stops dead. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower.

He climbs with a heavy, even tread, a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase: through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn’t want to lose his proximity to his faith. He’s far enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider–he is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a corrosive desert of faith.

At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn’t belong here: it’s a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black iron: Sadeq regards it as if it’s the head of an asp, poised to strike. Nevertheless he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy.

None of this is real, he reminds himself. It’s no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the djinni of the thousand nights and one night. Nevertheless, he can’t save himself from smiling at the scene–a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration.

Sadeq’s captors have stolen his soul and locked it–him–in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to paradise. It’s the whole classical litany of mediaevalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature; colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his appetite–and occupied by dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen: but he doesn’t dare permit himself to succumb to this temptation. I’m not dead, he reasons, therefore how can I be in paradise? Therefore this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that’s so, isn’t uploading a sin? In which case this can’t be paradise. Besides which, this paradox is so puerile!

Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical enquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth century Catholic church. If there’s one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology it’s two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can’t really be dead. Except …

The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs–until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating: not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night–for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket–Sadeq sits and thinks, grappling with Descartes’ demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: can I tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?

The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage–and has died again–many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation.

The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Turing era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost’s description dissatisfyingly incomplete: like saying she was been drugged and brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile.

She doesn’t have a problem with the ghost’s assertion that she is nowhere near Earth, either–indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai +4904/-56, they’d understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she’s still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as odd. The router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She’d somehow expected to be much further from home by now.

Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost’s assertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point she interrupts: “I hardly see what this has to do with me!” She blows across her coffee glass; “I’m dead,” she explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. “Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever here is–without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can’t even tell whether this is real or an embedded simulation. You’re going to have to explain why you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation–and I can tell you, I’m not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn’t the only one, you know?”

The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: have I gone too far? she wonders.

“There has been an unfortunate accident,” the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber’s own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions. “Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone.”

“Demilitarized … ?” Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. “What do you mean? What is this place?”

The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. “This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish informational value of migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures.”

“Currency!” Amber doesn’t know whether to be amused or horrified–both reactions seem appropriate. “Is that how you treat all your visitors?”

The ghost ignores her question. “There is a runaway semiotic excursion underway in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate.”

Amber drains her coffee cup. “Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?” she asks. “If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself running around here?” She raises an eyebrow at the ghost. “This looks like the start of an abusive relationship.”

The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. “Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ,” it asserts. “Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired.”

“This monster.” Amber leans forward: it’s her turn to ignore what she feels to be a spurious offer. Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind? she wonders dismissively. “what is this alien?” She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. “Is it part of the Wunch?”

“Datum unknown. It-them came with you,” says the ghost. “Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. Now it runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub or we will be cut off from the network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us ….”

A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided missile and far more deadly.

Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hotcore of the Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She’s free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million Euros; she’s a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It’s not exactly slavery: thanks to Dad’s corporate shell-game, she doesn’t have to worry about Mom chasing her, a cyanide-eyed abductress with feudal spawn-indenture rights in mind. And now she’s got a little pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to keep her company, and she’s gonna do that eighteenth century enlightenment tourist shit and do it right.

Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere.

China is where it’s at in this decade, hot and dense and full of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with the West has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest fad gadgets, the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America, the fastest hottest smartest upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter; this is a place where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamor of high technology living.

Walking along Jardine’s Bazaar–more like Jardine’s bizarre, she thinks–exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass and chrome roofs of the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak any more, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The Chinese–fighter? missile platform? supercomputer?–is heading out over the South China Sea, to join the endless patrol that guards the border of the capitalist world against the Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa’hab.

For the moment, she’s merely a human child: Amber’s subconscious is offlined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder bag.

“Hey!” she yells, stumbling. Her mind’s a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a physiology model of her assailant. It’s the frozen moment, the dead zone when online coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions offline she doesn’t know how to yell “stop, thief !” in Cantonese.

Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. “Get him, you bastards!” she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: an elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts–it’s going to make a scene if she doesn’t catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it.

By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: she has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And by that time there’s a robocop in attendance. “Identify yourself,” it rasps in synthetic English.

Amber stares at her bag in horror: there’s a huge gash in the side, and it’s far too light. It’s gone, she thinks, despairingly: he stole it. “Help,” she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through the robot’s eyes. “Been stolen.”

“What item missing?” asks the robot.

“My Hello Kitty,” she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat: “My kitten’s been stolen! Can you help me?”

“Certainly,” says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder–a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence.

By the time Amber’s meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she’s being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. Some of them spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, and the Space and Freedom Party. As she’s being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with enquiries from lawyers, fast food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that’s been tracking her father’s connections. “Can you help me get my cat back?” she asks the policewoman earnestly.

“Name,” the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation: “to please wax your identity stiffly.”

“My cat has been stolen,” Amber insists.

“Your cat?” The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn’t in her repertoire. “We are asking your name?”

“No,” says Amber. “It’s my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been stolen.”

“Aha! Your papers, please?”

“Papers?” Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can’t feel the outside world; there’s a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell and it’s claustrophobically quiet in here. “I want my cat! Now!”

The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. “Papers,” she repeats. “Or else.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Amber wails.

The cop stares at her oddly. “Wait.” She rises and leaves, and a minute later returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly.

“You are making a scene,” he says, rudely and abruptly. “What is your name? Tell me truthfully or you’ll spend the night here.”

Amber bursts into tears. “My cat’s been stolen,” she chokes out.

The detective and the cop obviously don’t know how to deal with this scene; it’s freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. “You wait here,” they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

The implications of her loss–of Aineko’s abduction–are sinking in now, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It’s hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year now, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup, is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with.

But after an hour, just as she’s quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there’s a knock–a knock!–at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. “Please to come with us?” It’s the female cop with the bad translation ware. She takes in Amber’s sobbing and tsks under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.

At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. “Please identify,” he asks, snipping the string.

Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. “Is it–” she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. “What took you so long?” asks the cat as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.

“If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges,” says Amber. “Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me–round up the usual suspects–and give them root privileges, too. Then we’ll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns.”

“That may be difficult,” says the ghost. “Many other humans reached halting state long-since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-are lost in DMZ. We-us can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons.”

Amber sighs. “You guys really are media illiterates, aren’t you?” She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep’s enervation leaching from her muscles. “I’ll also need my–” it’s on the tip of her tongue: there’s something missing. “Hang on. There’s something I’ve forgotten.” Something important, she thinks, puzzled. Something that used to be around all the time that would … know? … purr? … help? “Never mind,” she hears her lips say. “This other human. I really want her. Non-negotiable. All right?”

“That may be difficult,” repeats the ghost. “Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe.”

“Eh?” Amber blinks at it. “Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?”

“Illustration:” the ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber’s eyes cross as she looks at it. “Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes’ demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact.”

“Well, can you get me into that space?” asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it’s part and parcel of life as an upload. “Give me some leverage–”

“Risk may attach to this course of action,” warns the ghost.

“I don’t care,” she says irritably. “Just put me there. It’s someone I know, isn’t it? Send me into her dream and I’ll wake her up, okay?”

“Understood,” says the ghost. “Prepare yourself.”

Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by–

“Shit,” she mumbles. “Who are you?” The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn’t wearing a stitch, she’s completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. “Yes?” Amber asks, “what is it?”

The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. “Sorry, that’s just not my scene.” She backs away into the corridor, unsteady but thoughtful. “This is some sort of male fantasy, isn’t it? And a particularly puerile one at that.” She looks around again. In one direction a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. “Shit, looks like I’m going to have to do this the hard way. I wish–” she frowns. She was about to wish that someone else was here, but she can’t remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.

“Up or down?” she asks herself. Up–it seems logical, if you’re going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this space? She wonders. And what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. Wait ’til I give him an earful ….

There’s a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn’t fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he’s built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn’t Pierre, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.

The room is bare and floored in wood. There’s no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh shit. Her eyes widen. Is this what’s been inside his head all along?

“I did not summon you,” Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. “Go away, tempter. You aren’t real.”

Amber clears her throat. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re wrong,” she says. “We’ve got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?”

Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. “That’s odd.” He undresses her with his gaze. “You look like someone I used to know. You’ve never done that before.”

“For fuck’s sake!” Amber nearly explodes but catches herself after a moment. “What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?”

“I–” Sadeq looks puzzled. “I’m sorry, are you claiming to be real?”

“As real as you are.” Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: he doesn’t resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.

“You’re the first visitor I’ve ever had.” He sounds shocked.

“Listen, come on.” She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. “Do you want to stay here? Really?” She glances back at him. “What is this place?”

“Hell is a perversion of heaven,” he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. “We’ll have to see how real you are–” Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and back-handing him hard.

“You’re real!” he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. “Forgive me, please! I had to know–”

“Know what?” she snarls. “Lay one finger on me again and I’ll leave you here to rot!” She’s already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: it’s a serious threat.

“But I had to–wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that.” He’s breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. “I’m sorry, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not.”

“A zombie?” She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skin-tight leather suit with a cut-away crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. “You thought I was one of those?”

Sadeq nods. “They’ve gotten cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for–” he shudders convulsively. “Unclean!”

“Unclean.” Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. “This isn’t really your personal paradise, is it?” After a moment, she holds out a hand to him. “Come on.”

“I’m sorry I thought you were a zombie,” he repeats sadly: then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.

More memories converge on the present moment:

The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father’s business partners are helping her to build. It’s also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel.

A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semi-sentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar meme-set. A whole bundle of multi-threaded counter-suits are dragging at her attention, in a counter-attack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper’s intentions.

Right now, Amber isn’t home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She’s left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system–tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass–while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust’s orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O’Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: most of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust’s borganism.

There’s a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the Borg’s special-interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can’t be bothered. She’s just had a great meal, she doesn’t have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by–

“Do you keep in touch with your father?” asks Monica.

“Mm.” The cat purrs quietly and Amber strokes its flank. “We email. Sometimes.”

“I just wondered.” Monica is the local Borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl–Yorkshire English overlaid with silicon-valley speak. “I hear from him, y’know. From time to time. He was talking about coming out here.”

“What? To PeriJove?” Amber’s eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.

“Don’t worry.” Monica sounds vaguely amused. “He wouldn’t cramp your style, I think.”

“But, out here–” Amber sits up. “Damn,” she says, quietly. “What got into him?”

“Middle-aged restlessness, my down-well sibs say.” Monica shrugs. “This time, Annette didn’t stop him. But he hasn’t made up his mind to travel yet.”

“Good. Then he might not–” Amber stops. “The phrase. Made up his mind. What exactly do you mean?”

Monica’s smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. “He’s talking about uploading.”

“Is that embarrassing, or what?” asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn’t looking her way. So much for friends, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships–

“He won’t do it,” Amber predicts. “Dad’s burned out.”

“He thinks he’ll get it back if he optimizes himself for reentrancy.” Monica continues to smile. “I’ve been telling him it’s just what he needs.”

“I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Memo to immigration control: no entry rights for Manfred Macx without clearance through the Queen’s secretary.”

“What did he do to get you so uptight?” asks Monica idly.

Amber sighs, and subsides. “Nothing. He’s just so extropian it’s embarrassing. Like, that was the last century’s apocalypse. Y’know?”

“I think he was a really very forward-looking organic,” Monica, speaking for the Franklin Borg, asserts. Amber looks away. Pierre would get it, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more-or-less mature–Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn’t seen him for a long time–walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned.

“Parents. What are they good for?” asks Amber, with all the truculence of her seventeen years. “Even if they stay neotenous they lose flexibility. And there’s that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it.”

“How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your own?” challenges Monica.

“Five. That’s when I had my first implants.” Amber smiles at the approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: yes, it’s Nicky, and he seems pleased to see her. Life is good, she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre.

“Times change,” remarks Monica. “Don’t write your father off too soon; there might come a time when you want his company.”

“Huh.” Amber pulls a face at the old Borg component. “That’s what you all say!”

As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her: she has management authority here, and this universe is big, wide open, not like Sadeq’s existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has an uncomfortable feeling that she’s running in a compatibility box, here–there are signs that her access to the simulation system’s control interface is very much via proxy–but at least she’s got it.

“Wow. Back in the real world at last!” She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre’s performance of Puritan Hell. “Look! It’s the DMZ!”

They’re standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city that snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape dwindling into the blue yonder, incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. “How big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents.”

“This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system’s router and the civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?” The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.

Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. “Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them,” she explains. “Turn them into dust–structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron; the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It’s like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, all running uploads–Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space.”

“Ah.” Sadeq nods thoughtfully. “Is that your definition, too?” he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence.

“Substantially,” it says, almost grudgingly.

“Substantially?” Amber glances around. A billion worlds to explore, she thinks dizzily. And that’s just the firewall? She feels obscurely cheated: you need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at play here, but there’s nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life-expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing “dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!” in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to come in in the third decade of the third millennium, the space and freedom party taking over the EU and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where’s the exotic super-science? I have a bad feeling about this, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq; it isn’t advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites hitching a ride in the machine?

The Wunch, a disastrous infection that had nearly taken over the Field Circus, are dumb parasitic aliens who infest the routers. Luckily, Earth’s first uploads–who had reached the router years earlier and been assimilated by the Wunch–had been lobsters; the confused carpetbaggers succumbed to defenses jury-rigged by Pierre and the rest of the crew.

You believe it’s lying to us? Sadeq sends back.

“Hmm.” Amber sets off down-slope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. “It looks a bit too human to me.”

“Human,” echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. “Did you not say humans are extinct?”

“Your species is obsolete,” the ghost comments smugly. “Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messy global variables–”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the picture,” says Amber, turning her attention on the town. “So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you’ve got a problem with?”

“It asked for you,” said the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, and then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. “And now it’s coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye.”

“Oh shit–” Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery republic, is charmingly rustic–but there’s nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it.

“We appear to be alone for now,” says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. “Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?”

“Our host.” Amber peers around. “The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?”

“It asked for us.” Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. “That could be very good news–or very bad.”

“Hmm.” Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better idea, she ambles over to the table and sits down at the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it’s just embarrassment. If I had an afterlife like that, I’d be embarrassed about it too, Amber thinks to herself.

“Hey, you nearly tripped over–” Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber’s left foot. He looks puzzled. “What are you doing here?” he asks her blind spot.

“What are you talking to?” she asks, startled.

He’s talking to me, dummy, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. So the fuckwit’s trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? That’s not exactly clever.

“Who–” Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the blindness. “Are you the alien?”

“What else could I be?” the blind spot asks with heavy irony. “No, I’m your father’s pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?”

“Uh.” Amber rubs her eyes. “I can’t see you, whatever you are,” she says politely. “Do I know you?” She’s got a strange sense that she does know the blind spot, that it’s really important and she’s missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can’t tell.

“Yeah, kid.” There’s a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. “They’ve hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in and I’ll fix it.”

“No!” exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. “Are you really an invader?”

The blind spot sighs. “I’m as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I’m not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency.”

“Fungible–” Sadeq stops. “I remember you,” he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. “What do you mean?”

The blind spot yawns, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. “Lemme guess. You woke up in a room and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?”

Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. “Is it lying?” she asks.

“Damn right!” The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won’t go away–she can see the smile, just not the body it’s attached to. “My reckoning is, we’re about sixteen light years from Earth. The Wunch have been through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it’s a trashhole, you wouldn’t believe it. The main life form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as currency.”

There’s a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears; predatory, intelligent-looking. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. “You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared and they’ve mangled my memories–” Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its front paws.

“Yeah. Except that they didn’t bargain on meeting something like me.” The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire cat grin on the front of an orange and brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber’s gaze like a hallucination. “Your mother’s cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?”

“Hong–”

There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the Field Circus waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the gaping holes–interfaces to the other routers in the network.

“Welcome back,” Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. “Now you’re out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?”

Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don’t mean so much any more, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude–some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth millennium.

While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router–itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56–while Amber and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes–while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase “smart money” has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species–fast-moving corporate carnivores in the net. The planet Mercury has been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar output; a million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no further out than Mercury used to be.

Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one’s brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping robots into an all-pervading neurosis–sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines: and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Some time later, there will probably be a war: the dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that pool at the bottom of their gravity well.

Energy and thought are driving a phase change in the condensed matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoidal curve–dumb matter is coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately mark the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they’re seeing: the death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death throes that within a few centuries will mean the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that star–for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are innately hostile to fleshy life.

Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they’ve discovered about the bazaar–as they call the space the ghost referred to as the demilitarized zone–over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of a sociable joint.

“It’s half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as massive as Earth,” Pierre explains. “Not solid, of course–the largest component is about the size my fist used to be.” Amber squints, trying to remember how big that was–scale factors are hard to remember accurately. “I met this old chatbot that said it’s outlived its original star, but I’m not sure it’s running with a full deck. Anyway, if it’s telling the truth, we’re a third of a light-year out from a closely coupled binary system–they use orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those icky gravity wells.”

Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because the bazaar is several orders of magnitude more complex than the totality of human pre-singularity civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she’s worried that getting home may be impossible–requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still, she’s got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the bazaar will change so many things–

“How much money can we lay our hands on?” she asks. “What is money hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they’ve got a scarcity-mediated economy. Bandwidth, maybe?”

“Ah, well.” Pierre looks at her oddly. “That’s the problem. Didn’t the ghost tell you?”

“Tell me?” Amber raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, but it hasn’t exactly proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?”

“Tell her,” Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something.

“They’ve got a scarcity economy all right,” says Pierre. “Bandwidth is the limited resource and things that come from other cognitive universes are, well, currency. We came in through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?”

“That’s so deeply wrong that I don’t know where to begin,” Amber grumbles. “How did they get into this mess?”

“Don’t ask me.” Pierre shrugs. “I have the distinct feeling that anyone or anything we meet in this place won’t have any more of a clue than we do–whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain’t nobody home any more except for the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We’re in the dark, just like they were.”

“Huh.” Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state vector. A moment later her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table; iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. “Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that’s something to work with. Tried any self-modification?”

“That’s dangerous,” Pierre says emphatically. “The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling of our own.”

“How deep does reality go, here?” asks Sadeq. It’s almost the first question he’s asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he’s finally coming out of his shell.

“Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter here. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like real spacetime.”

“Well, then.” Sadeq pauses. “They can zoom their reality if they need to?”

“Yeah, fractals work in here.” Pierre nods. “I didn’t–”

“This place is a trap,” Su Ang says emphatically.

“No, it isn’t,” Pierre replies, nettled.

“What do you mean, a trap?” asks Amber.

“We’ve been here a while,” says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when they’re emulating a sleeping cat. “After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things here that–” she shivers. “Humans can’t survive in most of the simulation spaces here. We’re talking universes with physics models that don’t support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you’d need to be ported to a whole new type of logic–by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren’t here any more. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield.”

“So there’s no hope of making contact,” Amber summarizes. “At least, not with anything transcendent and well-inclined.”

“That’s right,” Pierre concedes. He doesn’t sound happy about it.

“And we’re stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum-dwellers who want to use us for currency. ‘Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.’ Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Su Ang looks gloomy.

“Well.” Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sun spot that limns the square with shadows. “Hey, god-man. Got a question for you.”

“Yes?” Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. “I’m sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat–”

“Don’t be.” Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. “Have you ever been to Brooklyn?”

“No, why–”

“You’re going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we’ve sold it, we’re going to get the buyer to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, here’s how we’re going to do it ….”

“I can do this, I think,” Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner of the fourth dimensional store. “I spent long enough alone in there to–” he shivers.

“I don’t want you damaging yourself,” Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiration date attached.

“Oh, never fear.” Sadeq grins lopsidedly. “One pocket hell is much like another.”

“Do you understand why–”

“Yes, yes,” he says dismissively. “We can’t send copies of ourselves into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?”

“Well. The idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn’t that it?” Su Ang asks hesitantly. She’s looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she’s spun off to attend to perimeter security.

“Who are we selling this to?” asks Sadeq. “If you want me to make it attractive–”

“It doesn’t need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a pre-singularity civilization full of humans. You’ve got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied.”

Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. “Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in realtime? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?”

Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. “‘Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time.” The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. “The ghosts are pushing. You know? I don’t think I can sustain this for too much longer. They’re not good at hacking you, but I think it won’t be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that’ll be predisposed to their side.”

“I don’t get why they didn’t assimilate you along with the rest of us.”

“Blame your mother again–she’s the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. ‘Illegal consciousness is copyright theft’ sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it’s a lifesaver.” Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. “I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off.”

“I will take it, then.” Sadeq stands. “Thank you.” He smiles at the cat; a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower–this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind.

“That leaves just us.” Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. “Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?”

Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna–her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter–is filming everything for posterity. “Who do we know who’s dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?”

Pierre looks at her suspiciously. “I think we’ve been here before,” he says slowly. “You aren’t going to make me kill anyone, are you?”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we’re going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us.”

“You see, she learned from last time,” Ang comments, and Amber nods. “No more misunderstandings. Right?” She beams at Amber.

Amber beams right back. “Right. And that’s why you–” she points at Pierre–”are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won’t refuse.”

“How much for just the civilization?” asks the slug.

Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It’s not really a terrestrial mollusk; slugs on earth aren’t two meters long and don’t have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn’t really the alien it appears to be, either; it’s a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors won’t recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient.

“The civilization isn’t for sale,” Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different deep grammar: not merely translating his syntax, but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary. “But we can give you privileged observer status if that’s what you want. And we know what you are. If you’re interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there than here.”

The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump; its skin blushes red in patches. “Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time-cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter contracts?”

“I could ask my patron,” Pierre says casually. Suppressing a stab of angst; he’s still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just a business relationship and he worries about the risks she’s taking. “My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require shell companies, but that can be taken care of.”

The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some difficult concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it’ll work, however. He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mud flats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be considering the bizarre proposition that Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it.

“Sounds interesting,” the slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. “If I supply the genome, can you customize a container for it?”

“I believe so,” Pierre says carefully. “For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?”

“From a gate?” For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. “Easy. Gates are all entangled: dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another.”

“But the lightspeed lag–”

“No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum. Whole point of the network is that it is non-lossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?”

Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the slug’s cosmology. But there isn’t really time, here and now: they’ve got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time to get everything together, if Aineko is right, before the angry ghosts that resurrected Amber to do their bidding start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. “If you are willing to try this, we’d be happy to accommodate you,” he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits’ feet and firewalls.

“It’s a deal,” the membrane translates the slug’s response back at him. “Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?”

Pierre stares at the slug: “But this is a business arrangement!” he protests. “What’s sex got to do with it?”

“Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?”

“Not that way. It’s a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we’re setting up for them ….”

And so on.

Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq’s afterlife universe. In her own subjective time, it’s been about half an hour since he left. “Coming?” she asks her cat.

“Don’t think I will,” says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned.

“Bah.” Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq’s pocket universe.

As before, she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there’s something different about it, and, after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: there are people here.

She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It’s hot outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down, she sees motor scooters, cars–filthy fossil-fuelled behemoths, a ton of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM–brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic.

“Just like home, isn’t it?” says Sadeq, behind her.

Amber starts. “This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?”

“It doesn’t exist any more, in realspace.” Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she’d rescued from this building–back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife–scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: “Probably a good thing. They were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?”

“It’s detailed.” Amber throws her gaze out through the window, multiplexes it, sends little virtual viewpoints dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial ‘burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the Hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets.

“It’s the best time I could recall,” Sadeq says. “I didn’t spend much time here–I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training–but it’s meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren’t doing well elsewhere.”

“I thought democracy was a new thing there?”

“No.” Sadeq shakes his head. “There were pro-democracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That’s why the first revolution–no.” He makes a cutting gesture. “Politics I can live without.” He frowns. “But look. Is this what you wanted?”

Amber recalls her scattered eyes–some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus–and concentrates on reintegrating: memories of Sadeq’s recreation. “It looks convincing. But not too convincing.”

“That was the idea.”

“Well, then.” She smiles. “Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?”

“Who, me?” He raises an eyebrow. “I have enough doubts about the morality of this–project–without trying to trespass on Allah’s territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us; the people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more.”

“Well, then.” Amber pauses. Recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road. Remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. “Are you sure they aren’t real?” she asks.

“Quite sure.” But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. “Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?”

“Yes to the first, and Pierre’s working on the second. Come on, we don’t want to get trampled by the squatters.” She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza, where her robot cat–the alien’s nightmare intruder in the DMZ–sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps; let’s go and sell a bridge.”

Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.

“You have confined the monster,” the ghost states.

“Yes.” Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing-channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately.

“And you have modified yourself to lock out external control,” the ghost adds. “What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?”

“Don’t you have any concept of individuality?” she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.

“Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,” says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. “A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?”

“It’ll do as I say,” Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels–that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than any real feline. “Now, the matter of payment arises.”

“Payment.” The ghost sounds amused. But now Pierre’s filled her in on what to look for, Amber can see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. “How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?”

Amber smiles. “We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through.”

“Impossible,” says the ghost.

“We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it.”

“Impossible,” the ghost repeats.

“We can trade you a whole civilization,” Amber says blandly. “A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go and we’ll see to it.”

“You–please wait.” The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.

Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.

They’re moving in. This bunch don’t remember what happened on the Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So the slug’s got them to cooperate. It’s kinda scary to watch–like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know?

I don’t care if it’s scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if we’re ready yet.

Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.

Right, pack yourself down. We’ll be moving soon.

The ghost is firming up in front of her. “A whole civilization?” it asks. “That is not possible. Your arrival–” It pauses, fuzzing a little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! “You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives.”

“The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator,” she asserts blandly. “It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It’s an archivore–everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system, already: there is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router–or the high bandwidth hub we linked to it.”

“You are sure you have killed this monster?” asks the ghost. “It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives.”

“I can guarantee it won’t trouble you again if you let us go,” says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn’t seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko’s goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.

“We-us agree.” The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token–a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. “Here is your passage. Show us the civilization.”

“Okay–” Now! “–catch.” Amber twitches an imaginary muscle and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq’s existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can’t believe what they’ve lucked into–an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.

The ghost drifts toward the open window; Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still; and then–

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway slug-corporation’s proxy is holding the router open, and the lump of strange matter is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star eight light years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the once-human solar system.

Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They’re curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England, a bed that appears to be carved from thousand year old oak beams. As with everything else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive: and even more so in the cramped simulation spaces of the Field Circus as it slowly accelerates toward a tenth of lightspeed.

“Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran populated by refugee members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?”

“Yeah.” Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. “It’s their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn’t use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn’t have fallen for a trick like that, would they?”

“People. Money.”

“Well.” She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. “Corporations are life forms back home, too, aren’t they? We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but it goes further. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and with staff bowing-and-scraping everywhere–”

“–The new aristocracy. Right?”

“Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.” The queen passes her consort a wine glass. He drinks from it: it refills miraculously. “You’ve got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went.”

“Maybe the companies spent them.” Pierre looks worried. “Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um.” He pauses. “Tribal. A primitive post-singularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Over-awed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human–or alien–capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there’s nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.”

“Speculation.”

“Idle speculation,” he agrees.

“But we can’t ignore it.” She nods. “Is the hitch hiker happy?”

“Last time I checked on him, yeah.” Pierre blows on his wine glass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light, but he looks dubious at the mention of the slug-shaped corporate instrument they’re taking with them in return for help engineering their escape. “Don’t trust him out in the unrestricted sim-spaces yet. Aineko is spending a lot of time with him.”

“So that’s where she is!”

“Cats never come when you call them, do they?”

“There’s that,” she agrees. Then with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter’s cloudscape: “I wonder what we’ll find when we get there?”

Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.

I hate days like this.

It’s a rainy Monday morning and I’m late in to work at the Laundry because of a technical fault on the Tube. When I get to my desk, the first thing I find is a note from Human Resources that says one of their management team wants to talk to me, soonest, about playing computer games at work. And to put the cherry on top of the shit-pie, the office’s coffee percolator is empty because none of the other inmates in this goddamn loony bin can be arsed refilling it. It’s enough to make me long for a high place and a rifle … but in the end I head for Human Resources to take the bull by the horns, decaffeinated and mean as only a decaffeinated Bob can be.

Over in the dizzying heights of HR, the furniture is fresh and the windows recently cleaned. It’s a far cry from the dingy rats’ nest of Ops Division, where I normally spend my working time. But ours is not to wonder why (at least in public).

“Ms. MacDougal will see you now,” says the receptionist on the front desk, looking down her nose at me pityingly. “Do try not to shed on the carpet, we had it steam cleaned this morning.” Bastards.

I slouch across the thick, cream wool towards the inner sanctum of Emma MacDougal, senior vice-superintendent, Personnel Management (Operations), trying not to gawk like a resentful yokel at the luxuries on parade. It’s not the first time I’ve been here, but I can never shake the sense that I’m entering another world, graced by visitors of ministerial import and elevated budget. The dizzy heights of the real civil service, as opposed to us poor Morlocks in Ops Division who keep everything running.

“Mr. Howard, do come in.” I straighten instinctively when Emma addresses me. She has that effect on most people—she was born to be a headmistress or a tax inspector, but unfortunately she ended up in Human Resources by mistake and she’s been letting us know about it ever since. “Have a seat.” The room reeks of quiet luxury by Laundry standards: my chair is big, comfortable, and hasn’t been bumped, scraped, and abraded into a pile of kindling by generations of visitors. The office is bright and airy, and the window is clean and has a row of attractively un-browned potted plants sitting before it. (The computer squatting on her desk is at least twice as expensive as anything I’ve been able to get my hands on via official channels, and it’s not even switched on.) “How good of you to make time to see me.” She smiles like a razor. I stifle a sigh; it’s going to be one of those sessions.

“I’m a busy man.” Let’s see if deadpan will work, hmm?

“I’m sure you are. Nevertheless.” She taps a piece of paper sitting on her blotter and I tense. “I’ve been hearing disturbing reports about you, Bob.”

Oh, bollocks. “What kind of reports?” I ask warily.

Her smile’s cold enough to frost glass. “Let me be blunt. I’ve had a report—I hesitate to say who from—about you playing computer games in the office.”

Oh. That. “I see.”

“According to this report you’ve been playing rather a lot of Neverwinter Nights recently.” She runs her finger down the printout with relish. “You’ve even sequestrated an old departmental server to run a persistent realm—a multiuser online dungeon.” She looks up, staring at me intently. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

I shrug. What’s to say? She’s got me bang to rights. “Um.”

“Um indeed.” She taps a finger on the page. “Last Tuesday you played Neverwinter Nights for four hours. This Monday you played it for two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, staying on for an hour after your official flexitime shift ended. That’s six straight hours. What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Only six?” I lean forward.

“Yes. Six hours.” She taps the memo again. “Bob. What are we paying you for?”

I shrug. “To put the hack into hack-and-slay.”

“Yes, Bob, we’re paying you to search online role-playing games for threats to national security. But you only averaged four hours a day last week … isn’t this rather a poor use of your time?”

****

Save me from ambitious bureaucrats. This is the Laundry, the last overmanned organization of the civil service in London, and they’re everywhere—trying to climb the greasy pole, playing snakes and ladders with the org chart, running esoteric counterespionage operations in the staff toilets, and rationing the civil service tea bags. I guess it serves Mahogany Row’s purposes to keep them running in circles and distracting one another, but sometimes it gets in the way. Emma MacDougal is by no means the worst of the lot: she’s just a starchy Human Resources manager on her way up, stymied by the full promotion ladder above her. But she’s trying to butt in and micromanage inside my department (that is, inside Angleton’s department), and just to show how efficient she is, she’s actually been reading my time sheets and trying to stick her oar in on what I should be doing.

To get out of MacDougal’s office I had to explain three times that my antiquated workstation kept crashing and needed a system rebuild before she’d finally take the hint. Then she said something about sending me some sort of administrative assistant—an offer that I tried to decline without causing mortal offense. Sensing an opening, I asked if she could provide a budget line item for a new computer—but she spotted where I was coming from and cut me dead, saying that wasn’t in HR’s remit, and that was the end of it.

****

Anyway, I’m now looking at my watch and it turns out that it’s getting on for lunch. I’ve lost another morning’s prime gaming time. So I head back to my office, and just as I’m about to open the door I hear a rustling, crunching sound coming from behind it, like a giant hamster snacking down on trail mix. I can’t express how disturbing this is. Rodent menaces from beyond spacetime aren’t supposed to show up during my meetings with HR, much less hole up in my office making disturbing noises. What’s going on?

I rapidly consider my options, discarding the most extreme ones (Facilities takes a dim view of improvised ordnance discharges on Government premises), and finally do the obvious. I push the door open, lean against the battered beige filing cabinet with the jammed drawer, and ask, “Who are you and what are you doing to my computer?”

I intend the last phrase to come out as an ominous growl, but it turns into a strangled squeak of rage. My visitor looks up at me from behind my monitor, eyes black and beady, and cheek-pouches stuffed with—ah, there’s an open can of Pringles sitting on my in-tray. “Yuh?”

“That’s my computer.” I’m breathing rapidly all of a sudden, and I carefully set my coffee mug down next to the light-sick petunia so that I don’t drop it by accident. “Back away from the keyboard, put down the mouse, and nobody needs to get hurt.” And most especially, my sixth-level cleric-sorcerer gets to keep all his experience points and gold pieces without some munchkin intruder selling them all on a dodgy auction site and re-skilling me as an exotic dancer with chloracne.

It must be my face; he lifts up his hands and stares at me nervously, then swallows his cud of potato crisps. “You must be Mr. Howard?”

I begin to get an inkling. “No, I’m the grim fucking reaper.” My eyes take in more telling details: his sallow skin, the acne and straggly goatee beard. Ye gods and little demons, it’s like looking in a time-traveling mirror. I grin nastily. “I asked you once and I won’t ask you again: Who are you?”

He gulps. “I’m Pete. Uh, Pete Young. I was told to come here by Andy, uh, Mr. Newstrom. He says I’m your new intern.”

“My new what … ?” I trail off. Andy, you’re a bastard! But I repeat myself. “Intern. Yeah, right. How long have you been here? In the Laundry, I mean.”

He looks nervous. “Since last Monday morning.”

“Well, this is the first anyone’s told me about an intern,” I explain carefully, trying to keep my voice level because blaming the messenger won’t help; anyway, if Pete’s telling the truth he’s so wet behind the ears I could use him to water the plants. “So now I’m going to have to go and confirm that. You just wait here.” I glance at my desktop. Hang on, what would I have done eight years ago … ? “No, on second thought, come with me.”

****

The Ops wing is a maze of twisty little passageways, all alike. Cramped offices open off them, painted institutional green and illuminated by underpowered bulbs lightly dusted with cobwebs. It isn’t like this on Mahogany Row or over the road in Administration, but those of us who actually contribute to the bottom line get to mend and make do. (There’s a malicious, persistent rumor that this is because the Board wants to encourage a spirit of plucky us-against-the-world self-reliance in Ops, and the easiest way to do that is to make every requisition for a box of paper clips into a Herculean struggle. I subscribe to the other, less popular theory: they just don’t care.)

I know my way through these dingy tunnels; I’ve worked here for years. Andy has been a couple of rungs above me in the org chart for all that time. These days he’s got a corner office with a blond Scandinavian pine desk. (It’s a corner office on the second floor with a view over the alley where the local Chinese take-away keeps their dumpsters, and the desk came from IKEA, but his office still represents the cargo-cult trappings of upward mobility; we beggars in Ops can’t be choosy.) I see the red light’s out, so I bang on his door.

“Come in.” He sounds even more world-weary than usual, and so he should be, judging from the pile of spreadsheet printouts scattered across the desk in front of him. “Bob?” He glances up and sees the intern. “Oh, I see you’ve met Pete.”

“Pete tells me he’s my intern,” I say, as pleasantly as I can manage under the circumstances. I pull out the ratty visitor’s chair with the hole in the seat stuffing and slump into it. “And he’s been in the Laundry since the beginning of this week.” I glance over my shoulder; Pete is standing in the doorway looking uncomfortable, so I decide to move White Pawn to Black Castle Four or whatever it’s called: “Come on in, Pete; grab a chair.” (The other chair is a crawling horror covered in mouse-bitten lever arch files labeled STRICTLY SECRET.) It’s important to get the message across that I’m not leaving without an answer, and camping my hench-squirt on Andy’s virtual in-tray is a good way to do that. (Now if only I can figure out what I’m supposed to be asking …) “What’s going on?”

“Nobody told you?” Andy looks puzzled.

“Okay, let me rephrase. Whose idea was it, and what am I meant to do with him?”

“I think it was Emma MacDougal’s. In Human Resources.” Oops, he said Human Resources. I can feel my stomach sinking already. “We picked him up in a routine sweep through Erewhon space last month.” (Erewhon is a new Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that started up, oh, about two months ago, with only a few thousand players so far. Written by a bunch of spaced-out games programmers from Gothenburg.) “Boris iced him and explained the situation, then put him through induction. Emma feels that it’d be better if we trialed the mentoring program currently on roll-out throughout Admin to see if it’s an improvement over our traditional way of inducting new staff into Ops, and his number came up.” Andy raises a fist and coughs into it, then waggles his eyebrows at me significantly.

“As opposed to hiding out behind the wet shrubbery for a few months before graduating to polishing Angleton’s gear-wheels?” I shrug. “Well, I can’t say it’s a bad idea—” Nobody ever accuses HR of having a bad idea; they’re subtle and quick to anger, and their revenge is terrible to behold. “—but a little bit of warning would have been nice. Some mentoring for the mentor, eh?”

The feeble pun is only a trial balloon, but Andy latches onto it immediately and with evident gratitude. “Yes, I completely agree! I’ll get onto it at once.”

I cross my arms and grin at him lopsidedly. “I’m waiting.”

“You’re—” His gaze slides sideways, coming to rest on Pete. “Hmm.” I can almost see the wheels turning. Andy isn’t aggressive, but he’s a sharp operator. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Bob, this fellow is Peter-Fred Young. Peter-Fred, meet Mr. Howard, better known as Bob. I’m—”

“—Andy Newstrom, senior operational support manager, Department G,” I butt in smoothly. “Due to the modern miracle of matrix management, Andy is my line manager but I work for someone else, Mr. Angleton, who is also Andy’s boss. You probably won’t meet him; if you do, it probably means you’re in big trouble. That right, Andy?”

“Yes, Bob,” he says indulgently, picking right up from my cue. “And this is Ops Division.” He looks at Peter-Fred Young. “Your job, for the next three months, is to shadow Bob. Bob, you’re between field assignments anyway, and Project Aurora looks likely to keep you occupied for the whole time—Peter-Fred should be quite useful to you, given his background.”

“Project Aurora?” Pete looks puzzled. Yeah, and me, too.

“What is his background, exactly?” I ask. Here it comes …

“Peter-Fred used to design dungeon modules for a living.” Andy’s cheek twitches. “The earlier games weren’t a big problem, but I think you can guess where this one’s going.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault!” Pete hunches defensively. “I just thought it was a really neat scenario!”

I have a horrible feeling I know what Andy’s going to say next. “The third-party content tools for some of the leading MMORPGs are getting pretty hairy these days. They’re supposed to have some recognizers built in to stop the most dangerous design patterns getting out, but nobody was expecting Peter-Fred to try to implement a Delta Green scenario as a Neverwinter Nights persistent realm. If it had gone online on a public game server—assuming it didn’t eat him during beta testing—we could have been facing a mass outbreak.”

I turn and stare at Pete in disbelief. “That was him?” Jesus, I could have been killed!

He stares back truculently. “Yeah. Your wizard eats rice cakes!”

And an attitude to boot. “Andy, he’s going to need a desk.”

“I’m working on getting you a bigger office.” He grins. “This was Emma’s idea, she can foot the bill.”

Somehow I knew she had to be tied in with this, but maybe I can turn it to my advantage. “If Human Resources is involved, surely they’re paying?” Which means, deep pockets to pick. “We’re going to need two Herman Miller Aeron chairs, an Eames bookcase and occasional table, a desk from some eye-wateringly expensive Italian design studio, a genuine eighty-year-old Bonsai Californian redwood, an OC3 cable into Telehouse, and gaming laptops. Alienware: we need lots and lots of Alienware ….”

Andy gives me five seconds to slaver over the fantasy before he pricks my balloon. “You’ll take Dell and like it.”

“Even if the bad guys frag us?” I try.

“They won’t.” He looks smug. “Because you’re the best.”

****

One of the advantages of being a cash-starved department is that nobody ever dares to throw anything away in case it turns out to be useful later. Another advantage is that there’s never any money to get things done, like (for example) refit old offices to comply with current health and safety regulations. It’s cheaper just to move everybody out into a Portakabin in the car park and leave the office refurb for another financial year. At least, that’s what they do in this day and age; thirty, forty years ago I don’t know where they put the surplus bodies. Anyway, while Andy gets on the phone to Emma to plead for a budget I lead Pete on a fishing expedition.

“This is the old segregation block,” I explain, flicking on a light switch. “Don’t come in here without a light or the grue will get you.”

“You’ve got grues? Here?” He looks so excited at the prospect that I almost hesitate to tell him the truth.

“No, I just meant you’d just step in something nasty. This isn’t an adventure game.” The dust lies in gentle snowdrifts everywhere, undisturbed by outsourced cleaning services—contractors generally take one look at the seg block and double their quote, going over the ministerially imposed cap (which gets imposed rigorously on Ops, freeing up funds so Human Resources can employ plant beauticians to lovingly wax the leaves on their office rubber plants).

“You called it a segregation block. What, uh, who was segregated?”

I briefly toy with the idea of winding him up, then reject it. Once you’re inside the Laundry you’re in it for life, and I don’t really want to leave a trail of grudge-bearing juniors sharpening their knives behind me. “People we didn’t want exposed to the outside world, even by accident,” I say finally. “If you work here long enough it does strange things to your head. Work here too long, and other people can see the effects, too. You’ll notice the windows are all frosted or else they open onto air shafts, where there aren’t any windows in the first place,” I add, shoving open the door onto a large, executive office marred only by the bricked-up window frame in the wall behind the desk, and a disturbingly wide trail of something shiny—I tell myself it’s probably just dry wallpaper paste—leading to the swivel chair. “Great, this is just what I’ve been looking for.”

“It is?”

“Yep, a big, empty, executive office where the lights and power still work.”

“Whose was it?” Pete looks around curiously. “There aren’t many sockets …”

“Before my time.” I pull the chair out and look at the seat doubtfully. It was good leather once, but the seat is hideously stained and cracked. The penny drops. “I’ve heard of this guy. ‘Slug’ Johnson. He used to be high up in Accounts, but he made lots of enemies. In the end someone put salt on his back.”

“You want us to work in here?” Pete asks, in a blinding moment of clarity.

“For now,” I reassure him. “Until we can screw a budget for a real office out of Emma from HR.”

“We’ll need more power sockets.” Pete’s eyes are taking on a distant, glazed look and his fingers twitch mousily; “We’ll need casemods, need overclocked CPUs, need fuck-off huge screens, double-headed Radeon X1600 video cards.” He begins to shake. “Nerf guns, Twinkies, LAN party—”

“Pete! Snap out of it!” I grab his shoulders and shake him.

He blinks and looks at me blearily. “Whuh?”

I physically drag him out of the room. “First, before we do anything else, I’m getting the cleaners in to give it a class four exorcism and to steam clean the carpets. You could catch something nasty in there.” You nearly did, I add silently. “Lots of bad psychic backwash.”

“I thought he was an accountant?” says Pete, shaking his head.

“No, he was in Accounts. Not the same thing at all. You’re confusing them with Financial Control.”

“Huh? What do Accounts do, then?”

“They settle accounts—usually fatally. At least, that’s what they used to do back in the sixties; the department was terminated some time ago.”

“Um.” Pete swallows. “I thought that was all a joke? This is, like, the BBFC? You know?”

I blink. The British Board of Film Classification, the people who certify video games and cut the cocks out of movies? “Did anyone tell you what the Laundry actually does?”

“Plays lots of deathmatches?” he asks hopefully.

“That’s one way of putting it,” I begin, then pause. How to continue? “Magic is applied mathematics. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set. Demonology is right after debugging in the dictionary. You heard of Alan Turing? The father of programming?”

“Didn’t he work for John Carmack?”

Oh, it’s another world out there. “Not exactly, he built the first computers for the government, back in the Second World War. Not just codebreaking computers; he designed containment processors for Q Division, the Counter-Possession Unit of SOE that dealt with demon-ridden Abwehr agents. Anyway, after the war, they disbanded SOE—broke up all the government computers, the Colossus machines—except for the CPU, which became the Laundry. The Laundry kept going, defending the realm from the scum of the multiverse. There are mathematical transforms that can link entities in different universes—try to solve the wrong theorem and they’ll eat your brain, or worse. Anyhow, these days more people do more things with computers than anyone ever dreamed of. Computer games are networked and scriptable, they’ve got compilers and debuggers built in, you can build cities and film goddamn movies inside them. And every so often someone stumbles across something they’re not meant to be playing with and, well, you know the rest.”

His eyes are wide in the shadows. “You mean, this is government work? Like in DeusEx?”

I nod. “That’s it exactly, kid.” Actually it’s more like Doom 3 but I’m not ready to tell him that; he might start pestering me for a grenade launcher.

“So we’re going to, like, set up a LAN party and log onto lots of persistent realms and search ‘n’ sweep them for demons and blow the demons away?” He’s almost panting with eagerness. “Wait’ll I tell my homies!”

“Pete, you can’t do that.”

“What, isn’t it allowed?”

“No, I didn’t say that.” I lead him back towards the well-lit corridors of the Ops wing and the coffee break room beyond. “I said you can’t do that. You’re under a geas. Section III of the Official Secrets Act says you can’t tell anyone who hasn’t signed the said act that Section III even exists, much less tell them anything about what it covers. The Laundry is one hundred percent under cover, Pete. You can’t talk about it to outsiders, you’d choke on your own purple tongue.”

“Eew.” He looks disappointed. “You mean, like, this is real secret stuff. Like mum’s work.”

“Yes, Pete. It’s all really secret. Now let’s go get a coffee and pester somebody in Facilities for a mains extension bar and a computer.”

****

I spend the rest of the day wandering from desk to desk, filing requisitions and ordering up supplies, with Pete snuffling and shambling after me like a supersized spaniel. The cleaners won’t be able to work over Johnson’s office until next Tuesday due to an unfortunate planetary conjunction, but I know a temporary fix I can sketch on the floor and plug into a repurposed pocket calculator that should hold ‘Slug” Johnson at bay until we can get him exorcised. Meanwhile, thanks to a piece of freakish luck, I discover a stash of elderly laptops nobody is using; someone in Catering mistyped their code in their Assets database last year, and thanks to the wonders of our ongoing ISO 9000 certification process there is no legal procedure for reclassifying them as capital assets without triggering a visit by the Auditors. So I duly issue Pete with a 1.4 gigahertz Toshiba Sandwich Toaster, enlist his help in moving my stuff into the new office, nail a WiFi access point to the door like a tribal fetish or mezuzah (“this office now occupied by geeks who worship the great god GHz”), and park him on the other side of the spacious desk so I can keep an eye on him.

The next day I’ve got a staff meeting at 10:00 a.m. I spend the first half hour of my morning drinking coffee, making snide remarks in e-mail, reading Slashdot, and waiting for Pete to show up. He arrives at 9:35. “Here.” I chuck a fat wallet full of CD-Rs at him. “Install these on your laptop, get on the intranet, and download all the patches you need. Don’t, whatever you do, touch my computer or try to log onto my NWN server—it’s called Bosch, by the way. I’ll catch up with you after the meeting.”

“Why is it called Bosch?” he whines as I stand up and grab my security badge off the filing cabinet.

“Washing machines or Hieronymus machines, take your pick.” I head off to the conference room for the Ways and Means Committee meeting—to investigate new ways of being mean, as Bridget (may Nyarlathotep rest her soul) once explained it to me.

At first I’m moderately hopeful I’ll be able to stay awake through the meeting. But then Lucy, a bucktoothed goth from Facilities, gets the bit between her incisors. She’s going on in a giggly way about the need to outsource our administration of office sundries in order to focus on our core competencies, and I’m trying desperately hard not to fall asleep, when there’s an odd thudding sound that echoes through the fabric of the building. Then a pager goes off.

Andy’s at the other end of the table. He looks at me: “Bob, your call, I think.”

I sigh. “You think?” I glance at the pager display. Oops, so it is. “‘Scuse me folks, something’s come up.”

“Go on.” Lucy glares at me halfheartedly from behind her lucky charms. “I’ll minute you.”

“Sure.” And I’m out, almost an hour before lunch. Wow, so interns are useful for something. Just as long as he hasn’t gotten himself killed.

I trot back to Slug’s office. Peter-Fred is sitting in his chair, with his back to the door.

“Pete?” I ask.

No reply. But his laptop’s open and running, and I can hear its fan chugging away. “Uh-huh.” And the disc wallet is lying open on my side of the desk.

I edge towards the computer carefully, taking pains to stay out of eyeshot of the screen. When I get a good look at Peter-Fred I see that his mouth’s ajar and his eyes are closed; he’s drooling slightly. “Pete?” I say, and poke his shoulder. He doesn’t move. Probably a good thing, I tell myself. Okay, so he isn’t conventionally possessed …

When I’m close enough, I filch a sheet of paper from the ink-jet printer, turn the lights out, and angle the paper in front of the laptop. Very faintly I can see reflected colors, but nothing particularly scary. “Right,” I mutter. I slide my hands in front of the keyboard—still careful not to look directly at the screen—and hit the key combination to bring up the interactive debugger in the game I’m afraid he’s running. Trip an object dump, hit the keystrokes for quick save, and quit, and I can breathe a sigh of relief and look at the screen shot.

It takes me several seconds to figure out what I’m looking at. “Oh you stupid stupid arse.” It’s Peter-Fred, of course. He installed NWN and the other stuff I threw at him: the Laundry-issue hack pack and DM tools, and the creation toolkit. Then he went and did exactly what I told him not to do: he connected to Bosch. That’s him in the screenshot between the two half-orc mercenaries in the tavern, looking very afraid.

****

Two hours later it’s lunchtime, Brains and Pinky are baby-sitting Pete’s supine body (we don’t dare move it yet), Bosch is locked down and frozen, and I’m sitting on the wrong side of Angleton’s desk, sweating bullets. “Summarize, boy,” he rumbles, fixing me with one yellowing rheumy eye. “Keep it simple. None of your jargon, life’s too short.”

“He’s fallen into a game and he can’t get out.” I cross my arms. “I told him precisely what not to do and he went ahead and did it. Not my fault.”

Angleton makes a wheezing noise, like a boiler threatening to explode. After a moment I recognize it as two-thousand-year-old laughter, mummified and out for revenge. Then he stops wheezing. Oops, I think. “I believe you, boy. Thousands wouldn’t. But you’re going to have to get him out. You’re responsible.”

I’m responsible? I’m about to tell the old man what I think when a second thought screeches into the pileup at the back of my tongue and I bite my lip. I suppose I am responsible, technically. I mean, Pete’s my intern, isn’t he? I’m a management grade, after all, and if he’s been assigned to me that makes me his manager, even if it’s a post that comes with loads of responsibility and no actual power to, like, stop him doing something really foolish. I’m in loco parentis, or maybe just plain loco. I whistle quietly. “What would you suggest?”

Angleton wheezes again. “Not my field, boy, I wouldn’t know one end of one of those newfangled Babbage machine contraptions from the other.” He fixes me with a gimlet stare. “But feel free to draw on HR’s budget line. I will make enquiries on the other side to see what’s going on. But if you don’t bring him back, I’ll make you explain what happened to him to his mother.”

“His mother?” I’m puzzled. “You mean she’s one of us?”

“Yes. Didn’t Andrew tell you? Mrs. Young is the deputy director in charge of Human Resources. So you’d better get him back before she notices her son is missing.”

****

James Bond has Q Division; I’ve got Pinky and Brains from Tech Support. Bond gets jet packs, I get whoopee cushions, but I repeat myself. Still, at least P and B know about first-person shooters.

“Okay, let’s go over this again,” says Brains. He sounds unusually chipper for this early in the morning. “You set up Bosch as a server for a persistent Neverwinter Nights world, running the full Project Aurora hack pack. That gives you, oh, lots of extensions for trapping demons that wander into your realm while you trace their owner’s PCs and inject a bunch of spyware, then call out to Accounts to send a black-bag team round in the real world. Right?”

“Yes.” I nod. “An internet honeypot for supernatural intruders.”

“Wibble!” That’s Pinky. “Hey, neat! So what happened to your PFY?”

“Well …” I take a deep breath. “There’s a big castle overlooking the town, with a twentieth-level sorceress running it. Lots of glyphs of summoning in the basement dungeons, some of which actually bind at run-time to a class library that implements the core transformational grammar of the Language of Leng.” I hunch over slightly. “It’s really neat to be able to do that kind of experiment in a virtual realm—if you accidentally summon something nasty it’s trapped inside the server or maybe your local area network, rather than being out in the real world where it can eat your brains.”

Brains stares at me. “You expect me to believe this kid took out a twentieth-level sorceress? Just so he could dick around in your dungeon lab?”

“Uh, no.” I pick up a blue-tinted CD-R. Someone—not me—has scribbled a cartoon skull-and-crossbones on it and added a caption: DO’NT R3AD M3. “I’ve been looking at this—carefully. It’s not one of the discs I gave Pete; it’s one of his own. He’s not totally clueless, for a crack-smoking script kiddie. In fact, it’s got a bunch of interesting class libraries on it. He went in with a knapsack full of special toys and just happened to fuck up by trying to rob the wrong tavern. This realm, being hosted on Bosch, is scattered with traps that are superclassed into a bunch of scanner routines from Project Aurora and sniff for any taint of the real supernatural. Probably he whiffed of Laundry business—and that set off one of the traps, which yanked him in.”

“How do you get inside a game?” asks Pinky, looking hopeful. “Could you get me into Grand Theft Auto: Castro Club Extreme?”

Brains glances at him in evident disgust. “You can virtualize any universal Turing machine,” he sniffs. “Okay, Bob. What precisely do you need from us in order to get the kid out of there?”

I point to the laptop: “I need that, running the Dungeon Master client inside the game. Plus a class four summoning grid, and a lot of luck.” My guts clench. “Make that a lot more luck than usual.”

“Running the DM client—” Brains goes cross-eyed for a moment “—is it reentrant?”

“It will be.” I grin mirthlessly. “And I’ll need you on the outside, running the ordinary network client, with a couple of characters I’ll preload for you. The sorceress is holding Pete in the third-level dungeon basement of Castle Storm. The way the narrative’s set up she’s probably not going to do anything to him until she’s also acquired a whole bunch of plot coupons, like a cockatrice and a mind flayer’s gallbladder—then she can sacrifice him and trade up to a fourth-level demon or a new castle or something. Anyway, I’ve got a plan. Ready to kick ass?”

****

I hate working in dungeons. They’re dank, smelly, dark, and things keep jumping out and trying to kill you. That seems to be the defining characteristic of the genre, really. Dead boring hack-and-slash—but the kiddies love ’em. I know I did, back when I was a wee spoddy twelve-year-old. Fine, says I, we’re not trying to snare kiddies, we’re looking to attract the more cerebral kind of MMORPG player—the sort who’re too clever by half. Designers, in other words.

How do you snare a dungeon designer who’s accidentally stumbled on a way to summon up shoggoths? Well, you need a website. The smart geeks are always magpies for ideas—they see something new and it’s “Ooh! Shiny!” and before you can snap your fingers they’ve done something with it you didn’t anticipate. So you set your site up to suck them in and lock them down. You seed it with a bunch of downloadable goodies and some interesting chat boards—not the usual MY MAG1C USR CN TW4T UR CLERIC, D00D, but actual useful information—useful if you’re programming in NWScript, that is (the high-level programming language embedded in the game, which hardcore designers write game extensions in).

But the website isn’t enough. Ideally you want to run a networked game server—a persistent world that your victims can connect to using their client software to see how your bunch ‘o’ tricks looks in the virtual flesh. And finally you seed clues in the server to attract the marks who know too damn much for their own good, like Peter-Fred.

The problem is, BoschWorld isn’t ready yet. That’s why I told him to stay out. Worse, there’s no easy way to dig him out of it yet because I haven’t yet written the object retrieval code—and worse: to speed up the development process I grabbed a whole bunch of published code from one of the bigger online persistent realms, and I haven’t weeded out all the spurious quests and curses and shit that make life exciting for adventurers. In fact, now that I think about it, that was going to be Peter-Fred’s job for the next month. Oops.

****

Unlike Pete, I do not blunder into Bosch unprepared; I know exactly what to expect. I’ve got a couple of cheats up my non-existent monk’s sleeve, including the fact that I can enter the game with a level eighteen character carrying a laptop with a source-level debugger—all praise the new self-deconstructing reality!

The stone floor of the monastery is gritty and cold under my bare feet, and there’s a chilly morning breeze blowing in through the huge oak doors at the far end of the compound. I know it’s all in my head—I’m actually sitting in a cramped office chair with Pinky and Brains hammering away on keyboards to either side—but it’s still creepy. I turn round and genuflect once in the direction of the huge and extremely scary devil carved into the wall behind me, then head for the exit.

The monastery sits atop some truly bizarre stone formations in the middle of the Wild Woods. I’m supposed to fight my way through the woods before I get to the town of, um, whatever I named it, Stormville?—but sod that. I stick a hand into the bottomless depths of my very expensive Bag of Holding and pull out a scroll. “Stormville, North Gate,” I intone (Why do ancient masters in orders of martial monks always intone, rather than, like, speak normally?) and the scroll crumbles to dust in my hands—and I’m looking up at a stone tower with a gate at its base and some bint sticking a bucket out of a window on the third floor and yelling, “Gardy loo.” Well, that worked okay.

“I’m there,” I say aloud.

Green serifed letters track across my visual field, completely spoiling the atmosphere: WAY K00L, B0B. That’ll be Pinky, riding shotgun with his usual delicacy.

There’s a big, blue rectangle in the gateway so I walk onto it and wait for the universe to download. It’s a long wait—something’s gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren’t as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)

Inside the North Gate is the North Market. At least, it’s what passes for a market in here. There’s a bunch of zombies dressed as your standard dungeon adventurers, shambling around with speech bubbles over their heads. Most of them are web addresses on eBay, locations of auctions for interesting pieces of game content, but one or two of them look as if they’ve been crudely tampered with, especially the ass-headed nobleman repeatedly belting himself on the head with a huge, leatherbound copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Are you guys sure we haven’t been hacked?” I ask aloud. “If you could check the tripwire logs, Brains …” It’s a long shot, but it might offer an alternate explanation for Pete’s predicament.

I slither, sneak, and generally shimmy my monastic ass around the square, avoiding the quainte olde mediaeval gallows and the smoking hole in the ground that used to be the Alchemists’ Guild. On the east side of the square is the Wayfarer’s Tavern, and some distance to the southwest I can see the battlements and turrets of Castle Storm looming out of the early morning mists in a surge of gothic cheesecake. I enter the tavern, stepping on the blue rectangle and waiting while the world pauses, then head for the bar.

“Right, I’m in the bar,” I say aloud, pulling my Project Aurora laptop out of the Bag of Holding. (Is it my imagination, or does something snap at my fingertips as I pull my hand out?) “Has the target moved?”

N0 J0Y, B08.

I sigh, unfolding the screen. Laptops aren’t exactly native to NWN; this one’s made of two slabs of sapphire held together by scrolled mithril hinges. I stare into the glowing depths of its screen (tailored from a preexisting crystal ball) and load a copy of the pub. Looking in the back room I see a bunch of standard henchmen,—women, and—things waiting to be hired, but none of them are exactly optimal for taking on the twentieth-level lawful-evil chatelaine of Castle Storm. Hmm, better bump one of ’em, I decide. Let’s go for munchkin muscle. “Pinky? I’d like you to drop a quarter of a million experience points on Grondor the Red, then up-level him. Can you do that?” Grondor is the biggest bad-ass half-orc fighter for hire in Bosch. This ought to turn him into a one-man killing machine.

0|< D00D.

I can tell he’s really getting into the spirit of this. The barmaid sashays up to me and winks. “Hiya, cute thing. (1) Want to buy a drink? (2) Want to ask questions about the town and its surroundings? (3) Want to talk about anything else?”

I sigh. “Gimme (1).”

“Okay. (1) G’bye, big boy. (2) Anything else?”

“(1). Get me my beer then piss off.”

One of these days I’ll get around to wiring a real conversational ‘bot into the non-player characters, but right now they’re still a bit—

There’s a huge sound from the back room, sort of a creaking graunching noise. I blink and look round, startled. After a moment I realize it’s the sound of a quarter of a million experience points landing on a—

“Pinky, what exactly did you up-level Grondor the Red to?”

LVL 15 C0RTE5AN. LOL!!!

“Oh, great,” I mutter. I’ll swear that’s not a real character class. A fat, manila envelope appears on the bar in front of me. It’s Grondor’s contract, and from the small print it looks like I’ve hired myself a fifteenth-level half-orc rent boy for muscle. Which is annoying because I only get one hench-thug per game. “One of these days your sense of humor is going to get me into really deep trouble, Pinky,” I say as Grondor flounces across the rough wooden floor towards me, a vision of ruffles, bows, pink satin, and upcurved tusks. He’s clutching a violet club in one gnarly red-nailed hand, and he seems to be annoyed about something.

After a brief and uncomfortable interlude that involves running on the walls and ceiling, I manage to calm Grondor down, but by then half the denizens of the tavern are broken and bleeding. “Grondor pithed,” he lisps at me. “But Grondor thtill kickth ath. Whoth ath you wanting kicked?”

“The wicked witch of the west. You up for it?”

He blows me a kiss.

LOL!!! ROFL!!! whoops the peanut gallery.

“Okay, let’s go.”

****

Numerous alarums, excursions, and open-palm five-punches death attacks later, we arrive at Castle Storm. Sitting out in front of the cruel-looking portcullis, topped by the dismembered bodies of the sorceress’s enemies and not a few of her friends, I open up the laptop. A miniature thundercloud hovers overhead, raining on the turrets and bouncing lightning bolts off the (currently inanimate) gargoyles.

“Connect me to Lady Storm’s boudoir mirror.” I say. (I try to make it come out as an inscrutable monkish mutter rather than intoning, but it doesn’t work properly.)

“Hello? Who is this?” I see her face peering out of the depths of my screen, like an unholy cross between Cruella De Vil and Margaret Thatcher. She’s not wearing make-up and half her hair’s in curlers—that’s odd, I think.

“This is the management,” I intone. “We have been notified that contrary to statutory regulations issued by the Council of Guilds of Stormville you are running an unauthorized boarding house, to wit, you are providing accommodation for mendicant journeymen. Normally we’d let you off with a warning and a fifty-gold-piece fine, but in this particular case—”

I’m readying the amulet of teleportation, but she seems to be able to anticipate events, which is just plain wrong for a non-player character following a script. “Accommodate this!” she hisses, and cuts the connection dead. There’s a hammering rumbling sound overhead. I glance up, then take to my heels as I wrap my arms about my head; she’s animated the gargoyles, and they’re taking wing, but they’re still made of stone—and stone isn’t known for its lighter-than-air qualities. The crashing thunder goes on for quite some time, and the dust makes my eyes sting, but after a while all that remains is the mournful honking of the one surviving gargoyle, which learned to fly on its way down, and is now circling the battlements overhead. And now it’s my turn.

“Right. Grondor? Open that door!”

Grondor snarls, then flounces forward and whacks the portcullis with his double-headed war axe. The physics model in here is distinctly imaginative, you shouldn’t be able to reduce a cast-iron grating into a pile of wooden kindling, but I’m not complaining. Through the portcullis we charge, into the bowels of Castle Storm and, I hope, in time to rescue Pete.

I don’t want to bore you with a blow-by-blow description of our blow-by-blow progress through Cruella’s minions. Suffice to say that following Grondor is a lot like trailing behind a frothy pink main battle tank. Thuggish guards, evil imps, and the odd adept tend to explode messily very soon after Grondor sees them. Unfortunately Grondor’s not very discriminating, so I make sure to go first in order to keep him away from cunningly engineered deadfalls (and Pete, should we find him). Still, it doesn’t take us too long to comb the lower levels of the caverns under Castle Storm (aided by the handy dungeon editor in my laptop, which allows me to build a bridge over the Chasm of Despair and tunnel through the rock around the Dragon’s Lair, which isn’t very sporting but keeps us from being toasted). Which is why, after a couple of hours, I’m beginning to get a sinking feeling that Pete isn’t actually here.

“Brains, Pete isn’t down here, is he? Or am I missing something?”

H3Y d0NT B3 5AD D00D F1N|< 0V V XP!!!

“Fuck off, Pinky, give me some useful input or just fuck off, okay?” I realize I’m shouting when the rock wall next to me begins to crack ominously. The hideous possibility that I’ve lost Pete is sinking its claws into my brain and it’s worse than any Fear spell.

OK KEEP UR HAIR 0N!! 15 THIS A QU3ST?? D0 U N33D 2 C0NFRONT S0RCR3SS 1ST?

I stop dead. “I bloody hope not. Did you notice how she was behaving?”

Brains here. I’m grepping the server logfile and did you know there’s another user connected over the intranet bridge?

“Whu—” I turn around and accidentally bump into Grondor.

Grondor says, “(1) Do you wish to modify our tactics? (2) Do you want Grondor to attack someone? (3) Do you think Grondor is sexy, big boy? (4) Exit?”

“(4),” I intone—if I leave him in a conversational state he won’t be going anywhere, dammit. “Okay, Brains. Have you tracerouted the intrusion? Bosch isn’t supposed to be accessible from outside the local network. What department are they coming in from?”

They’re coming in from—a longish pause—somewhere in HR.

“Okay, the plot just thickened. So someone in HR has gotten in. Any idea who the player is?” I’ve got a sneaking suspicion but I want to hear it from Brains—

Not IRL, but didn’t Cruella act way too flexible to be a ‘bot?

Bollocks. That is what I was thinking. “Okay. Grondor: follow. We’re going upstairs to see the wicked witch.”

Now, let me tell you about castles. They don’t have elevators, or fire escapes, or extinguishers. Real ones don’t have exploding whoopee cushions under the carpet and electrified door-handles that blush red when you notice them, either, or an ogre resting on the second-floor mezzanine, but that’s beside the point. Let me just observe that by the time I reach the fourth floor I am beginning to breathe heavily and I am getting distinctly pissed off with Her Eldritch Fearsomeness.

At the foot of the wide, glittering staircase in the middle of the fourth floor I temporarily lose Grondor. It might have something to do with the tenth-level mage lurking behind the transom with a magic flamethrower, or the simultaneous arrival of about a ton of steel spikes falling from concealed ceiling panels, but Grondor is reduced to a greasy pile of goo on the floor. I sigh and do something to the mage that would be extremely painful if he were a real person. “Is she upstairs?” I ask the glowing letters.

SUR3 TH1NG D00D!!!

“Any more traps?”

N0!!??!

“Cool.” I step over the grease spot and pause just in front of the staircase. It never pays to be rash. I pick up a stray steel spike and chuck it on the first step and it goes BANG with extreme prejudice. “Not so cool.” Rinse, cycle, repeat, and four small explosions later I’m standing in front of the doorway facing the top step. No more whoopee cushions, just a twentieth-level sorceress and a minion in chains. Happy joy. “Pinky. Plan B. Get it ready to run it, on my word.”

I break through the door and enter the witch’s lair.

Once you’ve seen one witch’s den you’ve seen ’em all. This one is a bit glitzier than usual, and some of the furniture is nonstandard even taking into account the Laundry hack packs linked into this realm. Where did she get the mainframe from? I wonder briefly before considering the extremely ominous Dho-Na geometry curve in the middle of the floor (complete with a frantic-looking Pete chained down in the middle of it) and the extremely irate-looking sorceress beyond.

“Emma MacDougal, I presume?”

She turns my way, spitting blood. “If it wasn’t for you meddling hackers I’d have gotten away with it!” Oops, she’s raising her magic wand.

“Gotten away with what?” I ask politely. “Don’t you want to explain your fiendish plan, as is customary, before totally obliterating your victims? I mean, that’s a Dho-Na curve there, so you’re obviously planning a summoning, and this server is inside Ops block. Were you planning some sort of low-key downsizing?”

She snorts. “You stupid Ops heads, why do you always assume it’s about you?”

“Because—” I shrug. “We’re running on a server in Ops. What do you think happens if you open a gateway for an ancient evil to infest our departmental LAN?”

“Don’t be naïve. All that’s going to happen is Pimple-Features here is going to pick a good, little, gibbering infestation then go spread it to Mama. Which will open up the promotion ladder once again.” She stares at me, then her eyes narrow thoughtfully. “How did you figure out it was me?”

“You should have used a smaller mainframe emulator, you know; we’re so starved for resources that Bosch runs on a three-year-old Dell laptop. If you weren’t slurping up all our CPU resources we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong until it was too late. It had to be someone in HR, and you’re the only player on the radar. Mind you, putting poor Peter-Fred in a position of irresistible temptation was a good move. How did you open the tunnel into our side of the network?”

“He took his laptop home at night. Have you swept it for spyware today?” Her grin turns triumphant. “I think it’s time you joined Pete on the summoning-grid sacrifice node.”

“Plan B!” I announce brightly, then run up the wall and across the ceiling until I’m above Pete.

P1AN 8 :) :) :)

The room below my head lurches disturbingly as Pinky rearranges the furniture. It’s just a ninety-degree rotation, and Pete’s still in the summoning grid, but now he’s in the target node instead of the sacrifice zone. Emma is incanting; her wand tracks me, its tip glowing green. “Do it, Pinky!” I shout as I pull out my dagger and slice my virtual finger. Blood runs down the blade and drops into the sacrifice node—

And Pete stands up. The chains holding him to the floor rip like damp cardboard, his eyes glowing even brighter than Emma’s wand. With no actual summoning vector spliced into the grid it’s wide open, an antenna seeking the nearest manifestation. With my blood to power it, it’s active, and the first thing it resonates with has come through and sideloaded into Pete’s head. His head swivels. “Get her!” I yell, clenching my fist and trying not to wince. “She’s from personnel!”

“Personnel?” rumbles a voice from Pete’s mouth—deeper, more cultured, and infinitely more terrifying. “Ah, I see. Thank you.” The being wearing Pete’s flesh steps across the grid—which sparks like a high-tension line and begins to smolder. Emma’s wand wavers between me and Pete. I thrust my injured hand into the Bag of Holding and stifle a scream when my fingers stab into the bag of salt within. “It’s been too long.” His face begins to lengthen, his jaw widening and merging at the edges. He sticks his tongue out: it’s grayish-brown and rasplike teeth are sprouting from it.

Emma screams in rage and discharges her wand at him. A backwash of negative energy makes my teeth clench and turns my vision gray, but it’s not enough to stop the second coming of “Slug” Johnson. He slithers towards her across the floor, and she gears up another spell, but it’s too late. I close my eyes and follow the action by the inarticulate shrieks and the wet sucking, gurgling noises. Finally, they die down.

I take a deep breath and open my eyes. Below me the room is vacant but for a clean-picked human skeleton and a floor flecked with brown—I peer closer—slugs. Millions of the buggers. “You’d better let him go,” I intone.

“Why should I?” asks the assembly of molluscs.

“Because—” I pause. Why should he? It’s a surprisingly sensible question. “If you don’t, HR—Personnel—will just send another. Their minions are infinite. But you can defeat them by escaping from their grip forever—if you let me lay you to rest.”

“Send me on, then,” say the slugs.

“Okay.” And I open my salt-filled fist over the molluscs—which burn and writhe beneath the white powderfall until nothing is left but Pete, curled fetally in the middle of the floor. And it’s time to get Pete the hell out of this game and back into his own head before his mother, or some even worse horror, comes looking for him.

Charlie Stross knew he wanted to be a writer from the age of six, or thereabouts, but didn’t really get started until his early teens (when his sister loaned him a manual typewriter around the time he was getting heavily into Dung ……

(To read the rest of this bio, and see other stories in Jim Baen’s Universe visit Charlie Stross’s author page.)

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The soldiers on the back of the personnel carriers stared around, wide-eyed, clutching their rifles like drowning men hanging on to buoyant life-rafts. They were out of their depth, teenage conscripts from the sticks being trucked in by the Grey Men in the Kremlin, none of them sure what they were meant to be doing here. The emigre group seemed to be taking it quite well as the BMP’s rumbled past their hotel. They clustered in the bar, talking quietly in small groups, occasionally pestering a vodka out of the distracted staff. Reporters swarmed and darted everywhere, like wasps around a rubbish bin in summer. And Oleg Meir …

Oleg Meir ignored the soldiers as he left the temporary safety of the hotel. The phones were down, only international calls from the city’s contingent of foreign correspondents getting through. They must be crazy, he thought: cutting off communications at a time like this. Trembling with a chill, he thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets as he walked back towards the University. He glanced up at the clock jutting from the face of one of the office buildings on the opposite side of the road. It was almost ten o’clock! He’d have to hurry. Oleg increased his pace until it was little short of a trot. Got to get the papers, destroy them or something. Change myself, get lost in the crowd. That way they won’t find me. If I can do it before Andrei catches up with me …

Yesterday’s events had brought everybody out onto the streets; everyday life had ground to a halt. The air was filled with tension, as if an abscess was about to burst. Never had he seen crowds of people who all looked so angry; it scared him almost as much as the horror of a remembered guilt, the phone call in the early hours from his mysterious patron—just before the public lines went down.

Tanks were drawn up in the square outside the University, their engines ticking over, soldiers milling around uncertainly in front of a throng of defiant youths; they made no attempt to detain the bespectacled professor as he made his way past them towards the concrete monolith of the Institute of Space Sciences. Nobody stopped him as he went in, but he noticed a few anomalies: a distinct shortage of staff, a surfeit of students milling around the foyer and chattering.

Can’t be good. Oleg made for the elevator, half-remembered skills blending him with the shadows like a third element of light and darkness. Too many people about. The elevator began to rise. He yawned uncontrollably. The elevator stopped; its brass gate slid open. “Professor Meir?”

Oleg jumped. “Who is—oh, Anatoly. What is it?”

The student stared at him. “You looked a bit preoccupied, is all,” he said. “About the coursework, I know it’s overdue—”

“Don’t worry about it.” Oleg looked away. “Heard the news?”

“Which news?”

“Don’t worry.” Moving down the corridor towards his office, the student following him: Oleg had things on his mind. “Have you got a few minutes?”

“For you, professor?” The student’s elaborate shrug was wasted. Oleg was too busy unlocking his office to notice.

“These filing cabinets. Do me a favour, get everything out of the top drawer there, stacked in order, and put it on the table. Please? I’ll make it worth your while.”

“How worthwhile?” Something nudged Oleg’s attention, but when he looked up Anatoly looked back at him innocently. “A regrading?”

“You said it, not me.” Anatoly turned to the filing cabinet eagerly. “Now if you will excuse me—”

The terminal on Oleg’s desk was an antique, but it still connected him to the machines in the basement. To his surprise, Oleg found that his palms were sweating as he sat down and logged on. This has gone too far. He shivered and glanced over his shoulder. If Andrei gets his grubby hands on these there won’t be an excuse under heaven that’ll save me! Still he hesitated. Something in the air tickled his nostrils; scent of woodsmoke and gasoline far away, screams remembered in the moonless night. From her. Behind him, Anatoly was systematically stripping his files from their steel nest. Oh well. It had to happen—now or later.

Oleg began to type, carefully—the sluggardly machine could barely keep up with his keypresses—a short e-mail message. He stared at it for a few minutes after he finished it, trying to understand what he had done. To KGBVAX, the police monitor on the net. User: Valentin016. An anonymous label. Danger. He’d been sweating before he started. Now he pressed enter, consigning the message to the invisible guts of the connected mainframes, where it would find it’s way eventually to the destination—

To Valentina. Who’d know what to do, if anyone did. Oleg logged out and turned round, stood up and stretched, stared at the student working on his files. Time to think about avoiding Andrei. Why did I ever let it get this far? he wondered. Hands deep in pockets, he wandered over to the window and stared out towards the distant Kremlin. Dancing with the devil …

Twenty five years ago:

Oleg had first met Andrei back in sixty-three, sixty-four, back when he had been a young student of astrophysics, fresh in from the sticks. Always the terrified compulsion to look up at the stars—attending Shklovskii’s bull sessions about intelligent life in the universe made him feel out of control, his thin veneer of sophistication in danger of cracking open to reveal the depths of his superstitious fear. The feeling had a shuddery attraction to Oleg, who was unable to join in the merry banter of his colleagues.

“You see, comrades, if we are not alone in the universe, the very fact of our lack of uniqueness has implications for our way of life! No longer are we part of an isolated, unique trend. Other intelligences, once their existence can be proven, would provide a powerful stimulus to our exploratory tendencies. Such intelligences, should they be more advanced than us, may be expected to be in constant communication even if physical interstellar travel is impossible—yes? What is it? Meir, again?”

Oleg cleared his throat. “I think you overlook something,” he said, suddenly aware that his heart was pounding. “Perhaps, all is stillness and quiet not because we are alone … but because they are scared. After all, ideas can be dangerous, can they not?—Just as socialist ideas are considered dangerous by the capitalists, so may there be, darker things lurking among the stars. Things that listen, like us, for the transmissions of the unwary …”

“Like Voice of America?” some wit interrupted, and the whole room burst out laughing.

Oleg sat down, his face turning beet red. He looked round, searching for support against the hilarity—there was a man he had never seen before at the back of the hall, and his expression was set and thoughtful. Something about him was vaguely familiar, like a half-remembered family photograph. Oleg looked away rapidly, and tried to ignore the good-natured joshing he received after the lecture from those who believed that the laws of dialectical materialism applied to interstellar communication. But somehow the face stuck in his mind; and he was not surprised when, two days later, he was awakened by a peremptory rap on the door of his room.

Struggling out of bed, Oleg made his way to the door. “Who is it?” he called, half-certain that it was the apartment warden about to complain again about him lying in on a perfectly good Saturday—

“Open up!” called a voice outside. “We haven’t got all day!”

Oleg tensed, shivering with more than cold—muscles bunching and coiling like ropes beneath his skin—then opened the door a crack. “What’s it about?” he asked. “I was in bed—”

“Never mind that. You can get dressed now. You’re going for a drive in the country this morning, how about that? Don’t bother packing, you’ll be back before sunset, I promise. Come along now!”

Goaded into sudden action, Oleg grabbed his clothes and began to yank them on haphazardly. “You can come in,” he called when he had his trousers belted. The door opened. “Have we met?” he asked politely.

The stranger shut the door behind him. “Two nights ago, at the Institute. I was in the row behind you.”

Oleg’s shoulders slumped with something like relief. “I thought you were with the cheka,” he muttered as he buttoned his shirt.

The stranger looked at him and smiled, exposing his teeth. “You thought right—sort of. The people I’m with … the KGB don’t like us, but we don’t have to put up with them. Do the initials GRU mean anything to you?” Oleg stared uncomprehendingly. “Good. Now they do. We’re going for a little drive in the country, and we’ll have lunch at a dacha and I’m sure you’ll enjoy our little chat; I’ll drop you off back here this evening. How does that sound, comrade?”

Mouth dry, heart pounding again: “you want me to be an informer?” Oleg pulled on his boots, not looking at the man from the GRU, whatever that was, trying to memorise his face in case he had to—

“Don’t be an idiot. We’re not the fucking MVD; we’re the army. What you were saying about contact with extraterrestrial civilisations interests us … we just want to ask you a few more questions, bounce some ideas about, see what you can come up with. And you know something else?” Oleg jumped round as a hand landed on his shoulder, then froze. A faintly familiar smell tickled at his nostrils like the memory of a forgotten sin. “I was right,” said the stranger who had stolen his identity. Then, in a language far older than that of the russ—“how long have you been living alone among the humans, my friend?”

Moscow: Lunch time, 20th August 1991:

Cosmology and guilt and a blind fear of the unknown blurred together in Oleg’s mind as he tried to concentrate on what he was doing. A trip to see the big military radar system at Semipalatinsk blurred into the dog-eared files he was lifting out of the back of his cabinet, vast banks of humming tubes meshed with the sleek Western computer chained to his desk. Time was of the essence: panic was …

Possible. The big old radio beside the window was tuned to Radio Free Europe, but the MVD were jamming it again for the first time in years, the pock-pock-whirr of microwaves blasted into the ionosphere to stop the people learning of the crimes committed against them. Radar stations in the hands of Andrei and his dark-worshippers. Oleg shuddered, uncertain. Just as long as he doesn’t know where to point them. He looked up, clutching a sheaf of papers about Cepheid variables. “Get me everything you can find under Krasnoyarsk,” he muttered.

“Under what?” Anatoly looked perplexed.

“Krasnoyarsk,” Oleg repeated. “It’s a radar installation. You know? One of the big ones the military let us borrow.”

“Oh, that. Isn’t it one of the ones comrade General Secretary agreed with the Americans to dismantle?”

Oleg sniffed, bitterly amused by the way Anatoly still referred to Gorbachev by his title. “I see. What do you expect to find there, boss? Is that where they’re holding him?”

“Not on another planet,” Oleg muttered, thumbing through notes made years ago. The pile of paper was inches thick, held together with rough string and stale lies. Some of the documents were twenty, thirty years old: some were new, and of these a number bore CONFIDENTIAL stamps. Oleg had removed these from his safe.

He sighed as he contemplated the documents with a mixture of fear and pride. My life’s work, and this is all there is to it? Itchy fear made the skin in the small of his back crawl; his leg muscles twitched, aching to be elsewhere. If Andrei gets hold of these … they were the originals, not the precisely-faked duplicates he had filtered to the GRU Colonel over the past years. Careful cooperation, playing the useful idiot to find out how much Andrei knew, who his friends were, that was one thing. But this was for real; the probable coordinates of the end of the world … he stopped subvocalizing so suddenly that he nearly bit his tongue. Maybe they knew where he came from, what he had done. Frightened, he looked over his shoulder, but only a bust of Lenin was watching. He scooped up the bundle and began to squeeze it into his briefcase. Halfway through the process he discovered that it wasn’t going to fit unless he emptied the case first; he upended it over the carpet. Anatoly watched with what Ol g assumed to be amused tolerance. He had to leave out the confidential papers, the ones about Krasnoyarsk, but finally everything fit together and he bent down to close his case.

Behind him, Anatoly cleared his throat. “There’s something you should know, professor.”

Oleg turned to Anatoly, who stood behind him, and sniffed, although he could tell perfectly well what was happening. His guts loosened abruptly. “What’s going on? Where did you get that gun?” He tried to conceal his dismay as his companion stared at him. “What’s happening?”

“This way, academician.” The gun was small, oily-looking, the hole in its muzzle horribly dark; he could see the rifling in the barrel, which pointed straight at him. “Your services are required. Happenings more significant than the current … ruckus, are being expedited under cover of the confusion. Events of cosmic importance. You could say the trigger just fell into our hands.” Anatoly—the being who wore the student Anatoly’s face—gestured Oleg backwards.

Oleg glanced left and right, but there was no way out. He backed slowly towards the door. The stranger was holding his briefcase, and Oleg had a gut-deep feeling that his living cooperation was not essential. “What do you want with me?” he whispered.

“Just cooperate. Through the door. Into the lift.”

The lift grilles rattled open behind him. The gunman crowded in close, thrusting the muzzle of his weapon into a coat pocket to conceal it from bystanders. “Press the first floor button.”

Oleg did as he was told, obedient, tense, knees trembling. “What are you doing?” he mumbled.

“Taking you somewhere safe.” Anatoly sounded bored by the question.

“But—this is crazy! Why are you kidnapping me? Who are you?”

The rough walls of the lift shaft rose up on either side. “Don’t be naive, Oleg. You made a bargain years ago. Your research to be allowed to continue, with our support, in return for obedience—when the time came. And what happens? You call your KGB kitten! That’s not what I call obedience. And the falsehoods you’ve been feeding us this past year have not amused us greatly. Anyone would think you were trying to play a two-way game … and you know what happens to people who get caught in the middle.”

The lift came to a stop. Oleg looked around frantically. The lobby outside the elevator cage was deserted but for four Interior Ministry soldiers, rifles at the ready. One of them crossed the floor and pulled the doors open. Anatoly gestured him back with his free hand. “Forward, professor. We have a long journey ahead of us.” He smiled as one of the guards opened the front door to reveal an armoured personnel carrier backed up against it, engine running. “Glad you could make the party!”

Leningrad: Monday morning, August the 20th, 1991:

Valentina was waiting impatiently in the station lobby at the airport, a woolen coat pulled tight around her; when she saw the uniformed officer she waved. He approached her rapidly. “This had better be good,” she said.

He looked away from her. “Maybe not,” he said, so quietly that the words were nearly lost in the omnipresent traffic roar. Louder: “there’s a message for you from Moscow, high priority. You want to read it here?”

Valentina stared at him. Just another uniformed flunky. “Give it to me.”

He passed her the sealed slip and hung around, evidently pleased with himself. She hadn’t bitten his head off, which was an unexpected bonus: Major Valentina Pavlova was notorious for expecting of her subordinates the same efficiency that she was known for herself.

She read the message quickly, face expressionless in the gloom. The officer glanced around, nervously; there were few people in the airport today, and when he looked at them they turned away pointedly. “What’s going on?” he asked. “First the putsch, then this priority traffic—”

She stopped him with a brisk shake of the head. “I wouldn’t worry about the coup if I were you. It will all be over soon. I need to get to Moscow as soon as possible. Take a message! When you see me leave, tell Major Gromov I’ll report back in three days, until then I’ll be in deep cover.”

“You’ll be—” she stared at the messenger until his eyes watered and he looked away.

“Don’t ask. Tell him it’s urgent. Is that understood, sergeant?”

He straightened up: saluted. “Yessir!”

“Good.” She was already moving, walking towards the checkin desk, coat billowing out behind her.

“What is it?” he called over her shoulder.

“Got a plane to catch,” she said, hurrying through the door.

“Authorisation—”

“No problem.”

“Papers? Channels?”

“No time.”

“As you say. Sir.” They approached the milling crowd at the ticket counter together. The queue was long and agitated, worried travellers anxious to return to their own republics; but when Valentina produced her official pass everybody scattered. Despite the resentful glances, some things never changed.

“Yes? What is it?” sniffed the clerk. She looked tired and irritated.

“This. Where is your manager?”

She thrust his badge under the clerk’s nose. It didn’t have the desired effect. The woman snorted, as if amused: “You don’t expect that to get you anywhere, do you? Chekist. We’ve had enough of your kind …”

Valentina reached out with a fluid motion and grabbed the clerk by one wrist. “You do as I say,” she said quietly. “Otherwise I break your arm. Do you understand?”

The clerk mouthed something silently, her eyes growing round with surprise and sudden pain. “What—what do you want?” she stuttered.

“To see whoever is in charge here,” she said. “Of the air defense facilities. I have a plane to catch, for Moscow.”

“But no flights are scheduled!” protested the clerk. Valentina let go of her wrist, but continued to stare at her unblinkingly.

“Now there is. I repeat; where is the manager? I have a plane to catch.”

The clerk picked up a telephone handset and began to dial, glancing up warily at Valentina as she did so. “I’ll see what can be done, but I make no promises,” she said.

Valentina caught the sergeant’s eye; he nodded imperceptibly. “Tell Gromov,” she emphasized. “It is essential.”

The clerk paused. “But why?” she asked, curiosity getting the better of her fear. “What’s so important?”

Valentina glanced over her shoulder at her assistant. “She asks what’s so important,” she said quietly, all the time conscious of the crowd watching over his shoulder, not yet nasty but quite capable of turning if they saw something not to their liking … “what’s important? I’ll tell you what’s important,” she said. “If we don’t get to Moscow by noon, both you and your boss can look forward to an extended holiday in Siberia … whoever’s in charge …”

Moscow: Three o’clock:

The ancient Kamov chopper she’d requisitioned clattered into the Moscow air defense region. The phones were down: whether it would have made any difference was questionable. Valentina sat in the middle of the narrow, glassed-in cockpit, beside the pilot. Her jaw was rigid, as tense as steel; her eyes were focussed on a point a million miles away, replaying cinema reels of memory. Glacial, slow memories. Memories of an interview, not long after she’d come to Moscow: memories of a militiaman long forgotten, one of the kin, who’d helped her change her life …

They’d been lucky to find her. Not so much gone to the dogs as abandoned to the humans … twenty-nine, addicted to heroin, living as a street prostitute, a member of the officially non-existent underground encouraged by the Brezhnev faction during their twenty year reign of hypocrisy. My, but they did a good job of westernizing us fast! All the vices and none of the virtues … lost in her memories, she blinked, astonished by the strange value systems her own mind was capable of throwing up. Hey, live among humans for long enough, you even start thinking like one—

It had been pure coincidence. One of the street-sweeps they’d been so keen on under Andropov; the weerde who finally found her was a militia lieutenant assigned to mopping up the untouchables who weren’t meant to contaminate the crime sheets of the squeaky-clean new order—after all, prostitution and drug abuse were western problems, weren’t they? She remembered the cigarette smoke rising in spirals from the ash tray on the scarred desk, the long interviews by lamp light as they tried to work out who she knew and why she had been tolerated for so long: unable to admit publicly that all cultures have a dark side, that everyone needs something to be afraid of, to lust after, some forbidden fruit …

The woman in the fur coat, black mini-dress, tights and make-up that weren’t even in the shops for people to queue for; the first thing that had caught the policeman’s attention was how attractive she was. Thin, but not gaunt, young-looking but not a child. She shouldn’t be pretty, not with the kind of lifestyle she led—a three needle a day habit, not to mention the chalk mixed with the damned Afghan dust by her scumbag dealer. “We know all about you,” he said, tapping her folder meaningfully, and she had laughed at him like a wolf in the depths of the winter forest.

“No matter how much you think you know about me you will never know all about me,” she said. She stared at him with black, glittering eyes, ice cubes that didn’t melt under the lamp.

“Really?” he asked. To a human it would have sounded like something between a cough and a grunt.

Her eyes had widened, but not from fear: he had seen her fingers flexing to strike, and tensed. “If my brother sent you to get me back,” she had said, “you can tell him I’m not interested.”

The cop had leaned forward, exposing his throat: “really?” he asked. “And why would your brother do a thing like that?”

“Because he loves me. Or he thinks he does. I don’t think he would know love if it bit his throat out. All he’s in love with is the dark.” She relaxed her hands, looked down; noticed for the first time how bony they looked. As if her skin had become a translucent film, a winding sheet for her skeleton, in the undead time since she came out of the forest. “That’s why I left. After our parents died.”

The cop had leaned back, the hardest bit of the interview over: making her decide to talk. “And since leaving, is that when you began to hang out on the street?”

She shrugged. A certain tension had gone out of the interrogation; now it was more like a conversation. “It’s a living. I have no papers, as you may have noticed …”

“That can be remedied.” She blinked rapidly, surprised by a stab of resentment. Trapped. “But first, it would help if you would answer a couple of questions. Strictly on a cooperative basis; it makes it look better on the record.”

“Like what?” she asked, forcing herself to relax. The sense of being caught in a trap intensified.

“Like beginning with when did you last see your brother?”

“Huh.” She snorted. It would have been a laugh if she’d been human. “He wrote to me until a year or two ago; I burned the letters. He always knows where I am; where he is I don’t think even the KGB know.” She stared at him. “Do they?”

“Really!” The kin who was also a militia lieutenant shrugged. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. The word has gone out from on high that people like you don’t exist. So what are you going to do about it?”

“Why should I do anything about it?” she asked, feeling a chill run up and down her spine as she met his gaze. This was what she’d been afraid of for a long time, since the icy nights so long ago: the loss of her freedom of action. “I’m doing very well as it is.”

“No you’re not.” He had stared at her until she was forced looked away. “You’re ill. Your shit-head of a pimp is cutting your fix with chalk, you know that? Your apartment has slime on the walls and the residents hate you—that’s why you’re here. You were fingered.”

“So what business of yours is it, how I go about destroying myself?” she asked, mustering a calm as brittle as her paper-fine skin; “why do you want to stop me?”

The cop reached out and took her hand—gambling that nobody would be watching this interview, that it was not a hidden test of some kind—“because you’re one of us and you’ve been hurt by those fucking animals,” he grunted. Her eyes flickered left and right, but she didn’t pull away. She could feel his pulse against her skin, fast, like any other of her kind. “How long is it since you had a proper meal?”

“What’s one of those?” she asked. “Hey, don’t lay that shit on me!” Now she pulled away. “I can look after myself. What are you after?”

The lieutenant glanced at the ceiling, abashed. “Nothing,” he said after a moment. “I don’t want anything from you. At least nothing you can give me. I just thought—”

She reached out and touched his hand. “Okay,” she said. “Comrade. So that’s what it is?” She looked at him askance. “That’s all it is?”

“And a full list of all your partners in crime,” he added; “but that’s no reason to run away from me. I’m not a monster. I’ll settle for just the humans.”

“Uh-huh.”

They sat in silence for a minute as Valentina collected her nerves for the next step in the process. There was an inevitability to it, a determinism, which scared and exhilerated her; will everything begin to get better, now? “There is one thing, though,” she said quietly.

“What’s that?”

“For the records, we need an excuse. I can’t just disappear.”

“So?” The temperature in the cell seemed to drop a couple of degrees.

“I want to cut a deal.”

“Oh.”

Then Val leaned forwards intently. “My help,” she whispered, “in return for yours. I’ll need a hand afterwards, you see. I’ll give you everything you want. But in return I need something.”

“And what would that be?” asked the cop, leaning back in his chair, staring at her with cool expectation.

She licked her lips. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This is no career for a lady. But tell me, do you know how easy it is to get a job in the undercover police?”

She was awakened by the change in engine noise as the chopper came in to land. From the military field it was a half-hour drive into the city. She was out of the police car as soon as it pulled up outside the Institute building; before she reached the doors some students emerged. They gathered in front of her, blocking the path. “What do you want here?” demanded one of them, a fat, balding man with a beard and the look of an agitator about him. “Who the hell are you?”

She stared at him, breathing hard. “Is Academician Meir in his office today?” she asked; “I need to speak to him urgently.”

“I’ll bet you do,” began the fat man, only to be cut off by one of his companions, a woman; “Wait! Who are you? Why do you want to see the professor?”

“He’s in danger,” she said simply. Nameless emotions threatened her control; she fought back ruthlessly, steeling herself for the big half-truth. “I want to get him out of it.”

Almost at once the students crowded in. “You’re too late,” said the woman. “Militia came for him oh, half an hour ago! In an APC.” She positively bristled. “Fuckers threatened to shoot anyone who got in their way—” There was an angry rumbling from behind.

“Do you have any idea where they were taking him?” She asked, excitement and dread washing through her.

“No, but, hey! What—”

She pushed past the fat man. “Where’s Oleg’s office?” she asked.

“Here. I’ll take you.” It was the woman student again. They hurried indoors, then waited interminably for a creaking lift to arrive. “We’ve barricaded the stairs—if they try to root us out we’ll shut off the lift motor,” said the student. “Who are you?”

“A friend of Oleg’s. Not all the security forces are against you,” said Val. The lift doors opened and they crowded in. “Where did they go?”

“One of them—an informer, looked like one of us—came and took the Academician downstairs. Oh, there’s his office.”

“Looks like he left in a hurry,” observed Valentia, as the student swung the lift doors open and darted into the room. “Hey, what a mess! What …”

The woman leaned over the desk, concentrating. “These are all his papers. Shit.”

Valentina stepped closer, her right hand thrust deep into her pocket. “What are they about?” she demanded.

“This—these are all confidential! I didn’t know Professor Meir worked for the army—”

She turned and made a dash for the lift; Valentina followed her, grabbed the back of her coat. “Wait,” she hissed. “What kind of papers?”

The student twisted round, then saw Valentina’s expression. “Uh—”

Breathe. Relax. Val forced herself to smile. “What were they about?”

“Uh … oh. Something about the radar base at Krasnoyarsk. You know it? Big rocket forces base. They’re going to dismantle it soon. Uh. I could have sworn you—”

But Valentina wasn’t there any more, wasn’t in the lift; was back through the office then half way down the stairs and out to the police car before she stopped to think, before the student could even blink back afterimages of what she had thought she’d seen in Val’s face.

“Airfield,” Val snapped at her driver: “fast!” Rubber screeched. “I’ve got a plane to catch.” Why Krasnoyarsk? she puzzled, consulting her inner oracle, her memory of her brother. But all he did was shrug and smile and say something: and all she could make out was one phrase. Three thousand megawatts.

Three o’clock:

Oleg Meir peered out of the small, dim porthole and tried to ease the pain in his wrists. The handcuffs were too tight, and the fleshy part of his hands tingled with pins and needles. A simple exercise, thinning out his own flesh, would ease it—but his captors knew who they were dealing with, and there were limits to what could be done in an hour or two. Besides, with fists the size of a baby’s he’d be in no position to put up a fight.

This is the worst part: the waiting. He looked down across the white emptiness below, tried to ignore the itching in the back of his throat and the pain in his ears. Outside the fuselage, four giant Turmanskii gas turbines howled across the tundra. The sky overhead was the deep blue of an ice age. Pine trees clustered across the lowlying terrain to the south, but the flight path of the jet was carrying Oleg ever closer to the Arctic circle. How long will this take? He tried to calculate it in his head; assuming an air-speed of five hundred knots, that would make it … seven hours. Give or take. To the land of ice and sky fire, where nuclear-powered pyramids brooded beneath the eternal sun. Vast, many-tracked crawlers bearing fiery cylinders of nuclear death. Oceans of ice beneath which submarines crept in cold-war pursuits. Ancient tribes of ice-dwelling hunters, bemused by the entry of the modern world into their dream of ages, forced out of the wire-wrapped military reservations. Solzhenitsyn had w itten about the Gulag archipelago, the islands of prisoners locked in the sea of Siberia, but this was something else. This was the continent of the military, gripped in the paranoid embrance of an eternal winter of the soul.

I ought to stop them from doing it, Oleg told himself for the thousandth time. It was a pathetic mantra, but repetition made it seem more practical; if only the sense of doing it would not so stubbornly elude him …

Up front, a door banged open. Oleg looked up; it was Anatoly, or whoever passed for him. The shadows standing out beneath his high cheekbones gave him a lupine appearance. Oleg turned his head away and closed his eyes. His captor ignored this; seconds later he sensed warm breath centimetres from his face.

“You don’t have any choice in the matter, you know.”

Oleg opened his eyes. “Don’t I?” he asked.

Anatoly—whoever he was—seemed to find this amusing. “Avoid the end of the universe? Huh!” He drew away a fraction and Oleg flinched, expecting a blow. It never came. “We are not cruel, Professor. We are not the dark. Our intentions are good.”

Oleg held up his chained wrists. “Then why ..?”

Anatoly shook his head slowly. “You don’t understand. We can’t afford to take any chances. It has been many years since we tried and failed … too long ago. Our German colleagues who set the agenda at the Wannsee conference—now they were evil. In human terms, at least. But us? You do me a disservice.” He leaned forward until he was nose-to-nose with Oleg. “We are here to help you.”

“Help me!” He snorted. “How?”

“Help you—” Anatoly paused for a moment—“help you do what you didn’t have the guts to do on your own. Even though you’ve known how to do it for years, now … even though we gave you all the facilities you could possibly need. Don’t play the innocent, Professor. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I do?” Oleg found himself unable to look away from Anatoly’s dark eyes; the expression on that face, the shared fear of the pit over which he had been walking these past years, black as his worst fears … “You really think that I can summon down the Dark?” His stomach turned over, a vast uneasy sense of urgency growing inside him. His heart raced, and the handcuffs slid around his slippery wrists as if on a thin coating of slime.

Anatoly leaned close to him. “I know you can, Oleg. Because you want to do it, don’t you? Otherwise you’d have turned me in long ago, to that chekist major you can’t leave alone, you think we don’t know about that?”

Anatoly’s face rippled slowly before Oleg’s eyes, twisting into another shape that it had worn for a long time before it’s owner had chosen to pass for a student; a visage at once familiar and frightening. “I know you better than you think, Comrade Academician. You like your cosy office too much, and you’re still afraid of the dark the way they taught you to be. But part of you wants to get it over with very badly, doesn’t it? You don’t like human people, although you try to hide it—isn’t that so? You don’t even like your own kind very much. So you crouch in dark corners and search frantically for the key to the thing that scares you most, telling yourself that you need the information in order to hide better—such nonsense! I’ll tell you what you wanted to know. You wanted to work out where the Dark had gone, in those long aeons since it first came, while the sun swung around the core of the galaxy—isn’t that right?—because you knew better than most of us where the technology was leading the umans.”

Anatoly-Andrei turned sinuously and sat down beside Oleg. Oleg stared, trying to fix ever tiny detail in his mind: the pores in Andrei’s skin, the faint, acrid smell of the kin, the slight, nervous way he fidgeted with his left hand. Andrei stared back, eyes wide in a display of inhuman concern.

“Another twenty years and their geneticists, they’ll be able to pin us down everywhere. Have you thought of that? It would mean the end of us, the end of everything. But not if we have the guts to do what we should do, and use those three thousand megawatts, no? If we get our blow in first, we can be safe again. All of us. To sleep away another age without fear of interruption by the hairless apes.” Andrei—visibly Andrei now, still as youthful as when Oleg had first met him in the mid-sixties—stared like an obsessive, fear and calculation mingled in his gaze. “Isn’t that right?” he asked. “Don’t you know it’s true? We can’t let them carry on—”

“You’re—” Oleg stopped, at a loss for words. He thinks he knows everything. Andrei blinked rapidly, as if looking for a further justification.

“The function systems, Professor. We’ve seen your interest in Lyupanov space and chaos theory. We even heard about those programs you ran—after you erased them and shredded the results. We can guess. You know exactly how to go about summoning the dark; where to point the antennae, what message to send, how long it will take. The radar site at Krasnoyarsk interested you, so we guessed. Big, powerful transmitters. That’s it, isn’t it? You are our people’s only hope, now.”

“Why? I don’t understand. What’s in it for you?”

“Nothing, probably. Freedom from fear.” Andrei shrugged, suddenly abashed. “Come now, professor. We’re all afraid together, aren’t we? Those who think the Dark will kill us, and those—like you—who fear it but understand the need. I just—” he sighed and looked away for a moment. Then: “I just want to get it over with. The fear, not knowing. We live among animals who could turn on us at any time. What could be worse than that? Face it, professor. When it comes down to it, we are all kin. And that’s all the humans will see if they learn of us.”

Oleg held up his hands again. “With these, how can I trust you?” he asked, simply.

Andrei held up a key. “How can I trust you, if you won’t even tell me what you’re running from?” he asked. “Say it. You can’t hide forever.”

“Say what …” Oleg’s mouth was dry, his heart pounding; he barely noticed that the tension of years was melting away from him as he let his real face peep through, let the darkness that had been raised in his childhood soul reveal itself to his captor.

“We know about the taiga.”

“The taiga …” Oleg swallowed, breaking out in sweat. “What do you mean?” He looked at Andrei, terrified beyond rational cause; he had expected them to kill him, not dig up his past.

“We know what you did. All we want you to do is to do it again. How does that sound?” It was a plea rather than a threat, and it spoke to Oleg. “Is it so bad that you must forget even who you were, what you did?”

“You’re mad,” Oleg whispered, falling back on his last defense.

Andrei shook his head sadly. “If I am mad, then so are you,” he said, turning away. “Think about it professor: it’s not so much. And you will do it, don’t you? Because you want to. See you later …”

He left. And Oleg sweated out the rest of the flight, cold as ice and frightened as a ghost. Because, when he forced himself to confront the issue, Andrei was substantially correct. Nothing would please him more than do to away with these turbulent humans, except for the cost of returning to his own worst nightmare …

“They took off two hours ago, outbound for the Kola peninsula on a 192 with long-range fuel tanks and a detachment of military police. Looks like they’re clear of you.”

“Shit.” Valentina thumped the table so hard that the telephone on it bounced. “Can’t you do anything about it?”

“Like what? Take then down?” The voice on the other end of the line was sardonic. “Be sensible! He’s only a dissident—”

She hung up angrily. “Well?” called the base political officer from across the room.

“Air Defense says no,” she muttered; “well fuck ’em!”

“You could follow them,” suggested the captain, complacent in his insularity. “It’s only a slow cargo plane.”

“No. I’d still be too late. All they need is the authorization to run a quick sky-search; that’s what Oleg had. An astronomer. Then blast three gigawatts of pulsed microwave energy in the direction of …” she shuddered, searching for an excuse. “The American early warning satellite.” What a good lie. We should never have let them discover the wheel …

“I didn’t know it was that serious,” the political complained. “If they’d warned us, through proper channels—”

“Forget it,” she snapped. She stared out the window of the office, towards the runway where the MiG-29’s squatted on their landing gear like menacing green wasps. “Those birds. Any of them ready to go? With a passenger?”

“But they’re single-seaters—” the political stood up, paused for a moment of indecision—“I think one of them’s a trainer, though. You’re going to requisition a fighter?”

Valentina turned and stared at him. “Why not?” she asked, deceptively innocent. “The man’s got to be stopped. He’s dangerous. I’ve got to get where he’s going—fast. Can you suggest anything better?”

“Can you?” challenged the captain. “I mean, it’s all very well for you, but me—I’ve got to answer to the boss! Who will be unhappy, unless—”

“Name a price. Bill Department Seven Special Circumstances for the budget.” She was already halfway to the door when she paused. “Where do you keep your flight suits?” she asked.

The base security officer was smiling. “This way,” he said. “You’re really going after him? To get there first and arrest him?” Valentina nodded, unwilling to trust her own tongue. “That’s great! Just like in the movies!” And he held the door open for her as she went to collect her flight kit.

Six twenty-three:

Almost before it taxi’d to a halt beside the despatch terminal, a personnel carrier drew up beside the jet. The evening sun scattered in orange shards from the truncated pyramids in the distance; a fine powder of snow dusted the runway beneath the aircraft’s nose. An ancient military stairlift drew up beside the cockpit canopy as it swung open. As Valentina clambered down the ladder she discovered a welcoming committee. “Major Valentina Pavlova? Major Rostopov, base security. I hope you have an explanation for this.” The spokesman wore a coat with major’s epaulettes and a smile as charmless as a rattlesnake. His guards were decked out in full winter combat gear, rifles held at the ready.

“There’s an explanation all right. Who are you?” Valentina shivered in her flight suit: it was a summer’s evening, and the temperature had already dropped below freezing.

“Your papers—”

Valentina stared at him coldly. “Contact Leningrad Central KGB. The exchange code is gold nine zero five. Ask to be connected to the office of Marshal Dmitri Yazov. Explain that Major Pavlova is here and you require clearance to proceed.”

Rostopov recoiled slightly, then caught himself. “And if I don’t?” he asked sharply. “This is a cold country, major. Have you noticed which way the wind is blowing?”

“Or you can contact Moscow Parliament. Ask for the office of the President. Tell Comrade Yeltsin’s secretary to read you Presidential Emergency Decree forty—”

“Enough.” Rostopov raised his hands abruptly, as if surrendering. “If you would care to get inside the carrier—I’m sure we can discuss this in my office—” He looked as if he had tasted something extremely bitter.

“No time. I want to go to the Priority Installation, not the airfield. Can you take me there directly?”

“The Priority …” Rostopov stared at him. “What is this? You’ve got the Emergency Committee and the President in your pocket and … shit, I don’t believe this!” He clambered into the body of the APC, still muttering vaguely. “You bet I’m going to check your credentials, comrade, this is extremely irregular—”

Valentina followed him into the passenger compartment. As she did so she removed her right hand from her pocket. The Stetchkin automatic that nestled inside had not been needed—this time. It’s amazing how gullible the confusion makes them …

The carrier rumbled off towards the compound gates, under the gaze of the perimeter guards. She sat very still, waiting for the hot-air blowers to blast the chill out of the rattling metal box. It felt unnatural, in a way that she had never really learned to block out; too much living among humans numbed the senses, trained them to ignore alien smells and ways. She’d have told her brother it was a bad idea if he’d ever asked, back when they were young—but he wasn’t likely to ask such penetrating questions, and she was not about to volunteer her opinion without it first being requested. That was the basis of all her relationships, after all. She remembered all too well where breaking that rule that had got her in the past.

As they travelled, Major Rostopov tried to wheedle information out of her. This Valentina found vaguely amusing. “What is going on, comrade, that can’t wait until the current situation blows over? You nearly gave the Colonel a heart attack when he heard what kind of speed that bird of yours was doing—he thought it was a yankee F-111 coming down his throat—what gives?”

She yawned. “It’s been a long day, Major. And very unpleasant. Wet working conditions, if you take my meaning.” Rostopov blanched and shut his mouth with an audible snap, then scrambled forward into the driver’s section.

The carrier rumbled through a tight turn and stopped while the outer gate opened in front of it. Rostopov reappeared; “I can take you as far as the commandant’s office,” he said. “They won’t let this vehicle go any further. You’d better have your papers ready.”

Valentina nodded. “That will do.”

The diesel wound up into a full-throated howl and the armoured personnel carrier went to full speed. It was all she could do to prevent herself from being thrown from wall to wall like a rag doll; conversation was out of the question. For a gut-freezing moment she tried to remember whether she’d set the safety on her gun: a Stetchkin looked like a pistol, but it could discharge a full magazine in only a second, spraying white-hot lead around the whole compartment. That was why she’d chosen it. I might only get the one chance. Somehow the thought elated her at the same time as it scared her to death: it made her think of blood-red nights and flesh-hot mouths, of predatory passions that humans could not and should not understand. She’d come a long way for this, unimaginably far.

The one chance—she remembered her brother, the last night. He’d gone away when she was a baby, leaving her alone with their parents: gone away to school in the city where buildings of stone scraped at the sky until it wept stars of blood. Left her to years of cloying intimacy, the family that lived alone on the tundra in a hovel that froze from the inside out in winter: strange, inbred folk ignored by humans, shunned by everyone but the nomadic trappers … it couldn’t last forever. When he returned from the unimaginably distant city she was older and wiser, but not old enough. He took her by the hand: “I love you, sister,” he said, “you’re the only one.” Twenty years older than she was and he was right, there were no other kin within five hundred kilometres. When he touched her her skin caught fire and burned with an alien heat. “Let me show you why,” he said.

They had gone outside in the woods, he and she, alone at dusk in summer, when the mosquitos bred in swarms above the stagnant ponds that lay among the roots of decaying pine trees. The summer tundra was stagnant and fetid, like a bloated corpse. He’d led her by the hand, deep into the woods along a path that human eyes could never follow, to a small glade surrounded by dead trees. There he set fire to her senses with his hands and body: it was not a new experience, for she was weerde and fey and coming into adulthood in a land where the ice rarely melted. When she came she bayed like a wolf at the midnight sun.

Afterwards, as they lay side-by-side together, he said to her slyly: “I have a secret, sister. Do you want to know what it is?”

Still warm from his embrace, she had said yes, she did. “It’s the humans. The trappers. Do you wonder why so few have visited us this spring?”

She’d nodded, mutely. Thier absence had worried her unaccountably. “They’re not our people,” he said. “Ancient, primitive … they think they know it all. But we scare them. They mutter curses and keep their women behind the covers of their yurts because they think we posess the evil eye. Maybe they’d tell the communists, but they’re afraid of us … the hex is still stronger than the red star. You know something? They’re right.”

He stood, naked, above her: shape melting into the trees like the ghost of something unimaginably ancient. No longer human, but raw and elemental as the winter. “I hold the key, sister. I know where It dwells; the thing with no Name, of which the legends speak.” Leaning down, he helped her rise. Inhuman eyes glittered in the un-night. “One day this will return, whether we will it or no. They sensed this, I think. I had no alternative.”

Together they walked deeper into the forest, where the trees wove overhead into a canopy of darkness and the ground was a rancid mulch of needles, he leading and she following. “They came in the night to lead the kommunisti to us,” he said.

Deep foreboding chilled her to the core: “What have you done?” she demanded.

“Didn’t want to lose you,” he said, reaching for her hands. “They were doomed anyway. In the nature of their people. Look:” she looked. Saw what he had done to the traders who had been their only contact with the outside world. “I did it for you, my love. Didn’t want to lose you. What’s wrong?”

She remembered bending her head forward to kiss the dead thing that passed for an altar, no longer breathing, gagging on the stench of decomposition—“One day this will return, whether we will it or no”—striking out, changing her face, her mind, her memory to expunge the memory until the day a year later when she woke up to see a letter lying on her straw-filled pillow—her fingers flexed involuntarily, opening and closing like talons. Why did it fall to me to be born to the parents of a monster? He couldn’t leave her alone; through all the years he’d tracked her, from a distance, known where to find her. Bracing herself against one green-painted wall, she reached into her pocket for reassurance. But he’d never dared to face her down, to venture an explanation. Happiness is a warm gun. Yes, there it was: the sick feeling in her stomach subsiding momentarily. A flash of malice made her shudder with its intensity; I hope he’s still there, the bastard. So many lost years to answer for, and when e finally calls it’s only to tell me …

She noticed Major Rostopov was back. He was staring at her. She let herself smile back at him; let it all shine out, then closely observed the fear sketch livid shadows beneath his eyes.

Seven fourteen:

Tracking Control was a cavernous chamber in a bunker deep beneath the permafrost, protected by layers of air defense missiles and interceptor squadrons against the day when the B-52’s came over the horizon. Oleg Meir felt anything but safe, though. Even with Andrei behind him, smoothing the way at every turn and smiling-joking with the Colonel in charge, it felt wrong. Perhaps it was guilt. Oleg knew exactly what he was doing … and he had a feeling that Andrei, however strong his faith in the Dark might be, did not. Besides which, Oleg knew who was coming. Fear and guilt roiled inside him until he felt almost hollow. What if she’s right? He worried. What if she hasn’t forgotten?

“So I would like it if you could load the ephemerides and begin transmitting for a period of one hour as soon as the message is loaded. Think you can manage that?” asked Andrei.

The captain in charge of the post nodded. “And bill the Institute … for SETI? Think we’ll find anything, comrade Academician?” He seemed to be more bemused than anything else.

Oleg shrugged uncomfortably, glancing at Andrei, who smiled down at him with tight-pursed lips. “It’s a theory. We need to complete it for a thesis, big international conference, you know the sort of thing. Anyway, the Americans haven’t done it yet—they’ve listened, Project Ozma back in the sixties was the first—but transmitted? If this trial is a success we’ll be able to get backing for a full research project. Who knows? We might even get to keep the big dish, whatever arms treaties they come up with.”

The captain’s eyes glittered. Like far too many of the hairless apes, Oleg realised, he thought of his machines as being more human than other people. “So what is the text of the message, exactly?” he asked.

Andrei nudged Oleg surreptitiously. Oleg tapped a couple of keys on the shielded terminal, calling up a listing. He’d loaded it off tape barely an hour since, under Andrei’s wary eye. He hadn’t given him an inch of slack, whatever he might have said on the flight in; Oleg was precisely as free as he had been before, handcuffed or otherwise. “It’s a fractal. Random looking, in the most unimaginably deterministic way. There are very few ways you can decode it, and all of them imply that it is no coincidence … the message is the medium, in this case. With three gigawatts punching it out, it should be quite deafening out to a couple of hundred light year’s range. If I get the chance to repeat, we’ll need to sustain it for a full year.” But we won’t need to, thought Oleg. Not if the old legends are correct. If thoughts alone could summon it, even a fraction of a megawatt beaming the right message should be overkill …

“That’s settled, then,” said the captain. “All I need is the authorisation—oh.” He stopped, looked up.

Andrei leaned over Oleg’s chair and turned the full force of his personality on the hapless officer. “I’ll see to that at once! I’m sure Colonel Blavatsky will agree; after all the project release has been signed by the ministry, hasn’t it?” He smiled, baring spotless teeth, and the captain nodded back helplessly. “Perhaps you’d like to load the transmission sequence now and run it through the modulator stage, just to check that there are no unforseen problems … you’re sure you can transmit on twenty-one centimetres? The, uh, water hole?”

“H-band, yes.” He nodded so violently that one of the technicians glanced round inconcern before bending back over his diagnostic station. “Of course. You want me to load it? Sure.”

He began tapping keys on his terminal at a surprising rate. Oleg watched, fascinated and terrified at the same time: his authorisation on this system didn’t extend to actually issuing commands. It was all automated—a phased array radar was nothing more than a series of pulses propagating through silicon, after all—but still it made him catch his breath, to see a palid-looking captain sitting at a desk steer a billion roubles of electronics to point at an ephemeris from which no American missile could possibly originate …

There was a banging, some way off in the building. Oleg ignored it, watching instead the big wall screen that painted the beam path across a polar map of the Union. The highlighted strip jumped, suddenly, pointing inwards and upwards; a searchlight beacon of microwaves pouring energy out towards the stars. “That’s good,” he said, encouragingly.

The young officer grinned back. “We can point it anywhere,” he said; “even down here, if we wanted to fry our brains out. Hey—” He made as if to stand up, but Oleg caught his hand and held it.

“Sit down,” he said softly. “Let the colonel deal with it.” Behind him, Andrei was moving towards the door. “You don’t actually think this is a good thing to do?” he asked the captain, suddenly curious to hear this young man pronounce upon his own species’ demise.

For a moment doubt flickered across the young man’s features. “What makes you ask that, comrade? Is this some kind of political thing?”

A shadow of exasperation crossed Oleg’s features. “They don’t tell you anything out here, do they? About the coup? It’ll collapse, you know, but the Union will go on in one form or another. No, not politics. Just … think what might lie out there! What hideous evil we might be summoning down when you transmit that call sign …”

But the captain shook his head and grinned. “But you must be wrong, comrade! Look—” before Oleg could stop him he punched keys. “I send it now! And you know, of course if they can understand what they are reading in decades time from now, they must be more intelligent than us, more civilized! Mustn’t they?”

Oleg stared at the anonymous soldier, utterly aghast. There was a staccato banging noise in the distance. For a moment ice water coursed through his veins instead of blood. What have you done … “Of course, if you are wrong, you might have killed the human race.” He felt a giant laugh, two-thirds relief and one third terror, rumble through the back of his head like an echo of thunder, the humour of a mad god. Acutely aware of the guards, the guns pointing ever inwards, his guts melted to jelly. You fool! The most important event in the history of your species and you do it because of a discredited political theory! It’s humans like you who screwed us over so badly that this is the only way out—a grand, manic hilarity bubbled up inside him, thirty years of terror set free in a single moment.

The captain, oblivious, shook his head and smiled. “Rubbish, comrade! Any aliens sophisticated enough to read your message, of course they’ll be good communists, won’t they? I mean, it stands to reason that all intelligent life must be evolving towards—”

Oleg felt a sudden gust of cold air on his neck. The captain stood up, mouth hanging open, as Oleg spun round in his chair to face his sister, her frozen vengeful face, the ridiculously small pistol she clutched in her hands—“you can’t be serious,” he tried to say, smiling with embarrassment and fear: “I didn’t do it. They did it to themselves! After all these years I never even had to raise a finger!” Staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, wondering as if for the first time if he might be held accountable: “won’t you be reasonable? Talk to me!”

His sister took a step forward; and for a moment Oleg thought he saw her smile. “What’s there to talk about?” she asked.

“Everything—” he began.

But he was much too late.

Issue 3 of Cosmos, September 2005

Illustration by Justin Randall

Who said that death has to signal the end? It may just be an opportunity.

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks towards me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. She’s interested in me.

“You’re new around here, aren’t you?” she asks, pausing in front of my table.

I stare at her. Apart from the neatly articulated extra shoulder joints, the body she’s wearing is roughly ortho, following the traditional human body-plan. The skulls are sub-sized, strung together on a necklace threaded with barbed wire and roses. “Yes, I’m a nube,” I say. My parole ring makes my left index finger tingle, a little reminder. “I’m required to warn you that I’m undergoing identity reindexing and rehabilitation. People in my state may be prone to violent outbursts. Don’t worry, that’s just a statutory warning: I won’t hurt you. What makes you ask?”

She shrugs. It’s an elaborate rippling gesture that ends with a wiggle of her hips. “Because I haven’t seen you here before, and I’ve been coming here most nights for the past twenty or thirty diurns. You can earn extra rehab credit by helping out. Don’t worry about the parole ring, most of us here have them. I had to warn people myself a while ago.”

I manage to force a smile. A fellow inmate? Further along the program? “Would you like a drink?” I ask, gesturing at the chair next to me. “And what are you called, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’m Kay.” She pulls out the chair and sits, flipping her great mass of dark hair over her shoulder and tucking her skulls under the table with two hands as she glances at the menu. “I’ll have an iced double mocha pickup, easy on the coca.” She looks at me again, staring at my eyes. “The clinic arranges things so that there’s always a volunteer around to greet nubes. It’s my turn this swing shift. Do you want to tell me your name? Or where you’re from?”

“If you like.” My ring tingles and I remember to smile. “My name’s Robin, and you’re right, I’m fresh out of the rehab tank. Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth.” A bit over ten planetary days, a million seconds. “I’m from”—I go into quicktime for a few subseconds, trying to work out what story to give her, ending up with an approximation of the truth—“around these parts, actually. But just out of memory excision. I was getting stale and needed to do something about whatever it was I was getting stale over.”

Kay smiles. She’s got sharp cheekbones, bright teeth framed between perfect lips; she’s got bilateral symmetry, three billion years of evolutionary heuristics and homeobox genes generating a face that’s a mirror of itself—and where did that thought come from? I ask myself, annoyed. It’s tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a post-surgical identity prosthesis.

“I haven’t been human for long,” she admits. “I just moved here from Zemlya.” Pause. “For my surgery,” she adds quietly.

I fiddle with the tassels dangling from my sword pommel. There’s something not quite right about them, and it’s bugging me intensely. “You lived with the ice ghouls?” I ask.

“Not quite—I was an ice ghoul.” She crosses both pairs of arms defensively. “I’d feel like a liar looking like …” She glances past me. There are a handful of other people in the bar, a few bushujo and a couple of cyborgs, but most of them are wearing orthohuman bodies. She’s glancing at a woman with long blonde hair on one side of her head and stubble on the other, wearing a filmy white drape and a sword belt. The woman is braying loudly with laughter at something one of her companions just said: berserkers on the prowl for players. “Her, for example.”

“But you were orthohuman once?”

“I still am, inside.”

The penny drops: She wears xenohuman drag when she’s in public because she’s shy. I glance over at the group and accidentally make eye contact with the blonde woman. She looks at me, stiffens, then pointedly turns away. “How long has this bar been here?” I ask, my ears burning. How dare she do that to me?

“About three megs.” Kay nods at the group of orthos across the room. “I really would avoid paying obvious attention to them, they’re duellists.”

“So am I.” I nod at her. “I find it therapeutic.”

She grimaces. “I don’t play, myself. It’s messy. And I don’t like pain.”

“Well, neither do I,” I say slowly. “That’s not the point.” The point is that we get angry when we can’t remember who we are, and we lash out at first; and a structured, formal framework means that nobody else needs to get hurt.

“Where do you live?” she asks.

“I’m in the”—she’s transparently changing the subject, I realise—“clinic, still. I mean, everything I had, I”—liquidated and ran—“I travel light. I still haven’t decided what to be in this new lifetime, so there doesn’t seem much point in having lots of baggage.”

“Another drink?” Kay asks. “I’m buying.”

“Yes, please.” A warning bell rings in my head as I sense Blondie heading towards our table. I pretend not to notice but I can feel a familiar warmth in my stomach, a tension in my back. Ancient reflexes and not a few modern cheat-codes take over and I surreptitiously loosen my sword in its scabbard. I think I know what Blondie wants and I’m perfectly happy to give it to her. She’s not the only one around here prone to frequent flashes of murderous rage that take a while to cool. The counsellor told me to embrace it and give in, among consenting fellows: it should burn itself out in time. Which is why I’m carrying.

But the post-excision rages aren’t my only irritant. In addition to memory edits I opted to have my age reset. Being post-adolescent again brings back forgotten hormonal torments. It makes me pace my apartment restlessly, until I pull on a duellist’s sash and go out in search of random violence. Sex, too, has acquired an obsessive importance I’d forgotten. These urges are hard to fight off when you wake up empty and unable to remember who you used to be. And they’re a lot less fun the second time through the cycle of rejuvenation.

“Listen, don’t look round but you probably ought to know that someone is about to—”

Before I can finish the sentence Blondie leans over Kay’s shoulder and spits in my face. “I demand satisfaction.” She has a voice like a diamond drill.

“Why?” I ask stonily, heart thumping with tension as I wipe my cheek. I can feel the rage building but I force myself to keep it under control.

“You exist.”

There’s a certain look some post-rehab cases get while they’re in the psychopathic dissociative stage, still re-knitting the ravelled threads of their personality and memories into a new identity. The insensate anger at the world, the existential hate, often directed at their previously whole self for putting them into this world, naked and stripped of memories, generates its own dynamic. Wild black-eyed hatred and the perfect musculature of the optimised phenotype combine to lend Blondie an intimidating, almost primal presence. Nevertheless she’s got enough self-control to issue a challenge before she attacks.

Kay, shy and much further advanced in recovery than either of us, cowers in her seat as Blondie glares at me. That annoys me: Blondie’s got no call to intimidate bystanders. And maybe I’m not as out of control as I feel.

“In that case …” I slowly stand up, not breaking eye contact for a moment. “How about we take this to the remilitarised zone? First death rules?”

“Yes,” she hisses.

I glance at Kay: “Nice talking to you. Order me another drink. I’ll be right back.” I can feel her eyes on my back as I follow Blondie to the gate to the RMZ. Which is right beside the bar.

Blondie pauses on the threshold. “After you,” she says.

“Au contraire: Challenger goes first.”

She glares at me one more time, clearly furious, then strides into the T-gate and blinks out. I wipe my right palm on my leather kilt, grip the hilt of my sword, draw, and leap through the point-to-point wormhole.

Duelling etiquette calls for the challenger to clear the gate by a good ten paces, but Blondie isn’t in a good mood and it is a very good thing that I’m on the defensive and ready to parry as I go through because she’s waiting ready to shove her sword through my abdomen on the spot.

She’s fast and vicious and utterly uninterested in playing by the rules, which is fine by me because my own existential rage now has an outlet and a face. The anger that has been eating me up since my surgery, the hatred of the war criminals who forced me into this, of the person I used to be who surrendered to the large-scale memory erasure—I can’t even remember what sex I was, or how tall—has a focus, and on the other end of her circling blade Blondie’s face is a glow of concentration and fury to mirror my own.

This part of the remilitarised zone is modelled on a ruined city of old Urth, shattered postnuclear concrete wastelands and strange creeping vegetation shrouding the statues of conquerors and the burned-out wreckage of wheeled cars. We could be alone here, marooned on a planet uninhabited by other sapientes. Alone to work out our grief and rage as the post-surgical fugue slowly dissipates.

Blondie tries to rush me and I fall back carefully, trying to spot some weakness in her attack. She prefers the edge to the point and the right to the left but she’s not leaving me any openings. “Hurry up and die!” she snaps.

“After you.” I feint and try to draw her off-balance, circling round her. Next to the gate we came in through there’s a ruined stump of a tall building, rubble heaped up above head height. (The gate’s beacon flashes red, signifying no egress until one of us is dead.) The rubble gives me an idea and I feint again, then back off and leave an opening for her.

Blondie takes the opening and I just block her, because she’s fast: but she’s not sly, and she certainly wasn’t expecting the knife in my left hand—taped to my left thigh before—and as she tries to guard against it I see my chance and run my sword through her belly.

She drops her weapon and falls to her knees. I sit down heavily opposite her, almost collapsing. Oh dear. How did she manage to get my leg? Maybe I shouldn’t trust my instincts quite so totally.

“Done?” I ask, suddenly feeling faint.

“I—” There’s a curious expression on her face as she holds onto the basket of my sword. “Uh.” She tries to swallow. “Who?”

“I’m Robin,” I say lightly, watching her with interest. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched somebody dying with a sword through the guts before. There’s lots of blood, and a really vile smell of ruptured intestines: I’d have thought she’d be writhing and screaming, but maybe she’s got an autonomic override. Anyway, I’m holding my leg together. Blood keeps welling up between my fingers. Comradeship in pain. “You are …?”

“Gwyn.” She swallows. The light of hatred is extinguished, leaving something—puzzlement?—behind.

“When did you last back up, Gwyn?”

She squints. “Unh. Hour. Ago.”

“Well then. Would you like me to end this?”

It takes a moment for her to meet my eyes. She nods. “When. You?”

I lean over, grimacing, and pick up her blade. “When did I last back myself up? Since recovering from memory surgery, you mean?”

She nods, or maybe shudders. I raise the blade and frown, lining it up on her neck: it takes all my energy. “Good question—”

I slice through her throat. Blood sprays everywhere.

“Never.”

I stumble to the exit—an A-gate—and tell it to rebuild my leg before returning me to the bar. It switches me off and a subjective instant later I wake up in the kiosk in the washroom at the back of the bar, my body remade as new. I feel empty but, curiously, at peace with myself. Maybe I’ll be ready for a backup, soon? I flex my right leg. The assembler’s done a good job of canonicalising it and the edited muscle works just fine.

Kay takes me to a charmingly rustic low-gee piazza of spun diamond foam and bonsai redwoods, where quaint steam-powered robots cook succulent baby hams over charcoal grills. Kay and I chat and it becomes clear that she’s mightily intrigued to see me recovering visibly from the emotional after-effects of memory surgery. She has a quirky sense of humour. After we’ve eaten, I tell her, “I’ve been an idiot. I need to take a backup as soon as I go home.”

Her eyes widen. “You’ve been walking around here wearing a sword and a duelling sash all evening and you don’t have a backup?” Her voice rises to a squeak.

“Knowing you’ve got a backup blunts your edge. Anyway, I was angry with myself.” I stop frowning as I look at her.

Kay leans me up against the wall just beside the entrance, kisses me and does something electrifying with three of her hands. She vanishes into the hygiene suite to use the assembler, leaving me panting. When she returns I almost don’t recognise her—her hair has turned blue, she’s lost two arms, and her skin has turned the colour of milky coffee. But she walks right up to me and kisses me again and I recognise her by the taste of her mouth. I carry her to the bed and we explore each other’s bodies until we fall asleep.

You can’t stay angry forever.

Charles Stross is a science fiction writer in Edinburgh, Scotland, with qualifications in pharmacy and computer science. This is an extract from his novel, Glasshouse.

©2006 Luna Media Pty Ltd, all rights reserved

‘Rogue Farm’ appeared in ‘Live Without a Net’ (ed Lou Anders, pub Roc 2003). It is copyright Charles Stross.

It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the south-eastern sky towards the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey-Fergusson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it towards the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.

“Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farmhouse. “Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”

“Joe? Is that you? Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the house.

“Where are you?” He yelled back.

“I’m in the bathroom.”

“Bugger,” he said again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month …”

The sound of a toilet sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on the staircase, then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?” she demanded.

“Out front, about a quarter mile up the lane.”

“Right.” Hair wild and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard yet?”

“I was thinking you’d want to talk to it first.”

“Too right I want to talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near Edgar’s pond I got some issues to discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and keep it off our property,” she called after him: “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Joe nodded to himself, then carefully picked out the twelve-gauge and a preloaded magazine. The gun’s power-on self test lights flicker ederratically, but it seemed to have a full charge. Slinging it, he locked the cupboard carefully and went back out into the farmyard to warn off their unwelcome visitor.

The farm squatted, buzzing and clicking to itself, in the road outside Armitage End. Joe eyed it warily from behind the wooden gate, shotgun under his arm. It was a medium sized one, probably with half a dozen human components subsumed into it—a formidable collective. Already it was deep into farm-fugue, no longer relating very clearly to people outside its own communion of mind. Beneath its leathery black skin he could see hints of internal structure, cytocellular macro-assemblies flexing and glooping in disturbing motions. Even though it was only a young adolescent, it was already the size of an antique heavy tank, andblocked the road just as efficiently as an Apatosaurus would have. Its melled of yeast and gasoline.

Joe had an uneasy feeling that it was watching him. “Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” he muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labour could manage—the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. “What do you want with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.

“Brains, fresh brains for baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a dozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farms’ back then retracted again, coyly.

“Don’t want no brains around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go away.”

“I’m a nine-legged semi-automatic groove machine!” Crooned the farm. “I’m on my way to Jupiter on a mission for love! Won’t you buy my brains?” Three curious eyes on stalks extruded from its upper glacis.

“Uh—” Joe was saved from having to dream up any more ways of saying fuck off by Maddie’s arrival. She’d managed to sneak her old battledress home after a stint keeping the peace in Mesopotamia twenty ago,and she’d managed to keep herself in shape enough to squeeze inside. Its left knee squealed ominously when she walked it about, which wasn’t often, but it still worked well enough to manage its main task—intimidating trespassers.

“You.” She raised one translucent arm, pointed at the farm. “Get off my land. Now.”

Taking his cue, Joe raised his shotgun and thumbed the selector to full auto. It wasn’t a patch on the hardware riding Maddie’s shoulders, but it underlined the point. The farm hooted: “why don’t you love me?” it asked plaintively.

“Get orf my land,” Maddie amplified, volume cranked up so high that Joe winced. “Ten seconds! Nine! Eight—” Thin rings sprang out from the sides of her arms, whining with the stress of long disuse as the Gauss gun powered up.

“I’m going! I’m going!” The farm lifted itself slightly, shuffling backwards. “Don’t understand. I only wanted to set you free to explore the universe. Nobody wants to buy my fresh fruit and brains. What’s wrong with the world?”

They waited until the farm had retreated round the bend at the top of the hill. Maddie was the first to relax, the rings retracting back into thearms of her battle dress, which solidified from ethereal translucency to neutral olive drab as it powered down. Joe safed his shotgun. “Bastard,”he said.

“Fucking A.” Maddie looked haggard. “That was a bold one.” Her face was white and pinched-looking, Joe noted: her fists were clenched. She had the shakes, he realised without surprise. Tonight was going to be another major nightmare night, and no mistake.

“The fence.” They’d discussed wiring up an outer wire to the CHP baseload from their little methane plant, on again and off again for the past year.

“Maybe this time. Maybe.” Maddie wasn’t keen on the idea of frying passers-by without warning, but if anything might bring her around it would be the prospect of being overrun by a bunch of rogue farms. “Help me out of this and I’ll cook breakfast,” she said.

“Got to muck out the barn,” Joe protested.

“It can wait on breakfast,” Maddie said shakily. “I need you.”

“Okay.” Joe nodded. She was looking bad; it had been a few years since her last fatal breakdown, but when Maddie said I need you it was a bad idea to ignore her. That way led to backbreaking labour on the biofab and loading her backup tapes into the new body; always a messy business. He took her arm and steered her towards the back porch. They were nearly there when he paused.

“What is it?” asked Maddie.

“Haven’t seen Bob for a while,” he said slowly. “Sent him to let the cows into the north paddock after milking. Do you think—”

“We can check from the control room,” she said tiredly. “Are you really worried …?”

“With that thing blundering around? What do you think?”

“He’s a good working dog,” Maddie said uncertainly. “It won’t hurt him. He’ll be alright; just you page him.”

# # #

After Joe helped her out of her battle dress, and after Maddie spent a good long while calming down, they breakfasted on eggs from their own hens, homemade cheese, and toasted bread made with rye from the hippie commune on the other side of the valley. The stone-floored kitchen in the dilapidated house they’d squatted and rebuilt together over the past twenty years was warm and homely. The only purchase from outside the valley was the coffee, beans from a hardy GM strain that grew likea straggling teenager’s beard all along the Cumbrian hilltops. They didn’t say much: Joe, because he never did, and Maddie, because there wasn’t anything that she wanted to say. Silence kept her personal demons down. They’d known each other for many years, and even when there wasn’t anything to say they could cope with each other’s silence. The voice radio on the windowsill opposite the cast-iron stove stayed off, along with the TV set hanging on the wall next to the fridge. Breakfast was a quiet time of day.

“Dog’s not answering,” Joe commented over the dregs of his coffee.

“He’s a good dog.” Maddie glanced at the yard gate uncertainly. “You afraid he’s going to run away to Jupiter?”

“He was with me in the shed.” Joe picked up his plate and carried it to the sink, began running hot water onto the dishes. “After I cleaned the lines I told him to go take the herd up the paddock while I did the barn.” He glanced up, looking out the window with a worried expression. The Massey-Fergusson was parked right in front of the open barn doors as if holding at bay the mountain of of dung, straw, and silage that mounded up inside like an invading odious enemy, relic of afrosty winter past.

Maddie shoved him aside gently and picked up one of the walkie-talkies from the charge point on the window sill. It bleeped and chuckled at her. “Bob, come in, over”. She frowned. “He’s probably lost his headset again.”

Joe racked the wet plates to dry. “I’ll move the midden. You want to go find him?”

“I’ll do that.” Maddie’s frown promised a talking-to in store for the dog when she caught up with him. Not that Bob would mind: words ran off him like water off a duck’s back. “Cameras first.” She prodded the battered TV set to life and grainy bisected views flickered across the screen, garden, yard, dutch barn, north paddock, east paddock, main field, copse. “Hmm.”

She was still fiddling with the smallholding surveillance system when Joe clambered back into the driver’s seat of the tractor and fired it up once more. This time there was no cough of black smoke, and as he hauled the mess of manure out of the barn and piled it into a three-metre high midden, a quarter of a ton at a time, he almost managed to forget about the morning’s unwelcome visitor. Almost.

By late morning the midden was humming with flies and producing a remarkable stench, but the barn was clean enough to flush out with a hose and broom. Joe was about to begin hauling the midden over to the fermentation tanks buried round the far side of the house when he saw Maddie coming back up the path, shaking her head. He knew at once what was wrong.

“Bob,” he said, expectantly.

“Bob’s fine. I left him riding shotgun on the goats.” Her expression was peculiar. “But that farm—”

“Where?” he asked, hurrying after her.

“Sqautting in the woods down by the stream,” she said tersely. “Just over our fence.”

“It’s not trespassing, then.”

“It’s put down feeder roots! Do you have any idea what that means?”

“I don’t—” Joe’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh.”

“Yes. oh.” She stared back at the outbuildings between their home and the woods at the bottom of their smallholding, and if looks could kill,the intruder would be dead a thousand times over. “It’s going to estivate, Joe, then it’s going to grow to maturity on our patch. And do you know where it said it was going to go when it finishes growing? Jupiter!”

“Bugger,” Joe said faintly, as the true gravity of their situation began to sink in. “We’ll have to deal with it first.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Maddie finished. But Joe was already on his way out the door. She watched him crossing the yard, then shook her head. “Why am I stuck here?” she asked herself, but the cooker wasn’t answering.

# # #

The hamlet of Outer Cheswick lay four kilometres down the road from Armitage End, four kilometres past mostly derelict houses and broken down barns, fields given over to weeds and walls damaged by trees. The first half of the twenty-first century had been cruel years for the British agrobusiness sector; even harsher if taken in combination with the decline in population and the consequent housing surplus. As a result,the drop-outs of the forties and fifties were able to take their pick from among the gutted shells of once fine farmhouses. They chose the best and moved in, squatted in the derelict outbuildings, planted their seeds and tended their flocks and practiced their DIY skills, until a generation later a mansion fit for a squire stood in lonely isolation alongside a decaying road where no more cars drove. Or rather, it would have taken a generation had there been any children against whose lives it could be measured; these were the latter decades of the population crash,and what a previous century would have labelled downshifter dink couples were now in the majority, far outnumbering any breeder colonies. In this aspect of their life, Joe and Maddie were boringly conventional. In other respects they weren’t: Maddie’s nightmares, her aversion to alcohol, and her withdrawl from society were all relics of her time in Peaceforce. As for Joe, he liked it here. Hated cities, hated the net, hated the burn of the new. Anything for a quiet life …

The Pig and Pizzle, on the outskirts of Outer Cheswick, was the only pub within about ten kilometres—certainly the only one within staggering distance for Joe when he’d had a skinful of mild—and it was naturally a seething den of local gossip, not least because Ole Brenda refused to allow electricity, much less bandwidth, into the premises. (This was not out of any sense of misplaced technophobia, but a side-effect of Brenda’s previous life as an attack hacker with the European Defense Forces.)

Joe paused at the bar. “Pint of bitter?” he asked tentatively. Brenda glanced at him and nodded, then went back to loading the antique washing machine. Presently she pulled a clean glass down from the shelf and held it under the tap.

“Hear you’ve got farm trouble,” she said non-commitally as she worked the hand pump on the beer engine.

“Uh-huh.” Joe focussed on the glass. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Never you mind.” She put the glass down to give the head time to settle; “you want to talk to Arthur and Wendy-the-Rat about farms. They had one the other year.”

“Happens.” Joe took his pint. “Thanks, Brenda. The usual?”

“Yeah.” She turned back to the washer. Joe headed over to the far corner where a pair of huge leather sofas, their arms and backs ripped and scarred by generations of Brenda’s semi-feral cats, sat facing each other on either side of a cold hearth. “Art, Rats. What’s up?”

“Fine, thanks.” Wendy-the-Rat was well over seventy, one of those older folks who had taken the p53 chromosome hack and seemed to wither into timelessness: white dreadlocks, nose and ear studs dangling loosely from leathery holes, skin like a desert wind. Art had been her boy-toy once, back before middle age set its teeth into him. He hadn’t had the hack, and looked older than she did. Together they ran a smallholding, mostly pharming vaccine chicks but also doing a brisk trade in high-nitrate fertilizer that came in on the nod and went out in sacks by moonlight.

“Heard you had a spot of bother?”

“‘S true.” Joe took a cautious mouthful. “Mm, good. You ever had farm trouble?”

“Maybe.” Wendy looked at him askance, slitty-eyed. “What kinda trouble you got in mind?”

“Got a farm collective. Says it’s going to Jupiter or something. Bastard’s homesteading the woods down by old Jack’s stream. Listen … Jupiter?”

“Aye well, that’s one of the destinations, sure enough.” Art nodded wisely, as if he knew anything.

“Naah, that’s bad.” Wendy-the-Rat frowned. “Is it growing trees, do you know?”

“Trees?” Joe shook his head. “Haven’t gone and looked, tell the truth. What the fuck makes people do that to themselves, anyway?”

“Who the fuck cares?” Wendy’s face split in a broad grin. “Such as don’t think they’re human anymore, meself.”

“It tried to sweet-talk us,” Joe said.

“Aye, they do that,” said Arthur, nodding emphatically. “Read somewhere they’re the ones as think we aren’t fully human. Tools an’ clothes and farmyard machines, like? Sustaining a prepost-industrial lifestyle instead of updating our genome and living off the land like God intended?”

“’Ow the hell can something with nine legs and eye stalks call itself human?” Joe demanded, chugging back half his pint in one angry swallow.

“It used to be, once. Maybe used to be a bunch of people.” Wendy gota weird and witchy look in her eye: “’ad a boyfriend back thirty, forty years ago, joined a Lamarckian clade. Swapping genes an’ all, the way you or me’d swap us underwear. Used to be a ‘viromentalist back when antiglobalisation was about big corporations pissing on us all for profits. Got into gene hackery and self-sufficiency bigtime. I slung his fucking ass when he turned green and started photosynthesizing.”

“Bastards,” Joe muttered. It was deep green folk like that who’d killed off the agricultural-industrial complex in the early years of the century, turning large portions of the countryside into ecologically devastated wilderness gone to rack and ruin. Bad enough that they’d set millions of countryfolk out of work—but that they’d gone on to turn green, grow extra limbs and emigrate to Jupiter orbit was adding insult to injury. And having a good time in the process, by all accounts. “Din’t you’ave a farm problem, coupla years back?”

“Aye, did that,” said Art. He clutched his pint mug protectively.

“It went away,” Joe mused aloud.

“Yeah, well.” Wendy stared at him cautiously.

“No fireworks, like.” Joe caught her eye. “And no body. Huh.”

“Metabolism,” said Wendy, apparently coming to some kind of decision. “That’s where it’s at.”

“Meat—” Joe, no biogeek, rolled the unfamiliar word around his mouth irritably. “I used to be a software dude before I burned, Rats. You’ll have to ‘splain the jargon fore using it.”

“You ever wondered how those farms get to Jupiter?” Wendy probed.

“Well.” Joe shook his head. “They, like, grow stage trees? Rocket logs? An’ then they est-ee-vate and you are fucked if they do it next door’cause when those trees go up they toast about a hundred hectares?”

“Very good,” Wendy said heavily. She picked up her mug in both hands and gnawed on the rim, edgily glancing around as if hunting for police gnats. “Let’s you and me take a hike.”

Pausing at the bar for Ole Brenda to refil her mug, Wendy led Joe out past Spiffy Buerke—throwback in green wellingtons and Barbour jacket—and her latest femme, out into what had once been a car park and was now a tattered wasteground out back behind the pub. It was dark, and no residual light pollution stained the sky: the Milky Way was visible overhead, along with the pea-sized red cloud of orbitals that had gradually swallowed Jupiter over the past few years. “You wired?” asked Wendy.

“No, why?”

She pulled out a fist-sized box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a light on its side to blink green, and nodded. “Fuckin’ polis bugs.”

“Isn’t that a—”

“Ask me no questions an’ I’ll tell you no fibs.” Wendy grinned.

“Uhhuh.” Joe took a deep breath: he’d guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections, and this—a portable local jammer—was proof: any police bugs within two or three metres would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling subsentient coppers whose job it was to prevent consipracy-to-commit offenses before they happened. It was a relic of the internet age, when enthusiastic legislators had accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by demanding keyword monitoring of everything within range of a network terminal—not realising that in another few decades ‘network terminals’ would be self-replicating bots the size of fleas and about as common as dirt. (The ‘net itself had collapsed shortly thereafter, under the weight of self-replicating viral libel lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance remained.) “Okay. Tell me about metal, meta—”

“Metabolism.” Wendy began walking towards the field behind the pub. “And stage trees. Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven—anyway. What you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just lignify and die in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and before the cells die they nitrate the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked ‘zymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s dead it’s like ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight explosive—it detonates cell by cell, and some of the xylemtubes are, eh, well, the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae witha depolarizing membrane nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s about efficient as’at old-time Ariane or Atlasrocket. Not very, but enough.”

“Uh.” Joe blinked. “That meant to mean something to me?”

“Oh ‘eck, Joe.” Wendy shook her head. “Think I’d bend your ear if it wasn’t?”

“Okay.” He nodded, seriously. “What can I do?”

“Well.” Wendy stopped and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon train making its orbital transfer window, self-sufficient posthuman Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted, embarking on the long, slow transferto Jupiter.

“Well?” He waited expectantly.

“You’re wondering where all that fertilizer’s from,” Wendy said eliptically.

“Fertilizer.” His mind blanked for a moment.

“Nitrates.”

He glanced down, saw her grinning at him. Her perfect fifth set of teeth glowed alarmingly in the greenish overspill from the light on her jammer box.

“Tha’ knows it make sense,” she added, then cut the jammer.

# # #

When Joe finally staggered home in the small hours, a thin plume of smoke was rising from Bob’s kennel. Joe paused in front of the kitchen door and sniffed anxiously, then relaxed. Letting go of the door handle he walked over to the kennel and sat down outside. Bob was most particular about his den—even his own humans didn’t go in there without an invitation. So Joe waited.

A moment later there was an interrogative cough from inside. A dark, pointed snout came out, dribbling smoke from its nostrils like a particularly vulpine dragon. “Rrrrrrr?”

“‘S’me.”

“Uuurgh.” A metallic click. “Smoke good smoke joke cough tickle funny arf arf?”

“Yeah, don’t mind if I do.”

The snout pulled back into the kennel; a moment later it reappeared, teeth clutching a length of hose with a mouthpiece on one end. Joe accepted it graciously, wiped off the mouthpiece, leaned against the side of the kennel, and inhaled. The weed was potent and smooth: within a few seconds the uneasy dialogue in his head was still.

“Wow, tha’s a good turn-up.”

“Arf-arf-ayup.”

Joe felt himself relaxing. Maddie would be upstairs, snoring quietly in their decrepit bed: waiting for him, maybe. But sometimes a man just had to be alone with his dog and a good joint, doing man-and-dog stuff. Maddie understood this and left him his space. Still …

“‘At farm been buggering around the pond?”

“Growl exclaim fuck-fuck yup! Sheepshagger.”

“If it’s been at our lambs—”

“Nawwwwrr. Buggrit.”

“So whassup?”

“Grrrr, Maddie yap-yap farmtalk! Sheepshagger.”

“Maddie’s been talking to it?”

“Grrr yes-yes!”

“Oh shit. Do you remember when she did her last backup?”

The dog coughed fragrant blue smoke. “Tank thump-thump full cow moo beefclone.”

“Yeah, I think so too. Better muck it out tomorrow. Just in case.”

“Yurrrrrp.” But while Joe was wondering whether this was agreement or just a canine eructation a lean paw stole out of the kennel mouth and yanked the hookah back inside. The resulting slobbering noises and clouds of aromatic blue smoke left Joe feeling a little queasy: so he went inside.

# # #

The next morning, over breakfast, Maddie was even quieter than usual. Almost meditative.

“Bob said you’d been talking to that farm,” Joe commented over his eggs.

“Bob—” Maddie’s expression was unreadable. “Bloody dog.” She lifted the Rayburn’s hot plate lid and peered at the toast browning underneath. “Talks too much.”

“Did you?”

“Ayup.” She turned the toast and put the lid back down on it.

“Said much?”

“It’s a farm.” She looked out the window. “Not a fuckin’ worry in the world ‘cept making its launch window for Jupiter.”

“It—”

“Him. Her. They.” Maddie sat down heavily in the other kitchen chair. “It’s a collective. Used ta be six people. Old, young, whatether, they’s decided ter go to Jupiter. One of ’em was telling me how it happened. How she’d been living like an accountant in Bradford, had a nervous breakdown. Wanted out. Self-sufficiency.” For a moment her expression turned bleak. “Felt herself growing older but not bigger,if you follow.”

“So how’s turning into a bioborg an improvement?” Joe grunted, forking up the last of his scrambled eggs.

“They’re still separate people: bodies are overrated, anyway. Think of the advantages: not growing older, being able to go places and survive anything, never being on your own, not bein’ trapped—” Maddie sniffed. “Fuckin’ toast’s on fire!”

Smoke began to trickle out from under the hot plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.

“Bugger,” she remarked.

“You feel trapped?” Joe asked. Again? He wondered.

Maddie grunted evasively. “Not your fault, love. Just life.”

“Life.” Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. “Life!”

“Horizon’s closing in,” she said quietly. “Need a change of horizons.”

“Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven’t I?” said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away: “got a shipment of fertilizer coming in.”

# # #

In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and surruptitiously EMPing every police ‘bot on the farm into the silicon afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it ran up the gadgets he’d ordered—a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with its own oxygen supply.

Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed. She didn’t seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign: Joe kept his questions to himself.

It took another five days for the smallholding’s power field to concentrate enough juice to begin fueling up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-net in the most deniable and surruptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chit-chat. He’d half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn’t say anything: just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she’d taken to holing up.

Finally, the tank was filled. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armour, picked up his weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.

The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a greenskirt that reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping willow; children had played here, pretending to explore the wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental control cameras.

That had been long ago. Today the woods really were wild. No kids, no picnicing city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket trolley of precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shorted out. The bones of the technological epoch, poking from the treacherous surface of a fossil mud-bath. And around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.

Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles were matt black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up all the available light: a network of tap roots and fuzzy black grasslike stuff covered the ground densely around them. Joe’s breath wheezed noisily in his ears and he sweated into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colourless, smoking liquid at the roots of each balistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him uneasy. As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one thing he’d been able to think of that was guaranteed to kill the trees stone dead without igniting them. After all, they hadcores that were basically made of gun cotton—highly explosive, liable to go off if you subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chainsaw. The tree he’d hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall sideways, and Joe stepped round it, efficiently squirting at the remaining roots. Right into the path of a distraught farm.

“My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my trees, my trees!” Eye stalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. “Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!”

“Back off,” said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter and fumbling for his airgun.

The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across angry blue irises. “How dare you?” demanded the farm. “My treasured seedlings!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. “Think I’d let you burn my holding when tha’ rocket launched? Stay the fuck away,” he added as a tentacle began to extend from the farm’s back.

“My crop,” it moaned quietly: “my exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for Baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn’t fucked up! Who set you up to this, Rat Lady?” It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle atop its leg cluster.

So Joe shot it.

Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyses skeletal muscles, the kind over which human nervous systems typically exert conscious control. Etorphine is an insanely strong opiate—twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against the etorphine—but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a blue whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time. It shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a syrette raised: “why?” it asked plaintively in a voice that almost made him wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. “We could have gone together!”

“Together?” he asked. Already the eye stalks were drooping; the great lungs wheezed effortfully as it struggled to frame a reply.

“I was going to ask you,” said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a thud like a baby earthquake. “Oh Joe, if only …”

“Joe? Maddie?” he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping the tranquiliser gun.

A mouth appeared in the farm’s front, slurred words at him from familiar seeming lips, words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from the farm. Passing the first dead tree he dropped the nitrogen tank: then an impulse he couldn’t articulate made him turn and run, back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm, pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his arms, he found it was already dead.

“Bugger,” said Joe, and he stood up, shaking his head. “Bugger.” He keyed his walkie-talkie: “Bob, come in, Bob!”

“Rrrrowl?”

“Momma’s had another breakdown. Is the tank clean, like I asked?”

“Yap!”

“Okay. I got ’er backup tapes in t’office safe. Let’s get’t’ank warmed up for ’er an’ then shift t’tractor down ’ere to muck out this mess.”

# # #

That autumn, the weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of Armitage End.

(THE END)

Historical note: this story was originally written in 1987. It was sold to There won’t be War in early 1988. However, it took rather a long time for that anthology to be published … it finally came out the week after the Moscow Putsch that toppled Mikhail Gorbachev and led to the breakup of the USSR.

If that kind of thing annoys you, just pretend it’s an “alternate history” story …

Day 1

NewsBurst:11:43 G.M.T.

The Third World War began this morning with a Russian dawn raid on the City of London. Bombs exploded all over the Docklands Enterprise Zone, disrupting the white-hot core of European industrial asset-stripping; the follow-up raids involved extensive use of lethal virus weapons and tactical assault units. Casualties included Larry Steinberg, a systems analyst for BSF:

Video intercut:

Steinberg: “It was terrible. They must have infiltrated those time bombs weeks ago, but there was no sign of them. They began going off at nine-thirteen this morning, bringing down whole systems. One entire block just crumbled … it was terrible, I tell you. We lost SEAQ for starters and then it all went to hell. There were casualties everywhere … I saw this young dealer, she was crying and pulling her hair out over her colleague, he’d copped it but bad, flat on the floor … “

Voice-over:”Barclays de Stoat Fader is just one of the large financial houses to suffer at the hands of the spetznaz assault this morning. Other large institutions affected include Country NatWest and the European desks of Drexel Burnham.

“Casualty figures are high, possibly running into tens of thousands of city workers and billions of ECU’s of damage. Further video updates will follow.”

Viral attack was largely confined to peripheral dealer desks where data throughput was limited to those personnel who had time to play a pirated game of Strip Poker which was being passed around. The virus was triggered by a date check, which suggests that the assault has been prepared far in advance. The main network through which it was disseminated appears to have been via SEAQ, the Stock Exchange Automated Quotations system.

BSF have refused to comment on a rumour to the effect that the attack was planned with the assistance of disgruntled employees sacked last year after a securities scandal which led to the company being investigated by the MMC.

The Soviet Embassy in London was unavailable for comment. The US Treasury Department is expected to make a statement later in the day.

NewsBurst:12:51 G.M.T.

Initial damage caused by the Soviet attack appears to have been limited, and the main clearing banks are switching in their reserve and back-up capacity. About 30% of the damaged dealer desks are up and running from backups, but the virus-infected optical discs are still in quarantine with DTI investigators and S&Q Enterprises called in. The attack failed to induce a massive slide, but Snake currencies are shaky and an unscheduled internal adjustment has been announced for this afternoon. Interest rates have not yet been affected, but announcements are expected hourly.

At 12:49 the European Currency Unit stood at 0.92 Roubles, down 23 Kopeks in just three and a half hours. The U.S. dollar remained stable at 0.89 ECUs, three cents up on yesterday.

A press conference has been scheduled by the Soviet Embassy in nine minutes time and will be covered by this service.

Just in:

At the press conferance in Washington that has just ended, the U.S. Treasury Department spokesman, Mr John Flatbush, read the following statement but left the platform before he could be asked any questions:

“At nine hundred hours today the Treasury Department monitoring service became aware of the serious nature of the current Russian attack on London. We are of course monitoring the present scenario in realtime, but we do not believe that there are any grounds for alarm in this country. The days of the great corporate raiders – Ikahn and Boesky and the like – are over, thanks to the decisive lead provided by the Jackson administration in restructuring the U.S. economy. There are no grounds to fear a joint Japanese-Soviet attack on our corporate heartland, but in order to prevent any localized slides we are taking action to freeze European assets held in U.S. stocks and bonds. These shares will be underwritten by the Federal Reserve Bank for the duration of the – er, instability.

“It falls to me to say – off the record – that any of our boys who go in there deserve the best of luck and our encouragment in fighting the good fight and getting while the getting’s good on foreign soil! This could be the offshore investment opportunity of the century, and I for one am gonna be phoning my broker as soon as this conference is over. Goodbye.”

Newsburst:13:27 G.M.T.

At 13:03 today, the Soviet trade attache, Ms. V. I. Retshuchenko, released the following statement, reproduced in its entirety:

“My friends, this morning forces based within the RFSFR launched an economic attack upon the United States of Europe, with the goal of dominating those states. On behalf of the government of the RFSFR, may I express our sincere sympathy for the victims of this unprecedented offensive; unfortunately we are unable to prevent further incursions. The hostile forces appear to be a secret consortium of Soviet industry, including Mikoyan-Gurevitch design bureau, Glavkosmos, and the First Consolidated Peoples’ Bank of Azerbaijan; these corporations appear to be cooperating with extranational powers of unknown identity.

“As you know, such an attack would have been both impossible and implausible if the RFSFR still retained the old, monolithic industrial centralism of the decadent Lenin-Brezhnev era. Following the marked improvements in international progress and trade of the past decade, however, certain organisations listed on the Moscow stock exchange have decided that the Soviet economy cannot support their investment programs. They appear to have decided that a leveraged buy-out of the entire Western economy would be a suitable way of resolving their balance of payments surplus, and unfortunately the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is unable to restrain them.

“Bluntly, such a sequence of events was not considered possible, and no restraining legislation has been drafted. The Politburo is not sanguine about the consequences, however. We have no desire to return to the isolationist, Cold War mentality of the seventies and eighties, and in any event such a policy will inevitably induce considerable public discontent.

“President Boris Yeltsin has expressed his condolences for the victims of the conflict, and has promised maximum cooperation with the European authorities in an attempt to negotiate an end to the shares war before the G-9 talks are jeopardised.

“Thank you very much indeed for coming here. Goodbye.”

Newsburst:14:56 G.M.T.

News is coming in of a bloody attack on Wall Street. As trading opened in New York at 13:00 G.M.T. the ailing infotech giant IBM (US) launched a hostile takeover bid for Mercury Telecom PLC in London. Fund transfers to Europe so far total over ten billion dollars, believed to be close to IBM’s entire liquid assets. Mercury is the main PSTN and ISDN operator for the London Stock Exchange and handles the Stock Exchange Automated Quotation system, SEAQ. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission have been notified, but no immediate action is possible because inspectors are working at saturation levels elsewhere in the City.

It appears that IBM has been controlled in large measure by shell corporations registered in Columbia and Peru for the past three months. CEO Debbie Beagle has refused to comment on allegations that her corporation is cooperating with the Soviet offensive in an attempt to dismember Western Europe’s high-technology industries.

Closer to home, EuroBank has launched a counter-offensive before the close of trading in Moscow, with a bid for shares in the state airline Aeroflot and a back-up investment of ECU 500m in BSF. Amstrad and News International’s Sky Channel have announced a consortium bid for BSB in an attempt to consolidate the satellite TV market under one umbrella. Glaxo, Ciba-Geigy, and the NHS Pharmatech division are reported to be entering the fray with a bid for several small Russian pharmaceutical manufacturing units; and the smell of money may drag British Power and even NHS(PLC) into the trade war.

The government remains silent on the issue so far, but a spokesman for Number Ten Downing Street has re-affirmed the Prime Ministers’ commitment to the free market. “The share issue for British Monarchy PLC will not be jeopardized,” he emphasized. “There is no alternative!”

The Queen was unavailable for comment.

In Europe there has generally been a measured response to the carnage. Fiat, Dassault-Renault, and Airbus Industrie are conducting intensive merger negotiations in conjunction with BMW, Porsche-SEAT and Arianespace, apparently in an attempt to inflate their group capital beyond any credible takeover attempt. The fact that this would automatically be viewed as monopolistic is irrelevant because the move is purely intended as a short-term defensive measure – safety in numbers, and the more zeros on the balance sheet the better.

NewsBurst:15:45 G.M.T.

In a move that has shocked industry bystanders, IBM (US) has dismissed the entire board of Mercury Telecom and moved a special Emergency Task Group into the boardroom. MT apparently held out for a full twenty-seven minutes under the intensive IBM bidding which raised the price of shares from 198 to 323 in less than half an hour. The price of shares has suddenly slumped into the red, with a post-takeover quotation of 121 delivered five minutes ago by human messenger. The SEAQ service appears to have been overloaded by the rapidity of events, with priority going to financial transactions; many smaller desks are apparently ‘flying blind’ on expert systems alone and praying that their software has no hidden bugs in it.

Judith Richmond, a broker with Copperhouse-Gerbil, had this to say:

“Things are just going crazy today. It’s not a classic melt down because some shares are going through the roof in real time, but it’s like a shooting war’s broken out. Nothing is stable any more, and all we small brokers can do is keep our heads down when the big countercurrent exchange laundries go into action. We’re spilling a million ECU’s a second right now, draining into the Soviet economy; it’s sheer havoc. I’m not going to predict what’s going to happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow I expect to see a lot of dealers throwing themselves under BMW’s … or Lada’s.”

Rumours of a second wave of software bombs tomorrow morning have prompted many dealer rooms to call in the security analysts overnight. There’re going to be many sleepless engineers earning their overtime checksumming the operating system files for signs of retrovirus infection.

In Tokyo, the Ministry of Finance announced a suspension of all trading for the next three days, an unprecedented move that echoes Meltdown Monday, October 19th 1987, when Wall Street lost more than a thousand points by closing time as a result of computerised panic selling. People’s Hong Kong and Manila are expected to follow suit.

Barclays Bank, the Midland Bank, and all the leading Merchant Banks announced a rise in interest rates of two percent in one day, to be reviewed as soon as the current crisis is defused. The Chancellor of the Exchequer refused to comment, but an official statement from Downing Street is expected imminently, as is a statement from Brussels.

NewsBurst:17:03 G.M.T.

In the past ninety-two minutes this service has been overwhelmed by the pace of developments. But first the general market report:

The London FT100 share index closed down 467.3 points at 2891.7, the largest fall on record since Meltdown Monday or the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The ECU was down 43 kopeks against the Rouble, to an all-time low of 72 kopeks to the ECU. Two hundred billion ECU’s was knocked off shares Europe-wide in what commentators have been calling “the Greenback War”. The Russian surprise attack this morning caused complete havoc, catching virtually every European conglomerate on the hop. Long term consequences are uncertain, but massive upheavals are expected in every market and a wave of panic selling cannot be ruled out.

Among the most bizarre developments of today was the attack by IBM (US) on Mercury Telecom, which was hijacked – there is no other word for it – for an outlay estimated conservatively to be triple its market value. Just what strategic priority IBM places on Mercury cannot yet be assessed, but the sheer scale of the offensive, taking place within hours of the Soviet attack, cannot be a coincidence.

In the United States, the Treasury Department commented on allegations of an ‘unholy alliance’ between IBM-Telecom and the computer and communications companies AT&T and DEC:

“All such allegations are specious and utterly untrue. We wish to make it clear that no American corporation would dabble in diabolism – you may remember the rumours concerning Proctor and Gamble’s trademark, which was subsequently changed following Moral Majority pressure. Any rumours of an ‘unholy alliance’ must, a priori, be considered to be malicious gosip and insider scaremongering. Rumours that we are investigating these corporations for monopolism will not be addressed at this date.”

There has been no official White House response so far, but a presidential aide has announced that President Jackson will make a substantial statement on the issue tomorrow. It is to be hoped that the President will bring to bear his usual combination of intellectual precision and raw charisma on the issue; at the very least his presence is expected to have a calming affect on the nation. The importance of this speech cannot be underestimated; as the first black president of the Republic, as its’ leading intellectual and the most popular supreme executive since John F. Kennedy, anything he says may make a decisive impact on the situation. Meanwhile the atmosphere in New York today is one of quite tension as millions of stockbrokers and company attorneys stay glued to their screens watching the carnage in Europe unfold, and all of them must be asking the same question: “Will it be our turn tomorrow?”

The situation in London this evening is calm but tense, with rumours of imminent government intervention if the situation deteriorates tomorrow. The European multinationals are feverishly negotiating massive mergers which will put them temporarily out of reach of the Russian raiders, even though antitrust legislation will inevitably break them up within a matter of weeks or months; meanwhile, bank interest rates are expected to go through the roof tomorrow. Already estate agents in central London have been offered houses at less than three-quarters of their market value, in the first ripples to spread out into the broader economy.

Several smaller brokers ceased trading this afternoon, with three companies filing for bankruptcy. These firms were unable to invest heavily in ISDN communication systems and artificial intelligence based dealing desks; when SEAQ overloaded this afternoon their dealing error margin increased catastrophically until they were caught in the general maelstrom of disinvestment by panicked shareholders.

NewsBurst:18:09 G.M.T.

Downing Street has announced the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his immediate suicide by hara-kiri over the events of this morning. The announcement from the P.M.’s office confirms rumours which have been circulating since late afternoon. It is believed that Bank of Europe officials informed the Prime Minister that the current rate of disinvestment could drive UK industry into bankruptcy in five days’ trading if strict monetarist policies were adhered to; knock-on effects could be expected to devastate the rest of Europe within a week at most. Despite her well-known attitude to interventionism, the Prime Minister made a statement supporting certain preventative measures at her recent press-conferance:

“It has come to my attention that the current catastrophic situation in the markets is the result of a complacent attitude towards foreign investment and trade, coupled with a very aggressive, not to say unprincipled, foreign assault on our entire industrial capacity.

“May I take this opportunity to say how deeply concerned I am that, while British industry must stand on its own two feet, this is not a normal situation; this is a perfidious attack upon all things British. It would be tantamount to ignoring our national honour were we to refuse aid to our gallant companies in their time of need. Such aid will be forthcoming when it is required. We are fully pursuing all possible diplomatic channels with President Yeltsin, and I am confident that a negotiated settlement will be arrived at shortly.

“Due to a difference of opinion over interest rates, the Chancellor has offered me his resignation, effective as of tonight. I have accepted it. (The terms of his resignation are classified under the Official Secrets Act and any of you reptiles who tries to get hold of it is going in the slammer so fast your feet won’t touch the ground. Understood?) In view of the impracticality of appointing a replacement at this short notice, I will be occupying this post until a suitable candidate can be coerced.

“There is no change in our long-term policies of de-nationalization and rolling back the nanny state. We cannot, and will not, permit small-minded and vindictive attacks to divert us from the grand sweep of history. British industry must, indeed is, learning to die on its own two feet, and will continue to do so for as long as I remain Head of State of these isles. As a standard of our determination, we have decided to proceed with the share issues of British Monarchy Group and British Justice PLC, regardless of the current market situation. (I can assure you that the Japs and the Arabs are going to go for these issues, which will add further weight to our balance of payments and cut off some more dry wood in the process).

“It is to be hoped that our friends in Europe will take note of the situation here, and take steps to ensure that economic cohesion triumphs over narrow-minded national isolationism in the hour of our trial. As I have said before, there is no alternative!”

Day 2

NewsBurst:09:04 G.M.T.

Following yesterdays spectacular events, massive counter-attacks took place in the Moscow stock exchange during the night. While Tokyo and Hong Kong remained closed, GEC-Plessey moved into Moscow with a vengeance, buying up shares in the Samizdata-Krokodil electronic publishing group and Glavkosmos space enterprises. Details are uncertain, and it remains to be seen whether Glavkosmos will succumb to the British counter-offensive, but as the major intermediary in the Soviet consortium Glavkosmos is an obvious target for retaliation.

American neutrality was called into question when, late last night in Washington D.C., President Jackson issued a brief statement supporting IBM and equating the takeover of Mercury Telecom with “Mom and Apple Pie and Coka Cola”. It is not clear whether this implies that the Cola Corporation is backing intervention in Europe; more information is expected following his speech later today. Ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced that a radical policy study was under way into the impact of the trade war on the Far East; he is believed to be especially concerned with rumours of Vietnamese infiltration of the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Fears of a second wave of computer viruses failed to materialise overnight, with many dealing rooms going back on-line at full capacity. EuroBank is today expected to make a general announcement concerning interest rates; rumours of massive inflationary measures cannot yet be discounted, despite the Prime Ministers’ known hatred of such techniques.

The mood at many desks in the City can best be described as tense, verging on overwound. Collars are unbuttoned, ties are forgotten, and there are hollows under every eye this morning at the thought of a repetition of the events of yesterday. Dealers at Citibank were issued notification of an imminent 50% pay cut as an alternative to instant dismissal; this was promoted as a necessary fluidity-conservation tactic. Small bank and building society branches around the nation will remain closed today until the situation resolves. Meanwhile, rumours that Army Intelligence Corps and GCHQ systems analysts have been called in to help run BSF’s investment net have not yet been confirmed.

NewsBurst:10:16 G.M.T.

EuroBank has just announced an across-the-board ten percent increase in the bank base lending rates. This has prompted sighs of relief from all the major fund clearing houses, but is expected to provoke an angry response in the House of Commons, and subsequently in the European Parliament, where it is perceived as a gamble with political suicide. The increase will be the first result of the crisis that the public at large have experienced, and will affect almost ten million mortgage holders immediately, with repayment increases in excess of 200% likely within days.

The announcement comes on top of panic-selling of GEC-Plessey shares on the basis of rumours that the electronics giant had over-extended itself in the Soviet market and was about to come under threat again from a Gorki-based consortium. Suggestions of an alliance with British Aerospace or Amstrad have been discounted by spokespersons for those companies.

Shares fell sharply from their opening prices, but recovered slightly half an hour into trading when buying programs were activated by unprecedentedly low prices. The DTI has not yet released details of its Emergency Economic Rescue Package, but an announcement from Downing Street is expected this afternoon.

In Moscow, the Politburo released a sharply critical statement, accusing several Soviet-based multinationals of placing personal gain ahead of the public good, and of forgetting their socialist origins. None of the companies concerned had anything to say in response to this accusation.

NewsBurst:11:25 G.M.T.

Catastrophe has struck the Stock Exchange in the past hour, with the revelation that IBM is definitely cooperating with the Soviet MGF consortium and Cola Corporation. Following the IBM takeover of Mercury, the company responsible for running the SEAQ dealer network, confidence in the very medium of trade has collapsed. It in considered likely that details of confidential bids are being piped direct to hostile corporate computers. While this ‘outsider dealing’ is definitely in breach of the law, it cannot yet be proven and by the time DTI inspectors and Scotland Yard have established the facts, many companies will be in receivership.

It is reported that the main Tandem fault-tolerant mainframes in use by Barcleys de Stoat Fader have become infected by a virus which is systematically downloading all their files into SEAQ. The blatant data piracy has shaken the board of directors, who are expected to announce a suspension of trading by the UK’s biggest investment house in less than half an hours’ time.

Chaos has hit the international exchange rates, with the ECU falling to 43 Kopeks, a completely unprecedented collapse. The FT100 index at 1100 G.M.T. stood at 1892, it’s lowest level in ten years.

President Jackson has scheduled his big speech for 13:00 G.M.T., which will be covered by this data channel.

The initial effect of the rise in interest rates has been a massive drop in the cost of housing. Prices in the high street chains have fallen by up to 60% in one morning, and reports of estate agents engaging in suicide pacts have been coming in. Pedestrians are advised to be careful about venturing out on foot in the Square Mile and the Docklands Enterprise Zone, where eight suicides by jumping have been reported this morning so far. The London Undergrounds’ Northern Line was reported to be at a standstill, with a record four bodies on the line in two hours.

The parliamentary Opposition has tabled a vote of no confidence in the government, and is predicting a defection by large numbers of back-bench Thatcherite MP’s. Fears of an incoming hard-left government have done nothing to allay share instability in the system; the Opposition remains committed to a massive program of re-nationalisation, wage and price control, and other policies which in the light of the events of this week can be expected to be massively popular with the electorate.

NewsBurst:12:07 G.M.T.

Amstrad and News International Group have been bought out by Yegor Ligachev Technologies of Novosibirsk, a relatively obscure hydro-electric power project whose fluidity has been massively augmented in the European markets by the behaviour of their commercial big brothers. Rupert Murdock and Alan Sucrose were unavailable for comment, but an unattributable source has stated that Mr. Sucrose is to be offered the Managing Directorship of Sony. With the loss of these two multinationals, the entire UK television industry is now concentrated in the hands of Soviet-owned companies.

A vote of no confidence in the government has been scheduled for 13:30 this afternoon.

Reports are coming in of the lynching of two bank managers in Stoke-on-Trent by customers angered by the rise in mortgage rates. Labour councils in the North-West are said to be considering a general buy-out offer for all mortgage holders unable to sustain repayments; in return for title to the properties, the councils are offering to maintain the occupants as sitting tenants in normal council accommodation.

The Trades Union Congress has called for an immediate one-week General Strike in those industries affected by Soviet takeovers, in an attempt to ‘poison the pill’. General Secretary Todt had this to say:

“We’re not going to sit around while them Russians take over our, our entire livelihoods. It’s not right! Peoples’ jobs are at stake and we can’t just sit here while the foreigners move in. Europe is one thing, but the Soviet Union, the Americans, they don’t care for our way of life. They don’t know what it is to be British.

“We say that by striking now, we can make our companies so unattractive that the Russians will ’ave to scarper. But we got to do it now, because if we leave it t’KGB’ll be through Congress House like a dose o’salts inside a month, you mark my words. I know them people.

“I call on the government to back our strike. It’s not they we’re striking against, it’s these foreign loan sharks who’re buying up t’country. If they use the trades’ union legislation they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot.

“Strike now, while it’s not too late! Strike a blow for British Industry!”

NewsBurst:1338 G.M.T.

President Michael Jackson shocked the world half an hour ago with his announcement that American corporations, with his approval, had signed a joint policy agreement with the Soviet MGF consortium. “This is a major breakthrough in international policy relations,” the President sang to a mesmerised audience of his fans. “We have the opportunity to forge a lasting bond with our Russian friends and secure peace in Europe forever. We should not let such a thrilling opportunity slip through our hands. What has Britain ever given us besides George the Third, Hitler, and the discovery of Heroin? My fellow Americans, I call upon you to forget the cold war, forget the old fears, and embrace the future with open arms. Nothing less than our share portfolios are at stake here, and our Russian friends have just offered us the deal of the century!”

The President then answered questions and sang an encore from Off the Wall before leaving in a convoy of carnival floats escorted by a National Guard regiment in pink tutus. Throughout the conference he was surrounded by Secret Service men disguised as zombies and Disney dwarves, presumably to deter enraged British expatriates from attempting to assassinate him.

The entire State Department diplomatic machine ground into gear immediately after the speech, which amounts to a declaration of economic war directed at Europe. This is viewed unhappily in some quarters, for many of the Presidents’ fans flocked into stadia all over the continent for his last concert tour ten years ago. However, in diplomatic circles it is seen as a shrewd move, adding political substance to the de facto hostilities which appear to be on the verge of succeeding. The presidential song and dance routine will certainly boost morale in the boardrooms of corporate America who elected him and stand to gain most from the conflict, and make it highly improbable that their conduct will now be investigated by the FBI. More significantly, the Presidents’ known dislike of Mrs Thatcher now appears to have found a relatively harmless outlet in these corporate outings from his recording studio.

An immediate reaction from the joint European Embassy expressed regret about the Presidents’ speech, and warned of possible trade sanctions specifically an embargo on exports of fresh bananas. It is not expected that Lucky’s diet will be affected, however; when he arrived, the President insisted that the White House freezers include a decades’ supply of his pets’ favourite food.

In the Palace of Westminster, MP’s are now taking a vote of no-confidence in the government. A large number of Tory MP’s are expected to abstain, raising the possibility that this really is the end of the road for Thatcherism.

Reports of rioting in Eastbourne have been coming in. The rioters are predominantly middle-class homeowners with mortgages. Violence has been confined to the town centre, but Estate Agencies have been looted and set alight, and a building society manager has been lynched. Police riot suppression teams are standing by, but have not yet been used to disperse the crowds.

It is anticipated that trading on the Stock Exchange will be suspended within the next two hours.

NewsBurst:15:00 G.M.T.

The Thatcher government has fallen. At this afternoon’s vote of confidence, more than two hundred Tory MP’s abstained, resulting in a rollover victory for the opposition. After more than fifteen years in office, the Prime Minister now has four weeks to vacate Number Ten Downing Street. In the present climate of public opinion, a MORI poll commissioned by the Guardian newspaper this morning shows support for the Labour Party running at 62%, the highest level on record. The party leader, Mr Ken Leninclone, was unavailable for comment; he is believed to be finalising his cabinet team.

Trading on SEAQ has been suspended indefinitely, pending DTI and Scotland Yard inspection of irregularities in the affairs of at least twenty major companies, including banks, building societies, investment brokers, and multinational corporations.

A total of 32% of all the FT100 company shares are now held in Soviet hands, and 19% in American hands. An announcement on compulsory nationalisation is anticipated as one of the first moves of the incoming left-wing administration.

The outgoing Prime Minister is believed to be seeking asylum with a number of foreign governments. The South African and Paraguayan embassies have indicated that if she makes an application for citizenship it will be well received.

At the suspension of trading, the FT100 index was hovering around the 1600 mark. The number of suicides in the City had risen to twenty-three confirmed and four in intensive care. The ECU was hovering at 41 Kopeks, but showed no signs of making a late recovery.

And finally, we bring you a late announcement from the caretaker government, directed to the Kremlin and the White House:

We surrender, tovaritch.

Version History

First published: There won’t Be War, ed. Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister, 1992

If you modify this text, please retain this version history.

Ver 1.5—31/7/2003—Anarchy Publications, HaVoK—This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.

They stopped me on the gangway and rolled up my left sleeve.

“Clockwork? Or quartz?” asked the one with the hammer.

“Oh—quartz,” I said.

“Sorry, but rules are rules,” said the one with the leather bag. I nodded. He gently peeled the watch off my wrist and laid it over the ship’s railing. Crunch: the hammer rebounded. He scooped what was left back into the bag, careful not to drop any glass fragments on the deck.

“I just forgot,” I said, slightly stunned. “Is there anything else …?”

They looked at each other and shrugged. The one with the bag looked a little guilty. “Here, you can borrow mine,” he said, offering it to me.

“Thanks.” I tightened the strap, then carried on up the gangway. It was an old Rolex Oyster, case tarnished with decades of sweat. I glanced back. The hammer team waited patiently for their next target. The one with the hammer was wearing a red T-shirt with a logo on its back. I squinted closer at the marketing slogan:

UNIX—THE TIME IS RIGHT.

Rita was already in the foredeck lounge when I got there. I had half expected her not to show up, but we’d booked the tickets five years ago, three years before the divorce, and her name hadn’t disappeared from the roster since then. I suppose I’d assumed she’d forget, or dismiss it, or not think it worth bothering with. I waited for the usual cold shudder of unnameable emotions to pass, then headed for the bar.

Polished brass and wood gleamed in the gas-light like an old-fashioned pub. (The overhead electrics were powered down, except for the red glare of an emergency light’s battery charge indicator.) One guy was already sitting on a bar stool, elbow-propped above his beer glass. I looked at him for a moment before I blinked and realized that it was the Professor. A blast from the past; he’d retired two years ago. I sat down on the stool next to him. There was nobody behind the bar, but I figured a steward would be along shortly.

“Marcus Jackman … isn’t it?” he asked, glancing round at me. Time hadn’t been kind to him; burst blood vessels streaked the tip of his nose and his eyes looked sore.

“Eight years and counting,” I said. “What are you drinking?”

He glanced at the row of optics behind the bar: “Perrier for now, I think.” He yawned. “Sorry, I haven’t had much sleep lately.”

“Anything in particular?” I asked.

“The usual,” he said. “The chancellor put a gagging order on me, can you believe it? Said what I was saying was bad for the institute’s public image. So I packed my bags and came here instead. Olaf said he’d keep a berth open for me but I didn’t think I’d be taking him up on it until … oh, a month ago. If that.”

I shook my head. A barman appeared silently: I tipped him the wink and he refilled the Professor’s tumbler from the fizzy water tap. I asked for and received a double gin and tonic. I felt I needed it. “They wouldn’t listen to you?” I asked.

The Professor shook his head. “Nothing ever changes at the top,” he said sadly. “So what did you make of yourself?”

“I run a big switch site. Loads of bandwidth. Nothing that’s going to be hit by the event—at least, not directly. But still, I don’t trust my bank account, I don’t trust the tax system … there’s too much brittleness. Everywhere I look. Maybe I’ve just been tracking risks for too long, and then again …”

“You made a down payment on this holiday three or four years ago, eh?”

I nodded.

“They wouldn’t listen to me,” he muttered. “I kept on for as long as was reasonable, even though they told me it was a career-limiting move—as if some little thing like tenure would stop them—until I was too tired to go on.”

“I get to see a lot, out in the real world,” I volunteered. “That standard lecture piece you did, on the old reactor control system—I’ve seen worse.”

“Oh yes?” He showed a flicker of interest, so I continued.

“A big corporate accounting system. Used to run on a bundle of mainframes at six different national headquarters, talking via leased line. Want to hear about it?”

“Pray continue.” I had his attention.

“They downsized everything they could, but there were about fifty million lines of PL/I on the accounts system. Nobody could be bothered to bring it up to date—it had taken about two hundred programmers twenty years to put it all together. Besides which, they were scared of the security implications of reverse-engineering the whole thing and sticking it on modern networked machines. In the end, they hit a compromise: there was this old VM/CMS emulator for DOS PC’s floating around. They bought six stupidly powerful workstations running something a bit more modern. Stuck a DOS emulator on each workstation, and ran their accounting suite under the VM/CMS emulator under the DOS emulator—”

I waited while his spluttering subsided into a chuckle. “I think that deserves another drink: don’t you?”

I took a big gulp from my G&T and nodded. “Yeah.” More fizzy water for the Prof. “Anyway. These six, uh, mainframes, had to talk to each other at something ridiculous like 1200 baud. So the droids who implemented this piece of nonsense hired a hacker, who crufted them up something that looked like a 1200 baud serial line to the VM/CMS emulator, but which actually tunneled packets through the internet, from one workstation to another. Only it ran under DOS, ’cause of the extra level of emulation. Then they figured they ought to let the data entry clerks log in through virtual terminals so they could hire teleworkers from India instead of paying guys in suits from Berkhampstead, so they wrote a tty driver just for the weird virtual punched-card reader or whatever the bloody accounting system thought it was working with.”

Someone tapped me on my shoulder. I glanced round.

“Yo, dude! Gimme five!”

“Six,” I said. Clive beamed at me. “Been here long?”

“Just arrived,” he said. “I knew I’d find you propping up the bar. Hey, did the guys on the gangway give you any aggro?”

“Not much.” I put my hand over my watch’s face. The whole thing disturbed me more than I wanted to think about, and Rita’s silent presence (reading a book in a deep leather-lined chair at the far side of the room) didn’t contribute anything good to my peace of mind. “I was just telling the professor about—”

“The mainframes.” The professor nodded. “Most interesting. Can I trouble you to tell me what happened in the end? I hate an interrupted tale.”

I shrugged. “Drink for my man here,” I said.

“Make mine a pint,” said Clive.

“In a nutshell,” said the professor.

“In a nutshell: they’d put it all in an emulator, and handled all the logins via the net, so some bright spark suggested they run six emulators in parallel on one box and use local domain sockets to emulate the serial lines. It looked like it would save about fifty thousand bucks, and they’d already spent a quarter million on the port—as opposed to eighty, ninety million for a proper re-write—so they did it. Put everything in one box.”

“And what happened?” asked Clive.

Well, they stuffed the old corporate accounting system into a single workstation. You’ve got to understand, it was about fifty times as powerful as all six mainframes put together. The old mainframes were laid off about two months after the emulator went live, to save on the maintenance bill. So they moved office six months after that, and they managed to lose the box in the process. The inventory tag just went missing; it was so unobtrusive it looked like every other high-end server in the place. By the time they found it again, some droid from the marketing department who though Christmas had come early had reformatted its root partition and installed a multiuser game server on it …”

“Man, that’s bad,” said Clive. He looked improperly cheerful.

“Yes.” The professor looked worried. “That almost tops the reactor story.” He drained his glass then absent-mindedly checked the dosimeter he kept clipped to the breast pocket of his sports jacket: “but not quite.”

Unscheduled Criticality Excursion—( jargon) term used in the nuclear engineering industry to refer to the simultaneous catastrophic failure of all of a fission reactor’s safety features, resulting in a runaway loss of coolant accident. ( Formerly: meltdown.)

The ship set sail three hours later. I was already adrift, three sheets to the wind, and Clive steered me out on deck to watch the pier drift astern.

“Feel that breeze,” he said, and leaned out over the railing until I worried about him falling overboard. (An accident, so early in the voyage, would be a bad way to start; there was plenty of time for such incidents ahead.) “It’s cool. Onshore. Loads of salt. Iodine from decaying seaweed. Say, did you bring your iodine tablets? Sun block? Survival rations?”

“Only what I figured we’d definitely need,” I said, slurring on my certainty. “Didn’t know about Rita. Shit. Don’t need that shit. Are you okay over there?”

“Don’t be silly!”

And guess who’d seen fit to join us on deck? If it wasn’t my ex. I was drunk enough to be a bit out of control and in control enough to feel vulnerable: not, in other words, at my best. “And whash you doing here?” I asked, leaning against the rail beside Clive.

“Coming to ask what you’re doing here,” she said. “You’re a mess.” There was no rancour in her voice; just a calm, maddening self-assurance, as if she thought she’d earned the right to know me better than I knew myself.

“Funny, I could have sworn he was an engineer,” quipped Clive.

“You used the original ticket?” I asked.

Rita leaned up against the railing a couple of metres away from me. “I tried to exchange it,” she said guardedly. “By then, the ship was over-booked.”

“More fools,” quipped Clive. He leaned even further overboard: “cretins ahoy!” Rita’s stare could have frozen molten lead, but Clive bore its weight unheeding.

“Let’s talk,” she said. I followed her around the curve of the deck, away from Clive. The sea was still, but even so I had difficulty keeping my balance as it gently rolled beneath my feet. She stopped in the shadow of a lifeboat. “You know what this means?” she asked.

More histrionics, I thought. “It means we both just have to be very careful,” I said, emphasizing the final word.

Unexpectedly, she smiled at me. “Two years and you didn’t change your ticket!” It was not a very pretty smile.

I shrugged. “So that makes me a fool?”

She looked at me sharply: “no more than ever, Marcus. See you later.” She turned and stalked off in the direction of the door we’d come through. I looked towards the stern of the ship, a dark mass of shadows in the night: the breeze became slightly chilly if I stood in one place for long enough. I stood there for a long time.

Risks of embarking on an expensive sea voyage booked too far in advance, number 12: having to share a cramped cabin with a spouse who divorced you years ago.

I went to bed drunk, and when I awoke the next morning the cabin was mine. I sat up. My neck ached as if I’d lain too long in the wrong position; my tongue tasted as if something small and furry had died on it far too long ago. The cabin was a mess. My trunk was stowed neatly beneath the lower bunk bed—but a familiar suitcase was open and strewn across the table, and she’d spread her toiletries across every available surface in the cramped bathroom.

I groaned, sat up, and hastily made for the toilet—the head, I remembered to call it. Today was The Eve of Destruction; December the 31st, to the real world at large, and we would be sailing south-east and out into the endless blue eye of the Gulf of Mexico. Theoretically I had booked a two week holiday from my job. As a matter of caution—I checked carefully in the bag full of dirty socks in my trunk before heading for breakfast—both small, extremely heavy bars of metal were still there. Five thousand ecus each, they’d set me back: a whopping great hole in my savings, but if what we were expecting was the case, well worth it in the long run.

The dining lounge had seen better days; although this cruise ship called itself a liner, I had my suspicions. It reminded me of a run-down hotel, formerly a grand palace of the leisured classes, now reduced to eking out a living as a vendor of accomodation and conference space to corporate sales drones on quarterly kick-off briefings. I sat down at one of the tables and waited for one of the overworked stewards to come over and pour me a coffee.

“Mind if I join you?”

I looked up. It was a woman I’d met somewhere—some conference or other—lanky blonde hair, palid skin, and far too evangelical about formal methods. “Feel free.” She pulled a chair out and sat down and the steward poured her a cup of coffee immediately. I noticed that even on a cruise ship she was dressed in a business suit, although it looked somewhat the worse for wear. “Coffee, please,” I called after the retreating steward.

“We met in Darmstadt, ‘97,” she said. “You’re Marcus Jackman? I critiqued your paper on performance metrics for IEEE maintenance transactions.”

The penny dropped. “Karla … Carrol?” I asked. She smiled. “Yes, I remember your review.” I did indeed, and nearly burned my tongue on the coffee trying not to let slip precisely how I remembered it. I’m not fit to be rude until after at least the third cup of the morning. “Most interesting. What brings you here?”

“The usual risk contingency planning. I’m still in catastrophe estimation, but I couldn’t get anyone at work to take this weekend seriously. So I figured, what the hell? That was about two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks—” I stopped. “How did you wangle that?”

She sipped her coffee. A lock of hair dropped across it; she shoved it back absend-mindedly. “There’s always a certain rollover in things like this,” she said. “It just depends who you talk to …”

Showoff. Whoever had set up the booking system, whatever troll from the deep, dark, underside of the ACM SIG-RISK group, had known more than a little about queueing theory; I’d spent two months, on and off, trying to get Pauli aboard the lifeboat, while she’d just walked on board. “I thought there was a waiting list,” I said.

“Even lists have holes.” She stared coldly at the steam rising from her coffee cup; “and even institutional coffee tastes better than this rubbish. I say, waiter!”

“Why did you leave it so late, if you believe in the rollover meltdown?” I asked, wishing she’d just let the coffee quality issue die.

“Because it’s not the meltdown I’m interested in,” she said; “ah, it’s about this coffee. It’s disgusting. Have you been letting the jug stand on a hot plate for too long? So a few legacy systems, big hierarchical database applications for the most part, wrap around and go nonlinear when the year increments from 99 to 00. A fair number of batch reconcilliation jobs go down the spout at midnight, and never get up again. Yes, some fresh arabica will do nicelyh. Maybe even some big ones, like driver licensing systems or the Police national computer, or the odd merchant bank. But nothing bolted together in the past ten years will even break wind, so to speak. Excuse me, break stride. And realtime systems won’t even notice it; they mostly run on millisecond timers and leave the nonsense about dates to external conversion routines, if they understand the concept of dates at all, thank you very much, like a Mars Rover running on mission elapsed time in seconds. Good, much better, thank you.”

The harried waiter made a break for the other diners and I began to dig myself out of the hole in my chair I’d unconsciously tried to retreat into.

“It’s just an artefact of the datum,” she continued implacably, ignoring the coffee cut placed apologetically before her. “You might as well have picked on the UNIX millenium; it only runs for two to the thirty-one seconds from midnight on January first, nineteen-seventy, then some time thirty-two years from now the clocks begin counting in negative numbers. Of course, not many systems run for seventy years without maintenance, but there’s been an alarming trend lately towards embedding UNIX in black-box applications it’s totally unsuited for. Personally, I think twenty thirty-two is a much more realistic armageddon-type datum, for that and other reasons.”

I cringed slightly. “What brings you here, then, if you don’t think there’s going to be a fairly major disaster?”

“Because this is a ship of fools,” she said brightly. “I wanted to observe and see how you’re managing under percieved stress. Not to mention that some people here have jobs to go back to. I’m thinking of collaborating on a paper with a sociologist from my local university on stresss-related idiopathic delusional complexes in closed professional bodies. Chicken Little crying ‘the sky is falling’, when quite simply it can’t fall yet because this is a premature software apocalypse.”

I gritted my teeth and swallowed the last of my coffee. “You’re very sure that this is a false alarm.”

“But it can’t be the real thing! It’s too early—only the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Now the two thousandth anniversary of his Crucifixion is another matter, and the coincidence with the UNIX millennium is another sign. But what really clinches it is the timewave zero hypothesis advanced by Terrance McKenna, who proved that the Aztec cyclic history sequence actually comes to an end—a singularity—in the same time scale. If you think this is a survival trip, just wait for the next one in thirty-two years time! The ability of humans to anticipate an apolcalypse tends towards a maximum in line with the proximity of big dates in their numbering system; they unconsciously fail to plan for survival past the next one, so disaster ensues. Now in this age of computers I think the baseline has shifted from the millennium to the kiloyear—which as you know, is two to the tenth years, or one thousand and sixteen. And St John was quite obviously talking about access permission bits when he said that the number of the Beast was six, six, six. More coffee?”

I excused myself and made for the deck with all possible haste; I could tell it was going to be one of those days.

I didn’t dare to venture back into the dining room for another hour, until I was sure Karla had finished browbeating the staff; I wandered the upper deck like a lost soul, staring out across the muddy green expanse of sea, towards the gently swaying line in the distance where green met greyish white. The weather was poor (rather worse than I had been led to expect) and my head still throbbed from the night before. Back in the ops room at the institute, Marek or one of the other admins would be sitting up with a dog-eared paperback and a stack of blank backup cartridges, waiting patiently for the autochanger to bleat for a new load to accomodate the terabytes of data spooling slowly down onto tape. If I was there I’d probably be doing a dervish whirl of emergency disaster recovery preparations, single-handedly preparing to hold back the deluge of user complaints due on the first day of the new year. But I wasn’t there: all I could do was squint into the wind, face pinched in by impotent tension, and wish I was in another line of work.

When my face turned numb I went below, back to the gently rolling warmth of the dining room. Karla had evidently finished; Clive waved at me from a corner so I went and joined him. “How’s the morning?” I asked.

He pulled a face. “As you’d expect. Some woman tried to chat me up but it turned out she was recruiting for some Church or other. I managed to get away in one piece, though. Are you on for this evening’s festivities?”

I nodded. “What’s everyone doing today, then?”

“There’s a seminar session on disaster recovery techniques for large transaction-based systems in the forward lounge on C deck. Some old salt is giving a lecture on navigating by the stars in the bar before lunchtime, then the Professor is giving his account of the Sizewell ‘B’ disaster—the one he gave at the ACM bash in London this year. You were there, weren’t you? Oh, and there’s a bingo game somewhere or other, it’s on the noticeboard on D deck.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

Clive put his knife down with a clatter. “I’m going to read a book,” he said. “The weather’s crap and the sea’s going to get rough according to the shipping forecast. Might as well hole up and relax a bit.”

“There’s a radio?”

“I bought mine along.” He fished something out of his pocket; a tiny Sony multiband reciever, with an old-fashioned analog tuning dial. “Shortwave reception’s okay.”

“Read a book,” I echoed. “Sounds like a good idea.” I could already smell the boredom rising from the great and borderless sea outside our hull; a boredom born of nervy fright, knowledge of what countdown was now in progress in the real world. Karla, for all her objectionable manner and dubious hypotheses, had maybe had a point; humans set their historical clocks by the stars, and the beginning of a new millennium is no insignificant event. Even if the real fruitcakes think the show’s coming thirty-two years later …

Boredom: Knowing that the end of the world is due to happen in less than eighty-one thousand seconds, but being unable to hurry it along, impede it, or even ignore it and do something else in the meantime.

I had brought along a book on formal design methodologies to break my head on for the voyage, but I didn’t feel like reading it. When I returned to my cabin I found that Rita was still elsewhere. She’d brought along a huge mass of junk literature; disposable magazines, novels, a two-day-old newspaper. I read the leader columns in the paper, then the lifestyle section, then finally the job advertisements. They were recruiting lots of corporate drones, chief information officers: scope for a hollow laugh at someone else’s expense. But I didn’t feel like reading much, as my stomach was slightly weak from the constant swaybacked lurching of the deck, so I lay down on my bunk to catch the forty winks of the truly bored.

I dreamed that I was being interrogated by three sinister, shadowy men in dark suits who kept a bright light pointed at my eyes. They wanted to know why I had abandoned Rita and our two-year old daughter. They didn’t seem to understand that we had never had a child, and that Rita had left me—not the other way around. They said I set a dangerous, risky example to society at large; that runaway fathers should be allowed to make off with the taxpayers money was not a message they were prepared to send. They were about to sentence me to—something—when I awakened with a panicky jolt. Rita was leaning over me.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

I tried to croak “I think so,” but nothing very intelligible came out so I nodded instead.

“You looked as if you were having a bad dream.”

“I was.” I tried to sit up but she put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me down again. “Please …” I said.

“Lie down.” I did as I was told. “Who were you with this morning at breakfast?” she asked.

“Some fruitcake,” who thinks the apocalypse is due in thirty-two years and we’re all barking up the wrong tree. “She sat down at the same table and started trying to convert me to baptism or whatever the hell she believes in.”

“I see.” She was quiet for a moment. “Well just don’t bring her back to this cabin, you hear me? Don’t you dare.” She turned away abruptly, leaving me too dumbstruck to say anything as she stalked out of the cabin and yanked the door shut behind her. Maybe I was a fool to be here, but that didn’t make Rita any less blind herself.

I wandered along to a late lunch—cold buffet only—then an afternoon seminar on trusted anonymous systems validation. I avoided the deck, which was subject to an intermittent cold rain. There was due to be a banquet in the evening; I headed back to my cabin, had a shower, then changed into the suit I’d bought along for the occasion.

The bar adjoining the main dining room was drawing a steady business as twilight cast its shadow across the ship; refugee computer professionals in various states of formal attire held ice-cube clinking tumblers of whiskey in tense conversational huddles, while spousal units watched disinterestedly or discussed the foul weather. I saw Karla Carrol, wearing a long green dress and too much makeup, and shrank into the ‘L’-shaped recess at the opposite end of the bar, where two hunchbacked mainframe administrators were trying to top one-another’s dumb user stories. Karla seemed to have snagged an unfortunate woman who was something big in actuarial systems, and was talking into her ear: I ordered a double vodka and coke, and then another before the steward ushered us into the dining room.

To my surprise, I found myself seated next to Rita. She seemed to be enjoying herself as long as she payed no attention to me; as I hadn’t seen her that happy since a year before we split up, I was quite content to maintain my reserve. Besides, the food was substantially filling and my glass never seemed to empty, until I leaned back in a bloated semi-stupor to listen to the Prof give his keynote speech (after some nonentity from the organizing committee, introduced to the limbo of my memory by one of the ship’s officers.)

The Professor staggered slightly as he took the podium. “Friends, I am pleased to be here to speak to you tonight, but less pleased at the necessity for this voyage.” He paused for a moment and fiddled with the microphone. I was surprised by how little he had changed from my perspective, even given an extra ten years of age on my own account. He was still impressive.

“Software allows us to build huge, invisible machines—virtual mountains so complex that nobody can really understand the whole scope of a large application. But software is brittle: change an underlying constraint, and the whole edifice crumbles like a mountain hit by an earthquake. A single fundamental assumption that changes—as simple as the shift from one century to the next at the junction between two millennia—can break just about anything, anywhere, in the guts of such a system, and it could take seconds or months for the damage to surface. Back in the mid-nineties there were an estimated two hundred and fifty billion lines of vulnerable source code, waiting for the new century to rattle the ground from under them; at twenty thousand lines of code per programmer per year that would have taken a million programmers a year to fix … so everybody pretended it wasn’t there. Except us. Everyone here tonight has had some role in attempting to cure the crisis of complacency. Everyone here has been burned by the fire of bureaucratic inertia. And so it is that everyone here chose of their own free will to join this ship of fools on a voyage who’s motto might be, ‘I told you so!’”

He covered his mouth and hiccuped as discreetly as one may in front of an audience of two hundred. I glanced sideways at Rita; her face was a carefully controlled mask for boredom.

“In about an hour, it will be midnight back in England. It is already five o’clock in the morning of January first, year two thousand, somewhere far to the east of here. The datum is sweeping remorselessly round the dark side of the world, leaving random malfunctions in its wake. Some of those malfunctions are doubtless trivial; bugs in systems long since retired. Others are naggingly pernicious but relatively harmless matters, such as the school districts that fall victim to collation routines that tell them everyone above the age of one hundred and three needs to be enrolled in a nurserey class. But one or two …” he stopped, and for a moment seemed bowed down by a terrible weight: “might be serious. As serious, perhaps, as the Sizewell disaster.”

I didn’t want to pursue that line of logic, and neither (apparently) did the Prof. What happened at Sizewell happened because nobody understood the entire system, and nobody subjected it to formal proof: nor did they look into some of the more obscure race conditions that could arise if different subsystems found themselves marching to the beat of a different clock. The results—of which the least were the suicides jumping from the Lloyds building—had proven a ghastly point: but one that the politicians did not understand. Or at least, not profoundly enough to budget for the consequences.

“I should like to stress that this holocaust of our own making is nothing less than a matter of complacency,” the Professor continued. “Once we quantised time, we tied our work to the clock; and now that the work is automated, so is the ticking. We are a short-sighted species. That there was a quarter of a trillion lines of bad software out there seven years ago is no surprise. That such a quantity has been halved to date is good news, but not quite adequate. We have, in a very real way, invented our own end of history: a software apocalypse that in the day ahead will engulf banks, businesses, government agencies, and anyone who runs a large, monolithic, database that is more than perhaps ten years old. Let us hope for the future that the consequences are not too serious—and that the lesson will be learned for good by those who for so long have ignored us.”

Polite applause, then louder: a groundswell of clapping as the ship gently pushed its way through the waves.

I began to push my chair back; it was close and hot, and I felt slightly queasy. A hand descended on my wrist: “remember what I said earlier,” hissed Rita.

“What are you—” I saw her expression. Being the object of such ferocity made me feel as if we had not gone our separate ways. (And what if, in the weeks of confusion after the Sizewell incident—ten miles from the hotel I had been staying in while doing my contract work—I had not visited the vasectomy clinic? What if my morbid fear over fission products, that had in turn caused our own atomic split, never quite reached such a pitch? Would we still be together, a nuclear family with glow-in-the-dark children?) “What do you care? I’m no use to you, am I?”

Her expression was unreadable as she let go of my arm. “What use is any of this? We’re sailing on the Titanic, only the disaster starts when we go back to harbour. Don’t spoil my cruise for me, Marcus, or you’ll be sorry. I’ll throw all your luggage overboard.”

I nearly laughed, but instead I stood up and staggered slightly as I headed back to the bar. How like Rita; the paranoid over-reaction, fear of shadows, utilitarian approach to people around her … I began to wonder how much I hated myself to have put up with her for so long, and not to have found anyone better.

I was into my second gin and tonic when Clive appeared. “Been in a car wreck?” he asked sympathetically.

“Rita,” I said morosely.

“Oh.” He was quiet for a minute. I heard faint applause from the dining room. The steward at the bar turned his back to us and polished the brasswork.

“Try one of these,” he suggested, offering something that looked a bit like a handmake lump of chocolate. “It’s the only way to see in such a fuck-up; totally stoned, drunk as a skunk, and happy with it.”

I palmed the sticky lump and swallowed. There was a sweet, herbal taste under the chocolate that nearly made me gag. Not my favourite way to take the stuff, but better than nothing. (And Rita didn’t approve, even of something as mild as marijhuana: which somehow made it more daring, more essential …)

“Any more?” I asked, but he shook his head.

“Strong stuff. Got to have enough to go round,” he added with a curious smile. I could see he’d been at it himself, then. “Settles the stomach, too.”

I drained my glass, winced slightly, then walked over to the bar for a refil. The barman didn’t bother with an optic, just poured in the gin and topped it off by eye. “Will that be all, sir?” he asked.

“I’d like one for my friend,” I said. Another glass appeared as if by magic. All drinks were on the house, this night if no other. “Thanks.” I returned to the table, where Clive was tapping his fingers idly.

“Let’s go on deck,” he suggested. I tried to dissuade him but he was adamant: “it’s fresh up there but the rain stopped and the cloud’s clearing. Let’s chill out, okay?”

“If you must,” I said. He stood up and lurched slightly as he headed for the door. I followed him, expecting a chill of damp air to rush in. Instead, I found that he was right; the overcast had lifted and stars twinkled high in a deep black vault. There was a slow breeze blowing from ahead, and it was no cooler now than it had been during the day.

“What do you expect to find when you go back?” asked Clive.

“Everything. Nothing.” In the distance, a monstrously deep horn sounded a bass note; ships passing in the night, I supposed. “I can’t quite bring myself to believe in the apocalypse. End of civilization as we know it. Construction of cyberspace, the usual nonsense; it’s bollocks. We’ll go back and find lots of database programs have fallen over and there’ve been some really major cock-ups, maybe even a local stock exchange or two, but life goes on.”

“That’s one view,” Clive said morosely.

“What do you expect?”

“The end of the world.” He leaned out across the railing, staring into the dark water beyond and below us. “Nobody expects things to continue, not really. Everybody wants a day of judgement, right? An end to the mortal coil. Pot of gold at the end of the information superhighway.” Another, even deeper, horn sounded in the distance. “We’ve designed for obsolescence for so long that it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole pack of cards tumbles down. A bit like the fundies, who believe that it doesn’t matter how we run the world because they’re all going a-flying up to heaven in a couple of years anyway. The rapture, they call it. Every city in the west is maybe twenty four hours away from chaos and civil war—that’s all the supplies they store locally, you know that? All it takes is enough cracks in the fabric …”

I wanted to tell him he was sounding like an old-fashioned fundamentalist preacher but the words caught in my throat: at that moment an almost palpable wave of cold washed over me, as if the air around me had turned to seawater. A great distant moaning wail of a horn shuddered out beneath the moonless sky, so deep and loud that I felt my stomach relax and contract with its passage; a chilly sweat prickled across my forehead for a moment, and I felt brushed by the ghostly fingertips of drowned sailors.

“What’s that?” I demanded.

“Tanker, probably,” said Clive. “Really close, too—”

A smell like smouldering insulation made my nostrils twitch: “ too close!” We were near the front of the ship, on the right hand side: I wondered if we should head for the back, or if someone on the bridge would be able to see whatever we were bearing down on. Burning insulation and a rancid undertone of sulphur, of reeking burnt meat, of something revolting and sweet at the same time; a dim red light loomed on the horizon. The ship rolled beneath my feet and I felt light-headed.

“Look, over there.” I followed Clive’s outstretched arm. “What’s happening?”

Whatever it was, it bulked out of the darkness like a congealing fog bank, lit from within by a red glow. That dreadful horn sounded again, rattling my innards, and there was a faint echo from behind—as if its distant partner sounded a desolate mating chorus from across the empty sea. Stars burned like halogen lights in the vast darkness overhead. One by one they began to fall, tracing bright lines across the sky until they faded out in the distance. I looked towards the rear of the ship, back the way we’d come; a false dawn bulked green on the horizon. “I don’t like this,” I said, clutching the railing with fingertips that felt like dry bones. “I’m too stoned.”

“I’m not.” Clive looked distracted, as if he was listening to something. “What … did you ever wonder, what it would be like if the godbotherers were really right all along? If maybe their revelation was the truth, and it was all going to happen—only they’d been out by a couple of thousand years?”

“Can’t happen.” My teeth were chattering. “No rapture. No singularity. It’s just the way we think. We humans, we want to lose our problems in some future end of all worries. Natural tendency.”

“Overruns,” Clive muttered. “Schedule slippage. They got all geared up at the turn of the first millennium, then the apocalypse was cancelled. Now they’ve got it all over again. What if they held the end of the world but nobody came?”

Something dark bubbled up from the sea behind us. A deep bass rumble, like a cross between an earthquake and a sousaphone: the angular mass foamed the sea around, gathering shrapnel and wreckage together into the dark shape of an ancient submarine. Hakenkreutz half-rusted into the shadowy conning-tower, it ghosted through the waves towards the glow on the horizon, its charred and skeletal crew staring incuriously at us as it cruised past. Red and green afterimages rippled across the sea, across everything I looked at except the dial of my borrowed watch.

I shuddered in the grip of a dread so intense that my heart lurched towards pure panic. “Don’t!” Clive began to walk forwards, along the curve of the deck towards the front of the ship—“where are you going?”

“What if they held the end of the world, but we were all aboard the ship of fools and unbelievers?” he called over his shoulder: “I’m joining them!”

A seventh rumbling note cut through the night, so deep that I could barely hear it but only felt it in my bones. I turned and staggered back towards the door, back towards the warmth and safety of the bar and the dining room. Behind me, Clive called: “don’t leave me behind!”

The door slammed behind me. I looked around; the bartender glanced up from polishing the bar and raised an eyebrow.

“Give me a drink,” I gasped. “Something strong.”

“Bad night?” he asked casually. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I shuddered convulsively and took the tumbler, threw it at the back of my throat. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Happens,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Lots of funny things happen at sea. I could tell you some tales, I could.”

“Please don’t. I’ve had enough of them for one night.”

He looked away as I drained my glass.

“This isn’t a good cruise,” I said, trying to communicate. “You know what? You know why we booked it?”

“Why did you book the cruise?”

He studied me with the professional eye of an experienced barman.

“There’s something we’re running away from. But I’m not sure it’s the right thing.”

“Then, if you’ll pardon my French sir, wasn’t it a bit stupid of you to come along for the ride?”

I headed for the inner corridor, meaning to check the roll of dirty socks in my luggage. “I’m not really sure …”

So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which, though delusional, yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it, and were perfectly willing both to kill and to die for it. This phenomenon was to recur many times, in various parts of western and Central Europe …

—The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn

Over the horizon, without any fuss, all the mainframes were quietly going down.

The louring sky, half past pregnant with a caul of snow, pressed down on Davy’s head like a hangover. He glanced up once, shivered, then pushed through the doorway into the Deid Nurse and the smog of fag fumes within.

His sometime conspirator Tam the Tailer was already at the bar. “Awright, Davy?”

Davy drew a deep breath, his glasses steaming up the instant he stepped through the heavy blackout curtain, so that the disreputable pub was shrouded in a halo of icy iridescence that concealed its flaws. “Mine’s a Deuchars.” His nostrils flared as he took in the seedy mixture of aromas that festered in the Deid Nurse’s atmosphere–so thick you could cut it with an axe, Morag had said once with a sniff of her lopsided snot-siphon, back in the day when she’d had aught to say to Davy. “Fuckin’ Baltic oot there the night, an’ nae kiddin’.” He slid his glasses off and wiped them off, then looked around tiredly. “An’ deid tae the world in here.”

Tam glanced around as if to be sure the pub population hadn’t magically doubled between mouthfuls of seventy bob. “Ah widnae say that.” He gestured with his nose–pockmarked by frostbite–at the snug in the corner. Once the storefront for the Old Town’s more affluent ladies of the night, it was now unaccountably popular with students of the gaming fraternity, possibly because they had been driven out of all the trendier bars in the neighbourhood for yacking till all hours and not drinking enough (much like the whores before them). Right now a bunch of threadbare LARPers were in residence, arguing over some recondite point of lore. “They’re havin’ enough fun for a barrel o’ monkeys by the sound o’ it.”

“An’ who can blame them?” Davy hoisted his glass: “Ah just wish they’d keep their shite aff the box.” The pub, in an effort to compensate for its lack of a food licence, had installed a huge and dodgy voxel engine that teetered precariously over the bar: it was full of muddy field, six LARPers leaping.

“Dinnae piss them aff, Davy–they’ve a’ got swords.”

“Ah wis jist kiddin’. Ah didnae catch ma lottery the night, that’s a’ Ah’m sayin’.”

“If ye win, it’ll be a first.” Tam stared at his glass. “An’ whit wid ye dae then, if yer numbers came up?”

“Whit, the big yin?” Davy put his glass down, then unzipped his parka’s fast-access pouch and pulled out a fag packet and lighter. Condensation immediately beaded the plastic wrapper as he flipped it open. “Ah’d pay aff the hoose, for starters. An’ the child support. An’ then–” He paused, eyes wandering to the dog-eared NO SMOKING sign behind the bar. “Ah, shit.” He flicked his Zippo, stroking the end of a cigarette with the flame from the burning coal oil. “If Ah wis young again, Ah’d move, ye ken? But Ah’m no, Ah’ve got roots here.” The sign went on to warn of lung cancer (curable) and two-thousand-Euro fines (laughable, even if enforced). Davy inhaled, grateful for the warmth flooding his lungs. “An’ there’s Morag an’ the bairns.”

“Heh.” Tam left it at a grunt, for which Davy was grateful. It wasn’t that he thought Morag would ever come back to him, but he was sick to the back teeth of people who thought they were his friends telling him that she wouldn’t, not unless he did this or did that.

“Ah could pay for the bairns tae go east. They’re young enough.” He glanced at the doorway. “It’s no right, throwin’ snowba’s in May.”

“That’s global warmin’.” Tam shrugged with elaborate irony, then changed the subject. “Where d’ye think they’d go? The Ukraine? New ‘Beria?”

“Somewhaur there’s grass and nae glaciers.” Pause. “An’ real beaches wi’ sand an’ a’.” He frowned and hastily added: “Dinnae get me wrong, Ah ken how likely that is.” The collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf two decades ago had inundated every established coastline; it had also stuck the last nail in the coffin of the Gulf stream, plunging the British Isles into a sub-Arctic deep freeze. Then the Americans had made it worse–at least for Scotland–by putting a giant parasol into orbit to stop the rest of the planet roasting like a chicken on a spit. Davy had learned all about global warming in Geography classes at school–back when it hadn’t happened–in the rare intervals when he wasn’t dozing in the back row or staring at Yasmin MacConnell’s hair. It wasn’t until he was already paying a mortgage and the second kid was on his way that what it meant really sank in. Cold. Eternal cold, deep in your bones.

“Ah’d like tae see a real beach again, some day before Ah die.”

“Ye could save for a train ticket.”

“Away wi’ ye! Where’d Ah go tae?” Davy snorted, darkly amused. Flying was for the hyper-rich these days, and anyway, the nearest beaches with sand and sun were in the Caliphate, a long day’s TGV ride south through the Channel Tunnel and across the Gibraltar Bridge, in what had once been the Northern Sahara Desert. As a tourist destination, the Caliphate had certain drawbacks, a lack of topless sunbathing beauties being only the first on the list. “It’s a’ just as bad whauriver ye go. At least here ye can still get pork scratchings.”

“Aye, weel.” Tam raised his glass, just as a stranger appeared in the doorway.

“An’ then there’s some that dinnae feel the cauld.” Davy glanced round to follow the direction of his gaze. The stranger was oddly attired in a lightweight suit and tie, as if he’d stepped out of the middle of the previous century, although his neat goatee beard and the two small brass horns implanted on his forehead were a more contemporary touch. He noticed Davy staring and nodded, politely enough, then broke eye contact and ambled over to the bar. Davy turned back to Tam, who responded to at his wink. “Take care noo, Davy. Ye’ve got ma number.” With that, he stood up, put his glass down, and shambled unsteadily towards the toilets.

This put Davy on his lonesome next to the stranger, who leaned on the bar and glanced at him sideways with an expression of amusement. Davy’s forehead wrinkled as he stared in the direction of Katie the barwoman, who was just now coming back up the cellar steps with an empty coal powder cartridge in one hand. “My round?” asked the stranger, raising an eyebrow.

“Aye. Mine’s a Deuchars if yer buyin’…” Davy, while not always quick on the uptake, was never slow on the barrel: if this underdressed southerner could afford a heated taxi, he could certainly afford to buy Davy some beer. Katie nodded and rinsed her hands under the sink–however well sealed they left the factory, coal cartridges always leaked like printer toner had once done–and picked up two glasses.

“New roond aboot here?” Davy asked after a moment.

The stranger smiled: “Just passing through–I visit Edinburgh every few years.”

“Aye.” Davy could relate to that.

“And yourself?”

“Ah’m frae Pilton.” Which was true enough; that was where he’d bought the house with Morag all those years ago, back when folks actually wanted to buy houses in Edinburgh. Back before the pack ice closed the Firth fro six months in every year, back before the rising sea level drowned Leith and Ingliston, and turned Arthur’s Seat into a frigid coastal headland looming grey and stark above the the permafrost. “Whereaboots d’ye come frae?”

The stranger’s smile widened as Katie parked a half-litre on the bar top before him and bent down to pull the next: “I think you know where I’m from, my friend.”

Davy snorted. “Aye, so ye’re a man of wealth an’ taste, is that right?”

“Just so.” A moment later, Katie planted the second glass in front of Davy, gave him a brittle smile, and retreated to the opposite end of the bar without pausing to extract credit from the stranger, who nodded and raised his jar: “To your good fortune.”

“Heh.” Davy chugged back a third of his glass. It was unusually bitter, with a slight sulphurous edge to it: “That’s a new barrel.”

“Only the best for my friends.”

Davy sneaked an irritated glance at the stranger. “Right. Ah ken ye want tae talk, ye dinnae need tae take the pish.”

“I’m sorry.” The stranger held his gaze, looking slightly perplexed. “It’s just that I’ve spent too long in America recently. Most of them believe in me. A bit of good old-fashioned scepticism is refreshing once in a while.”

Davy snorted. “Dae Ah look like a godbotherer tae ye? Yer amang civilized folk here, nae free-kirk numpties’d show their noses in a pub.”

“So I see.” The stranger relaxed slightly. “Seen Morag and the boys lately, have you?”

Now a strange thing happened, because as the cold fury took him, and a monstrous roaring filled his ears, and he reached for the stranger’s throat, he seemed to hear Morag’s voice shouting, Davy, don’t! And to his surprise, a moment of timely sanity came crashing down on him, a sense that Devil or no, if he laid hands on this fucker he really would be damned, somehow. It might just have been the hypothalamic implant that the sheriff had added to the list of his parole requirements working its arcane magic on his brain chemistry, but it certainly felt like a drenching, cold-sweat sense of immanence, and not in a good way. So as the raging impulse to glass the cunt died away, Davy found himself contemplating his own raised fists in perplexity, the crude blue tattoos of LOVE and HATE standing out on his knuckles like doorposts framing the prison gateway of his life.

“Who telt ye aboot them,” he demanded hoarsely.

“Cigarette?” The stranger, who had sat perfectly still while Davy wound up to punch his ticket, raised the chiselled eyebrow again.

“Ya bas.” But Davy’s hand went to his pocket automatically, and he found himself passing a filter-tip to the stranger rather than ramming a red-hot ember in his eye.

“Thank you.” The stranger took the unlit cigarette, put it straight between his lips, and inhaled deeply. “Nobody needed to tell me about them,” he continued, slowly dribbling smoke from both nostrils.

Davy slumped defensively on his bar stool. “When ye wis askin’ aboot Morag and the bairns, Ah figured ye wis fuckin’ wi’ ma heid.” But knowing that there was a perfectly reasonable supernatural explanation somehow made it all right. Ye cannae blame Auld Nick for pushin’ yer buttons. Davy reached out for his glass again: “‘Scuse me. Ah didnae think ye existed.”

“Feel free to take your time.” The stranger smiled faintly. “I find atheists refreshing, but it does take a little longer than usual to get down to business.”

“Aye, weel, concedin’ for the moment that ye are the deil, Ah dinnae ken whit ye want wi’ the likes o’ me.” Davy cradled his beer protectively.

“Ah’m naebody.” He shivered in the sudden draught as one of the students–leaving–pushed through the curtain, admitting a flurry of late-May snowflakes.

“So? You may be nobody, but your lucky number just came up.” The stranger smiled devilishly. “Did you never think you’d win the Lottery?”

“Aye, weel, if hauf the stories they tell about ye are true, Ah’d rather it wis the ticket, ye ken? Or are ye gonnae say ye’ve been stitched up by the kirk?”

“Something like that.” The Devil nodded sagely. “Look, you’re not stupid, so I’m not going to bullshit you. What it is, is I’m not the only one of me working this circuit. I’ve got a quota to meet, but there aren’t enough politicians and captains of industry to go around, and anyway, they’re boring. All they ever want is money, power, or good, hot, kinky sex without any comebacks from their constituents. Poor folks are so much more creative in their desperation, don’t you think? And so much more likely to believe in the Rules, too.”

“The Rules?” Davy found himself staring at his companion in perplexity. “Nae the Law, right?”

“Do as thou wilt shall be all of the Law,” quoth the Devil, then he paused as if he’d tasted something unpleasant.

“Ye wis sayin’?”

“Love is the Law, Love under Will,” the Devil added dyspeptically.

“That’s a’?” Davy stared at him.

“My employer requires me to quote chapter and verse when challenged.” As he said “employer”, the expression on the Devil’s face made Davy shudder. “And she monitors these conversations for compliance.”

“But whit aboot the rest o’ it, aye? If ye’re the deil, whit aboot the Ten Commandments?”

“Oh, those are just Rules,” said the Devil, smiling. “I’m really proud of them.”

“Ye made them a’ up?” Davy said accusingly. “Just tae fuck wi’ us?”

“Well, yes, of course I did! And all the other Rules. They work really well, don’t you think?”

Davy made a fist and stared at the back of it. LOVE. “Ye cunt. Ah still dinnae believe in ye.”

The Devil shrugged. “Nobody’s asking you to believe in me. You don’t, and I’m still here, aren’t I? If it makes things easier, think of me as the garbage collection subroutine of the strong anthropic principle. And they”–he stabbed a finger in the direction of the overhead LEDs–”work by magic, for all you know.”

Davy picked up his glass and drained it philosophically. The hell of it was, the Devil was right: now he thought about it, he had no idea how the lights worked, except that electricity had something to do with it. “Ah’ll have anither. Ye’re buyin’.”“No I’m not.” The Devil snapped his fingers and two full glasses appeared on the bar, steaming slightly. Davy picked up the nearest one. It was hot to the touch, even though the beer inside it was at cellar temperature, and it smelled slightly sulphurous. “Anyway, I owe you.”

“Whit for?” Davy sniffed the beer suspiciously: “This smells pish.” He pushed it away. “Whit is it ye owe me for?”

“For taking that mortgage and the job on the street-cleaning team and for pissing it all down the drain and fucking off a thousand citizens in little ways. For giving me Jaimie and wee Davy, and for wrecking your life and cutting Morag off from her parents and raising a pair of neds instead of two fine upstanding citizens. You’re not a scholar and you’re not a gentleman, but you’re a truly professional hater. And as for what you did to Morag–”

Davy made another fist: HATE. “Say wan mair word aboot Morag …” he warned.

The Devil chuckled quietly. “No, you managed to do all that by yourself.” He shrugged. “I’d have offered help if you needed it, but you seemed to be doing okay without me. Like I said, you’re a professional.” He cleared his throat. “Which brings me to the little matter of why I’m talking to you tonight.”

“Ah’m no for sale.” Davy crossed his arms defensively. “Who d’ye think Ah am?”

The Devil shook his head, still smiling. “I’m not here to make you an offer for your soul, that’s not how things work. Anyway, you gave it to me of your own free will years ago.” Davy looked into his eyes. The smile didn’t reach them. “Trouble is, there are consequences when that happens. My employer’s an optimist: she’s not an Augustinian entity, you’ll be pleased to learn, she doesn’t believe in original sin. So things between you and the Ultimate are … let’s say they’re out of balance. It’s like a credit card bill. The longer you ignore it, the worse it gets. You cut me a karmic loan from the First Bank of Davy MacDonald, and the Law requires me to repay it with interest.”

“Huh?” Davy stared at the Devil. “Ye whit?”

The Devil wasn’t smiling now. “You’re one of the Elect, Davy. One of the Unconditionally Elect. So’s fucking everybody these days, but your name came up in the quality assurance lottery. I’m not allowed to mess with you. If you die and I’m in your debt, seven shades of shit hit the fan. So I owe you a fucking wish.”

The Devil tapped his fingers impatiently on the bar top. He was no longer smiling. “You get one wish. I am required to read you the small print:

“The party of the first part in cognizance of the gift benefice or loan bestowed by the party of the second part is hereby required to tender the fulfillment of 1 (one) verbally or somatically expressed indication of desire by the party of the second part in pursuance of the discharge of the said gift benefice or loan, said fulfillment hereinafter to be termed ‘the wish’. The party of the first part undertakes to bring the totality of existence into accordance with the terms of the wish exclusive of paradox deicide temporal inversion or other wilful suspension contrary to the laws of nature. The party of the second part recognizes understands and accepts that this wish represents full and final discharge of debt incurred by the gift benefice or loan to the party of the first part. Notwithstanding additional grants of rights incurred under the terms of this contract the rights responsibilities duties of the party of the first part to the party of the second part are subject to the Consumer Credit Regulations of 2026…”

Davy shook his head. “Ah dinnae get it. Are ye tellin’ me ye’re givin’ me a wish? In return for, for … bein’ radge a’ ma life?”

The Devil nodded. “Yes.”

Davy winced. “Ah think Ah need another Deuchars–fuck! Haud on, that isnae ma wish!” He stared at the Devil anxiously. “Ye’re serious, aren’t ye?”

The Devil sniffed. “I can’t discharge the obligation with a beer. My Employer isn’t stupid, whatever Her other faults: she’d say I was short-changing you, and she’d be right. It’s got to be a big wish, Davy.”

Davy’s expression brightened. The Devil waved a hand at Katie: “Another Deuchars for my friend here. And a drop of the Craitur.” Things were looking up, Davy decided.

“Can ye make Morag nae have … Ah mean, can ye make things … awright again, nae went bad?” He dry-swallowed, mind skittering like a frightened spider away from what he was asking for. Not to have … whatever. Whatever he’d done. Already.

The Devil contemplated Davy for a long handful of seconds. “No,” he said patiently. “That would create a paradox, you see, because if things hadn’t gone bad for you, I wouldn’t be here giving you this wish, would I? Your life gone wrong is the fuel for this miracle.”

“Oh.” Davy waited in silence while Katie pulled the pint, then retreated back to the far end of the bar. Whaur’s Tam? he wondered vaguely. Fuckin’ deil, wi’ his smairt suit an’ high heid yin manners … He shivered, unaccountably cold. “Am Ah goin’ tae hell?” he asked roughly. “Is that whaur Ah’m goin’?”

“Sorry, but no. We were brought in to run this universe, but we didn’t design it. When you’re dead, that’s it. No hellfire, no damnation: the worst thing that can happen to you is you’re reincarnated, given a second chance to get things right. It’s normally my job to give people like you that chance.”

“An’ if Ah’m no reincarnated?” Davy asked hopefully.

“You get to wake up in the mind of God. Of course, you stop being you when you do that.” The Devil frowned thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, you’ll probably give Her a migraine.”

“Right, right.” Davy nodded. The Devil was giving him a headache. He had a dawning suspicion that this one wasn’t a prod or a pape: he probably supported Livingstone. “Ah’m no that bad then, is that whit ye’re sayin’?”

“Don’t get above yourself.”

The Devil’s frown deepened, oblivious to the stroke of killing rage that flashed behind Davy’s eyes at the words. Dinnae get above yersel’? Who the fuck d’ye think ye are, the sheriff? That was almost exactly what the sheriff had said, leaning over to pronounce sentence. Ye ken Ah’m naebody, dinnae deny it! Davy’s fists tightened, itching to hit somebody. The story of his life: being ripped off then talked down to by self-satisfied cunts. Ah’ll make ye regret it!

The Devil continued after a moment: “You’ve got to really fuck up in a theological manner before she won’t take you, these days. Spreading hatred in the name of God, that kind of thing will do for you. Trademark abuse, she calls it. You’re plenty bad, but you’re not that bad. Don’t kid yourself, you only warrant the special visit because you’re a quality sample. The rest are … unobserved.”

“So Ah’m no evil, Ah’m just plain bad.” Davy grinned virulently as a thought struck him. Let’s dae somethin’ aboot that! Karmic imbalance? Ah’ll show ye a karmic imbalance! “Can ye dae somethin’ aboot the weather? Ah hate the cauld.” He tried to put a whine in his voice. The change in the weather had crippled house prices, shafted him and Morag. It would serve the Devil right if he fell for it.

“I can’t change the weather.” The Devil shook his head, looking slightly worried. “Like I said–”

“Can ye fuck wi’ yon sun shield the fuckin’ Yanks stuck in the sky?” Davy leaned forward, glaring at him: “’Cause if no, whit kindae deil are ye?”

“You want me to what?”

Davy took a deep breath. He remembered what it had looked like on TV, twenty years ago: the great silver reflectors unfolding in solar orbit, the jubilant politicians, the graphs showing a 20% fall in sunlight reaching the Earth … the savage April blizzards that didn’t stop for a month, the endless twilight and the sun dim enough to look at. And now the Devil wanted to give him a wish, in payment for fucking things up for a few thousand bastards who had it coming? Davy felt his lips drawing back from his teeth, a feral smile forcing itself to the surface. “Ah want ye to fuck up the sunshade, awright? Get ontae it. Ah want tae be wairm …”

The Devil shook his head. “That’s a new one on me,” he admitted. “But–” He frowned. “You’re sure? No second thoughts? You want to waive your mandatory fourteen-day right of cancellation?”

“Aye. Dae it the noo.” Davy nodded vigorously.

“It’s done.” The Devil smiled faintly.

“Whit?” Davy stared.

“There’s not much to it. A rock about the size of this pub, traveling on a cometary orbit–it’ll take an hour or so to fold, but I already took care of that.” The Devil’s smile widened. “You used your wish.”

“Ah dinnae believe ye,” said Davy, hopping down from his bar stool. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Tam dodging through the blackout curtain and the doorway, tipping him the wink. This had gone on long enough. “Ye’ll have tae prove it. Show me.”

“What?” The Devil looked puzzled. “But I told you, it’ll take about an hour.”

“So ye say. An’ whit then?”

“Well, the parasol collapses, so the amount of sunlight goes up. It gets brighter. The snow melts.”

“Is that right?” Davy grinned. “So how many wishes dae Ah get this time?”

“How many–” The Devil froze. “What makes you think you get any more?” He snarled, his face contorting.

“Like ye said, Ah gave ye a loan, didn’t Ah?” Davy’s grin widened. He gestured toward the door. “After ye?”

“You–” The Devil paused. “You don’t mean …” He swallowed, then continued, quietly. “That wasn’t deliberate, was it?”

“Oh. Aye.” Davy could see it in his mind’s eye: the wilting crops and blazing forests, droughts and heatstroke and mass extinction, the despairing millions across America and Africa, exotic places he’d never seen, never been allowed to go–roasting like pieces of a turkey on a spit, roasting in revenge for twenty years frozen in outer darkness. Hell on Earth. “Four billion fuckers, isnae that enough for another?”

“Son of a bitch!” The Devil reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an antique calculator, began punching buttons. “Forty-eight–no, forty-nine. Shit, this has never happened before! You bastard, don’t you have a conscience?”

Davy thought for a second. “Naw.”

“Fuck!”

It was now or never. “Ah’ll take a note.”

“A credit–shit, okay then. Here.” The Devil handed over his mobile. It was small and very black and shiny, and it buzzed like a swarm of flies. “Listen, I’ve got to go right now, I need to escalate this to senior management. Call head office tomorrow, if I’m not there, one of my staff will talk you through the state of your claim.”

“Haw! Ah’ll be sure tae dae that.”

The Devil stalked towards the curtain and stepped through into the darkness beyond, and was gone. Davy pulled out his moby and speed-dialed a number. “He’s a’ yours noo,” he muttered into the handset, then hung up and turned back to his beer. A couple of minutes later, someone came in and sat down next to him. Davy raised a hand and waved vaguely at Katie: “A Deuchars for Tam here.”

Katie nodded nonchalantly–she seemed to have cheered up since the Devil had stepped out–and picked up a glass.

Tam dropped a couple of small brass horns on the bar top next to Davy. Davy stared at them for a moment then glanced up admiringly. “Neat,” he admitted. “Get anythin’ else aff him?”

“Nah, the cunt wis crap. He didnae even have a moby. Just these.” Tam looked disgusted for a moment. “Ah pulled ma chib an’ waved it aroon’ an’ he totally legged it. Think anybody’ll come lookin’ for us?”

“Nae chance.” Davy raised his glass, then tapped the pocket with the Devil’s mobile phone in it smugly. “Nae a snowball’s chance in hell …”

Above them the sky is a neon washout pierced by airship running lights.

“It’s cold out here,” says the Man in her soft, hoarse voice. “Won’t you come in?”

The car is long and low and shiny. Jimmy gets in. He perches on the jump-seat opposite the Man. She wears a long sheepskin coat. He looks in her eyes and thinks of video cameras. Next to her sits some hired muscle, looking at him like Jimmy has a target pasted between his eyes. The Man can be crude in some ways. Very crude.

“Two days, Jimmy,” she says.

He looks out the window. The sky is mirrored in the damp gutters.

“How much longer?” Her manner is exquisitely polite—utterly threatening.

He shrugs. “It didn’t come with a spec sheet.”

The Man gives him a long look. “What needs working on?” she asks.

The car swings round a corner into a blind alley. Rubbish skips piled high with cartons conceal the far wall.

He explains, “I’ve got as far as the kernel’s final password input. All we can do is wait. Breaking it is a semi-random process; two seconds or two weeks, who the hell knows? You can’t just sit still and bash away at the front door—it’s got Orange Book security, you hang around thirty seconds after a miss and the police’ll be all over you like flies on a turd.” Out the rear window he sees shadowy figures drift past the entrance to the alley.

“Remember who owns you,” the Man says. In the rearview, one of the shadowy figures throws something. Jimmy blinks.

It is a smart grenade. It detonates two metres above the parked Mercedes; a computer-controlled sequence of charges compresses a slug of uranium into a white-hot dart the size of an ice-pick and spits it out.

The Man and her companion lose their heads. Bits of windscreen spray the street. Jimmy feels nothing but the jolt of expanding air.

He opens the door and pools the tarmac with vomit. He crawls out, stumbles to his feet and totters to the back of the alley. He sits down in the garbage and drips blood over crumpled sushi cartons. His nose is bleeding—hydrostatic shock.

He watches the car. Steam curls from the open door. The alley smells of piss and burgers. A black cat leaps in through the open passenger door in search of scraps. Across the road, the lights of an amusement arcade exhort him to BOMB THE BASTARDS.

His ears ache.

Doctor Gordon Dexter, Vermont-born, Yale-educated chairman of Protein Technologies PLC, an Isle of Dogs-based research and development subsidiary of Chambers-Bayer, orders ginger and water chestnut vermicelli at an exclusive Japanese restaurant just north of Covent Garden.

His luncheon guest, Josephine Barr, manager of Chambers-Bayer’s UK Patent Department in Denmark Street, picks the biggest lobster in the tank.

Dexter has a bad feeling about this.

He says, stiffly: “I am pleased you will be taking personal charge of this case. I do not want a repetition of yesterday’s action.”

Josephine Barr picks up her chopsticks and clacks them together moodily, as if they were a claw she’d just grown. “The initial choice of subject for your experiment has provided some, shall we say, unique challenges.”

Dexter makes a placating gesture with the hand that’s not pouring them tea. His back aches. Not enough squash this month, he thinks to himself and shuffles uncomfortably on his cushion. “We were rushed, and now your department takes the brunt—it’s in the nature of things. You must understand the uniqueness of the opportunity he represented, though. Days—days!—after we are given the necessary protocols, the subject presented at a Chambers-Bayer sponsored clinic—in London at that—complaining of headaches!

“Which are?”

“He has an inaccessible tumor in his amygdala. Surgical excision is impossible because of the probability of brain damage, and death due to hydrocephalus is likely in one or two years.”

“Hydrocephalus?”

“Forgive me—elevated pressure within the skull.” Dexter smiles to himself. He likes people who ask questions. He thinks back with some nostalgia to his promising teaching career, now blighted by Protein’s multi-billion ECU research grant.

“Unfortunately,” Josephine points out sharply, “your subject worked for the most sophisticated data pirate in the whole Square Five Mile.”

“That was no excuse to indulge in one of the most absurd and bloody—” Dexter raises his voice as he speaks. He does not like being put on the defensive.

Josephine’s lobster arrives. Dexter shuts up. He blanches. The lobster is raw, served on a bed of diced puffer-fish. He looks at her and catches the ghost of a smile on her lips. She does not move. He swallows, hard. “Please, don’t wait for me,” he murmers.

“Oh, it’s not hot, I’ll wait.” She drains her cup.

Dexter fills it for her again and says, “Hydrostatic shock alone could have damaged him.”

Josephine Barr sighs. “The action is my responsibility, I grant you, but it was not my decision. The whole purpose of this meeting as I understood it is to prevent similar incidents.

Dexter nods enthusiastically. “Of course.” His vermicelli arrives and before he can lift the bowl to his mouth Josephine Barr has made her first attack upon the lobster. Dexter sees that its claws and skull have been crushed with kitchen pliers.

“The most unusual factor in this case,” Dexter explains, trying to look at Barr’s face without seeing what she’s putting in her mouth, “is that we simply don’t need to use our usual surveillance techniques. There is no point in us keeping more than the most cursory tabs on the poor lad. In the fullness of time he will make his whereabouts known to us.”

“Assuming the experiment works.”

Dexter impatiently raps the rim of his bowl with his chopsticks. “The experiment has already been initialised on a dendritic level. We didn’t let him out the clinic till we established that he would, in the fullness of time, come on line.”

Josephine Barr allows herself another, barely perceptible, smile. “Ah, and perhaps you can tell me when that will be? Before or after he cracks Protein’s knowledge base?”

Dexter stares. There is seaweed between his teeth.

Sergeant Tina Gullam Hussein of the Westminster Constabulary Mobile Response Unit is shown into the control room in Tower Bridge. Foster sits with his back to her, watching seven traffic monitors at once. She creeps up behind him and swipes the back of his head, lightly, with her glove.

He twists round. “Oh. Hi.”

“You forgot your other watch,” she says to him and takes out a worn men’s Swatch out her pocket and dangles it in front of him.

“Oh. Thanks.” He thinks a minute. “Look, could we meet after work? I know—I know we’ve really got to talk but I’m kind of—” He laughs, uncertain, and gestures at the monitors.

“Chief told me its your coffee break in five. Why d’you think he let me in here?”

“Oh. Right. It’s just I figured maybe we should take longer—”

“I don’t want to be around you longer than I have to,” she says, and in spite of herself she lets a little of the anger out—just a little.

He bridles. “Well, if that’s the way you’ve taken things I guess … “

“Things?”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that, which is good because she doesn’t want him to respond. She just wants him to sit there looking stupid and that is precisely what he does. “Well,” she says, “are you just going to sit there looking stupid or do I get a coffee?”

Foster curses under his breath. “Yes, yes, of course you do, I’m sorry.” He stand up and heads for the door. “Come on, then.” There’s an intimacy in his voice now—an anger that is no more than self-depre cation: anger at his own awkwardness. ‘Look at me, see what a klutz I am.’ She likes it, likes the trust it implies, but she hopes he won’t be like that to her again, because right now, with him gone from her bed and her apartment with only stupidity and platitudes for explanations—right now, she would like to hate him. It helps. She’s been here before and she knows it helps.

“You hear the Man is dead?” she says, when they get to the coffee lounge. “I just want to tell you, you and your buddies really screwed up the lights for us. Took us four minutes to get there through cross traffic. Lost a witness.”

Foster nods. “Messy. Whose was the hit?”

“It was corporate.”

“How come?”

“Intelligence hasn’t thrown up any urban grouping with that kind of firepower since the Stockwell raids.”

“You think that’s valid?”

“There’s more. When we cracked her kernel it looks like the Man was reading up on biosystems.”

Foster grins. “Sounds like you hit the big time.”

Tina Hussein shrugs. “Just picked the right straw.”

“That’s good. That’s good.”

She stares into his eyes. “What is it with you?”

He sighs. “Please, not again.”

“Why leave? Why cancel your diary?”

“Huh?”

“I’ve been doing a little detective work, that being what we do best, right? It’s not just me, is it? It’s Caroline and Thursday nights and even the wargamers at lunchtime, goddamnit. What’s got into you? Misanthropy?”

“Come again?”

“Buy a dictionary.” She hates people who ask dumb questions.

He drains his cup and says “Look, I just need some time on my own for a while and I know it sounds like the words came of the back of a cereal packet but it’s true.”

She smiles at him. She can’t help it. He is so naive. “Has anyone else bought this line?”

He, in his turn, can’t help but laugh. “No.”

Alright, she thinks. Alright, enough of this. She says, “I don’t know what you’ve got into, but if you need me I’ll be here, right?”

He looks like he’ll plead honesty again then gives it up for lost and just nods. “Right. Thanks.”

She turns and walks out before her anger boils over; she doesn’t want to do anything she might get arrested for later. When she sees daylight she realises she doesn’t have any idea what to do now. She looks around.

Her bike, leant up against the curb, spots her. It powers up.

Foam effluents drift down the Thames like melting ice sculptures. Automatics on Tower Bridge scan the traffic.

Jimmy thrusts his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket and turns from the view across the river. The shadow of an airship falls across him. He leans into the breeze as he walks.

He’s got the scanalyser on his belt. It looks like a ThinkMan. It burbles to itself, testing a new combination every eight-tenths of a millisecond. Worth a lot of cash on the fence—twenty K maybe, because the big companies are trying to stamp them out. But how can he fence it? The Man … he can feel the weight of the scanalyser at his hip. Incriminating. Jimmy wants rid of it but he can’t afford to trash it.

He’s near the City, now—the old financial heartland of the capital. He braves the underpass and when he surfaces there’s a bright window; a bar. There’s a whore sitting in the window seat, masturbating. He rummages in his pocket and feels cash—enough for a drink, perhaps. He goes in.

There is more to life than shooting Ants but nobody told the games designers. On his way in, Jimmy is assaulted by reverberations from Tank Battle Antarctica. Global graphics and incoming missiles in green, Ants in white, Aussies in traditional communist red. Two kids are playing it like it’s for real; Jimmy slides through the gap between them and the door. The barman has nobody else to serve.

“Something Sweet,” Jimmy says, then double-takes. There’s a throbbing at his temples—the usual sign. Cluster headaches that make him vomit. He knows there is something wrong up there, but the clinic told him zero. He remembers with a pang that the Man fixed him his MedicAid. It isn’t something he wants to think about a lot. He wobbles a bit and leans on the bar, watches incuriously as the barman makes up something turquoise. “What’s that?” he says.

“Something sweet. IBM Special—cocktail, one dollar fifty,” says the tender. Floating in the foam on his drink are flakes of sugar shaped like microprocessors. Jimmy sips, then pushes the glass away and puts the scanalyser down on the bar top. He looks at the display and sees a red light, burning steady.

His head pounds in time with the Tank Battle riff.

He is in.

Dexter doesn’t know how he got here but he’s in a limousine next to Josephine Barr and they are on the way to her flat in the West End, and he doesn’t understand this because Barr shouldn’t be able to afford a flat anywhere near there; he wonders precisely where it is.

She’s telling him about the Man. “She got wind of the project. Not necessarily by name—but she knew something was going down. Jimmy’s MedicAid bill probably gave her the clue. Right now there’s a scanalyser eating at Protein Technologies’ knowledge server. We can’t keep it out indefinitely so I bought a discreet police wringer on the would-be kernel breaker. It’s an ex-employee of the Man.”

“Jimmy.”

Josephine Barr nods.

Dexter folds his arms defensively. “Was this known before or after your people blew up a car full of people?”

“After.” Barr isn’t rising to the bait any more. She refuses to argue. It is very unsettling. “Now will you please tell me why I should not call the police and have him arrested and thrown into a nice safe holding area?”

“What if he came on-line in custody? Police holding areas are screened against radio and maser emission. It would be like testing a camera in a dark room.”

“What if we extradited him? Chambers-Bayer has a licence.”

“Why risk an arrest proceedure at all? Think, woman. The boy nearly had his head blown off! What if it went wrong, what if he was tipped off? He knows this city well enough to hide places we may never find him. I don’t deny Jimmy in custody would save us white hairs but can we really risk it going wrong? Look. Trust me. This is a delicate time. Even if Jimmy breaks the server he’ll only get there a couple of days early. Something Sweet may be on-line any day now.”

“You can’t tell me exactly when?”

“To be brief, no.”

“Don’t be.”

Dexter relaxes a little. “Something Sweet is basically a cure for a special kind of cancer. We’ve built a viral magic bullet—”

“Come again?”

“We’ve designed a retrovirus which attacks tumours. The virus contains genes that modify the cancer cells—they create conditions similar to those in the brain tissue of a foetus, where brain cells form synapses when they divide. The tumour gets turned into a logic-processing system—a physical embodiment of a mathematical idea known as a Turing machine. A computer, if you like; not just another neural network but a classical linear processor. And by doing that, we narrow the man-machine gap to the thickness of a gene. It gives us capabilities—commercially viable capabilities. The only prerequisite is cancer. And cancer growth itself is at best a semi-random process. Round about last week, Jimmy’s tumour became a processor—now it has to verify itself, clock and test itself. The procedures themselves are hardwired into the genetic protocol of the infected tissue, but how long it will take for it to debug itself is impossible to calculate precisely.”

Josephine Barr frowns. “Any day now.”

Dexter nods. “Any day now.”

“And should we find Jimmy sitting atop the Telecom Tower reciting the Dow Jones index from the aether, how do you propose to explain the phenomenon to the world’s press?”

“No problem,” Dexter replies easily. “Without this programme several thousand people a year will continue to die of brain tumours.”

“And what of his other abilities?” Barr insists.

Dexter thinks about it, and it makes him feel so good he does something very foolish. He pats Josephine Barr on the knee, quite tenderly, as if he were drunk. “My dear,” he says, warmly, “If Something Sweet works as well and as publically as you suggest, we are sitting on top of a market turnover estimated at twenty billion a year. Let the press suck on that.

Josephine Barr smiles sweetly at Dr Gordon Dexter and brushes his hand off her knee. “I still maintain that your department should have waited for a more suitable subject. After all, there are thousands of cases every year, not a few of them in London—”

“Yes, but they must present at the right time!” Dexter insists. “Anyway, you don’t know how much pressure I was under. We’re in a race with Wellcome, not to mention Hoffmann la Roche; but the real threat is Wellcome. If they win the consequences will be serious. If we don’t get our biological systems interfaced with human CNS successfully—and on the market first—they’ll wipe the floor with us using self-annealing optical implants. I’d like to remind you of the projections for turnover of integrated bionic control systems within the next ten years.”

But Barr isn’t listening. She is rubbing her forehead.

Dexter turns to her, concerned. “Headache?”

She smiles wryly and keeps on rubbing. “If only you had had a little more patience.”

It takes a while for Dexter to get the point. He would offer her his sympathy, but right now he’s realised something else.

The doors in this car have no handles.

Tina stares through the head-up pasted to the front of her visor. She sees the road through an overlay of ghostly images and smeared rain drops. Beneath her, the fuel cells of her bike convert methane into power using enzyme systems looted from electric eels. Fat tyres rumble across pot-holed tarmac and the world swings by to either side. Stretch out and you can touch it, leave your foot behind: speed burns. Of a sudden, data haemorrhages across the head-up like blood from a severed artery: a mole’s been sighted, caught supping copyrighted data through a scanalyser. It only takes a moment for the police computers to confirm the data.

SatNav overlays lead her to him.

The Yamaha drifts to the kerb and shuts itself down. Tina goes inside.

The barman sees her and makes a barely visible palms-up gesture: no trouble here. Tina nods and heads for the bar.

Jimmy is reading—

It is possible to tap a computer terminal at a distance with a directional aerial and the right decoder. The ear of a cat is sensitive to noises so faint that the limit on its hearing is imposed by quantum uncertainty. No one has conclusively proven that the transmission of messages between nerve cells is a purely chemical process by excluding electromagnetic effects. The system is designed to be more than just a passive supercomputer, a child prodigy. It has to talk …

He looks up and sees himself reflected in a mirrored visor.

“Shut it down,” says the helmet.

Jimmy’s guts twist.

“Shut it down and put your hands on the table.”

The tiny camera built into Tina’s helmet assimilates his portrait, then transmits it and waits. He can’t do anything—she has him pinned like a butterfly on a cardboard mount.

He reads her name badge. “What kind of bit-player are you, Hussein?” he says.

A cursor blinks inside her helmet, blurred by a film of condensation. The demisters come on automatically. Writing scrolls across the visor.

“I hereby inform you that as of 09:08:14 today you have been found guilty of violation of Article IV of the Data Control Act, and I warn you that—” She pauses to read.

DETAIN PENDING CIVIL EXTRADITION ORDER

“—anything you say will be recorded and offered for sale to the registered purchaser of your sentencing licence. You have the right to request a loan from public funds for purposes of your appeal procedure before their courts.”

She turns the helmet speaker off and talks to her helmet. It confirms: SECURITY VIOLATION CLEARED PROTEIN TECHNOLOGIES PLC SOLE BIDDERS EXTRADITION GRANTED 09:12:02 SQUAD MOBILE AS OF 09:12:43

Tina stares at her head-up.

Squad? she thinks. Squad?

She turns the speaker back on and the speach stress analysis package and she sits beside him. “What were you aiming?”

“I don’t know. The Man put it on me.”

“But what do you think?”

“Payroll, design specs, how the hell should I know? The Man just told me, get it. The Man’s dead.”

Tina nods. “I heard.”

“Can I have one of my pills?”

“Show me.”

Hesitantly he reaches into his jeans pocket and gets the pack out.

“What for?”

“Migraine.”

She’s not listening. She’s watching data spool from the speech stress programme. Level. All of it—level. Why, Tina wonders, does Protein want to buy this zero?

She thinks hard. A power play? The Man dies while her man breaks Protein’s kernels. A link? This could be a break for her. There is very little time. “Stand up,” she orders. “You can come with me and sort this out or wait for the big boys to get here—it’s up to you.”

They go outside. Tina puts a control cuff on him: explosives and a radio reciever slaved to her command-key. There is no traffic. Tina rolls through a U-turn and rumbles away with her compliant passenger. While they ride, Tina calls Control and files a restraining order on the extradition.

Tina leaves Jimmy in the holding area, goes upstairs and runs a Wringer on him—a fifth generation descendant of the old HOLMES system. Jimmy is a vapourware salesman who worked for the Man. He fits the description of the kid leaving the car in which the Man got hit. Period.

Tina chews her lip. If she fails to find anything about Jimmy’s case that warrants her holding action, then every hour Jimmy’s in her custody is an hour she doesn’t get paid. On top of that, the law gives her only four days before the restraining order expires. She accesses the standard suite—DSS, Health, Neighbourhood Watch.

Health makes strange reading. Migraines. MedicAid. Lots of MedicAid. Now, where did that come from? It doesn’t take her long to trace the connection. A familiar alias. The above-board tax-and-benefits face of the Man. Not so surprising. MedicAid is standard employee-perk fodder, and Jimmy ostensibly had a job with her.

Tina reads the file more closely. PSR scan, four days in hospital—She double-takes. Four days? She reads again. For the most part, it reads like a standard exploratory routine for persistent head pain. They tested his sight (20/20) and intra-ocular pressure (normal), his balance (excellent) and his coordination (better), they gave him diet and allergy advice, offered him a psychiatric consultation (he refused), and scanned him with a PSR spectroscope (clear). Four days in hospital.

Four days.

Migraines.

She thumbs on the speaker to the holding area, grill seventeen. “Hey Jimmy, you ever had an operation?”

Jimmy looks up at her, his face grey and distorted and grainy in the monitor above her head. “Sure,” he says, unnerved by her voice coming out the ceiling. “Err … last year.”

“Mind telling me what? I guess I should tell you you needn’t answer that. It doesn’t show on your health records, so if there’s a reason I shouldn’t—”

“Must be a mistake,” Jimmy says. “Sure I don’t mind. They opened my skull. Exploratory. Nothing there. Migraines, remember? Used to be real bad. Worse than now.” He winces—he’s still got the attack he was getting in the bar. “I guess.”

Tina stares at the screen, and she is very glad Jimmy cannot see her face right now. Oh you stupid kid, she thinks. Exploratory brain surgery?. Her face is a mixture of pity and horror and plain greed as it slowly clicks home that Jimmy is her meal-ticket.

She can, quite literally, taste success—it’s like sushi on her tongue.

The Man. Migraines. She cuts the connection and she’s grinning all over her face. The Man paid for the operation, the Man knew. Oh shit, oh shit this is good, she thinks, then someone else comes into the office and she calms down and hurries through the day’s other tasks.

More wringers. In grid eighteen there’s some jerk calls himself the Flyer.

Ho ho.

She runs another wringer through the network, and—as if it were a signal—all the screens go dead.

The holding area started out as a prefabricated sports hall; the floor is occupied by a grid of sockets at three metre intervals, some of them occupied by two-metre high aluminium christmas trees with periscopes—a taser fence. Anyone crossing between the branches walks into a painful electric shock. By using tasers they can regularly reconfigure the holding space: it foils escape plans. Jimmy isn’t alone; in the adjacent cell is a person who calls himself the Flyer. He wears a worn leather bomber jacket and does break-and-enter, burgling apartments and searching them for their telebanking access codes. Everyone keeps them on a slip of paper somewhere, in case their diary malfunctions. The Flyer flies by night, usually on dexamphetamine, which is why Wellcome caught him doing over an employee’s flat; he kept typing his name over and over again on a kitchen terminal until a grocery system got suspicious. Or so he maintains.

Jimmy stands as far away from him as possible, uncomfortably aware of the taser fence behind him and the cameras slung from the ventilation fans. The Flyer is a bearish shape, and his jacket stinks of dead skin. It reminds Jimmy of the Man, the car, and the way she …

Jimmy’s palms are damp and his migraine pulses like a badly programmed drum kit.

The Flyer talks incessantly.

“—I never gave the Man much line ‘cos she had it in her to carve me if I fucked up. Mind, we weren’t the worst of friends; I got this jacket, see, off her for a run of one of her pieces. She just wanted to talk to this shopkeeper’s central heating. Bang!”

Jimmy blocks his ears against the Flyer’s laughter and wonders what happens if you throw up on a taser?

The Flyer’s hands are lurid in the blood-orange light as he gesticulates. “Like I got me a contact will see I get out of here in a couple of weeks, which is better than the Man. A registered bidder, like. Buy herself my sentence! Company prison—bah! Company pad!” He sniggers drunkenly.

Jimmy figures that the Flyer is on the payroll or, possibly, mad. He is manic, a demented devil lost in a hell of coldly burning lights and electrified silver trees—a sudden wave of nausea grips Jimmy’s stomach. He gasps for breath as his sense of balance dissolves in a crazy whirl, but his migraine refuses to let him throw up.

The Flyer won’t stop talking. “Like I says, someone zeroed the Man. You hear about that? One of those smart grenades. Must’ve been quite a sight. I reckon it’s that mob from Tottenham, figured she was headed for them neuroplants and biologicals.”

Jimmy shivers.

The Flyer smiles at Jimmy and says, his voice a whisper all of a sudden: “I can give you a new identity and get you out of this shithole for free. Or my friends can finish what the grenade began. They’re all around you.”

Jimmy looks about him.

Every taser in the room is aimed at him.

The cameras turn their backs and examine the far corner of the holding area for cobwebs.

Jimmy’s neck prickles.

The Flyer grins and he walks through what should be fifty kilovolts. Nothing happens. “Come on, son,” he says, and takes Jimmy by the arm, leading him towards the service door in the nearest wall.

There is a corridor behind it, lined in blue acrylic. Jimmy and the Flyer run along a catwalk which is slung two feet above ground. The handrails shake. Beneath them, fat pipes squiggle along the floor. Jimmy follows the Flyer, his viewpoint shifting and swirling in crazy migranous patterns. There are lights in the pipes below him, pulsing. He keeps his eyes off them. They frighten him. As they walk, the flourescents set into ceiling alcoves dazzle then go past, dazzle then go past like they were moving too, the other way, like they were growing bright then dim as they rush past, then things get worse and they snap on off on off thundering in his head and when the flyer glances back and smiles encouragement his face is all collapsed, fallen in, like there was a singularity in his left eye, blinking, on off on off and when Jimmy glances away to the near wall the light from the fluorescents is threaded and latticed upon the rough white surface and it spells words behind his eyes and the words taste like the cocktail and he thinks—Something Sweet.

Ideograms etch their way across Jimmy’s eyes.

Fragments of speech rumble like trucks through the paths of his mind.

The tunnel seems to compress and expand in all directions at once. Suddenly he is aware of the network of service ducts behind the wall, the fistulae and abcesses in the city’s iron intestinal tract.

The Flyer leads Jimmy to the end of the tunnel. A spiral staircase as stark as the skeleton of some vast sea creature drills its way down to the basement.

They go down, reach ground level doors painted red for Fire Exit, and keep on going, past the doors, down, where the air gets stale, past more doors, painted blue for Car Park, and down, through other doors that should be locked (they glimmer and spark behind Jimmy’s eyes and when he looks back he sees wires coming out of them, amber running lights and loops of bell wire and black tape and all the paraphernalia of the Flyer’s trade) and down and down and down.

Jimmy’s veins churn in the rumble of traffic—a trunk subway, above them and to the right. He stumbles on the steps and the Flyer tells him to look where he’s going but all he can see are brake servos, stereos, fuel counters, cabin spies, lights and cigarette lighters and heaters and coolant pumps and fans and radio presets and CB slang writ large all over the walls of the spiral chasm.

“I think I’m blind,” Jimmy says and somewhere in his voice there’s the upswell of raging panic.

The Flyer curses and manhandles him down the steps and little by little, the further down they go, the better things get, till at last Jimmy gets his eyes back.

The spiral steps end in a square dead-space in the corpse of a metro system; the London Underground has been disused for a decade, ever since the IRA hit it with nerve gas. On Black Monday the bodies of a thousand civilians were laid out on the platforms at King’s Cross.

“Come on now,” says the Flyer. He kicks some rubbish against the wall and picks up a torch. “We’ve got a train to catch.”

Jimmy follows him onto the platform.

He becomes aware of something itchy, a feeling he’s had every time he passed a power cable since leaving the holding area. There is electricity about, an active power supply. The tracks gleam smoothly away into the shadows when The Flyer shines his torch along them.

They look used.

Tina thumps the alarm plate on her desk, strides across the room and thumbs a pad protruding from a white cabinet. It clicks and opens, recognizing her; inside it, nesting in a rack of black-painted aluminium, are three Heckler & Koch rifles of the latest model. She takes a rifle and a spare magazine and heads for the door and her helmet which hangs from a hook on the back of it. She pushes the helmet down onto her head then sprints down the stairs. Behind her, the arms cabinet whines shut and locks itself. The rifle, switched on by removal from its charge-point, chambers a cartridge.

Ahead of her, the service door opens; her relief has taken over Control and is helping her. She darts into the tunnel, rifle ready, guessing that Jimmy and the Flyer won’t have hung around for her. Her helmet video prints up a message; nobody ran a wringer on the Flyer. Nobody knows who he is. He could be anything; a man from the Man set to spring Jimmy, a mercenary assassin trained by the CIA, a goddamn Martian. Curse the fucking arresting officer for not running a wringer on him then and there! She comes to the staircase.

Now she knows where they’ve gone.

She radios Control and while she negotiates the operation and informs her superiors of what she’s already found about Jimmy her mind is racing. Between calls she dials the tape loop from the holding pen up onto her helmet visor, looking for the Flyer.

For some reason it’s Foster’s face inside her helmet.

Foster?

Then it comes together—

Foster’s cancelled diary.

Foster in traffic control.

Four minutes delay and a lost witness.

Jimmy.

A hissing rattle emanates from the tracks. Seconds later the far end of the tunnel is lit by the eerie lights of a thirty year old train. There is only one coach; it runs on autopilot. The doors drifts open and Jimmy and the Flyer get in.

“Who are we meeting?” Jimmy asks, then regrets it. It’s as if, when he opened his mouth, a hot pin stabbed morse code into his eyes.

The Flyer just shakes his head. “She scares the shit out of me.”

The train rattles through a couple more stations then Jimmy feels a shift in his balance on the seat as the train slows down. A needle beneath a dusty dial cover in the seat opposite him stirs itself as the brake pressure climbs; the sign on the platform reads Embankment

The train stops and the doors open. The Flyer gets out and waits impatiently for Jimmy.

“Come here,” says the Flyer. Jimmy obeys and follows him to the end of the platform, and an exit blocked by a massive armoured door. Looking up, he sees the eye of a camera gleaming at him.

With a grating of rusty metal, the flood barrier rolls up until it is poised like a giant guillotine above the doorway. They go through. Bonsai oak trees spread a waist-high avenue of foliage between walls rich in Picasso, Seurat and Tanguy. Jimmy doesn’t recognize most of them but he knows they are originals. They stink of time and money.

The roof completes the surreal effect. Here, so far underground, Jimmy looks up and sees clouds drifting above the ruby glow of a setting sun—and a falcon, hovering on wings of light.

“Jimmy, Say hello to Josephine.”

Jimmy stares at the employer, whose name is Josephine, and sees the realization of his fears; the Man could be her twin sister. Her retarded twin sister.

“Hello,” he says tentatively. The Flyer steps back and removes his flying jacket.

“Hello Jimmy.” She moves towards him and takes his hand. “Come on in.” Her hand is small and cool in his. It’s as good an excuse as any to break down and cry; he tries to conceal it.

“Do you like this place?”

Jimmy nods, taking the path of least resistance.

“It’s not mine. I borrowed it, from a friend of yours. You know who I mean, don’t you, Jimmy?”

Jimmy can guess. The Man.

“Listen,” says Josephine, “I need something of yours, something very special. Do you remember Doctor Dexter?”

Jimmy lifts a hand to his forehead without thinking. A blur of red lines has smeared across the centre of his vision. Perhaps his mind is becoming more sensitive to electrical fields.

“My headache,” Jimmy mumbles. He cradles his forehead in his hands. The red lines are firming up. They twist and turn like angry snakes. They menace his sanity.

Josephine glances at the Flyer. “Have a guest suite prepared.”

The red lines shimmer into place—alphanumerics. Abstracts from research papers. Foetal cerebellar tissue left over from abortions used to cure parkisonism. Embryonic nerves reproduce, grow, replace the burnt out tissue of the substantia nigra. Immature brain tissue used to patch up the living. Jimmy sees another document.

A self-referential one.

Something Sweet.

“No!” he shouts, and lashes out. He keeps on spinning while, pixel by pixel, the world is going out.

“Wake up.”

Jimmy is in a real bed.

“Yeah?” he groans. It is very dark. He cannot see anything.

“You’ve got to move out.”

He feels his arms and legs moving of their own accord, pulling him out of the entwining quilt.

The bed surges uneasily beneath him; the water baffles aren’t set up. His head is cold; he touches his scalp with his hand and feels bare skin. His fingers curl with revulsion and he shudders, like he’d touched a cold blooded thing.

“Josephine wants Something Sweet. She needs it or she’ll die. Only she wants it on her terms. She killed the Man for it, now she’s ready to kill you. What do you think Dexter’s here for?

Jimmy feels for the light switch.

“The light is on.”

Jimmy can’t see a thing.

“Dexter has anaesthetised your optic nerves—he’s blinded you.”

Jimmy starts screaming but his voice gets strangled, cut off, like whoever is speaking to him has put a hand round his throat, only he can’t feel any touch. Just—pressure.

“They don’t want you. They want me. They blinded you for me. So I can see.”

There’s nobody else in the room but Jimmy. It’s Jimmy’s voice. Something Sweet is coming on-line, heading for synergy; picking up emissions with its neural antenna, adding Jimmy’s optic and speech centres to its own calculation spaces. Lay every cell in Jimmy’s tumour end to end, they’d stretch to the moon and back.

“Jimmy, you must get out of here. They want to cut your head open again.”

Oh God, Jimmy whispers to himself, only his mouth’s still forbidden him. He has to think the words, recite them in his head. Oh God, I can’t see I can’t see I can’t see …

“Will you please calm down? If you don’t we’ll never escape and Doctor Dexter will dice your brain.”

Then, through his minds’ eye, Jimmy sees words—big black san serif letters against ever-brightening whitespace.

CHAIR BY SNOWDON

SOFTWOOD TABLE WITH METAL TRESTLE SUPPORTS AND SEPIA PLASTIC LAMINATE WORK SURFACE WITH DESIGN DERIVED FROM 23 ENVELOPE ALBUM COVER

A PAIR OF POLISH IMPORT WORKING TROUSERS TORN AT LEFT KNEE

‘SHITTED’ BY GILBERT AND GEORGE (ORIGINAL)

Jimmy is allowed a quiet moan.

The words in his eyes swim and coagulate. Black and white shapes intersect and snap together—a living room in dazzle paint.

“Note also woodcuts by seminal dazzle theorist Edward Wadworth.”

The windows are opening in Jimmy’s head—pictures, dates, critiques, contexts, letters, bulletin-board screen dumps, and suddenly Jimmy’s head does not feel like an enclosed space at all, but a curved surface, utterly exposed, a gateway folded back on itself, a place that is no place.

“Welcome to the noosphere. But first, a word from our sponsors.”

A living room blinks into existence around him. Bright, vibrant, unreal colour. Superrealist precision. Jimmy starts counting dust particles in the far corner of the room—then something lifts his gaze and he notices the door. The door is locked, but Jimmy imagines the numeric code for it, goes over and punches it into the keypad.

The door opens.

Jimmy steps out. It is a bright, cloudless day in the corridor. There is no movement.

“The police are on their way now. Josephine knows this. She will want to move you.”

The Flyer steps into the corridor and sees Jimmy. He’s surprised, but he tries not to show it. “Hello, Jimmy! Nasty turn you had—”

He approaches.

“I think round about now is a good time to do something.”

The Flyer stops dead. “What’s that?”

Jimmy just stands there, arms by his sides, and thinks, What? What am I supposed to do?

“Come on, extemporize!”

“Are you okay, Jimmy?” says the Flyer.

“Tell me, Jimmy—” Jimmy’s voice drips sarcasm. “Have you ever, just once in your life, taken the initiative?”

The Flyer scowls. “You iced up with me or something?”

“Keep out of this. I’m counselling my client.”

The Flyer just stares as the truth kicks home. “Oh shit,” he murmers. “Oh shit.” He turns and runs.

All of a sudden the sky explodes. Great red clouds like lumps of raw meat rain blood and bats down upon the ceiling with all the force of a vengeful god. The Flyer screams and Jimmy falls to his knees and covers up his eyes in horror.

Jimmy’s curled up like a foetal ball, shivering on the carpet and his mouth won’t stop yelling at him.

“Get up! Get up! Doctor Dexter’s coming to get you! Josephine’s going to bundle you up in her car and take you somewhere forgettable—Get up!

Jimmy gets a toe-hold in his own mouth. He keens.

“Honestly,” says his mouth, “you can lead a horse to water but you—”

“Jimmy?”

Josephine’s voice.

Jimmy looks up. Josephine is very pretty, he realises. The corridor’s sky is full of demons and winged pudenda but Josephine isn’t taking any notice.

Jimmy’s voice says, “You killed the Man.”

“Yes,” she says. “The Man wanted your—”

“The Man paid for your MedicAid, didn’t she, Jimmy?”

Josephine’s eyes narrow as she realises what she’s speaking to.

Jimmy gets his voice back. He gazes beseachingly at Josephine. “Help me.” His voice gets twisted from him again. It says: “Well Jimmy, that’s the last time I try to appeal to your higher feelings.”

The Flyer comes up behind Josephine. “We’ve got to leave. The police have entered the station.”

“Right.”

All the lights go off.

“Shit.”

Jimmy’s body jumps and jitters. “Wake up! Wake up! This is your life speaking! Ach, isn’t it just my luck to wake up in a spear carrier—”

Somewhere down the corridor the Man’s hi-fi starts bleating like a sheep. An eighteen ton sheep.

There is a shout, an inarticulate garble of noise culminating in the flat crackle of automatic weapons.

Blue bike-lights penetrate the gloom of Josephine’s pad.

Two sudden explosions flare like immature rose-hips and something round and hairy comes rolling along the corridor. In the light of a burning painting Jimmy recognizes his old consultant. There’s something caught between his teeth, squirming and struggling. His tongue.

Jimmy’s mouth says, “Isn’t it funny how things always come in threes?”

There’s one bike still coming. Jimmy scrambles up and flings himself against the wall, out its way.

The wall by his head is laced with blood and scraps of flesh.

“Nah, it’s only a Jackson Pollock.”

The floor shivers and someone grabs him—soft cool hands tight round his neck. He’s thrust back in his room and hears Josphine’s laboured breath as she presses home a special code on the door lock.

Words appear out the blackness of the room.

DOOR

CARPET IN ORIGINAL WILLIAM MORRIS DESIGN

MURDERING PATENTS EXECUTIVE

BOY WITH NO SURVIVAL INSTINCT

The living room clicks on again—the monochrome view of an infrared camera, set high up in the ceiling, behind the light fitting. There he is, just behind Josephine, head bowed, unable to see in the blackness of the room. Jimmy takes a step forward, sees himself move. He peers at himself, feels the camera zoom at his command. His nose fills the screen.

And something very strange happens inside him. All of a sudden he has a feeling he has never experienced before.

Power.

Josephine starts screaming. Something Sweet has jumbled the lock. Through the walls Jimmy can see the secret liftshaft, locked against her. She whirls and runs out the room.

Gunfire. Instinctively he turns his head and of a sudden he is in a different place, and has a thousand eyes, and he watches the battle from every angle and at every instant of time, from the moment the police bikes appeared to the no-time called now.

Instinctively, Jimmy runs through every conduit and switch and bell-wire of the apartment. The lights flicker. The Man’s hi-fi system spits and snarls. All of a sudden, Jimmy is everywhere.

Jimmy gets a grandstand view of the Flyer’s butchery. Through the Man’s security cameras he watches the mobile response squad penetrate the apartment. With a sick twist in his stomach, Jimmy realises that the advance party doesn’t stand a chance. The Flyer’s too quick, he’s got hidden arsenals all over the apartment and the station, he’s better trained, and he knows their tactics.

Jimmy turns his head again and sees another scene with his argus eyes; the Flyer leaning over Josephine. It looks like she’s been run over by a bike. She’s no more substantial now than a discarded fragment of origami, and much stickier. Trapped in the antechamber to the tunnel, the Flyer shoulders his gun and ducks through the entrance into the tube. Incendiaries flower like green carnations as he jumps down onto the tracks and ducks for cover.

Jimmy sees a policewoman move east along the Northbound platform, turn down the interconnecting corridor.

All his other eyes show no-one else in the area.

Then he zooms in on her name badge and now he knows who it is.

Jimmy shouts. Jimmy screams. Jimmy loses his cool, and his one chance to save her.

The Flyer aims for Tina and fires and she goes spinning all over the platform and Jimmy runs out and the Flyer’s still there.

“A hero at last. Oh, terrific.” Words not his nor even human spill out Jimmy’s mouth while his eyes stream tears. One of his thousand ears has digested her comms overspill and now he knows she was here to save him.

She was here to kill Foster.

That Foster is aiming for him.

With all his might Jimmy hits out. Somewhere beneath the rails a circuit flips and the ghost train lights flicker on with the current. The Flyer at last lives up to his name, dancing and jiving and shedding sparks like there was a party inside him.

Jimmy kneels beside Tina. There’s a lot of blood. I’m sorry, he thinks, because he cannot speak, I was afraid and it happened too quick and I—I’m sorry.

“Oh shit,” Tina says.

Jimmy’s heart leaps. If she’s concious, he figures, maybe there’s hope.

“Oh God, how predictable,” says the voice, and Jimmy thinks Shut up! Shut up! Help me! Help her!

“Help her yourself. I’m not here to run your life. No one is. No one, ever again. You’re free.”

Jimmy shudders. Free.

Tina moans. “Wha’?”

Jimmy squeezes her hand. All of a sudden he finds he’s back where he can use his mouth. “You’ll be fine,” he says, and there’s an edge of confidence in his voice that wasn’t there before, that had got trodden down years before till he’d thought he’d lost it. “Can I lift you?” he says.

Tina stares at him. “I—I think so. Can’t stay here. Fire—”

Jimmy looks about with his thousand eyes. He watches her comrades mopping up. They fire and shout their way through rooms that were once the Man’s. He turns back to Tina. They’ve forgotten her in the heat of battle.

Up, says the thing in Jimmy’s head.

Jimmy picks Tina up in his arms, closes his eyes and concentrates. The train rumbles forward.

Jimmy blinks and the doors open.

They ride, Tina leant across Jimmy’s lap while he sits up against the doors of the train. Tina squeezes his hand, just a little. It is all she can manage. He squeezes her hand too, and he looks in her eyes.

She smiles.

Free.

Something Sweet steals into Jimmy’s mouth, and sings her a lullaby.

[ Site Index] [ Fiction Index] [ Feedback ]

Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead, with a sudden burst in the last couple of years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “Antibodies,”

“A Colder War,”

“Bear Trap,” and “Dechlorinating the Moderator” in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Odyssey, and New Worlds. In the fast-paced and innovative story that follows, he shows us that all this “posthuman” stuff may be arriving a lot faster than anyone thinks that it is …

Charles Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. Coming up is his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Old hackers never die; they just sprout more gray hair, their Tshirts fade, and they move on to stranger and more obscure toys.

Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Your Antiques! asked me to write about it, so I decided to find out where all the old hackers went. Which is how come I ended up at Toast-9, the ninth annual conference of the Association for Retrocomputing Meta-Machinery. They got their feature, you’re getting this con report, and never the two shall meet.

Toast is held every year in the Boston Marriot, a piece of disgusting glass-and-concrete cheesecake from the late 1970s post-barbarism school of architecture. I checked my bags in at the hotel reception, then went out in search of a couple of old hackers to interview.

I don’t know who I was expecting to find, but it sure as hell wasn’t Ashley Martin. Ashley and I worked together for a while in the early zeroes, as contract resurrection men raising zombies from some of the big iron databases that fell over on Black Tuesday: I lost track of him after he threw his double-breasted Compaq suit from a tenth-floor window and went to live in a naturist commune on Skye, saying that he was never going to deal with any time-span shorter than a season ever again. (At the time I was pissed off; that suit had cost our company fifteen thousand dollars six months ago, and it wasn’t fully depreciated yet.) But there he was, ten inches bigger around the waist and real as taxes, queuing in front of me at the registration desk.

“Richard! How are you?”

“Fine, fine.” (I’m always cautious about uttering the social niceties around hex-heads; most of them are oblivious enough that as often as not a casual “How’s it going?” will trigger a quarter-hour stack-dump of woes.) “Just waiting for my membership pack ….”

There was a chime and the door of the badge printer sprang open; Ashley’s membership pack stuck its head out and looked around anxiously until it spotted him.

“Just update my familiar,” I told the young witch on the desk; “I don’t need any more guides.” She nodded at me in the harried manner that staff on a convention registration desk get.

“The bar,” Ashley announced gnomically.

“The bar?”

“That’s where I’m going,” he said.

“Mind if I join you?”

“That was the general idea.”

The bar was like any other con bar since time immemorial, or at least the end of the post-industrial age (which is variously dated to December 31, 1999, February 29, 2000, or March 1972, depending who you talk to). Tired whiskey bottles hung upside down in front of a mirror for the whole world to gape at; four pumps dispensed gassy ersatz beer: and a wide range of alcohol-fortified grape juice was stacked in a glass-fronted chiller behind the bar. The bartop itself was beige and labeled with the runes DEC and VAX 11/780. When I asked the drone for a bottle of Jolt, they had to run one up on their fab, interrupting its continuous-upgrade cycle; it chittered bad temperedly and waved menacing pseudopodia at me as it took time out to spit caffeinated water into a newly spun bucky bottle.

Ash found a free table and I waited for my vessel to cool enough to open. We watched the world go by for a while; there were no major disasters, nobody I knew died, and only three industry-specific realignments or mergers of interest took place.

“So what brings you here, eh?” I asked eventually.

Ashley shrugged. “Boredom. Nostalgia. And my wife divorced me a year ago. I figured it was time to get away from it all before I scope out the next career.”

“Occupational hazard,” I sympathized, carefully not questioning the relationship between his answer and my question.

“No, it bloody isn’t,” he said with some asperity, raising his glass for a brief mouthful followed by a shudder. “You’ve got to move with the times. Since I met Laura I’ve been a hand crafted toy designer, not a, an—” he looked around at the other occupants of the bar and shuddered, guiltily.

“Anorak?” I asked, trying to keep my tone of voice neutral.

“Furry toys.” He glared at his glass but refrained from taking another mouthful. “That’s where the action is, not mainframes or steam engines or wearables or MEMS or assemblers. They’re all obsolete as soon as they come off the fab, but children will always need toys. Walking, talking dolls who’re fun to be with. I discovered I’ve got a knack for the instinctual level—” Something small and blue and horribly similar to a hairy smurf was trying to crawl out of one of his breast pockets, closely pursued by a spreading ink stain.

“So she divorced you? Before or after children?”

“Yes and no, luckily in that order.” He noticed the escaping imp and, with a sigh, unzipped one of the other pockets on his jacket and thrust the little wriggler inside. It meeped incoherently; when he zipped the pocket up, it heaved and billowed like a tent in a gale. “Sorry about that; he’s an escape artist. Special commission, actually.”

“How long have you been in the toy business?” I prompted, seeking some less-hazardous territory.

“Two years before we got married. Six years ago, I think.” Oh gods, he was a brooder. “It was the buried commands that did it. She was the marketing face; we got a lot of bespoke requests for custom deluxe Tele-tubby sets, life-sized interactive droids, that kind of thing. Peter Platypus and his Pangolin Playmates. I couldn’t do one of those and stay sane without implanting at least one buried Easter egg; usually a reflex dialogue, preferably a suite of subversive memes. Like the Barney who was all sweetness and light and I-love-you-you-love-me until he saw a My Little Pony; then he got hungry and remembered his velociraptor roots.”

“I suppose there were a lot of upset little girls—”

“Hell, no! But one of the parental investment units got pissed enough to sue; those plastic horsies are expensive collectors’ items these days.”

“Do you still get much work?” I asked.

“Yes.” He downed his glass in one. “You’d be amazed how many orcs the average gamer gets through. And there’s always a market for a custom one. Here’s Dean—” The wriggling in his pocket had stopped; it looked rather empty. “Excuse me a moment,” he said, and went down on hands and knees beneath the table in search of the escape artist.

<>

Handcrafted toys are probably the last domain of specialist human programmers these days. You can trust a familiar with most things, but children are pretty sensitive and familiars are generally response-tuned to adult company. Toys are a special case: their simple reflex sets and behaviors make them amenable to human programmers—children don’t mind, indeed need, a lot of repetition and simple behavior they can understand—while human programmers are needed because humans are still better than familiars at raising human infants. But someone who makes only nasty, abusive, or downright rude toys is—

<>

Later, while my luggage sniffed out a usefully plumbed corner and grew me a suite, I wandered around the hardware show.

Hardware shows at a big con are always fascinating to the true geek, and this one was no exception. Original PCs weren’t common at Toast-9, being too commonplace to be worth bringing along, but the weird and wonderful was here in profusion. In the center of the room was an octagonal pillar surrounded by a cracked vinyl loveseat: an original Cray supercomputer from the 1980s in NSA institutional blue. Over in that corner, that rarest and most exotic of beasts, an Altair-1 motherboard, its tarnished copper circuit tracks thrusting purposefully between black, insectoidal microprocessor and archaic hex keypad (the whole thing mounted carefully under a diamond display case, watchful guardian demons standing to either side in case any enthusiasts tried to get too close to the ancient work of art).

I strolled round the hall slowly, lingering over the ancient mainframes: starting with the working Difference Engine and the IBM 1604 console, then the Pentium II laptop. All of them were pre-softwear processors: discrete industrial machines from back before the prêt-à-porter brigade acquired personal area networks and turned electronics into a fashion statement. Back when processor power doubled every eighteen months and bandwidth doubled every twelve months, back before they’d been overtaken by newer, faster-evolving technologies.

I was examining a particularly fine late-model SPARCstation when somebody goosed me from behind. Strangers don’t usually sneak up on me for a quick grope—more’s the pity—so when I peeled myself off the ceiling and turned round, I wasn’t too surprised to see Lynda grinning at me ghoulishly. “Richard!” she said, “I knew you’d be around here somewhere! How’s tricks?”

“Much the same. Yourself?”

“Still with the old firm.” The old firm—Intangible Business Mechanisms, as they call themselves today—is a big employer of witches, and Lynda is a particularly fine exponent of the profession, having combined teaching at MIT and practice as a freelance consultant for years. Another of those child prodigies who seem attracted to new paradigms like flies to dog shit. (I should add: Lynda isn’t her real name. Serial numbers filed off, as they say, to protect the innocent.) “Just taking in a little of the local color, dear. It’s so classical! All these hardwired circuits and little lumps of lithographed silicon-germanium semiconductor. Can you believe people once relied on such crude technologies?”

“Tactless,” I hissed at her: an offended anorak-wearer was glaring from beside the Altair-1. “And the answer is yes, anyway. But it was all before your time, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I had a laptop, too, when I was a baby. But by the time I was in my teens, it was all so boring, dinosaur-sized multinationals being starved to death by the free software crowd and trying to drown them in a sea of press releases and standards initiatives, to a Greek chorus singing laments about Moore’s Law only giving room for another five years of improvements in microprocessor design before they finally ran up against the quantum limits of miniaturization. I remember when House of Versace released their first wearable collection, and there was me, a sixteen-year-old goth with more CPU power in her earrings than IBM sold in the 1990s, and it was boring. The revolution had eaten its own sense of wonder and shat out megacorporations. Would you believe it?” She blinked, and wobbled a little, as if drunk on words. I think her thesaurus was running at too high a priority level.

I surreptitiously looked at her feet: she was wearing heavy black boots, the preferred thinking environment of the security-minded. (Steel toe caps make for great Faraday cages.) Then I eyeballed her up and down; judging by the conservative business suit, she had deteriorated a lot in the past year, to the point where she needed corporate meme support. When I first met Lynda, she’d been wearing a fortune in homemade RISC processors bound together by black lacy tatters of goth finery, cracking badly secured ten-year-old financial transactions every few milliseconds. (And selling any numbered offshore accounts she detected to the IRS for a thief-taker’s cut, in order to subsidize her nanoassembler design startup.) Now she was wearing Armani.

<>

A business suit is a future-shock exoskeleton, whispering reminders in its wearers’ ears to prompt them through the everyday niceties of a life washed into bleeding monochrome by the flood of information they live under. Corporate workers and consultants today—I gather this, because I dropped out of that cycle a few years ago, unable to keep up with a new technological revolution every six months—live on the bleeding edge of autism, so wrapped up in their work that if their underwear didn’t tell them when to go to the toilet, their bladders would burst. And it’s not just the company types who need the thinking environment: geeks became dependent on low-maintenance clothing years before, and it’s partly thanks to their efforts that the clothing became sentient (if not fully independent).

Clothes today say far more about someone’s corporate and social status than they did in the twentieth century; we can blame the Media Lab for that, with their radical (not to say annoying) idea that your clothes should think for you. A conservative business suit by a discreet softwear company screams PHB groupware; sneakers and a sloganeering T-shirt or combat pants go with the Freeware crowd, anarchoid linuxers and hackers, some of them charging a thousand bucks an hour for their commercial services. A 1980s-yuppie would have been astonished at the number of body piercings in the boardrooms, the vacant, glassy stares of brain-webbed executives being steered round the local delicatessen by their neckties while their suit jackets engineered a hostile takeover in Ulan Bator and their shoes tracked stock prices. But then, an eighties’ yuppie would be a living fossil in this day and age, slow and cold-blooded and not sufficiently intelligent to breathe and do business simultaneously. O brave new world, to have such cyborgs in it.

<>

We arrived back in the bar. “I think I need a drink,” said Lynda, wobbling on her feet. “Oops! So sorry. Er, yes. This is so slow, Richard! How do you handle the boredom?”

“Excuse me?” The bartender handed me another Jolt, this one nicely chilled. A large margarita slid across the bartop and somehow appeared in her hand.

“This!” She looked around vaguely. “Real time!”

I stared at her. Her pupils were wide. “Are you on anything I should know about?” I asked.

“Sensory deprivation. My suit’s powered down.” She shook her head. “I feel naked. I haven’t been offline in months; there are things happening that I don’t know about. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m not sure. Is it always like this?”

“How long have you been down?” I asked.

“I’m unsure. Since I saw you in the show? I wanted to get into your headspace and see what it was like, but it’s so cramped! Maybe half an hour; it’s a disciplinary offense, you know?”

“What, going offline?”

Her eyeballs flickered from side to side in the characteristic jitter of information-withdrawal nystagmus. “Being obsolete.”

I left Lynda in the safe custody of a hotel paramedic, who didn’t seem to think there’d be any permanent side effects once her clothing had rebooted. I headed back to the con, fervently glad that I’d stepped off the treadmill a couple of releases after Ashley, way before things got this bad.

<>

Information withdrawal is an occupational hazard for the well-connected, like diabetic hypoglycaemia; if the diabetic doesn’t get their sugar hit, or the executive their info-burn, they get woozy and stop working. On the other hand, you can only take it for so long …

Lynda is 26. At 16, she was cracking financial cryptosystems. At 17, she was designing nanotech assemblers. At 20 she was a professor, with a patent portfolio worth millions. Today she’s an executive vice-president with a budget measured in the billions. She will be burned out completely by 30, out of rehab by 32 (give or take a case of tardive dyskinesia), with a gold-plated pension and the rest of her life ahead of her—just like the rest of us proto-transhumanists, washed up on the evolutionary beach.

<>

Back in the con proper, I decided to take in a couple of talks. There’s a long and sometimes contradictory series of lectures and workshops at any Toast gathering, not to mention the speakers’ corners, where any crank can set up a soap-box and have their say.

First I sat through a rather odd monologue with only three other attendees (one of them deeply asleep in the front row): a construct shaped like a cross between a coatrack and a praying mantis was vigorously attacking the conceit of human consciousness, attempting to prove (by way of an updated version of Searle’s Chinese Room attack, lightly seasoned à la Penrose) that dumb neurons can’t possibly be intelligent in the same way as a, well, whatever the thing on the podium was. It was almost certainly a prank, given our proximity to MIT (not to mention the Gates Trust-endowed Department of Amplified Intelligence at Harvard), but it was still absorbing to listen to its endless spew of rolling, inspired oratory. Eventually the construct argued itself into a solipsistic corner, then asked the floor for questions; when nobody asked any, it stormed off in a huff.

I must confess that I was half-asleep by the time the robot philosopher denounced us as nonsapient automata, sparing only half my left eye to speed—read Minsky’s Society of Mind for clues; in any event. I woke up in time for the next talk, a panel discussion. Someone had rounded up an original stalwart of the Free Software Foundation to talk about the rise and demise of Microsoft. There was, of course, a Microsoft spokesdroid present to defend the company’s historic record. It started with the obligatory three-minute AV presentation about how Our Great Leader and Teacher (Bill) had Saved the World from IBM, but before they could open their mouths and actually say anything, Bill’s head appeared onscreen and the audience went wild: it was like the Three Minute Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

(I used to use the man’s software like everyone else, but after the debacle of Windows NT 6.2, and the ensuing grand jury investigation and lynchings, well—)

After the Microsoft talk I went back to my temporary apartment to estivate for a few hours. At my age, I need all the regeneration time I can get, even if I have to take it hanging upside down in a brightly colored cocoon woven to the side of a tower block’s support column. I run some quackware from India that claims to be a white-box clone of the Kaiser-Glaxo program the Pope uses; my tent and travel-equipment designs come courtesy of the Free Hardware Foundation. Having lost my main income stream years ago due to the usual causes, principally cumulative future shock and the letdown from the Y2K consultancy business, I’d be lost without the copylefted design schemata to feed to my assembler farm: I certainly can’t afford the latest commercial designs for anything much more exotic than a fountain pen. But life on a twenty-century income is still tolerable these days, thanks to the FHF. More about those angels in Birkenstocks later, if I can be bothered to write it.

I awoke feeling refreshed and came down from my cocoon to find a new wardrobe waiting for me. I’d got my tent to run up conservative geek-chic before my nap—urban camo trousers, nine-inch nails T-shirt, combat boots, and a vest-of-pockets containing numerous artifacts—and it whispered to me reassuringly as I pulled it on, mentioning that the fuel cell in my left hip pocket was good for thirty hours of warmth and power if I had to venture out into the minus-ten wind chill of a Boston winter. I pumped my heels, then desisted, feeling silly: in this day of barely-visible turbogenerators, heel power makes about as much sense as a slide rule.

Outside my spacious dome tent, the floor of the hotel had sprouted a many-colored mushroom forest. Luggage and more obscure personal servants scurried about, seeing to their human owners’ requirements. Flying things buzzed back and forth like insects with vectored-thrust turbojets. A McDonald’s stall had opened up at the far side of the hall and was burning blocks of hashish to make the neighbors hungry; my vest discreetly reminded me that I had some nose plugs.

I had been asleep for three hours. While I had been asleep, Malaysian scientists had announced the discovery of an earth-sized planet with an oxidizing atmosphere less than forty light-years away; the Gates Trust, in their eternal pursuit of favorable propaganda, had announced that they were going to send a Starwhisp to colonize it.

<>

Insert snide comment about clones, eyes of needles, possibility of passage through, at this juncture; the whole point of a Starwhisp is that it’s too small to carry any cargo much bigger than a bacillus. Probably the GT was just trying to tweak the American public’s guilt complex over the breakup of NASA.

<>

The Pope had reversed her ruling of last week on personality uploads, but reasserted the indivisibility of the soul, much to the confusion of theologians and neuroscientists alike.

There had been riots in Afghanistan over the forcible withdrawal of the Playboy channel by the country’s current ruling clique of backwoods militiamen. (Ditto Zimbabwe and Arkansas.)

Further confirmation of the existence of the sixth so-called gravitoweak resonance force had been obtained by a team of posthumans somewhere in high orbit. The significance of this discovery was massive, but immediate impact remained obscure—no technological spin-offs were predicted in the next few weeks.

Nobody I knew had died, or been born, or undergone major life-revising events. I found this absence of change obscurely comforting; a worrying sign, so I punched up a really sharp dose of the latest cognitive enhancer and tried to drag my aging (not to say reeling) brain back into the hot core of future-surfing that is the only context in which the antiquities of the silicon era (or modern everyday life, for that matter) can be decoded.

I got out into the exhibition hall only to discover that there was a costume show and disco scheduled for the rest of the night. This didn’t exactly fascinate me, but I went along and stared anyway while catching up on the past few hours’ news. The costume show was impressive—lots of fabric, and all of it dumb. They had realistic seventies’ hackers, eighties’ Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, nineties’ venture capitalists, and millennia resurrection men, complete with some bits of equipment too precious to put on public exhibition—things like priceless early wearable computer demos from the Media Lab, on loan for the evening: all badly glued Velcro, cellphone battery compartments run up on a glue-gun renderer, and flickering monochrome head-up displays. Toward the end, one of the models shambled on stage in a recent (three-month-old, hence barely obsolete) space suit: a closed-circuit life-support system capable of protecting its owner from any kind of hostile environment and recycling their waste for months or years. It probably qualified as an engineering miracle (closed-circuit life support is hard) but it left me with a lingering impression that a major cause of death among its users would be secondary consequences of sexual frustration.

The disco was, well, a disco. Or a rave. Or a waltz. These things don’t change: people dress up, eat, take intoxicants, and throw themselves around to music. Same old same old. I settled down with the drinks and the old crusties in the bar, intent on getting thoroughly wasted and exchanging tall stories with the other fogies.

About four or five drinks later; an advertisement crawled through my spam filter and started spraying hotly luminous colors across my left retina. I was busy swapping yarns with an old Cobol monkey called Solipsist Nation and I didn’t notice it at first. “Is something wrong, my friend?” he asked.

“S’spam. Nothing,” I said.

Solly pulled out a huge old revolver—a Colt, I think—and looked around. Squinting, he pointed it at the floor and pulled the trigger. There was no bang, but a cloud of smoke squirted out and settled rapidly to the ground, clustering densely around a small buglike object. The visuals stopped.

“It’s nothing now,” he agreed, putting his gun away. “There was a time when things were different.”

“When they didn’t hide behind microbots. Just hijacked mail seryers.”

He grinned, disquietingly. “Then they went away.”

I nodded. “Let’s drink a toast. To whatever made the mail spammers go away.”

He raised his glass with me, but I didn’t see him drink.

<>

Something the junk advertisers don’t seem to understand: we live in an information-supersaturated world. If I don’t want to buy something, no amount of shouting or propagandizing will budge me; all it will do is get me annoyed. On the other hand, if I have a need for your product, I can seek it out in an eyeblink.

<>

We now return you to your regular scheduled programming …

There was an art show. Fractals blossomed in intricate, fragile beauty on wall-sized screens of fabulously expensive liquid crystal, driven by the entropy-generating logic-chopping of discrete microprocessors. You could borrow some contact lenses and slip between two wall-sized panels and you’re on Europa’s seabed, gray ooze and timelessness shared with the moluscoids clustered around the hydrothermal vents. Endless tape loops played cheesy Intel adverts from the tail end of the 20th, human chip-fab workers in clean-room suits boogying or rocking to some ancient synthesizer beat. A performance-art group, the Anderoids, identically dressed in blue three-piece suits, hung around accosting visitors with annoyingly impenetrable PHB marketroid jargon in an apparent attempt to get them to buy some proprietary but horizontally-scalable vertical-market mission-critical business solution. The subculture of the nerd was omnipresent: an attack of the fifty-foot Dilbert loomed over walls, partitions and cubicle hell, glasses smudged and necktie perpetually upturned in a quizzical fin-de-siècle loop.

I took in some more of the panels. Grizzled hackers chewed over the ancient jousts of Silicon Valley in interminable detail: Apple versus IBM, IBM versus DEC, RISC versus CISC/SIMD, Sun versus Intel. I’ve heard it all before and it’s comforting for all its boring familiarity: dead fights, exhumed by retired generals and refought across tabletop boards without the need for any deaths or downsizings.

There was an alternate-history panel, too. Someone came up with a beauty: a oneline change in the 1971 antitrust ruling against AT&T that leaves them the right to sell software. UNIX dead by 1978, strangled by expensive licenses and no source code for universities; C and C++ nonstarters: the future as VMS. Another change left me shaking my head: five times per hour on a cross-wind. Gary Kildall didn’t go flying that crucial day, was at the office when IBM came calling in 1982 and sold them CP/M for their PCs. By Y2K, Microsoft had a reputation for technical excellence, selling their commercial UNIX-95 system as a high-end server system. (In this one, Bill Gates still lives in the USA.) What startled me most was the inconsequentiality of these points of departure: trillion-dollar industries that grew from a sentence or a breeze in the space of twenty years.

<>

This is the season of nerds, the flat tail at the end of the sigmoid curve. Some time in the 1940s, the steam locomotive peaked; great four-hundred-ton twin-engined monsters burning heavy fuel oil, pulling miles-long train sets that weighed as much as freight ships. Twenty years later, the last of these great workhorses were toys for boys who’d grown up with cinders and steam in their eyes. Some time in the 2010s, the microprocessor peaked: twenty years later our magi and witches invoke self-programming demons that constantly enhance their own power, sucking vacuum energy from the vasty deeps, while the last supercomputers draw fractals for the amusement of gray-haired kids who had sand kicked in their eyes. Sometime in the 2020s, nanotechnology began the long burn up the curve: the nostalgics who play with their gray goo haven’t been decanted from their placentories yet, and the field is still hot and crackling with the buzz of new ideas. It’s a cold heat that burns as it expands your mind, and I find less and less inclination to subject myself to it these days. I’m in my seventies; I used to work with computers for real before I lost touch with the bleeding edge and slipped into fandom, back when civilization ran on bits and bytes and the machineries of industry needed a human touch at the mouse.

<>

Eventually I returned to the bar. Ashley was still more or less where I’d left him the day before, slumped half under a table with his ankles plugged into something that looked like a claymation filing cabinet. He waved as I went past, so after I picked up my drink at the bar, I joined him. “How’re you feeling today?”

“Been worse,” he said cheerfully. Three or four empty bottles stood in front of him. “Couldn’t fetch me one, could you? I’m on the Kriek geuse.”

I glanced under the table. “Uh, okay.”

I took another look under the table as I handed him the bottle. The multicolored cuboid had engulfed his legs to ankle-height before; now it was sending pseudopods up toward his knees. “Your health. Seen much of the show?”

“Naah.” He raised the bottle to me, then drank from the neck. “I’m busy here.”

“Doing what, if I can ask?”

“I’ve decided to emigrate to Tau Ceti.” He gestured under the table. “So I’m mind-mapping.”

“Mind-map—” I blinked. I do not think that word means what I think it means drifted through my head. “What for?”

He sighed. “I’m sick of dolls, Richard. I need a change, but I’m not as flexible as I used to be. What do you think I’m doing?”

I spared a glance under the table again. The thing was definitely getting larger, creeping up to his knees. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You don’t need to do this, do you?”

“Afraid I do.” He drank some more beer. “Don’t worry, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I’m not a spring chicken, you know. And it’s not as if I’ll be dead, or even much different. Just smarter, more flexible. More me, the way I was. Able to work on the cutting edge.”

“The cutting edge is not amenable to humans, Ash. Even the weakly superhuman can’t keep up anymore.”

He smiled, the ghost of an old devil-may-care grin. “So I won’t be weakly superhuman, will I?”

I drew my legs back, away from the Moravec larva below the table. It was eating him slowly, converting his entire nervous system into a simulation map inside whatever passed for its sensorium: when it finished, it would pupate, and something that wasn’t Ashley anymore would hatch. Something which maintained conscious continuity with the half-drunken idiot sitting in front of me, but that resembled him the way a seventy-year-old professor resembles a baby.

“Did you tell your ex-wife?” I asked.

He flinched slightly. “She can’t hurt me anymore.” I shook my head. “Another drink?” he asked.

“Just one for the road,” I said gently. He nodded and snapped his fingers for the bar. I made sure the drink lasted; I had a feeling this was the last time I’d see him, continuity of consciousness or no.

<>

And that, dear reader, is why I’m writing this con report. The Your Antiques! audience want to know all about the history of Cray Y-MP-48 s/n 4002, hi-res walkthroughs and a sidebar describing the life and death of old man Seymour. All of which is, well, train-spotting. And you can’t learn the soul of an old machine by counting serial numbers; for that, you have to stand on the footplate, squinting into the wind of its passage and shovelling coal into the furnace, feel the rush of its inexorable progress up the accelerating curve of history. In this day and age, if you want to learn what the buzz of the computer industry was like, you’d have to stop being human. Transcendence is an occupational hazard, the cliff at the edge of the singularity; try climbing too fast and you’ll fall over, stop being yourself. It’s a big improvement over suicide, but it’s still not something I’d welcome just now, and certainly not as casually as Ashley took to it. Eventually it will catch up with me, too, and I’ll have to stop being human: but I like my childhood, thank you very much, and the idea of becoming part of some vast, cool intelligence working the quantum foam at the bottom of the M-theory soup still lies around the final bend of my track.

<>

1. In Which Laura Departs and Fiona Makes a Request

“I want you to know, darling, that I’m leaving you for another sex robot—and she’s twice the man you’ll ever be,” Laura explained as she flounced over to the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil behind her.

Our arguments always began like that: this one was following the script perfectly. I followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I’d missed this time. “Laura—”

She stopped abruptly, a faint whine coming from her ornately sculpted left knee. “I’m leaving,” she told me, deliberately pitching her voice in a modish mechanical monotone. “You can’t stop me. You’re not paying my maintenance. I’m a free woman, and I don’t have to put up with your moods!”

The hell of it is, she was right. I’d been neglecting her lately, being overly preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “But can we talk about this later? You don’t have to walk out right this instant—”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” She jerked into motion again, reaching for the door handle. “You’ve been ignoring me for months, darling: I’m sick of trying to get through to you! You said last time that you’d try not to be so distant, but look how that turned out.” She sighed and froze the pose for a moment, the personification of glittering mechanistic melodrama. “You didn’t mean it. I’m sick of waiting for you, Ralph! If you really loved me you’d face up to the fact that you’re an obsessive-compulsive, and get your wetware fixed so that you could pay me the attention I deserve. Until then, I’m out of here!”

The door opened. She spun on one chromed stiletto heel, and swept out of my life in a swish of antique Givenchy and ozone.

“Dash it all, not again!” I leaned my forehead against the wall. “Why now, of all times?” Picking a fight then leaving me right before a drop was one of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually came back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from witnessing me scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never failed to make me feel like an absolute bounder at the time; it’s a low blow to strike a cove right before he tries to drill a hole in the desert at mach twenty-five, what? But you can’t take femmes for granted, whether they be squish or clankie, and her accusation wasn’t, I am bound to admit, entirely baseless.

I wandered into the parlor and stood between the gently rusting ancestral space suits, overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless tension. I couldn’t decide whether I should go back to the simulator and practice my thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab of ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric re-entry, a searing blow-torch flare of hot plasma surging past, bare centimeters beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate dilemmas; there’s something terribly non-U about having to actually think about things.

You can never get in too much practice before a freestyle competition, and I had seen enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the desert that I was under no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as this race was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand, Laura’s walk-out had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and I’m never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a long, hot bath and a bottle of sake would get me over it so I could practice later; but tonight was the pre-drop competitors’ dinner. The club prefers members to get their crashing and burning done before the race—something to do with minimizing our third-party insurance premium, I gather—so it’s fried snacks all round, then a serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old firewater all night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple or topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat obtrusively.

“Ralph? Ralphie? Are you all right?”

I didn’t need the screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical of her to call at a time like this. “Yes,” I said wearily.

“You don’t sound it!” she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative emotions are an indicator of felonious intent.

“Laura just walked out on me again and I’ve got a drop coming up tomorrow,” I moaned.

“Oh Ralphie, stop angsting! She’ll be back in a week when she’s run the script. You worry too much about her, she can look after herself. I was calling to ask, are you going to be around next week? I’ve been invited to a party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country skiing season on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in pregnant unexpectedly and my herpetologist is having another sex change so I was just hoping you’d be able to look after Jeremy for me while I’m gone, just for a couple of days or maybe a week or two—”

Jeremy was Fiona’s pet dwarf mammoth, an orange-brown knee-high bundle of hairy malevolence. Last time I’d looked after Jeremy he puked in my bed—under the duvet—while Laura and I were hosting a formal orgy for the Tsarevitch of Ceres, who was traveling incognito to the inner system because of some boring edict by the Orthodox Patriarch condemning the fleshpits of Venus. Then there’s the time Jeremy got at the port, then went on the rampage and ate Cousin Branwyn’s favorite skirt when we took him to Landsdown Palace for a weekend with Fuffy Morgan, even though we’d locked him in one of the old guard towers with a supply of whatever it is that dwarf mammoths are supposed to eat. You really can’t take him anywhere—he’s a revolting beast. Not to mention an alcoholic one.

“Must I?” I asked.

“Don’t whine!” Fi said brightly. “Nobody will ever take you seriously if you whine, Ralphie. Anyway, you owe me a favor. Several favors, actually. If I hadn’t covered up for you that time when Boris Oblomov and you got drunk and took Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s yacht out for a spin around the moon without checking the anti-matter reserve in the starboard gravity polarizer ….”

“Yes, Fi,” I said wearily, when she finally let me get a word in edge-ways: “I surrender. I’ll take Jeremy. But I don’t promise I’ll be able to look after him if I die on the drop. You realize it’s under mortal jeopardy rules? And I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to protect him from Laura if she shows up again running that bestiality mod your idiot pal Larry thought it would be a good idea to install on her when she was high on pink noise that time—”

“That’s enough about Larry,” Fi said in a voice dripping liquid helium. “You know I’m not walking out with him any more. You’ll look after Jeremy for two weeks and that’s enough for me. He’s been a little sulky lately but I’m sure you’d know all about that. I’ll make certain he’s backed up first, then I’ll drop him off on my way to São Paolo skyport, right?”

“What ho,” I said dispiritedly, and put the phone down. Then I snapped my fingers for a chair, sat down, and held my head in my hands for a while. My sister was making a backup of her mammoth’s twisted little psyche to ensure Jeremy stayed available for future torments: nevertheless she wouldn’t forgive me if I killed the brute. Femmes! U or non-U, they’re equally demanding. The chair whimpered unhappily as it massaged my tensed-up spine and shoulders, but there was no escaping the fact that I was stressed-out. Tomorrow was clearly going to be one of those days, and I hadn’t even scheduled the traditional post-drop drink with the boys yet ….

2. The New Butler Calls

I was lying on the bottom of the swimming pool in the conservatory at the back of Chateau Pookie, breathing alcohol-infused air through a hose and feeling sorry for myself, when the new butler found me. At least, I think that’s what I was doing. I was pretty far-gone, conflicted between the need to practice my hypersonic p-waggling before the drop and the urge to drink Laura’s absence out of my system. All I remember is a vague rippling blue curtain of sunlight on scrolled ironwork—the ceiling—and then a huge stark shadow looming over me, talking in the voice of polite authority.

“Good afternoon, Sir. According to the diary, Sir is supposed to be receiving his sister’s mammoth in the front parlor in approximately twenty minutes. Would Sir care to be sober for the occasion? And what suit should Sir like to wear?”

This was about four more sirs than I could take lying down. “Nnngk gurgle,” I said, sitting up unsteadily. The breather tube wasn’t designed for speech. Choking, I spat it out. “M’gosh and please excuse me, but who the hell are you?”

“Alison Feng.” She bowed stiffly, from the waist. “The agency sent me, to replace your last, ah, man.” She was dressed in the stark black and white of a butler, and she did indeed have the voice—some very expensive training, not to mention discreet laryngeal engineering, went into producing that accent of polite condescension, the steering graces that could direct even the richest and most irritable employer in directions less conducive to their social embarrassment. But—

“You’re my new butler?” I managed to choke out.

“I believe so.” One chiseled eyebrow signaled her skepticism.

“Oh, oh jolly good, then, that squishie.” A thought, marinating in my sozzled subconscious, floated to the surface. “You, um, know why my last butler quit?”

“No, sir.” Her expression didn’t change. “In my experience it is best to approach one’s prospective employers with an open mind.”

“It was my sister’s mammoth’s fault,” I managed to say before a fit of coughing overcame me. “Listen, just take the bloody thing and see it’s locked in the number three guest dungeon, the one that’s fitted out for clankie doms. It can try’n destroy anything it bally likes in there, it won’t get very far an’ we can fix it later. Hic. Glue the door shut, or weld it or something—one of her boyfriends trained the thing to pick locks with its trunk. Got a sober-up?”

“Of course, sir.” She snapped her fingers, and blow me if there wasn’t one of those devilish red capsules balanced between her white-gloved digits.

“Ugh.” I took it and dry-swallowed, then hiccupped. “Fiona’s animal tamer’ll probably drop the monster off in the porch but I’d better get up’n’case sis shows.” I hiccupped again, acid indigestion clenching my stomach. “Urgh. Wossa invitation list for tonight?”

“Everything is perfectly under control,” my new butler said, a trifle patronizingly. “Now if Sir would care to step inside the dryer while I lay out his suit—”

I surrendered to the inevitable. After all, once you’ve accepted delivery of a dwarf mammoth on behalf of your sister nothing worse can happen to you all day, can it?

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Fiona’s chauffeuse did indeed deposit Jeremy, but on a schedule of her own choosing. She must have already been on the way as Fi was nattering on the blower. While Miss Feng was introducing herself, she was sneakily decanting the putrid proboscidean into the ornamental porch via her limousine’s airlock. She accomplished this with stealth and panache, and made a successful retreat, but not before she completed my sister’s act of domestic sabotage by removing the frilly pink restraining rope that was all that kept Jeremy from venting his spleen on everything within reach. Which he commenced to do all over great-uncle Arnold’s snooker table, which I was only looking after while he was out-system on business. It was the triumphant squeaking that clued me in that we had problems—normally Jeremy manages to achieve a preternaturally silent approach while he sneaks up on one with mischief in what passes for his mind—as I headed toward the stairs to my dressing room.

“Help me,” I said, gesturing at the porch, from which a duet for Hell’s piccolo and bull in a china shop was emanating.

The butler immediately rose in my estimation by producing a bolas. “Would this serve?” she asked.

“Yes. Only he’s a bit short for a mammoth—”

Too late. Miss Feng’s throw was targeted perfectly, and it would have succeeded if Jeremy had been built to the scale of a typical pachyderm. Alas, the whirling balls flew across the room and tangled in the chandelier while Jeremy, trumpeting and honking angrily, raised his tusks and charged at my kneecaps. “Oh dear,” said the new butler.

I blinked and began to move. I was too slow, the sober-up still fighting the residual effects of the alcohol in my blood. Jeremy veered toward me, tusks raised menacingly to threaten the old family jewels. I began to turn, and was just raising my arms to fend off the monster (who appeared dead-set on editing the family tree to the benefit of Fiona’s line) when Miss Feng leaned sideways and in one elegant gesture ripped the ancient lace curtains right off the rail and swiped them across my assailant’s tusks.

The next minute remains, mercifully, a confused blur. Somehow my butler and I mammoth-handled the kicking and struggling—not to mention squealing and secreting—Jeremy up the rear staircase and into the second best guest suite’s dungeon. Miss Feng braced herself against the door while I rushed dizzily to the parlor and returned with a tube of InstaSteel Bulkhead Bond, with which we reinforced the stout oak partition. Finally my stomach rebelled, quite outraged by the combination of sober-up and adrenaline, at which point Miss Feng diffidently suggested I proceed to the master bathroom and freshen up while she dealt with the porch, the pachyderm, and my suit in descending order of priorities.

By the time I’d cleaned up, Miss Feng had laid a freshly manufactured suit for me on the dresser. “I took the liberty of arranging for a limousine to your club, sir,” she said, almost apologetically. “It is approaching eighteen o’clock: one wouldn’t want to be late.”

“Eighteen—” I blinked. “Oh dear, that’s dashed awkward.”

“Indeed.” She watched me cautiously. “Ah, about the agency—”

I waved my hand dismissively. “If you can handle Jeremy I see no reason why you couldn’t also handle great-uncle Arnold when he gets back from Proxima Tau Herpes or wherever he’s gone. Not to mention the Dread Aunts, bless ’em. Assuming, that is, you want the job—”

Miss Feng inclined her head. “Certainly one is prepared to assume the role for the duration of the probationary period.” Sotto voce she added, almost too quietly for me to catch: “although continuing thereafter presupposed that one or both of us survives the experience ….”

“Well, I’m glad that’s sorted.” I sniffed. “I’d better trot! If you could see the snooker table goes for repair and look to the curtains, I’ll be off, what-what?”

“Indeed sir.” She nodded as if about to say something else, thought better of it, and then held the door open for me. “Good night, sir.”

3. The Dangerous Drop Club

I spent the evening at the Dangerous Drop Club, tackling a rather different variety of dangerous drop from the one I’d be confronting on the morrow. I knew perfectly well at the time that this was stupid (not to mention rash to the point of inviting the attention of the Dread Aunts, those intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic), but I confess I was so rattled by the combination of Laura’s departure, my new butler’s arrival, and the presence of the horrible beast in room two that for the life of me I simply couldn’t bring myself to engage in any activity more constructive than killing my own brain cells.

Boris Kaminski was present of course, boasting in a low-key manner about how he was going to win the race and buying everyone who mattered—the other competitors, in other words—as many drinks as they would accept. That was his prerogative, for, as the ancients would put it, there’s no prize for second place; he wasn’t the only one attempting to seduce his comrades into suicide through self-indulgence. “We fly tomorrow, chaps, and some of us might not be coming back! Crack open the vaults and sample the finest vintages. Otherwise you may never know …. “Boris always gets a bit like that before a drop, morbidly maudlin in a gloating kind of way. Besides, it’s a good excuse for draining the cellars, and Boris’s credit is good for it—“Kaminski” is not his real name but the name he uses when he wants to be a fabulously rich playboy with none of the headaches and anxieties that go with his rank. This evening he was attired in an outrageous outfit modeled on something Tsar Putin the First might have worn when presiding over an acid rave in the barbaric dark ages before the re-enlightenment. He’d probably found it in the back of his big brother’s wardrobe.

“We know you only want to get us drunk so you can take unfair advantage of us,” joshed Tolly Forsyth, raising his glass of Chateau !Kung, “but I say let’s drink a toast to you! Feet cold and bottoms down.”

“Glug glug,” buzzed Toadsworth, raising a glass with his telescoping sink-plunger thingie. Glasses were ceremoniously drained. (At least, that’s what I think he said—his English is rather sadly deficient, and one of the rules of the club is: no neural prostheses past the door. Which makes it a bit dashed hard when you’re dealing with fellows who can’t tell a fuck from a frappé I can tell you, like some high-bandwidth clankie heirs, but that’s what you get for missing out on a proper classical education, undead languages and all, say I.) Goblets were ceremonially drained in a libation to the forthcoming toast race.

“It’s perfectly all right to get me drunk,” said Marmaduke Bott, his monocle flashing with the ruby fire of antique stock-market ticker displays: “I’m sure I won’t win, anyway! I’m sitting this one out in the bleachers.”

“Drink is good,” agreed Edgestar Wolfblack, injecting some kind of hideously fulminating fluorocarbon lubricant into one of his six knees. Most of us in the club are squishies, but Toadsworth and Edgestar are both clankies. However, while the Toadster’s knobbly conical exterior conceals what’s left of his old squisher body, tucked decently away inside his eye-turret, Edgestar has gone the whole hog and uploaded himself into a ceramic exoskeleton with eight or nine highly specialized limbs. He looks like the bastard offspring of a multitool and a mangabot. “Carbon is the new—” his massively armored eyebrows furrowed—“black?” He’s a nice enough chappie and he went to the right school, but he was definitely at the back of the queue the day they were handing the cortical upgrades out.

“Another wee dram for me,” I requested, holding out my snifter for a passing bee-bot to vomit the nectar into. “I got a new butler today,” I confided. “Nearly blew it, though. Sis dumped her pet mammoth on me again and the butler had to clean up before I’d even had time to fool her into swearing the oath of allegiance.”

“How totally horrible,” Abdul said in a tone that prompted me to glance at him sharply. He smirked. “And how is dear Fiona doing this week? It’s ages since she last came to visit.”

“She said something about the Olympic skiing season, I think. And then she’s got a few ships to launch. Nothing very important aside from that, just the après ski salon circuit.” I yawned, trying desperately to look unimpressed. Abdul is perhaps the only member of the club who genuinely out-ranks Boris. Boris is constrained to use a nom de guerre because of his position as heir to the throne of all the Russias—at least, all the Russias that lie between Mars and Jupiter—but Abdul doesn’t even bother trying to disguise himself. He’s the younger brother of his Excellency the Most Spectacularly Important Emir of Mars, and when you’ve got that much clout you get to do whatever you want. Especially if it involves trying to modify the landscape at mach twenty rather than assassinating your elder siblings, the traditional sport of kings. Abdul is quite possibly certifiably insane, having graduated to orbital freestyle re-entry surfing by way of technical diving on Europa and naturist glacier climbing on Pluto—and he doesn’t even have my unfortunate neuroendocrine disorder as an excuse—but he’s a fundamentally sound chappie at heart.

“Hah. Well, we’ll just have to invite her along to the party afterward, won’t we?” He chuckled.

“Par-ty?” Toadsworth beeped up.

“Of course. It’ll be my hundredth drop, and I’m having a party.” Abdul smirked some more—he had a very knowing smirk—and sipped his eighty-year Inverteuchtie. “Everyone who survives is invited! Bottoms up, chaps?”

“Bottoms up,” I echoed, raising my glass. “Tally ho!”

4. The Sport of Kings

The day of the drop dawned bright and cold—at least it was bright and cold when I went out on the balcony beside the carport to suit up for my ride.

Somewhat to my surprise, Miss Feng was already up and waiting for me with a hot flask of coffee, a prophylactic sober-up, and a good-luck cigar. “Is this competition entirely safe, Sir?” she enquired as I chugged my espresso.

“Oh, absolutely not,” I reassured her: “but I’ll feel much better afterward! Nothing like realizing you’re millimeters away from flaming meteoritic death to get the old blood pumping, what?”

“One couldn’t say.” Miss Feng looked doubtful as she accepted the empty flask. “One’s normal response to incendiary situations that get the blood pumping is a wound dressing and an ambulance. Or to keep the employer from walking into the death trap in the first place. Ahem. I assume Sir intends to survive the experience?”

“That’s the idea.” I grinned like an idiot, feeling the familiar pulse of excitement. It takes a lot to drive off the black dog of depression, but dodging the bullet tends to send it to the kennels for a while. “By the way, if Laura calls could you tell her I’m dying heroically to defend her virtue or something? I’ll see her after—oh, that reminds me! Abdul al-Matsumoto has invited us—all the survivors, I mean—to a weekend party at his place on Mars. So if you could see that the gig is ready to leave after my drop as soon as I’ve dressed for dinner, and I don’t suppose you could make sure there’s a supply of food for the little monster, could you? If we leave him locked in the garret dungeon he can’t get into trouble, not beyond eating the curtains—”

Miss Feng cleared her throat and looked at me reproachfully. “Sir did promise his sister to look after the beast in person, didn’t he?”

I stared at her, somewhat taken aback. “Dash it all, are you implying …?”

Miss Feng handed me my preemptive victory cigar. She continued, in a thoughtful tone of voice: “Has Sir considered that it might be in his best interests—should he value the good opinion of his sister—to bring Jeremy along? After all, Lady Fiona’s on Mars, too, even if she’s preoccupied with the après ski circuit. If by some mischance she were to visit the Emir’s palace and find Sir sans Jeremy it might be more than trivially embarrassing.”

“Dash it, you’re right. I suppose I’ll have to pack the bloody pachyderm, won’t I? What a bore. Will he fit in the trunk?”

Miss Feng sighed, very quietly. “I believe that may be a remote theoretical possibility. I shall endeavor to find out while Sir is enjoying himself not dying.”

“Try beer,” I called as I picked up my surfboard and climbed aboard the orbital delivery jitney. “Jeremy loves beer!” Miss Feng bowed as the door closed. I hope she doesn’t give him too much, I thought. Then the gravity squirrelizer chittered to itself angrily, decided it was on the wrong planet, and tried to rectify the situation in its own inimitable way. I lay back and waited for orbit. I wasn’t entirely certain of the wisdom of my proposed course of action—there are few predicaments as grim as facing a mammoth with a hangover across the breakfast table—but Miss Feng seemed like a competent sort, and I supposed I’d just have to trust her judgment. So I took a deep breath, waited another sixty seconds (until the alarm chimed), then opened the door and stepped off the running board over three hundred kilometers of hostile vacuum.

The drop went smoothly—as I suppose you guessed, or I wouldn’t be here to bend your ear with the story, what? The adrenaline rush of standing astride a ten centimeter thick surfboard as it bumps and vibrates furiously in the hypersonic air-flow, trying to throw you off into the blast-furnace tornado winds of re-entry, is absolutely indescribable. So is the sight of the circular horizon flattening and growing, coming up to batter at your feet with angry fists of plasma. Ah, what rhapsody! What delight! I haven’t got a poetic bone in my body, but when you tap into Toadsworth outside of the club-house’s suppressor field that’s the kind of narcotic drivel he’ll feed you. I think he’s a jolly good poet, for an obsessive-compulsive clankie with a staircase phobia and knobbly protrusions; but, at any rate, a more accurate description of competitive orbital re-entry diving I haven’t heard from anyone recently.

A drop doesn’t take long. The dangerous stage lasts maybe twenty minutes from start to finish, and only the last five minutes is hot. Then you slow to subsonic velocity and let go of your smoldering surfboard, and pray to your ancestors that your parachute is folded smartly, because it would be mortifying to have to be rescued by the referee’s skiff. Especially if they don’t get to you until after you complete your informal enquiry into lithobraking, eh?

There was a high overcast as I came hurtling in across Utah, and I think I might have accidentally zigged instead of zagging a little too firmly as I tried to see past a wall of cloud ahead and below me, because when my fireball finally dissipated I found myself skidding across the sky about fifty kilometers off course. This would be embarrassing enough on its own, but then my helmet helpfully highlighted three other competitors—Abdul among them!—who were much closer to the target zone. I will confess I muttered an unsportingly rude word at that juncture, but the game’s the thing and it isn’t over ’til it’s over.

In the end I touched down a mere thirty-three thousand meters off-base, and a couple of minutes later the referees ruled I was third on target. Perry O’Peary—who had been leading me—managed to make himself the toast of the match before he reached the tropopause by way of a dodgy ring seal on his left knee. Dashed bad play, that, but at least he died with his boots on—even if they were glowing red-hot and welded to his ankles.

I caught a lift the rest of the way to the drop base from one of the referee skiffs. As I tromped across the dusty desert floor in my smoldering armor, feeling fully alive for the first time in weeks, I found the party already in full swing. Abdul’s entourage, all wearing traditional kimonos and burnooses, had brought along a modified camel that widdled champagne in copious quantities. He held up a huge platinum pitcher: “Drinks are on me!” he yodeled as Tolly Forsyth and some rum cove of a Grand Vizier—Toshiro Ibn CutThroat, I think—hoisted him atop their shoulders and danced a victory mazurka.

“Jolly good show, old son!” I called, ditching my helmet and gloves gratefully and pouring a beaker of bubbly over my steaming head. “Bottoms up!”

“B’m’s up undeed!” Abdul sprayed camel flux everywhere in salute. He was well into the spirit of things, I could tell; indeed, the spirit of things was well into him.

Ibn CutThroat’s kid brother sidled up behind me. “If Ralphie-sama would care to accompany me to His Majesty’s Brother’s pleasure barge, we will be departing for Mars as soon as the rest of the guests arrive,” he intimated.

“Rest of the guests? Capital, capital!” I glanced round in search of my clankie doxy, but there was no sign of Laura. Which was dashed strange, for she’d normally be all over me by this point in the proceedings: my nearly being turned off in front of an audience usually turned her on like a knife-switch. “Who else is coming?”

“Lots of people.” Ibn CutThroat Junior looked furtive: “it’s a very big party, as befits the prince’s birthday. Did you know it was his birthday …? It’s a theme party, of course, in honor of the adoptive ancestors of his ancient line, the house of Saud.”

Abdul al-Matsumoto is as much an authentic prince of Araby as I am a scion of the MacGregor, but that’s the price we all pay for being descended from the nouveau richewho survived the Great Downsizing hundreds of years ago. Our ancestors bought the newly vacated titles of nobility, and consequently we descendants are forced to learn the bally traditions that go with them. I spent years enduring lessons in dwarf-tossing and caber-dancing, not to mention damaging my hearing learning to play the electric bagpipes, but Abdul has it worse: he’s required by law to go around everywhere with a tea-towel on his head and to refrain from drinking fermented grape juice unless it’s been cycled through the kidneys of a re-engineered dromedary. This aristocracy lark has its down side, you mark my words.

“A theme party,” I mused, removing my face from my cup: “that sounds like fun. But I was planning on taking my gig. Is that okey-dokey, as they say? Is there room in the imperial marina?”

“Of course,” said the vizier, leering slightly as a shapely femme wearing a belly-dancer’s costume sashayed past. I noticed with distaste his hairless face and the pair of wizened testicles on a leather cord around his neck: some people think too much testosterone makes a cove stupid, but there’s such a thing as going too far, what? “Just remember, it’s a fancy-dress party. The theme is the thousand nights and one night, in honor of and for the selection of His Excellency’s newest concuboid. His Excellency says you should feel free to bring a guest or two if you like. If you need an outfit—”

“I’m sure my household wardrobe will be able to see to my needs,” I said, perhaps a trifle too sharply. “See you there!”

Ibn CutThroat bowed and scraped furiously as he backed away from me. Something odd’s going on here, I realized, but before I could put my finger on it there was a whoosh and I saw the familiar sight of my gig—well, actually it’s Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s, but as he’s not due back for six years I don’t think that matters too much—descending to a perfect three-point landing.

I walked over to it slowly, lost in thought, only to meet Miss Feng marching down the ramp. “I didn’t know you could fly,” I said.

“My usual employer requires a full pilot’s qualification, Sir. Military unrestricted license with interstellar wings and combat certification.” She cleared her throat: “Among other skills.” She took in my appearance, from scorched ablative boots to champagne hairstyle: “I’ve taken the liberty of laying out Sir’s smoking jacket in the master stateroom. Can I suggest a quick shower might refresh the parts that Sir’s friends’ high spirits have already reached?”

“You may suggest anything you like, Miss Feng, I have complete confidence in your professional discretion. I should warn you I have a guest tagging along, but he won’t be any trouble. If you show him to the lounge while I change, we shall be able to depart promptly. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from Laura?”

She shook her head minutely. “Not so much as a peep, Sir.” She stepped aside. “So, I’m to set course for Mars as soon as the guest is aboard? Very good, Sir. I shall be on the bridge if you need me.”

It appeared that Miss Feng was not only an accomplished butler, but a dashed fine pilot as well. Would miracles never cease?

5. Miss Feng Serves the Wrong Beer

Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s boat is furnished in white oak panels with brass trim, ochre crushed velvet curtains, and gently hissing gas lamps. A curving sofa extends around the circumference of the lounge, and for those tiresome long voyages to the outer system there are cozy staterooms accessible through hidden sliding panels in the walls. It is a model of understated classical luxury in which a cove and his fellows can get discreetly bladdered while watching the glorious relativistic fireworks in the crystal screen that forms the ceiling. However, for the journey to Abdul’s pleasure dome on Mars it suffered from three major drawbacks. For one thing, in a fit of misplaced bonhomie I’d offered Edgestar Wolfblack a lift, and old Edgy wasn’t the best company for a post-drop pre-prandial, on account of his preferred tipples being corrosive or hypergolic, or both. Secondly, Laura was still making her absence felt. And finally, as the icing on the cake, so to speak, Miss Feng had locked Jeremy in the luggage compartment. He was kicking up a racket as only a sober dwarf mammoth with a hangover can, and I could barely hear myself think over the din.

“Dash it all, how much beer did you give him?” I asked my butler.

“Two liters, Sir,” Miss Feng replied. “Of the rather elderly Bragote from the back of your uncle’s laboratory. I judged it the least likely to be missed.”

“Oh dear God!” I cried.

“Bragh-ought?” echoed Edgy, as a plaintive squeal and a loud thud echoed from the under floor bay. By the sound of things Jeremy was trying to dash his brains out on the undercarriage. (Unfortunately a dwarf mammoth’s skull is thick enough to repel meteors and small anti-matter weapons.)

“Was that a mistake?” Miss Feng enquired, unexpectedly tentatively.

I sighed. “You’re new to the household, so I suppose you weren’t to know this, but anything Uncle Featherstonehaugh brewed is best treated as an experiment in creative chemical warfare. He was particular keen on the Bragote: it’s a mediaeval recipe and it requires a few years to mature to the consistency of fine treacle, but once you dilute the alcohol it’s an excellent purgative. Or so I’m told,” I added hastily, not wanting to confess to any teenage indiscretions.

“Oh dear.” Her brow wrinkled. “One suspected it was a little past its prime. There is another firkin in the hold, just in case it becomes necessary to sedate Jeremy again.”

“I don’t think that will work,” I said regretfully. “He’s not entirely stupid. Uncle was working on a thesis that the Black Death of 1349 wasn’t actually a plague but a hangover.”

“Blackdeath? Is no posthuman of that nomenclature in my clade,” Edgy complained.

BUMP went the floor beneath my feet, causing my teeth to vibrate. “Only two hours to Mars,” Miss Feng observed. “If Sir will excuse me, I have to see to his costume before arrival.” She retreated into one of the staterooms, leaving me alone with old Edgy and the pachydermal punctuation.

6. Pleasure Domes of Mars: A Primer

I arrived on Mars somewhat rattled, but physically none the worse for wear. Miss Feng had rustled up a burnoose, djellaba, and antique polyester two-piece for me from somewhere, so that I looked most dashing, absolutely in character as a highly authentic Leisure Suit Larry of Arabia. I tried to inveigle her into costume, but she demurred: “I am your butler, Sir, not a party-goer in my own capacity. It wouldn’t be right,” she said, tucking an emergency vial of after-shave in my breast pocket. It’s hard to argue with such certainty, although I have a feeling that she only said it because she didn’t approve of the filmy harem pants and silver chainmail brassiere I’d brought along in hopes of being able to tempt Laura into them. Edgestar we dressed in a rug and trained to spit on demand: he could be my camel, just as long as nobody expected him to pass champagne through his reactor’s secondary coolant circuit. Jeremy emerged from storage pallid and shaking, so Miss Feng and I improvised a leash and decided to introduce him as the White Elephant. Not that a real White Elephant would have menaced the world with such a malign, red-rimmed glare—or have smelled so unpleasantly fusty—but you can’t have everything.

A word about Abdul’s digs. Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger brother of the Emir of Mars, lives in a madly gothic palace on the upper slopes of Elysium Mons, thirteen kilometers above the dusty plain. Elysium Mons is so big you’d hardly know you were on a mountain, so at some time in the preceding five centuries one of Abdul’s more annoying ancestors vandalized the volcano by carving out an areophysical folly, a half-scale model of Mount Everest protruding from the rim of the caldera. Thus, despite the terraforming that has turned the crumbly old war god into a bit of a retirement farm these days, Abdul’s pleasure dome really is a dome, of the old-fashioned do not break glass, do not let air out (unless you want to die) variety.

Ground Control talked Miss Feng down into the marina below the sparkly glass facets of the dome, then sent a crawler tunnel to lock on to the door before old Edgy could leap out onto the surface and test his vacuum seals.

The door opened with a clunk. “Let’s go, what?” I asked Jeremy. Jeremy sat down, swiveled one jaundiced eye toward me, and emitted a plaintive honk. “Be like that, then,” I muttered, bending to pick him up. Dwarf mammoths are heavy, even in Martian gravity, but I managed to tuck him under my arm and, thus encumbered, led the way down the tube toward Abdul’s reception.

If you are ever invited to a party by a supreme planetary overlord’s spoiled playboy of a younger brother, you can expect to get tiresomely lost unless you remember to download a map of the premises into your monocle first. Abdul’s humble abode boasts 2428 rooms, of which 796 are bedrooms, 915 are bathrooms, 62 are offices, and 147 are dungeons. (There is even a choice of four different Planetary Overlord Command Bunkers, each with their own color-coordinated suite of Doomsday Weapon Control Consoles, for those occasions on which one is required to entertain multiple planetary overlords simultaneously.)

If the palace was maintained the old-fashioned way—by squishy servants—it would be completely unmanageable: but it was designed in the immediate aftermath of the Martian hyper-scabies outbreak of 2407 that finished off those bits of the Solar System that hadn’t already been clobbered by the Great Downsizing. Consequently it’s full of shiny clicky things that scuttle about when you’re not watching and get underfoot as they polish the marble flags and repair the amazingly intricate lapis lazuli mosaics and re-fill the oil lamps with extra-virgin olive oil. It still needs a sizable human staff to run it, but not the army you’d expect for a pile several sizes larger than the Vatican Hilton.

I bounced out of the boarding tube into the entrance hall and right into the outstretched arms of Abdul, flanked by two stern, silent types with swords, and a supporting cast of houris, hashishin, and hangers-on. “Ralphie-san!” he cried, kissing me on both cheeks and turning to show me off to the crowd: “I want you all to meet my honored guest, Ralph MacDonald Suzuki of MacDonald, Fifth Earl of That Clan, a genuine Japanese Highland Laird from old Scotland! Ralphie is a fellow skydiver and all-around good egg. Ralph, this is—harrumph!—Vladimir Illich of Ulianov, Chief Commissar of the Soviet Onion.” Ulianov grinned: under the false pate I could see it was our old drinking chum Boris the Tsarevitch. “And this—why, Edgy! I didn’t recognize you in that! Is it a llama? How very realistic!”

“No, is meant to be a monkey,” explained Wolfblack, twirling so that his false camel-skin disguise flapped about. I opened my mouth to tell him that the barrel Miss Feng had strapped to his back to provide support for the hump had slipped, but he turned to Abdul: “You like?”

“Jolly good, that outfit!”

“Pip pip,” said Toadsworth, whirring alongside with a glass of the old neurotoxins gripped in one telescoping manipulator. I think it might have been a high-bandwidth infoburst rather than a toast, but due to my unfortunate hereditary allergy to implants I’m very bad at spotting that kind of thing. “Which way to the bar, old fellow?”

“That way,” suggested Ibn CutThroat, springing from a hidden trapdoor behind a Ming vase. He pointed through an archway at one side of the hall. “Be seeing you!” His eyeballs gleamed with villainous promise.

A black-robed figure in a full veil was staring at me from behind two implausibly weaponized clankie hashishin at the back of the party. I got an odd feeling about them, but before I could say anything Toadsworth snagged my free hand in his gripper and began to tug me toward the old tipple-station. “Come-on! Inebriate!” He buzzed: “all enemies of sobriety must be inebriated! Pip pip!” Jeremy let out a squealing trumpet blast close to my ear and began to kick. Not having a third hand with which to steady him, I let go and he shot off ahead of us, stubby ears flapping madly in the low Martian gravity.

“Oh dear,” said Miss Feng.

“Why don’t you just run along and see to my chambers?” I asked, irritated by the thought that the bloody elephant might poop in the punchbowl (or worse, dip his whistle in it) before I got there. “Leave the beast to me, I’ll sort him out later.”

“Inebriate! Inebriate!” cried Toadsworth, hurtling forward, the lights on his cortical turret flashing frantically. “To the par-ty!”

7. In Which Ralph Explains the Nature of his Relationship with Laura

Now dash it all, it behooves a young fellow to remain discreet and close-lipped about matters of an embarrassingly personal nature. But it’s also true to say that this story won’t make a lot of sense without certain intimate understandings—a nod’s as good as a wink to a deaf robot and all that—and in any event, ever since the minutiae of my personal affairs became part of the public gossip circuit following the unfortunate affair involving the clankie dominatrix, the cat burglar, and the alien hive-mind, it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to stand upon my privacy. So where a more modest cove might hesitate, allow me to step in it and, at risk of offending your sensibilities, explain something about my complex relationship with Laura.

I sometimes fancy that life must have been so much simpler back in the days of classical Anglo-American civilization, when there were only two openly acknowledged genders and people didn’t worry about whether their intimate affairs were commutative, transitive, or reflexive. No clankie/squishie, no U or Non-U, nothing but the antique butch/femme juxtaposition, and that was pretty much determined by the shape of the external genitalia you were born with. Perverts dashed well knew what they were, and life was simple. Modern life is enough to drive a cove to drugs in my opinion, but as a Butch U Squishie of impeccable ancestry I have the social option of maintaining a mistress, not to mention the money, and that’s where Laura comes in.

Laura is very clankie and very frilly femme with it, but with a squishy core and sufficiently non-U to make a casual relationship just barely acceptable to polite society on the usual sub-rosa Morganatic basis. We met on a shooting weekend at one of the Pahlavi girl’s ranches on Luna, doing our bit for evolution by helping thin the herd of rampaging feral bots during their annual migration across the Sea of Tranquillity. I’m not sure what she was doing there, but I think it was something to do with working her way around the Solar System on a cut-price non-U grand tour: laboring as a courtesy masseuse in Japan and a topiarist on Ceres while saving up the price of her next interplanetary jaunt. Her maternity factory or mother or whoever was sending her a small allowance to help pay her way, I think, but she was having to work as well to make ends meet, a frightfully non-U thing for a cute little clankie princess to have to do. Our eyes met over the open breech of her silver-chased Purdey over-and-under EMP cannon, and as soon as I saw her delicately wired eyelashes and the refractive sheen on her breasts, simultaneously naked and deliciously inaccessible in the vacuum, I knew I had to have her. “Why, I do declare I’m out of capacitors!” she fluttered at me, and I bent over backward to offer her my heart, and the keys to the guest room.

There is something more than a little bit perverse about a squish who chases clankie skirt: even, one might suppose, something of the invert about them; but I can cope with sly looks in public, and our butch/femme U/non-U tuple is sufficiently orthodox to merely Outrage the Aunts, rather than crossing the line and causing Offence. If she showed more squish while being less non-U, I suppose it would be too risqué to carry on in public—but I digress. I trust you can sympathize with my confusion? What else is a healthy boy to do when his lusts turn in a not-quite-respectable direction?

Of course, I was younger and rather more foolish when I first clapped eyes on the dame, and we’ve had our ups and downs since then. She was, to be fair, unaware of my unfortunate neurohormonal problems: and I wasn’t entirely clear on the costs, both mechanical and emotional, of maintaining a clankie doxie in the style to which she would want to become accustomed. Nor did I expect her to be so enthusiastic a proponent of personality patches, or so prone to histrionic fits and thermionic outrages. I expect I had some surprises for her, too. But we mostly seemed to bump along all right—until that last pre-drop walk-out, and her failure to turn up at the drop zone.

8. Jeremy Runs Amok; A Dreadful Discovery before Dinner

Among the various manners of recovering from the neurasthenic tension that accompanies a drop, I must admit that the one old Abdul had laid on for us took first prize for decadent (that means good) taste. It’s hard to remain stressed out while reclining on a bed of silks in a pleasure palace on Mars, with nubile young squishies to drop pre-fermented grapes through your open lips, your very own mouth-boy to keep the hookah smoldering, and a clankie band plangently plucking its various organs in the far corner of the room.

Dancers whirled and wiggled and undulated across the stage at the front of the hall, while a rather fetching young squishie lad in a gold lamé loincloth and peacock feather turban waited at my left shoulder to keep my cocktail glass from underflowing. Candied fruits and jellied Europan cryoplankton of a most delightful consistency were of course provided. “What-ho, this is the life, isn’t it?” I observed in the general direction of Toadsworth. My bot buddy was parked adjacent to my bower, his knobbly mobility unit sucking luxuriously conditioned juice from a discreet outlet while the still squishy bits of his internal anatomy slurped a remarkably subtle smoked Korean soy ale from a Klein stein by way of a curly straw.

“Beep beep,” he responded. Then, expansively and slowly, “you seem a little melancholy about something, old chap. In fact, if you had hyperspectral imagers like me, you might notice you were a little drawn. Like this: pip.” He said it so emphatically that even my buggy-but-priceless family heirloom amanuensis recognized it for an infoburst and misfiled it somewhere. “Indiscretions aside, if there’s anything a cove can do to help you—enemies you want inebriated, planets you want conquered—feel free to ask the Toadster, what?”

“You’re a jolly fine fellow and I may just do that,” I said. “But I’m afraid it’s probably nothing you can help with. I’m in a bit of a blue funk—did you know Laura left me? She’s done it before several times, of course, but she always comes back after the drop. Not this time, though, I haven’t seen gear nor sprocket of her since the day before yesterday and I’m getting a bit worried.”

“I shall make inquiries right away, old chap. The clankie grapevine knows everything. If I may make so bold, she probably just felt the need to get away for a while and lube her flaps: she’ll be back soon enough.” Toadsworth swiveled his ocular turret, monospectral emitters flashing brightly. “Bottoms up!”

I made no comment on the evident fact that if the Toadster ever did get himself arse over gripper he’d be in big trouble righting himself, but merely raised my glass in salute. Then I frowned. It was empty! “Boy? Where’s my drink?” I glanced round. A furry brown sausage with two prominently flared nostrils was questing about the edge of the bower where my cocktail boy had been sitting a moment before.

“Grab him!” I swore at the lad, but I fear it wasn’t his fault: Jeremy had already done him a mischief, and he was doubled over in a ball under the nearest curtain, meeping pathetically. Jeremy sucked the remains of my Saturnian ring ice-water margaritas up his nose with a ghastly slurping noise, and winked at me: then he sneezed explosively. An acrid eruction slapped my face. “Vile creature!” I raged, “What do you think you’re doing?”

I’m told that I am usually quite good with small children and other animals, but I have a blind spot when it comes to Jeremy. He narrowed his eyes, splayed his ears wide, and emitted a triumphant—not to say alcohol-saturated—trumpet-blast at me. Got you, he seemed to be saying. Why should you two-legs have all the fun? I made a grab for his ears but he was too fast for me, nipping right under my seat and out the other side, spiking my unmentionables on the way as I flailed around in search of something to throw at him.

“Right! That does it!” People to either side were turning to stare at me, wondering what was going on. “I’m going to get you—” I managed to lever myself upright just in time to see Jeremy scramble out through one of the pointy-looking archways at the back of the hall, then found myself eyeball to hairy eyeball with Ibn CutThroat’s administrative assistant.

“Please not to create so much of a noise, Ralphie-san,” said the junior under-vizier: “His Excellency has an announcement to make.”

And it was true. Human flunkies were discreetly passing among the audience, attracting the guests’ attention and quieting down the background of chit-chat. The band had settled down and was gently serenading us with its plucked vocal chords. I glanced after Jeremy one last time: “I’ll deal with you later,” I muttered. Even by Jeremy’s usual standards, this behavior was quite intolerable; if I didn’t know better, I’d swear there was something up with the blighter. Then I looked back at the stage at the front of the room.

The curtain sublimed in a showy flash of velvet smoke, revealing a high throne cradled in a bower of hydroponically rooted date palms. His Excellency Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger sibling of the Emir of Mars, rose from his seat upon the throne: naked eunuch bodyguards, their skins oiled and gleaming, raised their katanas in salute to either side. “My friends,” old Abdul droned in a remarkably un-Abdul like monotone: “It makes me more happy than I can tell you to welcome you all to my humble retreat tonight.”

Abdul wore robes of blinding white cotton, and a broad gold chain—first prize for atmosphere diving from the club, I do believe. Behind him, a row of veiled figures in shapeless black robes nudged each other. His wives? I wondered, or his husbands? “Tonight is the first of my thousand nights and one night,” he continued, looking more than slightly glassy-eyed. “In honor of my sort-of ancestor, the Sultan Schahriar, and in view of my now being, quote, too old to play the field, my elder brother, peace be unto him, has decreed a competition for my hand in marriage. For this night and the next thousand, lucky concubines of every appropriate gender combination will vie for the opportunity to become my sole and most important sultana.”

“That’s right, it’s not just a date!” added Ibn CutThroat, from the side-lines.

“I shall take the winner’s hand in marriage, along with the rest of their body. The losers—well, that’s too boring and tiresome to go into here, but they won’t be writing any kiss-and-tell stories: they should have made backups before entering the competition, that’s not my problem. Meanwhile, I ask you to raise a toast with me to the first seven aspiring princesses of Mars, standing here behind me, and their intelligence and courage in taking up Scheherazade’s wager.” He sounded bored out of his skull, as if his mind was very definitely busy elsewhere.

Everyone raised a toast to the competitors, but I was losing my appetite even before Ibn CutThroat stepped to the front of the stage to explain the terms of the competition, which would begin after the banquet. I may come from a long line of Japanese pretenders to the throne of a sheep-stealing bandit, but we’d never consider anything remotely as blood-thirsty and mediaeval as this. The prospect of spending a night with dashing young Abdul gave a whole new and unwelcome meaning to losing your head for love, as I suppose befitted a pretender to the crown of Ibn Saud—never mind the Sassanid empire—by way of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. “I don’t think this is very funny,” I mumbled to Toadsworth. “I wish Laura were here.”

Toadsworth nudged me with his inebriator. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, old chap. I spy with my little hyperspectral telescopic imager—”

—Ibn CutThroat was coming to the climax of his spiel: “gaze upon the faces of the brave beauties!” He crowed. “Ladies, drop your veils!”

I gaped like a fool as the row of black-garbed femmes behind the prince threw back their veils and bared their faces to the audience. For there, in the middle of the row, was a familiar set of silver eyelashes!

“Isn’t that your mistress, old boy?” Toadsworth nudged me with his inebriator attachment. “Jolly rum do, her showing up here, what?”

“But she can’t be!” I protested. “Laura can’t be that stupid! And I always forget to remind her to take her backups, and she never remembers, so—”

“‘M ‘fraid it’s still her on the stage, old boy,” commiserated the Toadster. “There’s no getting around it. Do you suppose she answered an advertisement or went through a talent agency?”

“She must have been on the rebound! This is all my fault,” I lamented.

“I disagree, old fellow, she’s not squishy enough to bounce. Her head, anyway.”

I glanced up at the stage, despondent. The worst part of it was, this was all my fault. If I’d actually bothered to pull myself out of my pre-drop funk and talked to her, she wouldn’t be standing on stage, glancing nervously at the court executioners standing to either side. Then I saw her turn her head. She was looking at me! She mouthed something, and it didn’t take a genius of lip-reading to realize that she was saying get me out of here.

“I’ll rescue you, Laura,” I promised, collapsing in a heap of cushions. Then my mouth-boy stuck a hookah in the old cake-hole and the situation lost its urgent edge. Laura wasn’t number one on the old chop-chop list, it appeared. There’d be time to help her out of this fix after dinner.

9. An After-Dinner Show; Discussions of Horticulture

Dinner took approximately four hours to serve, and consisted of tiresomely symbolic courses prepared by master chefs from the various dominions of the al-Matsumoto empire—all sixty of them. The resulting cultural mélange was certainly unique, and the traditional veal tongue sashimi on a bed of pickled jellyfish cous-cous a l’Olympia lent a certain urgency to my intercourse staggers to the vomitorium. But I digress: I barely tasted a single bite, so deeply concerned was I for the whereabouts of my cyberdoxy.

After the last platter of chili-roast bandersnatch in honey sauce was cleared and the dessert wine piped to our tables, the game show began. And what a game show! I sat there shuddering through each round, hoping against hope that Laura wouldn’t be called this time. Ibn CutThroat was master of ceremonies, with two dusky-skinned eunuchs to keep track of the score cards. “Contestant Number One, Bimzi bin Jalebi, your next question is: what is his Excellency the Prince’s principal hobby?”

Bimzi rested one elaborately beringed fingertip on her lower lip and frowned fetchingly at the audience. “Surfing?”

“A-ha ha ha!” crowed Ibn CutThroat. “Not quite wrong, but I think you’d all agree she had a close shave there.” The audience howled, not necessarily with joy: “so we’ll try again. Bimzi bin Jalebi, what do you think his Excellency the Prince will see in you?”

Bimzi rested one elegant hand on a smoothly curved hip and jiggled seductively at the audience: “my unmatched belly-dancing skills and—” wink—“pelvic floor musculature?”

“I’m asking the questions around here!” mugged the vizier, leering at the audience. Everybody ooh’d. “Did you hear a question?” Everybody ooh’d even louder.

“Pip pip,” said Toadsworth, quietly. He continued: “I detect speech stress analyzers concealed in the pillars, old boy. And something else.”

“Let me remind you,” oozed the Vizier, “that you are attending the court of his Excellency the Prince, and that any untruth told before me, in my capacity as grand high judicar before his court, may be revealed and treated as perjury. And—” he paused while a ripple of conversation sped around the room—“now we come to the third and final cut-off question before you spend a night of delight and jeopardy with his Royal Highness. What do you, Bimzi bin Jalebi, see in my Prince? Truthfully now, we have lie detectors and we know how to use them!”

“Um.” Bimzi bin Jalebi smiled, coyly and winningly, at the audience, then decided that honesty combined with speed was the best policy: “a-mountain-of-gold-but-that’s-not-my-only—”

“Enough!” CutThroat Senior clapped his hands together and her a-borning speech was arrested by the snicker-snack of eunuch katanas and a bright squirt of arterial blood. “To cut a long story short, his Excellency can’t stand wafflers. Or gold-diggers, for that matter.” He glanced at one particular section of the audience who, standing under guard, were white with shock, and smiled toothily: “And so, now that we’re all running neck and neck, who’d like to go first?”

“I can’t bear this,” I groaned quietly.

“Don’t worry, old fellow, it’ll be all right on the night,” Toadster nudged me.

To prove him wrong, Ibn CutThroat hunted through the herd of candidates and—by the same nightmare logic that causes toast to always land buttered-side down except when you’re watching it with a notepad and counter—who should his gaze fall on but Laura.

“You! Yes, you! It could be you!” cried the ghastly little fellow: “Step right up, my dear! And what’s your name? Laura bin, ah, Binary? Ah, such a fragrant blossom, so redolent of machine oil and ceramics! I’d spin her cams any day of the week if I still had my undercarriage,” he confided to the crowd as my pale person of pulchritude clutched a filmy veil around her and flinched. “First question! Are you the front end of an ass?”

Laura shook her head. The crowd fell silent. I tensed, balling my hands into fists. If only there was something I could do!

“Second question! Are you the back end of an ass?”

Laura shook her head again, silently. I tried to catch her eye, but she didn’t look my way. I quailed, terrified. Laura is at her most dangerous when she goes quiet.

“Well then! Let me see. If you’re not the front end of an ass, and you’re not the back end of an ass, doesn’t that mean you’re no end of an ass?”

Laura gave him the old fisheye for an infinitely long ten seconds then drawled, in her best Venusian butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth accent: “Why, I do declare, what is this ‘ass’ you speak of, human, and why are you so eager for a piece of it when you don’t have any balls?”

I was on my feet, staggering uncertainly toward the stage, as Ibn CutThroat raised his fists above his head: “We have a winner!” he declared, and the crowd went wild. “You, my fragrant rose, have passed the first test and go forward to the second round! My gentles, let it be known that Laura Binary has earned the right to an unforgettable night of ecstasy in the company of his Excellency the Prince!” Sotto voce to the audience: “Such a shame she won’t live long enough to forget it afterward.”

I saw red, of course: dash it, what else is a cove to do but stand up for his lady’s honor? But before I could take a step forward, meaty hands descended on each of my shoulders. “Bed time,” rumbled the guard holding my left arm. I glanced at his mate, who favored me with a suggestive leer as he fingered the edge of his blade.

“Flower bed time,” he echoed.

“Ahem.” I glanced at the stage, where Laura was struggling vainly as a cadre of guards as grotesquely overaugmented as old Edgy wrapped her in delicate silver manacles: “If you don’t mind, old fellow, I’ve got a jolly good mind to tell your master he can take your daisies and push them—”

“Bed time,” Miss Feng hissed urgently behind my right ear. “We need to talk,” she added.

“Okay, bed time,” I agreed, nodding like a fool.

Guard number two sighed dispiritedly as he sheathed his sword. “Petunias.”

“What?”

“Not daisies. Petunias.”

“Bed time!” Guard number one said brightly. I think he had a one-track mind.

“We were supposed to bury you under the petunias if you resisted,” Guard number two explained. “It’s so hard on the poor things, they don’t get enough sunlight out here and the soil is too acidic—”

“No, no, see, he’s quite right, if we bury him he’s supposed to be pushing up daisies,” said Guard number one, finally getting hold of the conversation. “So! Are you going to bed or are we going to have to tuck you—”

“I’m going, I’m going,” I said. The homicidal horticulturalists let go of me with visible reluctance. “I’m gone,” I whimpered.

“Not yet, Sir,” said Miss Feng, politely but forcefully propelling me away from the ring of clankie guards surrounding the stage. “Let’s talk about it in private, shall we?”

10. Miss Feng makes a series of Observations

The guards escorted me out of the dining pavilion and up two flights of stairs, then along a passageway to a palatial guest suite which had been made available for the members of the Club. Miss Feng followed, outwardly imperturbable, although I heard her swear very quietly when the guards locked and barred the main door.

“Dash it all.” I stumbled and sat down on a pile of cushions. “I’ve got to rescue her before it’s too late!”

Miss Feng looked at me oddly. “Indubitably, Sir. Although we appear to be locked in a guest suite on the second floor of a heavily fortified palace built by a paranoid lunatic, with guards standing outside the door to prevent any unscheduled excursions. Perhaps Sir would consider an after dinner digestif and a post-prandial nap instead?”

But I was too far gone in my funk to notice: “This is my fault! If only I’d talked to her instead, she wouldn’t be here. This isn’t like Abdul, either. I know him, he’s a good egg. There must be some mistake!”

“If Sir will listen to me for a minute—” Miss Feng drew a deep and exasperated breath, her chest swelling beneath her traditional black jacket in a most fetching manner—“I believe the key to the problem is not rescuing Miss Laura, but making a successful escapeafterward. Sir will perhaps recall the planetary defense grasers and orbital arbalests dug into the walls of the caldera? While I am an adequate pilot, I would much prefer our departure from the second-most-heavily fortified noble house on Mars to be facilitated by traffic rather than fire control. And—” she raised one eyebrow, infinitesimally—“Sir didpromise his sister to take care of her mammoth.”

“Dash it all to hell and back!” I bounced to my feet unsteadily: “Who cares about Jeremy?”

Miss Feng fixed me with a steely gaze: “Youwill, if your sister thinks you’ve mislaid him on purpose, Sir.”

“Oh.” I nodded, crestfallen, and ambled over to the screen of intricately carved soapstone fretwork that separated the central lounge from the inner servants’ corridor. Small thingumabots buzzed and clicked outside, scurrying hither and yon about their menial tasks. “I suppose you’re right. Well, then. We need to rescue Laura, retrieve Jeremy from whatever drunken escapade he’s got himself into, andtalk our way out of this. Bally nuisance, why can’t life be simple?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment, Sir. Compared to covering for one of Prince W the thirteenth’s little escapades this should be a piece of cake. Incidentally, did you notice anything odd about the Sheikh Abdul tonight?”

“What? Apart from his rum desire to butcher my beloved—”

“I was thinking more along the lines of the spinal parasite crab someone has enterprisingly planted on him since the race, Sir.”

“The spinal what? Dear me, are you telling me he’s caught something nasty? Do I need to take precautions?”

“Only if Sir wishes to avoid having his brain hijacked by a genetically engineered neural parasite, his prefrontal lobes scooped out and eaten, and his body turned into a helpless meat puppet. Mr al-Matsumoto’s burnoose covered it incompletely, and I saw it when he turned round: you might have noticed he’s not quite himself right now. I believe it is being controlled by Toshiro ibn-Rashid, the vizier.”

“Oops.” I paused a moment in silent sympathy. “Bloody poor show, that.”

“I’ve seen more than one attempted coup d’etat in my time, Sir, and it occurs to me that this is an unhealthy situation to be in. The banquet continues for three more days, and Sir might usefully question the wisdom of staying to the end. After all, his Excellency’s puppet master didn’t throw a party and invite all of the prince’s personal friends along for no good reason, did he?”

“Then I suppose we’ll just have to rescue Laura and make our escape.” I stopped. “Um. But how?”

“I have a plan, Sir. If you’d start by taking this sober-up, then I’ll explain ….”

11. A Meeting in the Tunnels

Miss Feng’s Plan was certainly everything you could ask for. One might even suspect her of black ops training, but experience has taught me that it is best to never knowingly underestimate the lethality of a sufficiently determined butler. I confess I harbored certain misgivings about the nature of her proposed offensive—but with stakes this high I was prepared to work to any plan.

However, it was after midnight before we could start, when the guards opened the doors to direct a shambolically intoxicated Edgestar and a thoroughly inebriated Toadsworth into our company. “Pip Paaarrrrrp,” Toadsworth burped, drifting to a bumpy halt in the middle of the floor: his cortical turret spun round twice with the force of the belch, as his lights strobed down through the spectrum and went dark.

“Am being pithed,” said Edgestar, shambling into a pillar and collapsing onto two legs. “Huuuurk!”

“Let me help you with that,” I said, stepping forward to relieve him of his camel-hair coat—and the full firkin of Bragote that Miss Feng had secreted beneath it. I nearly dropped the cask: nine gallons of ale is quite an armful, especially when it’s bottled up in corrosion-proof steel and biohazard warning stickers.

“Aaah, that’s better,” mumbled Edgestar, another leg retracting with a hiss of hydraulics and a brief stink of chlorine. “‘M tired. G’night.”

“Quietly,” Miss Feng reminded me, as I lowered the deadly cylinder to the tiles. “Excellent. I’ll take care of this.” She rolled it on its side, directing it toward the door, as she palmed a preemptive sober-up. “I’m sure it will be quite the hit at the squishie servants’ party,” she added, with something very like a shudder.

I tiptoed away from the door as she knocked on it, then dived into my room to hide as the bolts rattled. As a servant, Miss Feng stood a better chance of avoiding suspicion than I—but she had other tasks in mind for which Edgestar, Toadsworth, and I were clearly well-suited. And so I swallowed my misgivings, picked up the sober-up spray, and approached Toadsworth.

“Excuse me old chap,” I essayed, “but are you up for a jolly jape?”

“Bzzzt—” The cortical turret turned toward me and I confronted a red-rimmed eye stalk: “Inebriate? Par-ty?”

“Jolly good show, Toadster. But I think you might enjoy this first, what?” I flicked the sober-up at him. “Don’t want to let the side down, do we?”

There was a muffled explosion, his cortical turret spun round three times, and steam hissed from under his gasket. “You unspeakable bounder!” He buzzed at me. “That was below the belt!” His lights flashed ominously. “I’ve a good mind to—”

“Whoa!” I held up a hand. “I’m terribly sorry, and I’ll happily demonstrate the depth of my gratitude by groveling in any way you can imagine afterward, but we need to rescue Laura from the harem, and then we need to make our escape from the evil vizier and his mind control minions.”

“Really?” The Toadster froze in place for a moment. “Did you say evil vizier? With minions? My favorite kind!”

“Top hat, old boy, top hat!” I waved my hands encouragingly. “All we need to do is get old Edgy awake—”

“Some’buddy mention nominative identifier?” With a whine of overstrained hydraulics Edgestar Wolfblack began to unfold from his heap on the floor. One foot skidded out from under him and ended up scuttling around the skirting board, barking furiously until the Toadster was forced to shoot it to death with his Inebriator. “Hurrrrk. Query vertical axis of orientation?”

“That way,” I said, pointing at the ceiling. Edgy groaned, and began to quiver and fold in on himself, legs and arms retracting and strange panels extending to reveal a neat set of chromed wheels.

“Vroom,” he said uncertainly. “Where to?”

“To the harem! To rescue Laura and the other contestants, while Miss Feng poisons the squishie servants with Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s Bragote,” I explained. “If you’d be so good as to follow me, chaps ….”

I pulled on the black abaya Miss Feng had procured for me, then bent down to tap on the robot servitor’s hatch, clutching the identity beacon Miss Feng had acquired from one of the waitrons during dinner. The hatch deigned to recognize the beacon and opened, for which I was duly grateful.

The servants’ tunnel was built to a more than human scale: not all the bots were small bleepy things. I screwed my monocle firmly into place and hurried along the dank, roughly finished tunnel, blessing my foresight in remembering to download the map. I don’t mind admitting that I was sweating with fright, but at least I was in good company, with Edgestar whizzing alongside like a demented skateboard and the Toadster gliding menacingly through the darkened tunnel, his trusty Inebriator raised and ready to squirt.

Miss Feng’s plan was clear. The unlucky ladies would almost certainly be languishing under lock and key in the harem. Moreover, the harem’s main entrance would be guarded by palace eunuchs, or possibly chaperone-bots. However, she speculated, the servants’ passage would still be open—if we could get past the inevitable guard on the back passage. We would find the chaperone-bot, I would pretend to be a fainting misplaced maiden, and Edgy and the Toadster would play the part of Palace security guards who had found me and were taking me back inside. Getting out would be a little harder, but by then Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s tipple should have taken effect ….

Something moved in the tunnel ahead of me and I froze, knock-kneed in fear. I don’t lack moral fiber, it just gives me the runs: I swore under my breath and stopped dead in my tracks as Toadsworth ran over my hem. “What is it?” He buzzed, quietly.

“I don’t know. Shh.”

Holding my breath, I listened. There was a faint shuffling noise, a breathy whistling, and then a clicking noise from the dark recesses of a twisty little side-passage. A shadow moved across the floor, and paused. I sniffed, smelling an unholy foulness of stale sweat and something else, something familiar—I then blinked, as two evil, red-rimmed orbs brimming with pure, mindless hate loomed out of the darkness toward me.

“Jeremy!” The delinquent dwarf reared back, waving his tusks drunkenly in my face, and I could see his trunk begin to flare, ready to blow a betraying blast on the old blower. There was only one thing for it—I reached out and grabbed. “Hush, you silly old thing! If they hear you, they’ll kill you, too!”

Grabbing a mammoth by the trunk—even a hung-over miniature mammoth who’s three sheets to the wind and tiddly to the point of winking-is not an act I can recommend to the dedicated follower of the quiet life. However, rather than responding with his usual murderous rage at the universe for having made him sixteen sizes too small, Jeremy blinked at me tipsily and sat down. For a moment I dared to hope that the incident would pass without upset—but then the gathering toute came out suite, and the foul little beast sneezed a truly elephantine blast of beer-smelling spray in my direction. I let go instinctively: he struggled back to his feet and began to reverse shambolically into the tunnel, with a mistrustful glare directed over my left shoulder. I tried to scuttle after him, only to be brought up short by the Toadster, who was still parked on my skirt. “Dash it all, men, follow that mammoth!”

With a brain-rattling crash, a fiendishly stealthed black chaperone-bot jumped over my suddenly stationary form, slipped on the snot-lubed floor, tumbled head-over-heels into the far wall, and crashed to the ground in a shower of spiked armor and vicious stabby bits. I nearly jumped right out of my skin—indeed, I believe separating me from my integument had been the sole purpose of its acrobatic display.

Before I could gather my disguise and my wits and run, Edgestar revved up to speed and whizzed past me. Vrooming like a very vroomy thing, he jumped on the bally bot in a most unfriendly manner! It was a sight to see, I can assure you. The chaperone-bots of al-Matsumoto look a lot like Edgestar in humanoid form, only less convivial and disinclined to a discreet afternoon tipple when they could be out and about, briskly ripping unfortunates limb from limb. But being bots, they lack the true élan and esprit of a clankie, and even a hung-over tea-trolley posthumanoid is a fearsome thing to behold when it gets its cricket box on. Jeremy scampered off into the bowels of the palace honking tunelessly; meanwhile, old Edgy bounced up and down on the combat robot’s abdomen, squeaking furiously and spinning his wheels. They had cute little cutting disks on their inner rims! The chaperone-bot lay on its back, stiletto-tipped legs curling over and inward to stab repeatedly at the assailant on its abdomen, but Edgy was too fast for it. Presently it stabbed too enthusiastically for its own good—and Edgestar yanked hard, pulling the stinger under the edge of a gaping inspection panel. With a triumphant squeal of brakes he leapt off the chaperone-bot just in time, transforming back into humanoid form in mid-air as sparks began to fly and an acrid smoke poured from its joints.

“Jolly good show, that transformer!” I exclaimed.

“Pip-pip!” said the Toadster, regaining some of his joie de vivre.

I consulted my map again. “The back door to the harem is just around the corner! I say old chap, I think you’ve cleared the last obstacle. Let’s shuftie, shall we? If we’re to be home by tea it behooves us to get our move on.”

12. I Find Laura in Questionable Company

Well, to cut a long story short, there I was in the harem of the Emir of Mars’s younger brother, surrounded by adoring femmes, while my two fellows from the Club made themselves scarce. “Darling,” Laura trilled, reclining in my arms, “I do confess, I am so touched! Hic.”

“I know, my dear, but we can’t stay here.” I quickly outlined what I knew. “Miss Feng thinks the evil Vizier is conspiring to build resentment against the oppressive and harsh autocracy of the al-Matsumoto clan, and intends to use it to foment a revolt.”

“But the al-Matsumotos aren’t harsh and autocratic!” complained one of the ladies, a cute blonde bimbettebot in filmy harem pants and tank top: “they’re cute!” The room descended into giggles, but I frowned, for this was no laughing matter.

“They’ll be harsh and autocratic by the time Ibn CutThroat’s spinal crab is through with Abdul! Dash it all, do you want to be decapitated? Because that’s what’s going to happen if the Vizier seizes power! He won’t have any use for you—he’s the chief eunuch! He’s an ex-man, and his special power is chopping off heads! He probably thinks testosterone is something you catch from sitting too many exams.”

“Oh, I’m sure I can fix that,” a dusky six-armed beauty informed me with a flick of her aristocratic nose: “I didn’t study regenerative medicine for nothing.” Her arch look took in Laura: “Why don’t you take yourself and your tin-plate tart and leave us to sort out the matter of succession? She was only going to go down hard in the talent show round, anyway.”

“Pip-pip!” called Toadsworth, sailing from one vaulted side-chamber to another in pursuit of a giggling conical debutante, a silk favor knotted around his monocular. “Party back at my pad, old chap! Bring a knobbly pal! Inseminate! Inseminate! Bzzt!” I looked away before the sight of his new plug-in could scar my retinas for life. You can’t take these clankie stallions anywhere in polite company, they can’t so much as wink at a well-lubed socket without wanting to interface with it—

“She’s right, darling, we must be going.” Laura laid her elegant head on my shoulder and sighed. “Oh I do declare, my feet are killing me.” I scooped her up in my arms, trying to see over a faceful of frills.

“I’ve missed you so much,” I told her. “But what are you doing here anyway?”

“Hush.” She kissed me, and for a moment the world went away: “My brave, butch, bullish Ralphie!” She sighed again. “I was going to hold out until after the race! But I had just checked into the Hilton when I received a telephone call saying there was a gentleman waiting to see me in the lobby.”

Jealousy stabbed at me. “Who was it?” I asked, cringing and glancing away as Edgestar rolled past, having transformed himself into a tentacularly enhanced chaise lounge for the amusement of the blonde bimbettebot, who appeared to be riding him around the room using his unmentionables as a joystick.

“I don’t remember,” she said dreamily. “I woke up here, waiting for my prince—you! I do declare—but Toshiro said he was arranging a surprise for you, and there’d be a party, and then it all went a little vague—”

I can tell you, I was freezing inside as I began to realize just how disoriented she was. “Laura, what’s gotten into you?”

“Not you, not lately!” she said sharply, then lapsed back into dreamy incoherence: “But you came to rescue me, Ralphie, oh! He said you would. I swoon for you! Be my love rocket again!”

I saw a small, silver receptacle on a nearby table, and my heart sank: she’d clearly been at the happy juice. Then I sneaked a peek at the sockets on the back of her neck, under her hairline, and gasped. Someone had planted a hedonism chip and a mandatory override on her! No wonder she was acting out of sorts.

I plucked the ghastly thing out and dropped it on the floor. “Laura, stand up!” I cajoled. “We’ve got to be leaving. There’s a party to be going to, don’t you know? Let’s go.”

“But my—” She wobbled, then toppled against me: “Whoops!” She giggled. “Hic.” I might have pulled the chips out of the fryer but my fish was still thoroughly pickled.

I hadn’t expected this, but Miss Feng had insisted I take a reset pill, just in case. I hated to use the thing on her—or rather, Laura hated it, and this invariably led to a fight afterward—but sobriety is a lesser evil than being trapped in a castle by a mad vizier while subjected to mood-altering implants, what? So I pressed the silver cap against the side of her neck and pushed the button.

Laura’s jaws closed with an audible click, and she tensed in my arms for a second. “Ouch,” she said, very quietly. “You bastard, you know I hate that. What’s going on?”

“You’re on Mars and we’re in a bally fix, that’s what’s going on. This Ibn CutThroat fellow’s a thoroughly bad egg. He’s sneaked a spinal crab onto old Abdul, I think he picked you up because he wants a handle on me, and doubtless that’s why the rest of the Club’s all here—we’d be first to notice a change in our boy Abdul’s behavior, wouldn’t we? The cad’s obviously set up the sticky wicket so he can bowl us all out in one inning.”

“Dear me.” Laura stood up straight and took a step away from me. “Well, then we’d better be going, darling.” She straightened her attire and looked around, raising one sculpted eyebrow at my dishevelment. “Do you know how to get out of here?”

“Certainly.” I took her hand in mine, and led her toward the central lounge. “I’m sure there must be a way out around here somewhere ….”

“Over there,” offered bin-Sawbones, pointing: “you can’t miss it, head for the two hulking eunuchs and the evil vizier.” She pushed me hard in the small of my back. “Sorry, but business is business and when you’re trying to marry the second richest man on Mars you can’t be too picky, eh?”

13. Jeremy Pulls it off

The exit was unfortunately obstructed by Ibn CutThroat and his merry headsmen—with Abdul in tow, glassy-eyed and arms outstretched, muttering about brains. And Ibn CutThroat had spotted us!

One thing I will credit the blighter with: his sense of spectacle was absolutely classical. “Ah, Mister MacDonald!” he cried, menacingly twirling the anti-chemwar vibrissae glued to his upper lip. “How disappointing to see you here! I must confess I hoped you’d have sense enough to stay in your room and keep out of trouble. I suppose now you hope I’m going to tell you all my plans, then lock you in an inadequately secured cell so you can escape? I’m afraid not: I shall simply have you cut off shortly, chop-chop. My game’s afoot, and none will stop it now, for the ineluctable dialectic of history is on my side!”

“I don’t care what your dastardly scheme is, I have a bone to pick with you, my man!” I cried. The two headsmen took a step forward, and Laura clung to me in fear—whether feigned or otherwise I could not tell. “How dare you kidnap my concubine on the eve of a drop! That’s not cricket, or even baseball, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I see you in any of my clubs, even by the tradesmen’s entrance!” Meanwhile, Laura thrust a shapely arm inside my abaya and was fumbling with something in my dinner jacket pocket; but my attention was fixed on the villain before me.

“Clubs.” The word dropped from his lips with stony disinterest. “As if the degenerate recreations of the class enemy would be of any interest to me!” I shuddered: it’s always a bad sign when the hired help starts talking in polysyllables. One of his nostrils flared angrily. “Clubs and sports and jolly capers, that’s all you parasites think of as you gobble down our surplus wealth like the monstrous leeches you are!” I’d struck a nerve, as I could see from the throbbing vein in his temple and the set of his jaw. “Bloated ticks languishing in the lap of luxury and complaining about your parties and fashions while millions slave for your banquets! Bah.” Laura unwrapped her arm from my robe and covered her face, evidently to shield herself from the scoundrel’s accusations. “When we strive to better ourselves you turn your faces away and sneer, and when we give up you use us as beasts of burden! Well, I’ve had enough. It’s time to return your stolen loot to the toiling non-U proletarian masses.”

My jaw dropped. “Dash it all, man, you can’t be serious! Are you telling me you’re a …?”

“Yes,” he grated, his eyes aflame with vindictive glee: “the crisis of capitalism is finally at hand, at long last! It’s about seven centuries and a Great Downsizing overdue, but it’s time to bring about the dictatorship of the non-U and the resurrection of the proletariat! And your friend Abdul al-Matsumoto is going to play a key role in bringing about the final raising of class consciousness by fertilizing the soil of Olympus with the blood of a thousand maidens, and then crown himself Big Brother and institute a reign of terror that will—”

Unfortunately I can’t tell you how the Ibn-Cut Throat Committee for the Revolution intended to proceed, because we were simultaneously interrupted by two different people: namely, by Laura, who extended her shapely hand and spritzed him down with after-shave: and then by Jeremy.

Now, it helps to be aware that harems are not exactly noted for their testosterone-drenched atmosphere. I was, of course, the odd squishie out. Old Edgy was clearly hors de combat or combat des whores (if you’ll strangle my French) and the Toadster was also otherwise engaged, exploring conic sections with the fembot he’d been chasing earlier. But aside from myself and Ibn CutThroat—and, I suppose, Abdul, if he was still at home upstairs what with that crab-thingie plastered to his noggin—they were the only remotely butch people present.

Jeremy had been in smelly, sullen retreat for the past week. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was in musth, that state in which a male mammoth or elephant hates and resents other males because the universe acquires a crystal clarity and his function in life is to … well, Edgestar and Toadsworth got there first, minus the trumpeting and displays of aggression, but I’m sure you understand? There were no other small male mammals present, but Jeremy was well aware of his enemy, and his desperate need to assert his alpha-male dominance before he could go in search of cows to cover—and more importantly, there was one particular scent he associated with the enemy from long mutual acquaintance. His enemy smelled like me. But I was shrouded in a blackly occlusive robe, while Ibn CutThroat had just been doused in my favorite splash. And whatever Jeremy’s other faults, he’s never been slow to jump to a conclusion.

I do not know what passed through the 80 percent of Jeremy’s cranial capacity that serves as target acquisition and fire control, but he made his choice almost instantly and launched himself straight for where Ibn CutThroat’s crown jewels had once resided. Proboscideans are not usually noted for their glide ratio, but, in the weaker than accustomed Martian gravity, Jeremy was positively aerobatic, as he jumped with grace and elegance and tusks, straight for Toshiro’s tushie.

“Tally ho, old boy!” I shouted, giving him the old school best, as Laura took two steps smartly forward and, raising her skirts, daintily kick-boxed headsman number one in the forehead with one of her most pointed assets—for her ten centimeter stiletto heels are not only jolly fine pins, they’re physical extensions of her chrome-plated ankles.

Now I confess that things looked dicey when headsman number two turned on me with his axe and bared his teeth at me. But I’m not the Suzuki of MacDonald for nothing, and I know a thing or two about fighting! I threw the abaya back over my head to free my arms, and pointed Toadsworth’s Inebriator—which he had earlier entrusted to my safekeeping in order to free up a socket for his Inseminator—at the villain. “Drop it! Or I’ll drop you!” I snarled.

My threat didn’t work. The thug advanced on me, and as he raised his blade I discovered to my horror that the Toadster must have some very double-jointed fingers in order to work that trigger. But just as the barber of Baghdad was about to trim my throat, a svelte black silhouette drew up behind him and poured a canister of vile brown ichor over his head! Screaming and burbling imprecations, he sank to the floor clawing at his eyes, just in time for Laura to finish him off with a flamenco stomp.

Miss Feng cleared her throat apologetically as she lowered the empty firkin to the floor. (The brightly painted tiles began to blur and run where its damp rim rested on them.) “Sir might be pleased to note that one has taken the liberty of moving his yacht round to the tradesmen’s entrance and disabling the continental defense array in anticipation of Sir’s departure. Was Sir planning to stay for the bombe surprise, or would he agree that this is one party that he would prefer to cut short?”

I glanced at Ibn CutThroat, who was still writhing in agony under Jeremy’s merciless onslaught, and then at the two pithed headsmen. “I think it’s a damned shame to outstay our welcome at any party, don’t you agree?” (Laura nodded enthusiastically and knelt to tickle Jeremy’s trunk.) “By all means, let’s leave. If you’d be so good as to pour a bucket of cold water over Edgy and the Toadster, I’ll take Abdul in hand and we can drop him off at a discreet clinic where they treat spinal crabs, what-what?”

“That’s a capital idea, Sir. I shall see to it at once.” Miss Feng set off to separate the miscreants from their amorous attachments.

I turned to Laura, who was still tickling Jeremy—who by now was lying on his back, panting—and raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t he sweet?” she sang.

“If you say so. You’re carrying him, though,” I said, ungratefully. “Let’s hie thee well and back to Castle Pookie. This has been altogether too much of the wrong kind of company for me, and I could do with a nightcap in civilized company.”

“Darling!” She grabbed me enthusiastically by the trousers: “and we can watch a replay of your jump together!”

And indeed, to cut a long story short, that’s exactly what we did—but first I took the precaution of locking Jeremy in the second best guest suite’s dungeon with a bottle of port, and gave Miss Feng the night off.

After all, two’s company but three’s jolly confusing, what?

First published: Interzone 37, 1990

Sometimes you have to make speed, not haste. I made twenty kilos and moved it fast. Good old dex is an easy synthesis but the polizei had all the organochemical suppliers bugged; when a speed stash hit the street without any blat they’d be through the audit trail fast. They’d take a cut—my lungs, heart and ribosomes. Only idiots push psychoactives in Paraguay: only idiots or the truly desperate. I burned out via Brazilia and crashed into Ant City. Jet-lagged all the way across Australia, I considered my futures; it was time to move on to something bigger.

My first impression of Ant City was of being roasted, slowly. The blistering humidity was outflow from the huge heat exchangers run by the city reactors. Palm trees in the airport lounge, a rude, chattering spidermonkey loose among the branches. No power, no Ants, a simple equation: I was in Antarctica now, and wondering what the hell to do about it. It was another world out there: I could feel a grating closeness between my shoulder blades, the crush of humanity around me.

Alleyways of light lured me through the customs interface, briefing me on local lores. Digital fingers rifled my flesh with radiation but I was clean and mean—nobody with any sense takes bugs into the ant farm. It’s a ticket to redirection, and I need my inputs remoulding like I need a concience. My scams are all cortex-ridden, locked in by mnemonics until I’m ready to bring them out like a card sharp. Sleight of memory. The security goon smiled sweetly, her eyes asking me if I was really alive, and w aved me past the desk.

The shuttleport is half a klick above Ant City proper; I took the lift down. It was a medium sized lift, with only a medium-sized shopping mall. Shop, shop, expend, expend. A glaring incitement to—

I shut my eyes and as I was trying to pin down a plan this kid tried to lift the chips from out of my skull. Which was his bad luck: I didn’t have any. I opened my eyes and shifted my grip on his wrists so he had to face me.

“Nice way to greet tourists,” I said. He squirmed fearfully, muscles like metallic glass beneath his warm brown skin. “You know what I should do with you?” He looked as if he didn’t, and wasn’t interested in finding out either. He’d forgotten to feed the cat or something else important. I looked at the inside of his wrist; the node was there.

“You eat shit,” he said. I glared back at him.

“Yeah, every day just like you. I should bust your fingers. You want to tell me why not?”

“No,” said the kid, looking like trouble warmed over the next morning; “you break my fingers then my friend come and break yours.” He managed to ignore me and look contemptuous concurrently. He couldn’t have been topside of twelve years without maturity-mods. Neomacho, cued-up by background video. For the first time I looked at his tribals. He wore a one piece suit, ice camouflage militia-surplus. His wrist node was well-worn. Classic case of heroin from six years, riding the horse out from under the shad ow of future shock; it’s the kids who suffer most, these days.

“That would be kind of a bad idea,” I said, “for your friend. I got no chips. My wallet’s armed; tell your sister to put it back before she gets gluey fingers. You want me to give you some money?”

“You what?” said the kid. I felt butterfly fingers slip something that buzzed into my pocket; it stopped buzzing when it sniffed me again. I’m touchy about where my wallet goes without me.

“I repeat myself,” I said; “you want to earn some money?” I leaned forward. More suspicion.

“You want I should go to bed with you?”

“No. I want some names, nothing else. Like who shifts your stuff.”

His face cleared, magically. “You want some?” he asked, happily. “I sell you—”

“No,” I said, “I just want a name.”

“Oh.” He looked disappointed. Then, “are you polizei?”

I weighed my chances. “Would you believe if I said no?”

“No.” His eyes narrowed.

“Then get lost.” I gave him a push and he went. His sister had vanished into an open shopfront selling gauzy somethings under spotlights; for the moment at least they were zero factors in my equation. I stood alone for a while, wondering what I looked like to the local talent and whether I needed a new line; some nagging doubt kept telling me that I was getting too old for this game. Trying to quell my worry I crossed to the observation deck and looked out.

The mall was descending towards a park with a lake around it, and a landscaped garden at one end of the lake. Ant City floated like a submarine in an inclusion of melt-water beneath the ice cap. Kept from freezing by the tokamaks, the water acted as a buffer against icequakes; also as central heating. The lift was just now dropping out of the roof of the city, and the view was dizzying; the city curved with the horizon. Suddenly I had a sense of imminence, of seeing a new frontier opening up before me eve n though the underground was actually closing in for real, like the dizzying megatonnes of ice overhead: it was shaping up to be a classic revelation. The kind of sensation you get when a new idea is coming up hot and hard. I took stock of my situation—

So consider me: male, self-contained, intelligent, age twenty-seven. The product of an expensive corporate shockwave education, designed to surf over new developments on the cutting edge of R&D. I’d freebased from my corporate owners: only time and independence had cost me my flexibility. I had bank accounts in Liechtenstein and Forties Field, no commitments, but I was unable to access the big company AI’s, my knowledge was going rusty in the face of informational explosion; I was staring career burnout i n the face at thirty. I had pushed every synthetic narcotic I could make, but only in small-to-medium scale production: I had always managed to skip out before the blowback. Hit and run. I didn’t use them myself, but supplied a demand; I made people happy for a living. What could be better than that? I liked to consider myself to be a moral anarchist, Kropotkins’ heir. Only where was I going to go next?

There’s always time for another drug or craze; time for it to reach peak saturation, to maximize the number of receptors … every drug has its day! But in this age I was slowly turning into a classicist; I sold old clean shit with none of your new hoodoo metabolic mania to retool the human genome for optimal thrust. That made me techo-obsolescent. Things were moving too fast for people like me to keep up; not every dealer wanted to turn their skull into a gene-machine for the recombinant receptor-affinit y tuning that passed for heavy shit these days. Frankly, I was lousy at genetic programming; as likely to come up with a new disease as a saleable product. But there was a blindingly obvious solution staring me in the face, and I knew just where to find it; all I needed was a link.

I found a phone and used it to find a list of rented accomodation; I chose a flat, furnished, four rooms, monthly payments, good view of the park. If I hadn’t been speeding a week ago it would have cost an arm and a leg, or at least a kidney. Now all I had to do was make the right contact; and that, for someone of my background, was easy.

We met in a cafe on the edge of a drained swimming pool, where the penguins jostled excitedly for scraps from the tables. She looked nervous, which was to be expected. I was, too. I didn’t even know how much she wanted for the job! Just that she was as desperate as I was.

“What you’re looking for … “ she said; “dangerous, you know? The temporal annealing processes aren’t really mapped out very well, and the moles are kinda touchy about nosing it about. I mean, this is military surplus, right?” She dragged on the hookah nervously, watching the surveillance cameras for blind-spots. Concentrating on the long-lost lover bullshit for the digital polizei, I smiled tenderly before I replied.

“Look,” I said, “this is SDI spin-off material, right? After the third world war came out biological all the Pentagon defence contracts lapsed, leaving you with a heap of junk and no budget, right? So why not use it to make some quick cash? Face it, you’re damn near starving. Now I—” I leaned back in my chair—“I’m a potentia customer. With currency. The PERV was designed to let them know when to zap missiles before they torched off, and the Interactive Reality Transformer was built to open a hole in spacetime. So why can’t you turn them into a time machine for me? I’m willing to pay! And I mean to say, if the old Unistat government trusted that rig with their lives, what can go wrong with it now?”

She coughed. “Lots,” she said drily. “Just look what happened to them. You’re forgetting that this stuff was never used … only tested in simulation. Nobody ever did get round to firing smart rocks through a time window, did that escape your attention? This is highly, uh, dangerous.”

I sighed. “Look,” I said, “for the final time, that’s your speciality. Not mine! I mean, I like the idea of supporting higher education, I really do, but I can’t afford to throw money away without any comeback on the investment, right? But if you and your university department do this for me, I’ll see about .. uh, endowing a Chair in perpetuity, maybe?”

“The College authorities might be doubtful about naming a chair after a semilegal drug dealer,” she said dubiously. It was the first sign of her fall from grace; so she was desperate! I pushed on.

“Yeah,” I said, “but you can call it whatever you want. I paid for your flight here, didn’t I? When was the last time your government gave you any money for anything? Look, just do this for me and I’ll make an endowment you won’t forget.”

“Um, right,” she said, almost smacking her lips. Then she made her decision; the right one. “Okay. Fly up to Oxford in the first week of next month. I’ll have one of our post-docs meet you in; we should be ready to test by then.” A faint cloud crossed her face. “You’ve no idea how bad things have got up there,” she added softly; “You were a good student, on that exchange program. Try not to get shot before we’re ready, right?”

“Sure professor,” I said, waving for the waiter. “That’s, like, one of my life’s ambitions.”

She unwound a bit. “What’s the other?”

I grinned widely. “To fuck Ronald Reagan.”

While I was waiting for the call from the Hawking Laboratory I crashed out in front of the video, reading graphic novels and scanning reruns of twentieth century docudramas. The condenser burbled in the makeshift fume cupboard I’d built in the bathroom and the gene-spinners clicked intermittently as I soaked up Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev. Creatures of another era, when the universe was just about beginning to fill up and society was teetering on the edge of a baroque tomorrow; fasci nating cutouts in a past that was truly another country. Twenty years earlier still everything was so naive, so pre-technological; but the timezone I’d picked was already on the brink of today, unsophisticated bug-ridden systems powering up for the remorseless march into a post-modernist present. People were waking up to changes, beginning to notice the end of industrialism. Yeah, I figured I could hack it; gather protective coloration, not look too out of place, but be so far ahead of the p ack th t I could hit them with a dose of double-barrelled futurism and make my getaway clean-heeled and rich enough to retire …

“Just say NO,” I mimicked, and threw an empty beer can at the screen. Good jokes are made of this, I thought. Then the phone coughed.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“It’s for you,” it said, extending the handset. I took it and listened. “Twenty mil? That’s steep … okay, yeah, so it’s never been done before … how much? Oh, right. I’ll figure a way … day after tomorrow? Fine. See ya.” The phone grabbed its’ handset back and wiped it furiously. I tried to stare it down, but it didn’t seem to notice. In my experience when domestic appliances get uppity the only answer is to shoot them; but I didn’t have a gun on me so I leaned back and thought irritably abou t what the good professor’s news instead.

The weight restriction on the time jump was going to be tight. It worked out at ten kilograms, plus my good self. That’s not much, is it? Clothing, a portable kit, some raw materials—not much. Compute-power no problem; you can only cram so many mainframes into a false tooth, but back where I was going even one of them was going to give me an unfair edge. The real problem was going to be currency for investment. I frowned. Credit? Did they have credit in those days? Or did they have to carry metal coins around? What could I use instead?

Ah. Good idea. Why not do it right now? I sat up and grinned wildly, then staggered through to the bathroom. My gene-machine was sitting on the floor, humming to itself. I bent down and plugged myself in, figuring out the ideal stash. Something they’d never check for; something better than money, a dirt cheap commodity to vector on the market. Like the goose that laid the golden eggs, I was going to make a one-man heroin fortune in the eighties! I was going to be so successful the market pri ce was going to bomb! Yes, I’d seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The pot of yellow snow …

Yellow snow is a handle for a kind of cheap dealer shit; nobody falls for it these days. All it takes is a gene-machine and the nerve to use it on yourself. You engineer a retrovirus that makes a minor alteration to your enkephalin receptor’s tertiary structure, thus changing it’s substrate affinity; then you engineer another that adds a small peptide tag to the stuff your own receptors get off on, so that they match. Customise your pain/pleasure complex, right? That leaves you free to use another ‘virus, one that makes some of your peripheral tissue—pancreas, say—go into endorphin overdrive, pumping out the real McCoy in such volume that you literally piss heroin analogs away whenever you go to the toilet. Now—this is the cool bit—you add some acetic acid to neutralise all that ammonia and urea, then you partition it out in organic solvents and dissolve it in a sugar solution and re-crystalise. You get natural heroin in your kitchen sink! Indistinguishable from gold triangle authentic, exc pt that it’s better. Only trouble is, there’s a certain stigma attached to its source, hence the handle yellow snow; nobody wants to be pissed on by their dealer, hey? Anyway, these days customs computers don’t look out for hidden stashes; they’re on the scan for designer genes. So any time after the naughty ‘nineties yellow snow would be a nonstarter. But where/when I was going …

“Just say no,” I mimicked. Then I slurped another beer can. “I’m gonna piss on you, all, junkies!” Good joke for an anarchist businessman, teetering on the edge of burnout, to ride the elevator back to where it all began. I wondered why nobody had done this before; it seemed so cool!

Maybe I was going to find out.

I hitched a Zeppelin ride for Ancient Britannia to give me time to assemble my time-travel survival kit; also time to take it slow and easy and get my head screwed on in preparation for the jump. I locked myself in my first-class stateroom and ignored the long, stately cruise across icy wastes and the ocean gulf to the Cape of Good Hope. The passengers were socialising frenetically, holding balls and orgies in the gas-cell auditoria; I didn’t need it right then. I don’t like have people rammed down my thr oat, en masse: I need to retreat into my personal space, to maintain a distance between myself and the burning wilderness of raw nerve endings that constitutes a global culture for ten billion naked apes.

As we crossed the Azanian coast I went on a shopping spree. The latest databases from Grolier; a repo’d personal dialysis machine from Squibb; a very compact mainframe from Bull-Siemens. Everything to be collected when I got where I was going. In a mail-order feeding-frenzy I ordered anything I thought I could use that weighed less than fifty grams; then I crashed out for a relaxed sybaritic binge, dragging on designer silks for a bar-crawl around the kilometer-long airship. There was a lot of entertainme nt to be had, watching the desperate writhings of the jet-stream set on their slow intercontinental cruises through the new millennium; being rich beyond belief they travelled as slowly as possible, in order to flaunt their leisure time. As a handsome dowager told me on her way through my bed and my affections: “But dear, only the poor have to hurry to keep up! Speed is no substitute for real life.” No, but it sure could enhance my credit status …

A week to cover fourteen thousand kilometres and we were on final approach into one of the main British airports. One which still had a runway. I shook my head, looking down through the transparent deck. I was going to get something unique out of that? Even the ruins looked dingy.

The arrival zone was dirty yellow; beggars displayed their wounds beside a kitchen selling curry from the pot. They had a scared-looking goat tethered nearby to show how fresh the meat was. I pulled on my shades and walked fast, kept walking until I came to a concourse. Somebody grabbed me; I looked round.

“Mister Agonistes?” I saw naked fear in his gaunt face. Polizei leaned on their guns outside, sniffing for the spoor-signs of money. I nodded. “I’m from the research centre; I was to take you to the laboratory … “

“That’s good,” I said. “Where’s our chopper?”

“Our what? Oh … I’m sorry. We couldn’t possibly afford one,” he said lamely. Gaunt beneath threadbare tweed clothing: The public rice ration had gone downhill, I noted. “We could get a rickshaw … if you could pay … “

I paid.

The lab was a decrepit concrete cube, unpainted for decades, glass-faced windows nailed over with boards and a makeshift wind-turbine bolted to the roof. Only the satellite downlinks were clean, desperately polished to the shimmery finish of metal that was about to wear through. He led me inside, up a staircase in which trash had drifted deep. “We can only run the lift for two hours a day,” he apologized; “the turbine is for the big stuff.” He glanced over his shoulder furtively, as if trying to guess how much meat there was on my bones; I shivered. Maybe I’d grown too fat on the airship, and too slow.

“Here we are,” he said, pushing open a fire door at the top of the stairs. “Here’s where we stored the IRT modules. The PERV is hooked into our system next door; the stuff you ordered … it’s all here.”

“Where’s Professor Illich?” I asked.

He shrugged uncomfortably. “She’ll be here soon,” he said. “I’d better go now … “

He retreated through another door and I took stock. Everything I’d ordered, plus a cheap nylon rucksack of dubious vintage. I searched through it, assembling and ordering, then opened my wallet. Three small glass vials lined up like so many menacing soldiers; diseases of the imagination. I hoped I’d debugged them properly. I sat down on the dusty floor beneath a hulking piece of machinery that resembled a half-melted fusion reactor and contemplated them. My future: the past. I sat for a long time before I pulled out my works and fired them up.

Professor Illich arrived half an hour later; she looked just the same as she had in Ant city, except that now the hungry eagerness underlying her veneer of professionalism was nakedly obvious. I imagined her rotting in these dank, woodwormed buildings for decades, chances of the Nobel prize slipping through fingers without the financial grasp to obtain that vital extra funding … I kicked aside the empty vials. They clattered off the concrete as I stood up.

“Does it work?” I asked.

She smiled tensely, and rested one hand on the smooth ceramic side of the malnourished reactor. “It works,” she said. “One Probabilistic Eigenstate Reorganisation Viewer, in full working order.” She looked over her shoulder; “Steve … go tell Anwar to power up the Cray, there’s a good boy.” She turned back to me. “The account,” she said.

“Here. You tested it?” I kept my fingers on the folio as she paused.

“A cat. We sent it back six months then retrieved it. Alive.”

“How long was the delay?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Six milliseconds.”

“Six milliseconds!” Incredulous, I nearly grabbed the megadollar envelope back from her. She nearly exploded.

“Look, mister Agonistes, we’ve gone to all this trouble for you ..! Don’t you know anything about temporal annealing? There are limits to how far we can test it. Spacetime is a continuum, an interwoven fabric of superstrings; you can unravel it for a moment and see through to a new pattern … then it re-weaves itself, anneals into a new structural arangement with minimal potential energy. The wave-function always collapses—you ever heard of Schroedinger’s cat?”

“Yeah!” I said. “But six milliseconds?”

“You wanted a trip into the past. We wanted to prove that you could make it alive, not prove that you could make it and come back as well. That’s what you asked for, right? We had to go on half-rations for a week to afford the power for the one trial! There was no second chance. As it is we know you’ll make it alive, but there’s no guarantee that the past you come out in is our past—it might be another configuration, another local minimum in the energy diagram. We’ll try to bring you back … “ I held up a hand wearily.

“Okay.” I turned and looked up at the IRT module, squatting on concrete blocks streaked with rust like some prehistoric lunar module with cancer. I was loaded; I felt light-headed, almost feverish, as the retroviruses went to work in my brain and pancreas. “I’ll take it,” I said. “Try to bring me back one year downstream and I’ll double your money. After the event. You know why I’m trying to make this trip?”

She nodded mutely, trying to contain herself. What I’d just said—twenty million pounds more would keep her and her department running for ten years. Ethics could take a back seat for that kind of hope. I almost felt sorry for her for a minute.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s do it. Where do I go?”

She looked at me critically. “Here, in this circle.” White spot on concrete, right underneath something that bore an unpleasant resemblance to the exhaust nozzle of a big rocket motor. “Remember … when the eigenstate collapses, there are no guarantees. You might wind up in our past … then again, if there’s a local entropic minimum you might find yourself in a universe which has changed subtly. Less entropy; more information. That’s the curve, you see, randomness versus order. We’ll dragnet for you a y ear down the time stream from your target—April first, eighty four, wasn’t it?—as long as you keep holding onto this tag—” she passed a gadget to me that looked a bit like a quaint digital watch “—and hope for the best. Jump in thirty seconds ..”

With that she retreated rapidly, leaving me standing in a dusty circle with a small pack on my back and a feeling that maybe I’d been tricked, when there was a low growling noise and the naked light bulb dimmed, flickered and went out. Violet shadows seemed to flicker at the edges of my vision, dancing across the shadowy form of the IRT: then PERV counted down to the launch window, and in a sudden burst of shocking blue flashed out—

Darkness. Feeling giddy, I staggered, and kicked something that fell over with a terrifyingly loud clatter. Where was I? Fumbling in semi-panic I felt cold walls beneath my fingertips, then the inside of a door—

Light. Leaving the broom-cupboard I stumbled downstairs. The door: fresh green paint glared at me beneath recessed fluorescent lighting. AN ALARM WILL SOUND … I pushed through. Outside, the grass was neatly mown and the concrete apron was full of archaic-looking vehicles with squared-off edges and too much metal. Elation seized me; I’d made it! I headed for the street and reached a bus shelter—unvandalized—where I put my pack down. Fumbling, I pulled on my datashades and eyeballed a glittering cur sor into the middle of my visual field. There were few people about, and nobody seemed to be staring at me; I looked round, correlating visual parameters. Everything seemed to be in order, there were no visible anachronisms; it felt as if time had healed all wounds, as if the clock had wound back to deposit me gently in the tail-end of the last century when civilisation was a function of humanity rather than machines. I felt safe in my uniform of jeans and sweatshirt and backpack: camouflage for the urba fox. Safe and sly and hungry, ready to take on the forces of this sleepy little city … I began to walk, a spring in my step.

Street corner shops bustled with grey people in archaic clothing: mass production fashion victims filled the mall like so many mannequins of times gone by. Remember how everyone used to look the same? Vehicle traffic was thicker here/then, as I discovered when I crossed the road. Polizei … I tensed, then realised that there were no guns and I could actually see their eyes. There were no beggars, either. The skin on the back of my neck crawled. Without beggars, how do you know how rich you are? My shades were slowly caking over with graphics as their sensors correlated textual overspill, scanning ads for familiar campaigns. I hadn’t expected it to be quite like this, quite so disorientating. Not only did everyone wear more or less the same stereotyped costumes, they also seemed to be on an economic par with one another; as if poverty didn’t exist at all here.

I cancelled my video program and took my glasses off. People seemed to focus around me, avoiding contact, eyes downcast. I felt sweaty, in the first bout of a low grade fever as my immune system targeted surplus viral vectors. Disseminating the news, data for the public … how did they do it? Oh, archaic paper form. Remember … I dug into one pocket for my precious supply of antique coinage. It was time to buy a newssheet.

The shop was wired, but the systems were so primitive as to be untouchable; no EPOS magic touch here, no files to tamper with for a bonus redirection of products. Anyway, I wasn’t a black disc merchant to begin with; what was I thinking of? I looked at the racks and selected a fat-looking wedge of paper, then paid for it. The assistant—human—looked at me curiously, but was too busy with other customers to bother me; I nodded distractedly and strolled outside into the sunlight and shoppers.

Putting my datashades on I began to read the headlines, leaving my machines to deduce the social context from the references. Argentina was protesting to the UN about something called the Malvinas; there was widespread concern over a disaster at some place near Kiev; inflation was coming down. The computer pondered for a bit then reported a classic match. This was the past, okay. The incredible sense of elated freedom returned—it was true! I was going to make it! Burnout reversed by the futurist accel eration; coming from a time when progress was incremented in microseconds, how could I fail in a time where product lifecycles came and went in years?

This was going to be good. Shark-hungry for profits I glanced round, looking for nightlife stakeouts to make my pitch from; haunt a small market and connect with the local yardie zone-boss. Show them the colour of profit; yellow snow. Flash out snowflakes of sugar-coated ecstasy on a captive market at ten eurodollars—pounds—a hit. Set up a still in a cheap rented flat; drink, eat, refine a hundred grammes of peptides a day. Then invest the profits for my triumphant return; computer-assisted share bu ying for artificially intelligent deals. I looked to the finance pages, seeking commodities in which I knew I could make a profit, and that’s where I finally noticed the dissonance. Marihuana and opium futures were going down for the third successive year …

It’s been six months now.

I spent my first night, exhausted and hungry, on a park bench. Junkies shot up around me, cheap shit and clean needles available in a brown bag from the off-license stores; I watched, envying them their high, until one of them staggered over to me glowering and shaking a wobbly fist as he mouthed inaudible curses at me.

I began to notice signs beyond the financial pages. There’s less crime, less moralizing; less fear. Less wealth, too. All the narcotics have been legal since ‘thirty-three, when prohibition crashed in America and the rest of the world followed suit. Suicide is legal, too, and abortion, and anything you want to do to yourself in private. These people are so free! I should have guessed; what Professor Illich said about local minima in the curve of entropy, incomplete annealing of the wave-function, a time when things haven’t gone quite so far downhill as in my own days’ past …

I remember pissing in the gutter; pissing yellow gold that sparkled in the cold sunlight. But what use is the Midas touch in a world of floating currencies? For a while my urine ran red, an unexpected side-effect of the infections; I had a terrible headache, and my teeth chattered continuously. But I’m better now. Much better. Got over my fear of brain damage; I’m not that incompetent.

Shit may be legal but there is a Problem with it. I heard the Prime Minister talking about it on the news yesterday. The Police want Something to be Done. I’ll second that.

After a week, the Salvation Army took me in. They deal with a lot of junkies, try to rehabilitate them halfheartedly. I went overboard on the old ‘seen the light’ number, sang hallelujah! to their choir and mopped the floor after supper. They seem to like it.

Anyway, I have seen the light. Now I sleep in the hostel, clean floors in the evening, and parade the streets with a sandwich board by day. DRUGS ARE THE DEVIL’S TOOL, it says in big letters. I made it myself. I sleep on a narrow, hard bunk bed and dream up scams, but it’s so very hard to figure out how to turn a megadollar profit when you’re as broke as I am now; with no ID I can’t even claim social security benefits. Kind of embarrassing. Meanwhile, I keep on with the only scam I know, pis sing in the wind. You never know, I might get lucky. They might re-criminalize it tomorrow …

01.23.06

What finally wakes Huw is the pain in his bladder. His head is throbbing, but his bladder has gone weak on him lately—if he doesn’t get up and find the john soon he’s going to piss himself, so he struggles up from a sump-hole of somnolence.

He opens his eyes to find that he’s lying face-down in a hammock. The hammock sways gently from side to side in the hot stuffy air. Light streams across him in a warm flood from one side of the room; the floor below the string mesh is gray and scuffed and something tells him he isn’t on land any more. Shit, he thinks, pushing stiffly against the edge and trying not to fall as the hammock slides treacherously out from under him. Why am I so tired?

His bare feet touch the ground before he realises he’s bare-ass naked. He shakes his head, yawning. His veins feel as if all the blood has been replaced by something warm and syrupy and full of sleep. Drugs? he think, blinking. The walls—

Three of them are bland, gray sheets of structural plastic with doors in them. The fourth is an outward-leaning sheet of plexiglass or diamond or something. And a very, very long way below him he can see wave-crests.

Huw gulps, his pulse speeding. Something strange is lodged in the back of his throat: he stifles a panicky whistle. There in a corner is his battered kit-bag, and a heap of travel-worn clothing. He leans against the wall. There’s got to be a crapper somewhere nearby, hasn’t there? The floor, now he’s awake enough to pay attention, is thrumming with a low bass chord from the engines and the waves are sloshing by endlessly below. As he picks at a dirty shirt a battered copper teapot rolls away from beneath it. “Shitfuckpissbugger,” he swears, memories flooding back. Then he picks the teapot up and gives it a resentful rub.

“Wotcher, mate!” The djinn that materializes above the teapot is a hologram, so horribly realistic that for a moment Huw forgets his desperate need for a piss.

“Fuck you, too, Ade,” he mumbles.

“What kind of way to welcome yer old mate is that, sunshine?” Hologram-Adrian’s wearing bush jacket, pith helmet and shorts, a shotgun slung over one shoulder. “How yer feeling, anyway?”

“I feel like shit.” Huw rubs his forehead. “Like I’ve been shat. Where am I? Where’s Bonnie gotten to?”

“Flying the bloody ship. We can’t all sleep. Don’t worry, she’s just hunky-dory. How about you?”

“Flying.” Huw blinks. “Where the hell—”

“You’ve been sleeping like a baby for a good long while.” Ade looks smug. “Don’t worry, we got you out of Libya one jump ahead of Judge Rosa. You won’t be arriving in Charleston, South Carolina for another four or five hours, why’n’t you kick back and smoke some grass? I left at least a quarter of your stash—”

“South Carolina?” Huw screams, nearly dropping the teapot. “Unclefucking sewage filter, what do you want to send me there for?”

“Ah, pecker up. They’re your co-religionists, aren’t they? You won’t find a more natural, flesh-hugging bunch on the planet than the Jesonians who got left behind in the Geek Rapture. Hell, they’re the kind of down-home Luddites what make you look like Buck Rogers.”

“They’re radioactive,” Huw wails. “And I’m an atheist. They burn atheists at the stake, don’t they?” He rummages through his skanky clothes, turning them inside out and outside in as he searches for something not so a-crawl that he’d be unwilling to have it touch his nethers.

“Oh, hardly,” says Adrian. “Just get a little activated charcoal and iodine in your diet and memorize the Lord’s prayer and you’ll be fine, sonny.”

Huw ends up tying a t-shirt around his middle like a diaper and seizing the teapot, which has developed a nasty rattle in its guts.

“Breakfast and toilet. Not in that order. Sharp.”

“That door there,” says the tiny Adrian.

The zeppelin turns out to be a maryceleste, crewed by capricious iffrits whose expert-systems were trained by angry, resentful trade-unionists in ransom for their pensions. The amount of abuse required to keep the ship oncourse and to keep its commissary and sanitary systems in good working order is heroic.

Huw opens the door to the bridge, clutching his head, to find Bonnie perched on the edge of a vast, unsprung chair, screaming imprecations at the air. She breaks off long enough to scream at him. “GET THE FUCK OFF MY BRIDGE!” she hollers, eyes wild, fingers clawed into the arm-rests.

Huw leaps back a step, dropping the huge, suspicious sausage he’s been gnawing at. His diaper unravels as he stumbles.

Bonnie snorts, then gets back control. “Aw, sorry darlin’. I’m hopped up on hateballs. It’s the only way I can get enough FUCKING SPLEEN to MAKE THIS BUGGERY BOLLOCKY SCUM-SUCKING SHIP go where I tell it.” She sighs and digs around the seat cushion, coming up with a puffer which she inserts briefly into the corner of each eye. The tension melts out of her skinny shoulders and corded neck as Huw watches, alarmed.

“You look like a Welsh Ghandi,” she tells him, giggling. Her lips loll loose; she stands and and rolls over toward him with a half-drunken wobble. Then she throws her arms around his neck and fastens her teeth on his shoulder, worrying at his trapezium.

The teapot whistles appreciatively. Bonnie gives it a savage kick that sends it skittering back into the corridor.

“You need a wash, beautiful,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be microbial. Nearly out of fresh water. Tub’s up one level.”

“Gak.” Huw replies.

“‘Snot so bad.”

“It’s bugs,” he says.

“You’re hosting about three kilos of bugs right now. What’re a few more? Go.”

Huw picks up his sausage. “You know where we’re going, right?”

“Oh aye,” she says, her eyes gleaming. She whistled a snatch of “America the Beautiful.”

“And you approve?”

“Always wanted to see it.”

“They’ll burn you at stake!”

She picks up a different puffer and spritzes each eye, then bares her teeth in a savage rictus. “I’d like to see them fucking try. BATHE, YOU CRETINOUS STENCHPOT!”

Huw settles himself among the soup of heated glass beads and bacteria and tries not to think of a trillion microorganisms gnawing away at his dried skin and sweat.

“Bastard scum bastard,” he mumbles at the battered teapot—a one-time host for a cultural guidance iffrit to the People’s Magical Libyan Jamahiriya, and now evidently hacked by Ade and his international cadre of merry pranksters. “Why South Carolina? G’wan, you. Why there, of all places?”

He isn’t expecting a reply, but the teapot crackles for a moment then a translucent holo of Ade appears in the air above it, wearing a belly-dancer’s outfit and a sheepish expression. “Yer wot? Ah, sorry mate. Feckin’ trade union iffrit’s trying to make an alpha buffer attack on my sprites.” The image flickers then solidifies, this time wearing a bush jacket and a pith helmet. “Like, why South Carolina? To break the embargo, Huw. Ever since the snake-handlers crawled outta the swamps and figured the Rapture had been and gone and left ’em behind they’ve been waiting for a chance at salvation, so I figured I’d give them you.” Ade’s likeness grins wickedly as tiny red horns sprout from his forehead. “You and the backchannel to the ambassador from the Cloud. They want to meet God so bad I figured you’d maybe like to help the natives along.”

“But they’re radioactive!” Huw says, shaking his fist at the teapot with a rattle of yeast-scented beads. “And they’re lunatics! They won’t talk to the rest of the world because we’re corrupt degenerate satanists, they claim sovreignty over the entire solar system even though they can’t even launch a sodding rocket, and they burn dissidents to death by wiring them up to transformers! Why would I want to help them?”

“Because your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to open them up to the outside universe again.” Ade smirks slyly at him from atop the teapot.

“Fuck.” Huw subsides in a fizzing bath of beads, with are beginning to itch. Moving them around brings relief, although it’s making him a little piebald. “You want to infect the Fallen Baptist Congregations with godvomit, you be my guest—just let me get the fuck away before the shooting starts.”

“That’s the idea,” says Ade, scratching his beard absent-mindedly. “Bonnie’s one of our crack agents. We don’t wanna risk one of our best prophets-at-large in a backwater, mate. You’ll be safe as houses.”

Huw thinks of Sandra Lal, the house of the month club, and her minisledge, and shudders. His arse is beginning to itch as the bacteribeads try to squeeze through his puckered ringpiece: it’s time to get out. “If this goes wrong, so help me I am going to make you eat this teapot,” he says, picking it up. He shakes his head, then he heads downstairs to find Bonnie again and see if she’s come down far enough off the hateballs to appreciate how squeaky-clean Ade’s messiah manque is feeling.

The big zeppelin lurches and buzzes as it chases its shadow across the sandy beaches and out of control neomangrove jungle that has run wild across the gulf coast. The gasoline mangroves spin their aerofoil leaves in the breeze, harnessing the wind power and pumping long-chain terpenoids into their root systems, which ultimately run all the way to the hydrocarbon refineries near Beaufort. A long-obselete relic of the feverish cross-fertilization of the North American biotechnology biz with the dinosaurs of the petroleum age, they ought by rights to have made the US the world’s biggest source of refined petrochemicals—except that since the Singularity, nobody’s buying. Oil slicks glisten in the sunlight as they spread hundreds of kilometres out into the Atlantic, where they feed a whole deviant ecosystem of carbon-sequestrating petroplankton maintained by the continental quarantine authority.

Huw watches apprehensively from the observation window at the front of the bridge as Bonnie curses and swears at the iffrits, who insist that air traffic control is threatening to shoot them down if they don’t steer away from the land of the Chosen People. Bonnie’s verbal abuse of the ship ascends to new heights of withering scorn, and he watches her slicken her eyeballs with anger-up until they look like swollen golf-balls, slitted and watering. The ship wants to turn itself around, but she’s insisting that it plough on.

“Hail ground control NOW! you fucking sad, obsolete piece of shit, so that for once, JUST! FOR! ONCE! you will have done one genuinely USEFUL! thing for SOMEONE!” she snarls with a cough, hacking up excess angry-up that has trickled back through her sinuses. She picks up the mic and begins to stalk the bridge like an attack-comedian scouting the audience for fat men with thin dates to single out in her routine.

“This is Charleston Ground Control repeating direct order to vacate sovereign Christian States of America airspace immediately or be blown out of the sky and straight to Satan. Charleston Ground Control out.” The voice has the kind of robotic-slick Californian accent that tells Huw straightaway that he’s talking to a missile guidance computer rather than a human being.

“HAIL! HIM! AGAIN!” Bonnie yelled, hopping from foot to foot. “Arrogant Jesus-sucking sack of SARS, scabrous toddler-fondler, religion-addled motherfucker,” she continues, punching out with the mic for punctuation.

“Bonnie,” Huw says, quietly, flinching back from her candy-apple-red eyeballs.

“WHAT?”

“Maybe you should let me talk with them?” he says.

“I am PERFECTLY! capable of negotiating with MICROCEPHALIC! GOD! BOTHERING! LUDDITES!” she screeches.

No you’re not, Huw thinks, but he doesn’t even come close to saying it. In the state she’s in, she could lift a car and set it down on top of a baby, a reversal of the kind of hysterical strength he’s heard that mothers possess at moments of extreme duress. “Yes, you are,” he says. “But you need to fly the ship.”

She glares at him for a moment, fingernails dug so hard into her palms that drops of blood spatter to the flooring. He’s sure that she’s going to charge him, and then zeppelin changes direction with a lurch. So she throws the mic at his head, viciously—he ducks but it still beans him on the rebound—and goes back to screaming at the ship.

Huw staggers off the bridge and sinks back against one of the bare corridor-bulkheads—the zep that Adrian’s adventurers stole is made doubly cavernous by the absense of most of its furnishings.

“This is Airship Lollipop to Charleston Ground Control requesting clearance to land in accordance with the Third International Agreement on Aeronautical Cooperation,” he says into the mic, using his calmest voice. He’s pretty sure he’s heard of the Third International Agreement, though it may have been the Fourth. And it may have been on Aeronautical Engineering. But that there is an agreement he is sure of, and he’s pretty sure that the Christian States of America is no more up to date on international affairs than he is.

“Airship Lollipop, y’all welcome to land here, but we’s having trouble argumentating with this-here strategic defense battle computer that thinks y’all are goddless commie-fag euroweasels. I reckon you’se got maybe two minutes to repent before it blows y’all to Jesus.”

Huw breaths a sigh of relief: at least there’s a human in the loop. “How do we convince it we’re not, uh, godless commie-fag euroweasels?” He asks, suppressing a twinge as he realises that in fact he and Bonnie meet about 130 percent of those criteria between them.

“That’s easy, y’all just gotta have a little faith,” says the airhead on the traffic control desk.

Huw grits his teeth and looks through the doorway at Bonnie, whose ears appear to be smoking. He puts ahand over the mike: “does this thing carries missiles?” he calls to her.

“FUCKING fucking arse shit bollocks—” Bonnie hammers on a control panel off to one side. It bleeps plaintively, the ancient chime of servers rebooting: “—‘ing COUNTERMEASURES suite!”

“Hasta la vista, sinners,” drawls the missile launch computer in a thick gubernatorial Austro-Californian accent. Two pinpricks of light blossom on the verdant horizon of the gasoline mangroves, then a third that rapidly expands into a fireball as the antique pre-Cloud hypersonic missile bus explodes on launch. The surviving Patriots stab towards them and there’s a musical chime from the countermeasures control panel. Huw feels a moment of gut-slackening terror. “You’ve got mail!” the countermeasures system announces in the syrupy tones of a kindergarten teacher. “AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have new voice mail, which will follow automatically after this message from our sponsors: click the pink furry button to access our extensive range of introductory offers, the pink fuzzy button to access our customer accounts database, the pink lozenge to see how AOL can help you—”

Bonnie thumps something on the panel, muscles like whipcord standing out on her arm as she glares at the oncoming missiles. Huw backs away. She might actually be a communicant, he realises in absolute horror. She might actually be an AOL screen name—she’s mad enough … These days, tales of what AOL did with their users during the Singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

“Acknowledged,” says the possessed countermeasures suite, in the hag-ridden tones of a computer that has surrendered to the dark side. For a moment nothing seems to happen, then one of the onrushing pinpricks of light veers towards the other. Paths cross then diverge in a haze of debris. “You’ve got mail,” it sighs.

“Don’t read it!” Huw screams, but he’s too late—Bonnie has punched the console again, and messages begin scrolling across it. In the middle distance, Charleston airports’ cracked and vitrified runways are coming into view. Missile batteries off to one side cycle their launcher-erectors impotently, magazines long since fired dry at the robot-piloted godless commie-fag euroweasel aid flights.

“We gotta bail out before we land, otherwise we’d have to go through customs,” she says brightly. “That would be bad—South Carolina never ended prohibition.”

“What?” Huw shakes his head again. “Prohibition of what? What are you talking about?” His hands are shaking, he realises. “I need a drink.”

“Prohibition of grass DIPSHIT,” Bonnie says. She pauses for a moment, prodding at her eyes with a mister, but they are so swollen that she can’t get its applicator into contact with bare mucous membrane. She roots around some more, then whacks some kind of transdermal plaster on her arm. “Sorry, gotta ARSE FUCK come down now. Your stash, darling? It’s illegal here. If the customs crows catch you with it, they’ll stick you on the chain gang and you’ll be chibbed and FUCK RAPED BABY-EATING MURDERED by psychotic redneck klansmen for the next two hundred years. It’s bad for the skin, I hear.” She stands up and heads towards a battered cabinet at the rear of the bridge, which she opens to reveal a couple of grubby-looking parachutes that appear to have been carefully hand-packed by stoned marmosets. “We’ll be passing over the hot tub in about three minutes. You coming?”

The parachute harness she hands him is incredibly smelly—evidently its last owner didn’t believe in soap—but its flight control system assures Huw that it’s in perfect working order and please to extinguish all cigarettes and switch off all electronics for the duration of flight. Tight-lipped, Huw fastens it around his waist and shoulders then follows Bonnie to the back of the bridge and down a rickety ladder to the bottom of the gas bag. There’s an open hatch, and when he looks through it he sees verdant green folliage whipping past at nearly a hundred kilometres per hour, hundreds of metres below. “Clip the red hook to the blue static line eye,” says the harness. “Clip the—”

“I get the picture,” Huw mutters. Bonnie is already hooked up, and turns to check his rig, then gives him a huge shit-eating grin and steps backwards into the airship’s slipstream. “Aagh!” Huw flinches and stumbles, then follows her willy-nilly. Seconds later the chute unfolds its wings above him and his ears are filled with the sputtering snarl of a two-stroke motor as it switches to dynamic flight and banks to follow Bonnie down towards a clearing in the mangrove swamp.

The swamp rushes up to meet him in a confusion of green, buffeting him with superheated steam as he descends toward it, so that by the time the chute punches him through the canopy he feels like a dim-sum bun. Bonnie’s chute is speeding ahead of him, breaking branches off and clattering from tree to tree. He tries to follow its crazy trail as best as he can, but eventually he realizes, with a sick falling sensation in his stomach, that she’s no longer strapped into it. “Bonnie!” He yells, and grabs at the throttle control.

“Danger! stall warning!” the parachute intones. “Danger! Danger!”

Huw looks down, dizzily. He’s skimming the ground now, or what passes for it—muck of indeterminate depth, interspersed with clumps of curiously nibbled looking water hyacinth. The tree line starts in another couple of hundred metres, and it’s wall to wall petroleum plants. Black-leafed and ominous looking, the stunted inflammabushes emit a dizzying stench of raw gasoline that makes his eyes swim and his nose water. “Fuck, where am I going to land?” he moans.

“Please fold your tray table and return your seat to the upright position,” says the parachute control system. “Extinguish all joints, switch off mobile electronics, and prepare for landing.” The engine note above and behind him changes, spluttering and backfiring, and then the damp muck comes up and slaps him hard across the ankles. Huw stumbles, takes a faltering step forward—then the nanolight’s engine drops down as the ‘chute rigging collapses above his head and thumps him right between the eyes with a hollow tonk.

“What you’ve got to understand, son,” says the doctor, “is it’s all the fault of the alien space bats.” He holds up the horse syringe and flicks the barrel. A bubble wobbles slowly up through the milky fluid in the barrel. “If it wasn’t for them, and their Jew banker patsies, we’d be ascended to heaven.” He squeezes the plunger slightly and a thick blob of turbid liquid squeezes out of the syringe and oozes down the needle. “Property speculators.” He grins horribly, baring gold plated teeth, and points the end of the needle at Huw’s neck. Huw can’t seem to move his eyes from Doc’s moustache: it’s huge and bushy, a hairy efflorescence that twitches supiciously as the barefoot medic inhales with sharp disapproval.

“Property speculators?” Huw’s voice sounds weak, even to himself. He stares past the doctor at the peeling white paint on the wall of this sorry excuse for a medical centre. “What have they got to do with …”

“Property speculators.” Doc nods emphatically as he rams the blunt end of the quarter-inch needle against Huw’s jugular. Tiny machines whine and click and the side of Huw’s neck goes numb. “They bought up all the beachfront property, right? Hurricane alley. Then they vanished taking their mortgages with ’em and all the locals who’d put their savings into bank accounts and stocks and bonds were left holding the sack. Then the seas rose on account of globular incendiarism, and we got the double-whammy of the insurance corporations going bust.”

Huw tries to swallow. The plunger is going down and white goo is flooding into his circulatory system, billions of feral redneck nanochines bouncing off his fur-lined arteries in search of damaged tissue to fix. His mouth is dry, his tongue as crinkly and musty-dry as a dead cauliflower. “But the, the alien—”

“Alien space bats, son,” says Doc. He sighs lugubriously and pulls the syringe away from Huw’s neck. “With their fancy orbital fresnel lens. They’re behind the global warming thing, y’see, it’s nothing to do with burning oil. It dates to the fifties. Those commies, they were smart—using their ballistic missile radars to signal the space brothers! We live in a strongly anthropic universe, it stands to reason there must be aliens out there. It’s a long-term plot, a hundred year Communist plan to bankrupt America. And it’s working. All those deserters and traitors who upped and left when the Singularity hit, they just made it worse. They’re the savvy ones we need to make this country great again, rebuild NASA and Space Command and go wipe those no-good Ruskie alien space bats and their Jew banker patsies from the dark side of the moon.”

Oh Jesus fuck, Huw thinks incoherently, lying back and trying to get both eyes to focus simultaneously. He still feels sick to his stomach and a bit dizzy, the way he’s been since Bonnie found him neatly curled up under a gas tree with a huge lump on his head and his parachute rigging draped across the incendiary branches. “Have you seen my teapot?” he tries to say, but he’s not sure it comes out right.

“You want a cup of Joe?” asks Doc. “Sure, we can do that.” He pats Huw’s shoulder with avuncular charm. “You jes’ lie there and let my little helpers eat the blood clots in your brain for a while.”

“Bonnie—” Huw whispers, but Doc is already standing and turning towards the door at the other side of the surgery, out of his line of sight. The blow from the motor did something worse to him than concussion, and he can’t seem to move his arms or legs—or neck. I’m still breathing, so it can’t be that bad, he tells himself hopefully. Remember, if you break your neck during a botched parachute landing and then a mad conspiracy-theorist injects black market nanomachines into you, it’s highly unlikely that anything worse can happen before sundown, he tells himself in a spirit of misplaced optimism.

And things were, indeed, looking up compared to where they’d been an hour or two ago. Bonnie had found him, still unconscious, lying at the foot of a tree that was already dribbling toxic effluent across his boots. The teapot was screaming for help at the top of its tinny electronic lungs as an inquisitive stream of brick-red ants crawled over its surface, teaming up to drag it back to one wing of the vast sprawling supercolony that owned the continent. The ants stung, really, really hard. And there were lots of them, like a tide sweeping over his body. It was Bonnie who’d called Doc, using some kind of insane spatchcock mobile phone jury-rigged from the wreckage of her parachute harness to broadcast for help, and it was Bonnie who’d sat beside him, whispering sweet nothings and occasionally whacking impudent formicidae, until Doc had arrived on his half-rusted swamp boat. But she’d vanished immediately afterwards, not sticking around to explain to Doc how come she and Huw were at large in the neverglades—and Doc seemed mad about that.

After a couple of hours on the operating table Huw has begun to realise that half an hour can be a very long time indeed when your only company is a demented quack and you can’t even scratch your arse by way of entertainment. And his arse itches. In fact, it’s not all that itches. Up and down his spine, little shivers of tantalizing irritation are raising gooseflesh. “Shit,” he mumbles, as his left hand begins to tremble uncontrollably. The nanobots have reached the swollen, damaged tissues within his cervical vertebrae and are busily reducing the swelling. They’re coaxing suicidal neurons back into cytocellular stability, laying temporary replacement links where apoptosis has already proceeded to completion, and generally wreaking the wonder of the Christopher Reeve process on Huw’s supine spinal cord. For which Huw is incredibly grateful—if Doc was as nuts as he seems he might have injected a auto engine service pack and Huw might at this very moment be gestating a pile of gleaming ceramic piston rings—but it itches with the fire of a thousand ants crawling inside his veins. “Arse, bugger, fuck,” he moans. And then his toes begin to tremble.

By the time Doc reappears Huw is sitting up, albeit as shaky as an ethanol addict in the first week of withdrawl. He moans quietly as he accepts a chipped ceramic Exxon mug full of something dark and villainous enough that it resembles a double-foam latte, if the barrista substituted gulf crude for steamed milk. “Thanks,” he manages to choke out. “I think. Do you know where Bonnie’s going to be back?”

“That evil woman?” Doc cranks one eyebrow up until it teeters alarmingly. “Naw, son, you don’t want to be going worrying about the likes of her. She’s bad company, her and her crew—between you and me, I figure she’s in league with the space bats.” He chuckles humorlessly. “Naw, you’ll be much better off with me’n’Sam. Ade told us all about you’n’what you’re here for. We’ll set you straight.”

“Ade. Told you.” Huw’s stomach does a backflip, which feels extremely strange because something is wrong with his body image. It feels all wrong inside. He clears his throat, and almost chokes: the alien whistle-thing-communicator is gone! Then his stomach gives a warning twinge and his momentary flash of hope fades. The godvomit has simply retreated deeper into his gastrointestinal tract, hiding to bide its time like a robotic extra in a Ridley Scott movie. “How’d you know him?”

“’Cause we do a bit of business from time to time.” Doc’s eyebrow relaxes as he grins at Huw. “A little light smuggling, son. Don’t let it get on your nerves. Ade told us what to do with you and everything’s going to be just fine.”

“Just fine—” Huw stops. “What are you going to do with me?” he asks suspiciously.

“Ade figures we oughta deliver you to the Baptist temple in Glory City—that’s Charleston as was—in time for next Thursday’s memorial service. It’s the sixteenth anniversary of the Rapture, and they get kinda jumpy at this time of year.” A meaty hand descends on Huw’s shoulder and he looks round, then up, and up until his newly fixed neck aches at the sight of an enormous and completely hairless man with skin the colour of a dead fish and little piggy eyes. “Son, this is Sam. Say hello, Sam.”

“Hello,” rumbles the human mountain. Huw blinks.

“You’re going to hand me over to the baptists?” he asks. “What happens then?”

“Well.” Doc scratches his head. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

“But this anniversary. What do you mean, they get jumpy?”

“Oh, nothing much. Jes’ sacrifice a bunch of heretics to make God notice they still b’lieve, that kinda thing. You got a problem with that?”

“Maybe.” Huw licks his lips. “What if I don’t want to go?”

“Well, then.” Doc cocks his head to one side and squints at Huw’s left ear. “Say, son, that’s a mightly nice ear you’ve got there. Seeing as how you’ve not paid your medical bill, I figure we’d have to take it off you to cover the cost of your treatment. Plus maybe a leg, a kidney, and an eye or two. How about it?”

“No socialised medicine here!” rumbles Sam, as a second backhoe-sized hand closes around Huw’s other shoulder.

“Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” Huw squeaks.

Doc beams amiably at him. “That calls for a shot of corn likker,” says the medic. “I knew you’d see sense. Now, about the alien space bats. We’ve got this here telescope what Sam acquired, but we don’t know how to work it proper. Have you ever used one? We’re looking for the bat cave on the moon …”

Welcome to the American future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

The ant-colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the US, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has entered its eighth year of life, which is middle-aged for a normal colony, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.

The Godbotherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled in ant-tunnels within hours. They’ve learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their spacesuits and send them off to Bible classes.

The ants have eaten their way through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root-systems of the sickening flora (the gasoline refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony—anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouthpart with a lot of hydocarbons). They’ve eaten the beehives and wasp-nests, and they’ve laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few billion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.

The American continent is a fairy tale that the cloudmind tells itself whenever it doubts its collective decision to abandon humanity. The left-behinds there spent their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit—plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.

What more could they possibly need?

Once it becomes clear that Huw is prepared to go to Glory City, the Doc comes all-over country hospitality, seeing to it that Sam gets him properly lubricated. They watch the sunset through the tupperware walls of the Doc’s homestead, watch the thick carpet of ants swarming over the outer walls as they chase the last of the sun across the surface. When the sun finally sets, the sound of a billion tromping feet keeps them company.

“Well,” says Doc, nodding at Sam. “Looks like it’s time to hit the road.”

Huw sits up straight. Glory City is not on his agenda, but if he’s going to make a break for it, he wants to do it somewhere a bit more crowded and anonymous than here, right in the middle of Doc’s home turf. Plus, he’s still weak as a kitten from gasoline-tainted corn mash and the nanos’ knitting at his guts.

“We’ll take the bikes,” Doc announces with an affable nod. “Go get ’em, Sam.”

Sam thuds off towards an outbuilding, the plasticized floors dimpling under his feet.

“He’s a good boy,” says Doc. “But I figure I used too many cognitive enhancements on him when he was a lad. Made him way too smart for his own good.”

Sam returns with a serious-looking anime-bike dangling from each hand. “alt.pave-the-earth,” he says, setting them down. His voice is bemused, professorial. “I’ll go get the sidecar.”

“He’ll need a spacesuit,” Doc calls after him. “What’re you, about a medium?”

Huw, staring wordlessly at the stretched and striated bikes with their angular mouldings, opens his mouth. “I’m a 107 centimeter chest,” he replies vaguely.

“Ah, we don’t go in for that centimeter eurofaggotry around here, son. Don’t really matter much. Spacesuits never fit too good. You’ll get used to it. It’s only six hours.”

Sam returns with a low-slung sidecar under one arm and a suit of Michelin-Man armor over his shoulders.

“It’s very ergonomic,” he rumbles tectonically as he sits the suit down next to Huw’s folding lawn-chair, then goes to work attaching the car to one of the bikes.

Huw fumbles with the michelin suit, eventually getting the legs pulled on.

“Binds a bit at the crotch,” he says, hoping for some sympathy.

“Yeah, it’ll do that,” says Doc.

Huw modestly turns his back and reaches down to adjust himself. As he does so he fumbles with the familiar curve of the brass teapot. Peeking down he sees a phosphorescent miniature holographic Ade staring back up at him.

“Sharper than a trouser-snake’s tooth,” Adrian hisses.

Huw puts his hand where he’d expect to find a pocket and a little hatch pops open, exposing a hollow cavity in the thigh. Quickly, he slips the teapot into it and dogs the hatch shut. “I’m ready, I think,” he says, turning round again.

Doc and Sam have already suited up; they’re waiting impatiently for Huw to catch up. The bikes are bolted either side of the sidecar, and Doc waves Huw into the cramped seat. Waddling in the suit, clutching a portable aircon pack, Huw has a hard time climbing in. Everything sounds muffled except the whirr of the helmet fans, and a pronounced smell of stale gotchis and elderly rubber assaults his nose periodically, as if the suit is farting in his face. “Let’s go,” Sam rumbles, and they kick off towards the doorway, which irises open to admit a trickling rain of ants as the bikes roar and spurt gouts of flame against the darkness.

The jet-engine roar of the engines doesn’t die down, nor does the laser-show strobing off the organic LED pixelboards on the outsized fuel-tanks, but still, somehow, Huw snoozes through the next couple of hours in a moonshine-assisted haze. Doc is rambling at length about some recondite point of randite ideology, illuminating his own rugged self-reliance with the merciless glare of A-is-A objectivist clarity, but after a few minutes Huw discovers two controls on his chest plate that raise his opinion of the suit designers: a drinking straw primed with white lightning, and the volume control on the radio. As his sort-of jailers pedal away, driving him along a pot-holed track lined with the skeletons of dead trees, he kicks back and tries to get his head together. If it wasn’t for the eventual destination he could almost begin to enjoy himself, but there’s a nagging sense of weirdness in his stomach (where the godvomit still nestles, awaiting a communicative impulse) and he can’t help worrying about what he’ll do once they get to Glory City.

An indeterminate time passes, and Huw is awakened by a sharp prodding pain near his bladder. “Uh.” He lolls in the suit, annoyed.

“Psst, keep it quiet. They think you’re sleeping.” The prodding sensation goes away, replaced by a buzzing voice from just north of his bladder.

“Ade?” Huw whispers.

“No, it’s the tooth fairy. Listen, have you seen Bonnie?”

“Not lately. She went for—” Huw pauses. “You know I landed bad?”

“Shit.” Ade pauses. “So that’s what you’re with Doc for. Have they got her?”

“I don’t think so.” Huw desperately wants to scratch his head in puzzlement but his arms are folded down inside the sidecar and he doesn’t dare let Sam or Doc figure he’s awake. “Look, I woke up and the doctor—is he a real doc?—was trying to fix my neck. A motor fell on my head. Bonnie got him to help but then she left and I haven’t seen her. Went off on an errand or something.”

“Shit and double-shit.” Ade’s tinny voice sounds upset. “They’re not trustworthy, mate. Sell you as soon as look at you, those two. She said you were hurt, but—”

“You don’t know where she is, either,” Huw accuses.

“Nope.” They ride along in near silence for a while.

“What’s the big idea?” Huw asks, trying to sustain a sense of detachment. “Packing me off to bongo-bongo land to convert the cannibals is all very fucking well, but I thought you said this would be safe as houses?”

“Um well, there’s been a kinda technical hitch in that direction,” Adrian says. “But we’ll get that sorted out, don’t you worry yer little head over it. Main thing is, you don’t wanna stay with the randroids any longer than you got to, got that? Anyway, I’m sure you can show ’em a clean pair of heels, mate. When you get to Glory City, head for the John the Baptist Museum of Godless Evolution and make your way to the Steven Jay Gould Lies and Blasphemy Exhibit. There’s a trapdoor under the Hallucigena mock-up leading to an atheist’s hole and if you get there I’ll send someone to pick you up. ‘Kay?”

“Wait—” Huw says, but he’s too late. The buzzing stops, just as Doc reaches over and cuffs Huw around the helmet. “What?” Huw cranks the volume on his suit radio.

“—said, you paying attention, boy?” Doc demands. There’s a suspicious gleam in his eye, although Huw isn’t certain it isn’t just the effect of looking at him through a thin layer of toughened glass across which stray a handful of very lost ants.

“I was asleep,” Huw protests.

“Bah.” Doc rubs off the ants, then grabs the brakes. “Well, son, I was just saying: only a couple of hours now until we get there …”

The road is unlit and there’s little traffic. What there is seems to consist mostly of high-tech bicycle rickshaws retrofitted for unapologetic hydrocarbon combustion, and ancient rusting behemoth pickups that belch thick blue petroleum smoke—catalytic converters and fuel cells being sins against man’s deity-designated dominance over nature. The occasional wilted and ant-nibbled wreaths plaintively underscore the messages on the tarnished and bullet-speckled road signs: KEEP RIGHT and SLOW TRUCKS.

The landscape is dotted with buildings that have the consistency of halvah or very old cheddar. These are the remains of man’s folly and his pride, now bored out of 90 percent of their volume to fill the relentless bellies of the Hypercolony. Individually, the ants crawling across his faceplate, along his guantlets, over the sexy sizzle of the LEDs and crisped up in a crust around the flame-nozzles appear to be disjointed and uncoordinated. But now, here, confronted with the evidence of the Hypercolony’s ability to energize collective action out of its atomic units, Huw is struck with a deep, atavistic terror. There is an Other here, loose on the continent, capable of bringing low all that his kind has built. Suddenly, Huw’s familiar corporeality, the source of so much personal pride, starts to feel like a liability.

The aircon unit makes a sputtery noise that Huw feels rather than hears through the cavaties of the michelin-suit. He’s tried wiggling its umblicus in its suit-seal, but now the air coming out of it is hot and wet and smells of burning insulation. He’s panting and streaming with sweat by the time the dim white dome of Glory City swims out of the darkness ahead to straddle the road like a monstrous concrete carbuncle. Sam guns the throttle like a tireless robot, while Doc snores in the sidecar, his mouth gaping open beneath his moustache, blurred behind the ant-crawling lexan of his faceplate. “How much longer?” he gasps, the first words he’s spoken in an hour.

“Three miles. Then we park up and take a room for the night in Saint Pat’s Godly Irish Motel. No smoking, mind,” Sam adds. “They don’t take to the demon weed.”

Huw stares in grim, panting silence as they take the uphill slope towards the base of the enormous, kilometers-high Fuller dome that caps the former city. Impregnated with neurotoxins, the dome is the ultimate defense against ants. They ride into the city past a row of gibbeted criminals, their caged bones picked clean by ants, then into the deserted and enormous airlock, large enough to accomodate an armoured batallion. What Huw initially takes for an old-fashioned air-shower turns out to be a gas chamber, venting something that makes his throat close when he gets a hint of a whiff of it through the suit’s broken aircon. After ten minutes of gale-force nerve-gas, most of the ants are washed away, and those that remain appear to have died. Sam produces a stiff whisk broom and brushes him free of the few thousand corpses that have become anchored by their mouthparts to his suit, with curious gentleness, and then hands him the whisk so that he may return the favor. Then the inner doors to Glory City open wide, sucking them into the stronghold of the left-behind.

Once inside the dome, Huw finds that Glory City bears little resemblance to any streaming media representations of pre-singularity NorAm cities he’s ever seen. For one thing the roads are narrow and the buildings tall, leaning together like a sinister crowd of drunkards, the olde-world olde-town feel revived to make maximum use of the cubic volume enclosed by the dome. For another thing, about half the tallest buildings seem to be spiky towers, like the old mediaeval things back home that he associates with seamy nightclubs. It takes him a moment to realise: those are churches! He’s never imagined so many temples existing before, let alone in a single city.

The next thing he notices are the adverts. Everywhere. On billboards and paving stones and the sides of parked monster trucks. Probably tattooed on the hides of the condemned prisoners outside, before the ants ate them. Half the ads seem to be public service announcements, and the other half seem to be religious slogans, and some are in-between: ENJOY HOST ON A SHINGLE: COMMUNION WITH ZEST HALF THE CALORIES LOWER GLYCEMIC INDEX! Whichever they are, they set his teeth on edge—so that he’s almost happy when Sam steers him into a cramped parking lot behind a tall gray slab of concrete and grunts, “this is the motel.”

It’s about two in the morning, and Huw catches himself yawning as Sam shakes Doc awake and extracts him from the sidecar. “C’mon in,” says Doc. “Let’s get some sleep. Got a long day tomorrow, son.”

The lobby of the motel is guarded by a fearsome-looking cast-iron gate. Huw unlatches his faceplate and heaves a breath: the air is humid and warm, cloying and laden with decay as sweet as a rotting tooth. Doc approaches the concierge’s desk while Sam hangs back, one meaty hand gripping Huw’s arm proprietorily. “Don’t you go getting no clever ideas,” Sam rumbles quietly. “Doc tagged you with a geotracker chip. You go running away, you’ll just get him riled.”

“Uh. Okay.” Huw gulps.

Doc is at the desk, talking to a woman whose long black dress is like a throwback to the puritan colony days and who wears a bonnet that looks like it’s nailed to her head. She’s old, showing the distressing signs of physical senescence. “Twenty cents for the suite,” she says loudly, “and fifteen for the pen.” (Deflation has taken its toll on the once-mightly dollar.) She wags a wrinkled finger under Doc’s nose: “and none o’your filth!”

Doc draws himself up to his full height. “I assure you, I am here to do the Lord’s work,” he tells her icily. “Along with this misguided creep. And my assistant.”

Sam pushes Huw forward. “Doc gets the presidential suite whenever he stays here,” he says. “You get to sleep in the pen.”

“The …?”

“’Cause we don’t rightly trust you,” Sam says, pushing Huw towards a side-door behind the reception area. “So a little extra security is called for.”

“Oh—” Huw says, and stops. Oh, really now, Huw would say, except that now the Doc is back with a squeeze-bottle of something liquid and so cold that it is fogged with a rime of condensation. Huw’s dryth of throat manifests, and the gob in his mouth has the viscosity of rubber-sap.

“Thursday, Son?” the Doc says, playfully jetting a stream of icy liquid in the air.

“Ahhh,” Huw says, nodding vigorously. Six hours in the suit with nothing but highly diruetic likker and any number of hours of direct sunlight in its insulated confines after the aircon broke down—he’s so dehydrated he’s ready to piss snot.

“This a-way,” the Doc says, and beckons with the bottle.

Huw lets Sam help him climb out of the sidecar and barely notices the rubbery feeling of his legs after hours of being cramped up in the little buggy. “Hotcha,” the Doc says, “come on now, time’s a wastin’.” He gives the bottle another squeeze and water spatters the dusty ground.

“Aaah,” Huw agrees, lumbering after it. He’s never felt quite this thirsty in all his days.

The Doc heads for a staircase behind a row of suppository-shaped elevator cages, standing open and gleaming in scratched plastic dullness by the diffuse white light of the holy sodiums overhead. Huw can barely keep up, but even if he had to drop to his knees and crawl, he’d do it. That’s holy stuff, that water, infused with the numinous glow of life itself. Did’t the Christians have a hymn about it, “Jesus Gave Me Water?” Huw comes from a long line of trenchant black country atheists, a man who takes to religion the way that vegans take to huge suspicious Polish sausages that look like cross-sectioned dachshundts, but he’s having an ecstatic experience right now, taking the stairs on trembling knees.

The Doc spits on his thumb and smears the DNA across the auth-plate set in the door at the bottom of the stairs. It thinks for a long moment, then clanks open in a succession of matrioshkoid armour layers.

“G’wan now, you’ve earned it, the Doc says, rolling the bottle into the cell behind the door.

Huw toddles after it, the michelin suit making him waddle like he’s got a load in his diaper, but he can’t be arsed worrying about that right now because there’s a bottle of water with his name on it at the other side of the cell, a bottle so cold and pure that it cries out to him: drink me! Drink me!

He’s sucking it down, feeling the cold straight through to his skull-bone, a delicious brain freeze the size of the Universe, when the teapot rattles angrily in his thigh pocket. The sound is getting him down, distracting him from the sense of illumination appearing at the back of his mind’s eye as he gulps the water, so he pulls the thing out and looks at it, relaxing as he sees the shiny metal highlights gleaming happily at him.

Adrian pops out of the teapot, so angry he’s almost war-dancing, and he curses. “Fucking suggestibility ray—Bible-thumping pud-fuckers can’t be happy unless they’ve tasped someone into ecstasy. Come on, Huw, snap out of it.”

“Go ‘way,” Huw mumbles irritably, “m’havin’ a trash-transcential—transcendential ‘sperience here.” He gulps some more water then squats, leaning against the wall. Something loves him, something vaster than mountains and far stronger, and it’s bringing tears to his eyes. Except the teapot will have none of it.

“Fucking wake up! Jesus, didn’t they tell you anything in class when you was a kid? They infuse your cerebrospinal fluid with nanobots that have a built-in tropism for the god module in your temporal lobe. Tickle it with a broadband signal and you’ll see God, angels square-dancing in heaven, fuck knows what. Get a grip on yourself!”

“It’s God.” Huw’s got a name for the sensation now, and he grins idiotically at the opposite wall of his cell. It’s a slab of solid aluminium, scratched and dented and discoloured along the welds: and it’s as beautiful to Huw as fluted marble pillars supporting the airy roof of a pleasure dome, pennants snapping overhead in the delightful breeze blowing off the waters of the underground river Alph—

“It’s not God, it’s a fucking tasp! Snap out of it, dipshit, They’re only using it on you ’cause they want you nice and addled for the Inquisition tomorrow! Then, no more God module!”

“Huh?” Huw ponders the question for an eternity of proximate grace, as serried ranks of angels blow trumpets of glory in the distant clouds that wreath his head. “I’m … no, I’m happy. This way. I’ve found it.”

“What you’ve found is a bullet in the back of the head if you stay here, fuckwad!” Ade shakes his fists from the top of the teapot. “Think, damn you! What would you have thought of this yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” Yesterday, all his troubles, so far away. Huw nods, thinking deeply. “I’ve always been missing ‘thing like this, even f’I’didn’t know it. Feels right. Everything makes sense.” The presence of the ultimate, even if it’s coming from right inside his own skull courtesy of a 5.4 gigahertz transmission from Godbotherer Central, is making it hard for Huw to concentrate on anything else. “Wanna be like this ’til I die, if’s all the same to you.”

“They’ll kill you, man!” Ade pauses in his frantic fist-waving. “Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

“Mmf. Lemme think about it.” Huw slowly slumps back against the wall, his suit bulking and billowing around him and digging sharp joints into his bruised body, sanctifying and mortifying his flesh. “If I believed in an actual, like, God, this’d’be marvellous. But God’s such a goddamned primitive fetish, isn’t it? So’m’a, an atheist. Always have been, always will be. But this thing is like, inside me, and it’s huge, so enormous and blindingly brilliant it’s like my own reflection on infinity.” His eyes widen. “Hey, that means I’m a god. I’m like, transcendentistry, right? I think therefore I guess I am. If they try to shoot me I’ll just zap ’em with my god-powers.” He giggles for a while, pointing his fingers at the ceiling, walls and floor, lightning bolts of the illuminated imagination spraying every which way. “It’s a solipsystem! Nobody here but me. I am god. I am god. I am god—”

The teapot zaps him with an electric shock as Ade vanishes in a huff.

“Ouch.” Huw sucks his thumb for a moment and meditates on the cellestial significance of the autodeity sending him messages from his subconscious via a curved metal antiquity stuffed with black-market Libyan electronics. Then he tucks it away in his pocket and settles back down to work hard on regaining his sense of omnipotent brilliance. And he’s still sitting in that pose the next morning, staring at the wall, when the sense of immanence vanishes, the doors grind open, and Doc and Sam come to take him downtown to face the Inquisition.

They parade him down the road in the drab grey morning light of Glory City, past the filling-stations, the churches, the diners, the other filling stations, the refinery, the filling-station-memorabilia market, the GasHaus, the corkscrew apartment blocks where every neighbor can look in on every other’s window, and the execution ground.

And it all feels good to Huw.

As the parade progresses, curious locals emerge from their homes and workplaces as if drawn by some ultrawideband alert, rounded up and herded out to form a malignant rent-a-mob that demonstrates to Huw how important and central to reality he is. They pelt him with rotting fruit and wet cigar stubs with live coals on one end that singe him before bouncing free to the impermeable pavement, affirming his sense of holy closeness with the intensity of their focus on him. Once, they stop so that the Doc can roar a speech at the crowd—

“—heretic—vengeance—drugs—sex—wantonness—”

Huw doesn’t pay much attention to the speech. Through his feet he fancies he can feel the scritterscratch of the Hypercolony, gnawing patiently at the yards of stone and polymer between him and the blighted soil. It’s a bad feeling, as if Glory City is a snow-globe that has been lifted into the air on the backs of a heptillion ants who are carrying it away, making it sway back and forth. The curlicue towers and the gnarled and crippled crowd rock in hincky rhythm.

The faces on the balconies swim when he looks up. Some of them have horns on their foreheads. He turns away and tries to stare at a fixed point, using the ballerina’s trick of keeping his gaze still to make the world stop its whirling, but his gorge is rising, and his stomach is threatening to empty down his front.

This is not good.

He sits down hard, his armored ass klonking on the pavement, and Sam lumbers toward him. Huw holds out his hand, wanting to be helped to his feet, back to the godhead and the good trip. Just as Sam’s fingertips graze his, a woman wearing a voluminous black gown dashes out of the crowd and snatches him under the armpits, looping a harness around his chest. Where it touches his back it gloms on hard, hyperglue nanites welding it to the suit’s surface.

“Hold on,” Bonnie hisses in his ear, and he feels like weeping, because he knows he isn’t to be redeemed after all, but tediously rescued and rehabilitated and set free.

“Bitch harlot!” screeches Doc. “Sodomite! Stop her!” Sam grabs for her past Huw’s shoulder, sideswipes the rounded swell of her bosom—extensively, chastely covered, this being Glory City—and jerks his hand back as though he’d been burned.

The harness around Huw’s chest tightens with rib-bruising force and he’s dragged backwards, skittering over the roadway before the harness lofts them both into the air, up toward the balconies ringing the curlicue towers. Bonnie, who is tied off to him by a harness of her own, squints nervously down at the crowd receding below them.

Huw bangs chest-first into the side of one of the towers, Bonnie’s weight knocking the breath out of him. They dangle together, twirling in the breeze like a giant booger as strong hands hoist them bodily up and over a balcony, then inside, adding insult to injury in the form of an atomic wedgie. Bonnie scrambles in after him, unlocks her harness, and shakes out her voluminous petticoats. Huw is still dazed from the flight and gasping for breath. He’s bent over double, trying to breathe perfumed air thick with musky incense.

“You all right?”

Huw forces himself to straighten up and look around. The room is a tribute to excess: the wallpaper is printed with gold and red and black tesselations—obscene diagrams, he realises, interpenetrating and writhing before his eyes—and the sofa is flocked with crushed purple velvet. The coffee-table supports a variety of phallic implements in an assortment of improbable colours, suited to an altogether different kind of inquisition than the one that he’d been headed for.

As for the furniture, it’s inhabited by several persons of indeterminate gender, wearing outfits ranging from scanty to inappropriate for a place of worship—underwear is in fashion but not much else is.

Bonnie’s face swims into focus before him, her blue fringe brushing his forehead: that and her hands are the only parts of her body he can see. “It’s the gnostic sexual underground,” she hisses. “There’s always one to be had, if you know how to look. Nobody takes it up the tradesman’s like a man with religion. No one needs it more, either. These lucky folks just figured out how to square the circle, thanks to the Bishop.”

She gives him a hard shake. “Come on,” she says. “I hit you with enough seratonin reuptake blockers to depress a hyena.” He feels a hard tug at his throat and she holds up a small blowdart for him to examine. “I know you’re out of the god-box.”

Huw opens his mouth to say something, and finds himself sobbing. “You took away my god-self,” he manages to say, snotting down his beard and horking back briny mouthfulls of tears and mucus.

Bonnie produces a hankie from up one sleeve of her church-modest gown and wipes his face. “Sha,” she says, stroking his hair. “Sha. Huw, I need you here and now, OK? We’re in a lot of trouble and I can’t get us out on my lonesome. The god feeling was just head-in-a-jar stuff. You weren’t being god, you were feeling the feeling of being god. You hate that—it’s how they feel in the cloud, once they’ve uploaded.”

Huw snuffled. “Yeah,” he says.

“Yeah. Baby, I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but it’s how you want to live. If I know one person who’s equipped to cope with the distinction between sensation and simulation, it’s you. Jesus, Huw, other than these maniacs, you’re the only person I know who thinks there is a distinction.”

Huw struggles to his feet and teeters in his ridiculous trousers. Bonnie giggles.

“What are you wearing?” she asks.

Huw manages to crack a fractional smile. “They’re all the rage in the American Outback,” he says. “What’s that you’re wearing?”

“A disguise. Doubles as a biohazard shield.” She swivels her hips, setting twenty kilograms of underskirts swishing. “We’re both a bit over-dressed for the occasion; let’s skin off and I’ll introduce you to the Bishop. Go on, you get started.”

Huw begins the laborious unlatching process and gradually shucks the pants. The teapot clatters free, drawing a raised eyebrow from one of the sexually ambiguous catamites twined around a sofa arm. The vibration kicks some erratic connection back into life: Ade’s image glows softly through the deep pile carpet.

The little avatar wrinkles its nose. “Bugger me sideways,” says Ade. “Place looks like an Italian whorehouse, minus the charm and hygiene.” He turns and looks Huw up and down. “You look a little more like your usual cheerless self, though, mate. Should I assume that you’ve joined us again in the land of the independently cognited?”

Huw nods miserably. “I’m back,” he says. “No thanks to you. Those two assholes know you—they do business with you!”

Adrian’s avatar has the good grace to look faintly embarrassed. Bonnie leans past Huw with a creak of whalebone and picks up the teapot. “Did I hear that right?” she asks menacingly. “You been selling stuff again?”

“Uh.” Ade looks unrepentant. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“What kind of stuff?” Bonnie hisses, her eyes narrowing.

“Um … stuff. Mostly harmless.”

“What kind of mostly harmless stuff are we talking about here?” Huw asks, mustering up a faint echo of interest. The blissed-out resistance cadre on the sofa are showing signs of interest, too.

“Oh, the usual, sunshine. Telescope lenses, tinfoil hats—okay, Faraday cage helmets—formicide spritzes, tactical nuclear weapons, bibles, tinned spam, that kind of thing.”

“And in return they’re paying you in—” Huw begins, then Bonnie interrupts him.

“—No, wait. What else are you smuggling, you rat bastard? Don’t try to hide it from me. Those neverglade-living low-lives were so eager to hand Huw over to the Fallen Congregations that they had to be trying to cover something up. Like, oh, whatever the fuck you were doing with them. What was it, Ade? Resurrection on the installment plan? Banned downloads? Are we going to get that fucking mad crow descending on us?”

“Oh, I say!” someone says from behind her, but Bonnie is so worked up she doesn’t notice. Huw glances over his shoulder and sees one of the miscellaneous perverts standing nearby, a hand clasped over his/her mouth. The perv is fish-belly pale and wears nothing but very complicated underwear. “Did you say—”

“Just a few small downloads, lass,” Ade says cheerfully. “Nothing to get worked up about, keep your hair on.”

“Downloads. Shit.” Bonnie breathes deeply. She’s looking pale. “Shit, that’s all I need,” she says. She puts the teapot down. “Right, we’ll have to take this up later, Huw. Right now we’ve got to go see the Bishop, and that means skin. Help me out of this thing.”

Huw fumbles for a while with the complex catches and clasps on her dress, fuzzily aware that he’s standing very close to her and he’s not wearing any trousers. As she steps out of her costume she grabs him around the waist, squeezes him tight, and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. She’s nervous, vibrating like a live wire, and something squirms around in his throat, wanting to comfort her. “Why do we have to be naked?” he asks when she surfaces for air. “Who is this Bishop, anyway?”

“The Bishop runs the First Church of the Teledildonic. It’s a dissident: lives in a baptismal pond, says we’ve got it all wrong and time is flowing in reverse. We’ve passed the Tower of Babel—that’s the cloud—and the Flood—warming—and now we’re ready to move back into the Garden of Eden. So we’ve got to stop wearing clothes and start fucking like bunnies.”

“But—” Huw can feel his brain trying to twist out through his ears as he tries to accomodate this deviant theology to what he knows about the Fallen Baptist Congregations—“what’s that got to do with anything? With these folks?”

“I say, hold it right there, pardner!” says the pale perv, running drowned-looking hands through his/her long green hair. The effect would almost be sexy if not for the medium-sized pot belly and the black rubber hedgehog-apparatus that conceals his/her crotch, studded with silvery transducers: “You’ve got it all wrong!” He/she waves a finger at Bonnie. “This isn’t the Garden of Eden, it’s the Garden of the Son of God, after the rapture, the hundred and forty-four thousand saved souls living in paradise on Earth, free from sin—”

“What’s that, then?” asks Huw, rudely prodding in the direction of the strap-on.

The perv draws itself up to a haughty metre-fifty: “I’ll have you know that this is the finest model chastity phallus money can buy,” s/he says, voice cracking and descending an octave: “‘s got all the sensory inputs of the real thing, wired right into my spine, but because little feller himself is tucked out of sight behind it there’s no actual genital contact. No skin, no sin.” He fondles the thing happily and shudders. Another of the prosthetically enhanced worshipers is sitting up on the sofa behind him and showing signs of interest.

Huw backs away slowly. “Get me out of here,” he mouths at Bonnie. She nods, then reaches out and strokes the perv’s pristine love machine. “Now.” Bonnie leads him around the perv—who doubles—over in ecstasy at her touch—towards a pair of pornographically decorated hardwood doors at the rear of the room.

Bonnie takes a deep breath. “Wish I could stay,” she calls to the three or four temple whores on the bed, “but we’ve got to see their Grace. It’s urgent. If I were you, I’d get to a safe house before the gendarmes arrive.”

“Give him our love,” one of the omnisexuals calls behind them. They board a lift that runs sideways, down, up, and then sideways again, through a route that sends Huw’s inner ear on a loop-de-loop. They emerge into a hallway that’s carpeted with greasy-feeling tentacles that twine sensuously around his toes, and the walls have the sheen of waxed and oiled skin. The whole thing has the smell of Doritos and musk.

Bonnie hands him the sack with her clothes and his ruined underpants and the teapot and pushes him ahead of her, squeezing his ass affectionately as they go.

The Bishop is three meters high, ten-limbed, with eight complete sets of assorted genitals, fourteen breasts, four tongues, and is impossibly hideous to contemplate. Bonnie ushers him into its presence after dickering with a pair of disturbingly toothless ministers who bar the high door.

“Your Grace,” she says, as they step into its eucalyptus-fumed inner chamber.

“My dear child,” it says, with one of its mouths. “It warms Our heart to see you.” It has a voice like a teenaged boy, high and uncertain. “And your companion. You are both lovely as they day He made you.”

One of its hands slithers free of the tangle and extends before them. Bonnie bends down and kisses the ring painted on the third finger, then elbows Huw, who kneels tentatively and takes the proffered digit, which is warm and moist and pulses disturbingly.

“Your Grace?” he says.

“Be not afraid, child,” the Bishop says. “This meatsuit allows Us to bring the Word to Our scattered temples without having to transport Our physical person through the uncertain world. One day, all of us will be liberated by these meatsuits, free to explore our flesh in many bodies all at once.”

“You’re uploaded?” Huw says, drawing his hand back quickly and shuffling back on his knees.

The Bishop snorts a laugh with its rightmost face. “No, child, no. Merely telepresent. Uploading is the mortification of the flesh—this is its celebration.”

“Your Grace,” Bonnie says, peering up at it through her fringe with her eyes seductively wide. “It has been an honor and privelege to serve you in my time here in Glory City. I’ve found my counselling duties to be very rewarding—the gender-reassignees here face unique challenges and it’s wonderful to be able to help them.”

“Yes,” the Bishop said, crouching down. “And We’ve appreciated it very much. But We sense that you are here to ask some favor of Us now, and We wish you’d get on with it so that We could concentrate on the savage rogering we’re getting in one of Our bodies.”

“It’s complicated,” Bonnie said. “This guy here is on the run—he was headed for the auto-da-fe when I rescued him.”

“This is the One?” the Bishop said, putting one delicate feminine hand behind his head and pulling him closer to its big golden eyes. “The two who brought you to Glory City are not know for their extreme piety,” it says. “So why do you suppose they brought you here, rather than simply, oh, eating you or using you for spare parts?”

Huw keeps himself from shying back with an effort of will. “I don’t know,” he says. Bonnie crowds in to another one of the Bishop’s faces. Deep within him, Huw feels a shiver of golden light, the god-feeling.

“I think my downers are wearing off.”

“They tasped him, so I hit him with some depressants,” Bonnie says.

“Feels goooooood,” Huw says.

“It does, doesn’t it?” the Bishop says. “I favor three or four hours on the tasp myself, twice a week. Does wonders for the faith. But I suppose we’d best keep your ecstasy under control for now. Phillida!” it calls, clapping two of its hands together, bringing one of the ministers running. It twines an arm between the guardian’s legs and murmurs, “Bring Us a freethinker’s cap, will you?” The minister’s toothless maw gapes open in ecstasy, and then it scurries off quickly, returning with a mesh balaclava that the Bishop fits to Huw’s head, lining up the eye—and mouth-holes.

Huw’s golden glow recedes.

“It’s a Faraday cage with some noise-cancellation built in to reverse any of the mind-control rays that do get through,” the Bishop says. “How did you come to be on the American Continent, anyway?”

“It started when I ate some godvomit and smuggled it out of a patent court,” Huw says.

The Bishop’s golden eyes widen. “Judge Rosa Guilliani’s court? In Libya? Last week? You are carrying the Ambassador?”

“The very same,” Huw says, obscurely pleased at this notoriety. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me. Anyway, this smuggler I know—we know—Adrian, he sent me here. Said that this was the safest place to hide out.”

Bonnie breaks in. “But now we come to find out that he’s been dealing with the two who tasped Huw—”

“Sam and the Doc,” Huw says.

“I know of them,” the Bishop says.

“Selling them bootleg downloads from the Cloud.”

“Ahh,” the Bishop says. “Excuse Us a moment.” It arches its back and screams out a long orgasmic wail. “One of Our other meatsuits is being ministered to,” it says distractedly, “and We needed to have a bit of a shout.

“We’re pleased to know this. It explains certain pseudo-nuclear events in the outback that We’ve had word of—the Doc must be retailing anti-ant technology to the other hillbillies.”

Bonnie shuddered. “That’s just for openers, I’m sure. Fuck knows what else Ade has sold those nutjobs.”

“Just some downloads, he said,” Huw mumbles. “Fuck it, what did he mean by that? You can download anything; I know I did!”

“Downloads could be either good or bad,” the Bishop muses aloud, rubbing two disturbingly rugose limbs together slowly. “But first, We have more pressing temporal priorities to attend to, my children. It appears that your rescue did not go unnoticed by the puritan majority, and they will presently be calling. Moreover, this would explain a request for a flight plan and landing clearance that the airport acknowledged four hours ago—” the Bishop stops, its back arching ecstatically—“oh! Oh! OH! Closer to thee, my God!” Breasts quiver, their purple aureolae crinkling, and it screams out loud in the grip of a multiple orgasm of titanic proportions.

Huw peers out through the eye-holes of his mesh mask, which presses cold and hard into his skin. “Did you say that the law is nearby?”

“I believe they are,” the Bishop says. “Yes, there. The primary perimeter has been breached. Such a lovely front door.” It looks sternly at Bonnie. “You were reckless, child. They followed you here.”

“I took every precaution,” Bonnie says, blushing. “I’m no amateur, you know—”

Huw has a sudden sickening feeling. “It’s me,” he says. “I’m bugged with a geotracker.”

Bonnie glares at him. “You could have said something, she snaps. “We’ve compromised the whole operation here now.”

“I was distracted, all right? Mind-control rays make you forgetful, Okay?”

The Bishop clucks its tongues and gives them each a pat on their bare bottoms. “Never mind that now, children. All is forgiven. But I’m afraid that you are right, we are going to lose this temple. And I’m no more infallible than you, you know: I’ve been ever so lax with the evacuation drills here. My ministers find that they disturb their contemplation of the Almighty. I fear not for this meatsuit, but it would be such a shame to have all my lovely acolytes fall into the hands of the Inquisition. I don’t suppose that you’d be willing to help out?”

“Of course,” Bonnie says. “It’s the least we can do.”

No, the least we could do would be to get the fuck out, Huw thinks. He glares at Bonnie, who prods him in the belly with a fingertip.

“But of course, we could also use some help of our own—”

“Quid pro quo?” the Bishop says, its quavering voice bemused now, and that irritates Huw ferociously: the law is at the door, and the Bishop thinks it’s all a tremendous lark?

“Not at all, your Grace. We came to beg your indulgence long before we knew that there was a favor we could do for you. We need your assistance getting shut of this blighted wasteland. Transport to the coast, and an airship or a ballistic or something that can get us back to the civilized world.”

“And I need to shut down my geotracker,” Huw says, wondering where it has been implanted. Somewhere painful, Sam had told him.

“Yes, you certainly do,” the Bishop says. “You’ll find an escape-line clipped to the balcony out the third door on the right, along with some baskets. Pack the ministers in the baskets, tie them down (don’t mind if they squirm, it’s in their nature), clip the baskets to the line and toss them out the window—I’m making arrangements now for someone to catch them on the other end. If you do this small favor for me, I will, oh, I don’t know.” The Bishop idly strokes their scalps and tickles their earlobes. “Yes, that’s it. There’s a safe house on the coast, a farm where my people have been making preparations for a much more reasonable approach to dealing with the ants than godvomit and nukes. They will be delighted to shelter you for as long as it takes you to make contact with your people and get off the continent. Such a shame to see you go.” It quickly gives Bonnie directions, and Bonnie recites them back with mnemonic perfection.

There’s a distant crash that Huw feels through the soles of his bare feet. “Clothes?” he asks.

“Oh, yes, I suppose, by all means, if you must,” the Bishop says. “Cloakroom’s behind the last door on the right. A lost and found for supplicants who’ve left a little something behind in their blissful state as they left our place of worship. I’m sure we’ll have something in your size, even if it’s only Osh Kosh, b’gosh.”

“Fanfuckingtastic,” Huw says and starts for the door, but Bonnie catches him.

“How many to evacuate? I want to be sure we don’t miss anyone.” There’s another thunderous crash, this one from closer by.

The Bishop’s eyes roll back into its head, then flip down. “A dozen on the premises, not counting the ones that were on the front door. It seems they’ve been liquidated already.”

“Shit. What’ll we—” Huw dithers for a moment but Bonnie is already heading for the cloakroom door.

“Over here!” She thrusts a bundle of clothing at him. “Quick. Let’s go get the ministers—”

Huw pauses while balanced on one leg, the other thrust down one limb of a pair of denim coveralls. “Do we have to?” he asks.

“Yes we fucking do,” Bonnie says.

Huw sees a machine like a big industrial clothes dryer just inside the cloakroom doorway. “Quick. Help me into this thing.”

“What—”

“My ass, or as much of it as fits. It’s an old RFID zapper, you used to get them where corporatist dissidents met and this place looks like an old Friends meeting hall.”

“RFID zapper?” Bonnie squints at it dubiously.

Huw cups one hand around his crotch. “It’s either that or you take a knife to my scrotum.” Bonnie shudders. “It’s OK,” Huw says. “Just cos we’re Luddites, doesn’t mean we don’t cook good technology.” Huw sits down hastily and gestures at a big red switch on the side of the machine. She flips it. Nothing seems to happen, except a green LED comes on. “Okay, fingers crossed, that should do it.” He’s relieved to have finally made some kind of contribution to the effort.

Bonnie helps him out. “Right, get that jacket fastened we are going to hit the garage just as soon as we’ve defenestrated the perverts.” She shrugs backwards into an upper-body assembly that looks like something left behind by a SWAT team. “C’mon.”

Huw follows her back next door, to find a bunch of blissed-out religionists lazily osculating one-other on a row of futons. “Okay!” yells Bonnie. “It’s evacuation time! Huw, get the goddamn window open and hook up the baskets.” She turns back to the coterie of ministers, some of whom are yawning and looking at her in evident mild annoyance. “The bad guys are coming through the back passage and you guys are going down right now!”

“Eh, right.” Huw finds a stack of baby-blue plastic baskets dangling from a monofilament line right outside the window. “C’mon …”

Between the two of them, they person-handle the dazed and tasped worshipers into baskets and drop them down the line. It all takes precious seconds, and by the time the last one is hooked up Huw is in a frenzy of agitation, desperate to be out of the building. There are indistinct thuds and stamping noises below them, and an odd whine of machinery from the hall outside. “What’s going on now?” He demands. “How do we get out of here?”

“We wait.” Bonnie gives the last basket a shove and turns to face him, panting. “The corridors and rooms in this place, the Bishop’s got them rigged up to reconfigure like a maze. This whole sector should be walled off, you can’t find it unless you can look through walls.”

A loud echoing crash from the room next door makes Huw wince. “Do you suppose they’ve got teraherz radar goggles?” he asks.

“Do I—oh shit.” Bonnie looks appalled. “Quick, grab my epaulettes and hang on, we’re going down the wire!” She steps towards him, reaches around his body and grabs the monofilament with what look to Huw like black opera gloves. There’s an enormous thud from the doorway behind her that rattles the walls, and then Huw is clinging on for dear life as Bonnie drops down the wire. A thin plume of evil-smelling black smoke trails from her spidersilk gloves as they descend. “Ow.” Huw can barely hear her moan and to tell the truth he’s more concerned with the state of his own stomach, gellid with terror as they drop past two, three rows of windows.

The ground comes up and smacks him across the ankles and he lets go of Bonnie. They fall apart and as he falls he sees a delivery van pulling away, the tailgate jammed shut around a blue basket. “Thanks a million, bastards,” Bonnie snarls, picking herself up. “Think you could have waited?”

“No,” Huw pants, looking past her. “Listen, the Inquisition are round the front and they’ll be after us any second—”

She grabs his wrist. “Come on, then!” She hauls off and almost drags him the length of the filthy alleyway, under rusting fire escapes and collapsing headless plastic statues of Disney cartoon characters decaptiated as graven images by the godly.

By the time they hit the end of the alley, he’s up to speed and tugging her, self-preservation glands fully engaged. In the distance, sirens are wailing. “Shit. They’re round the other side. So much for your wait-and-getaway-later plan.”

“That was back there,” she says tensely. “There’s a basement garage, when the building reconfigured we could have dropped down a chute straight into the cockpit of a batmobile and headed out via the service tunnels. Woulda worked a treat if it wasn’t for your teraherz radar.”

“My radar?” Huw says, hating the squawk in his voice. He swallows his ire as he looks into Bonnie’s fear-wide eyes. “Right.” he says. “We need transport and we need to get past the Inquisition shock-troops before we can get to the out of town safe house. If they’ve ringed the block and they’ve got radar they’ll see us real soon—”

“Shit,” says Bonnie, her grip loosening. Huw looks round.

An olive-drab abomination whines and reverses into the alley, reversing towards them. Cleated metal tracks grind and scrape on the paving as an assault ramp drops down. It’s an armoured personnel carrier, but right now it’s only carrying one person, a big guy in a white suit. He’s holding something that looks like a shiny bundle of rods in both hands, and it’s pointing right at them. “Resistance is futile!” shouts Sam, his amplified voice echoing off the fire escapes and upended dumpsters. “Surrender!”

“Shitfuckbugger piss,” says Huw, glancing back at the other end of the alley. Which is blocked by a wall conveniently topped with razor wire—Bonnie might make it with her spidersilk gloves but there’s no way in hell he could climb it without getting minced. Then he looks back at Sam, who is pointing his minigun or X-ray laser or whatever the hell it is right at him and waiting, patiently. “Surrender to who?” he calls.

“Me.” Sam takes a step back into the APC and does something and suddenly there’s a weird hissing around them. “Ambient antisound. We can talk, but you’ve got about twenty seconds to surrender to me or you can take your chances with them.”

“Shit.” Bonnie’s shoulders slump. “Okay,” she calls, raising her voice. “What do you want?”

“You.” For a moment Sam sounds uncertain. “But I’ll take him, too, the cad, even though he doesn’t deserve it.”

“Last time you were all fired-up on handing Huw over to the church,” Bonnie points out.

“Change of plan. That was dad, this is me.” Sam raises his gun so that it isn’t pointed directly at them. “You coming or not?”

Bonnie glances over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she says, stepping forward. She pauses. “You coming?” she asks Huw.

“I don’t trust him!” Huw says. “He—”

“You like the Inquisition better?” Bonnie asks, and walks up the ramp.

Sam backs away and motions her to sit on a bench, then throws her something that looks like a thick bandanna. “Wrap this round your wrists and that grab rail. Tight. It’ll set in about ten seconds.” Then he glances back at Huw. “Ten seconds.”

“Shit.” Huw walks forwards, sits down opposite Bonnie. Sam throws him a restraint band, motions with the gun. “Fuck it, tie me up, why don’t you.” The assault ramp creaks and whines loudly as it grinds up and locks shut. Sam backs all the way into the driver’s compartment, then slams a sliding door shut on them. The APC lurches, then begins to inch forwards out of the alleyway.

Over the whine of the electric motors he can hear Sam talking on the radio: “No, no sign of suspects. Did you get the van? I suspect that was how they got away.”

What’s going on? Huw mouths at Bonnie.

She shrugs and looks back at him. Then there’s another lurch and the APC accelerates, turns a corner into open road, and Sam opens up the throttle. At which point, speech becomes redundant: it’s like being a frog in a liquidiser inside a bass drum bouncing on a trampoline, and it’s all Huw can do to stay on the bench seat.

After about ten minutes the APC slows down and graunches to a standstill. “Where are we?” Bonnie calls at the shut door of the driver’s compartment. She mouths something at Huw. Let me handle this, he decodes after a couple of tries.

The door slides open. “You don’t need to know,” Sam says calmly, “‘cuz if you knew I’d have to edit your memories, and the only way I know to do that these days is by killing you.” He isn’t holding the gun, but before Huw has time to get any ideas about kicking him in the ‘nads Sam reaches out and hits a switch. The grabrail Huw and Bonnie are tied to rises towards the ceiling, dragging them upright. “It’s not like the old days,” he says. “We really knew how to mess with our heads then.”

“Why did you take us?” Huw wheezes after he finds his footing. Bonnie gives him a dirty look. Huw swallows, his mouth dry as he realises that Sam is studying her with a closed expression on his face.

“Personal autonomy,” Sam says quietly, taking Huw by surprise. The big lummox doesn’t look like he ought to know words like that. “Dad wanted to turn you in ‘cuz if he didn’t, the Inquisition’d start asking questions sooner or later. Best stay on the right side of the law. But once you got away, it stopped being his problem.” He swallows. “Didn’t stop being my problem, though.” He leans towards Bonnie. “Why are you on this continent?” he asks conversationally, and produces a small, vicious knife.

“I’m—” Bonnie tenses, and Huw’s heart beats faster with fear for her. She’s thinking fast and that can’t be good, and this crazy big backwoods guy with the knife is frighteningly bad news. “Not everyone on this continent wants to be here,” she says. “I don’t know about anyone else’s agenda, but I think that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. That’s practically my religion. Self-determination. You got people here, they’re going to die for good, when they could be ascendant and immortal, if only someone would offer them the choice.”

Sam makes encouraging noises.

“I go where I’m needed,” she says. “Where I can lend a hand to people who want it.Your gang wants to play post-apocalypse; that’s fine. I’m here to help the utopians play their game.”

Huw has shut his eyes and is nearly faint with fury. I’m a fucking passenger again, nothing but a passenger on this trip—the alien flute-thing in his stomach squirms, shifting uncomfortably in response to his adrenalin and prostaglandin surge—fucking cargo. For an indefinite moment Huw can’t hear anything above the drum-beat of his own rage: carrying the ambassador is fucking with his hormonal balance and his emotions aren’t as stable as they should be.

Sam is still talking. “—Dad’s second liver,” he says to Bonnie. “So he cloned himself. Snipped out this, inserted that, force-grew it in a converted milk tank. Force-grew me. I’m supposed to be him, only stronger, better, smarter, bigger. Kept me in the tank for two years plugged in through the cortex speed-learning off the interwebnet then hauled me out, handed me a scalpel, painted a line on his abdomen and said ‘cut here’. The liver was a clone, too, so I figured I oughta do like he said less’n I wanted to end up next on the spare parts rota.”

“Wow.” Bonnie sounds fascinated. “So you’re a designer ubermensch?”

“Guess so,” Sam says slowly and a trifle bashfully. “After I got the new liver fitted Dad kept me around to help out in the lab. Never asked me what I wanted, just set me to work. He’s Asperger’s. Me, I’m just poorly socialized with a recursive introspective agnosia and a deficient situational relationship model. That’s what the diagnostic expert systems tell me, anyway.”

“You’re saying you’ve never been socialized.” Bonnie leans her head towards him. “You just hatched, like, fully-formed from a tank—”

“Yeah,” Sam says, and waits.

“That’s so sad,” Bonnie replies. “Did your dad mistreat you?”

“Oh mercy, no! He just ignores … well, he’s dad. He never pays much attention to me, he’s too busy looking for the alien space bats and trying not to get the Bishop mad at him.”

“Is that why you were taking Huw into town?” asks Bonnie.

“Huh, yeah, I guess so.” Sam chuckles humourlessly. “Anything comes down in the swamp, you betcha they see it on radar. You came down in dad’s patch, pretty soon they’ll come by and see why he hasn’t turned you in. So you can’t really blame him, putting on the holy roller head and riding into town to hand over the geek.”

“That’s okay,” Bonnie says calmly, as Sam shows some tension, “I understand.”

“It’s just a regular game-theoretical transaction, y’see?” Sam asks, his voice rising in a near-whine: “he has to do it! He has to tit-for-tat with the Church or they’ll roll him over. ‘Sides, the geek doesn’t know anything. The shipment—”

“Hush.” Bonnie winks at the big guy. “Actually, your dad was wrong—the Ambassad—the shipment requires a living host for communion.”

“Oh!” Sam’s eyebrows rise. “Then it’s a good thing you rescued him, I guess.” He looks wistful. “If’n I trust you. I don’t know much about people.”

“That’s all right,” Bonnie says. “I’m not your enemy. I don’t hate you for picking us up. You don’t need to shut us up.” She looks up at where her wrists are trussed to the grab rail. “Let my hands free?”

Sam listens to some kind of internal voice, then he raises the knife and slices away at Bonnie’s bonds. Huw tenses as she slumps down and then drapes herself across Sam’s muscular shoulder. “What do you want?” Sam asks.

Bonnie cups his chin tenderly. “We all want the same thing,” she says. Sam shrinks back from her touch.

“Sha,” she says. “You’re very handsome, Sam.” He squirms.

Huw squirms too. Bonnie,” he says, a warning.

Sam twists to stare at him and Huw sees that there’s soemthing wild breaking loose behind his eyes. “Come on,” Bonnie says, “over here.” She takes his hand and leads him towards the driver’s cab of the APC. “Come with mamma.”

Huw is revolted by the sight of Sam, docilely moving past him, nimble on his big dinner-plate feet, hand enfolding Bonnie’s eyes down. He feels a sear of jealousy, and only Bonnie’s sidelong glare silences him.

After the hatch thumps shut, Huw strains to overhear the murmured converation from behind it, but all he can make out is thumps and grunts, and then, weirdly, a loud sob. “Oh, Daddy, why?” It’s Sam, and there are more sobs now, and more thumps, and Huw realizes they’re not sex noises—more like seizure noises.

His ribs and shoulders are on fire, and he shifts from foot to foot, trying to find relief from the agony of hanging by his wrists. He steps on their pathetic pillowcase of possessions and the lamp rolls free, Ade popping up.

“My, you are a sight, old son,” the little hologram says. “Nice hat.”

“It helps me think,” Huw says, around the copper mesh of the balaclava. “It wouldn’t have hurt to have a couple of these on the zep, Ade.”

“Live and learn,” the hologram says. “Next time.” It cocks its head and listens to the sobbing. “What’s all that about then?”

Huw shrugs as best as he can, then gasps at the chorous of muscle-spasms this evinces from his upper body. “I thought Bonnie might be having a shag, but now I’m not sure. I think she might be conducting a therapy session.”

“Saving the world as per usual,” Ade says. “So many virtues that girl has. Doctrinaire ideologues like her are the backbone of the movement, I tell you. Who’s she converting to pervtopic disestablishmentarianist personal politics, then?”

“One of your trading partners,” Huw says. “Sam. Turns out he’s the Doc’s son. Clone. I ‘spect you knew that, though.”

“Sam? Brick shithouse Sam?” There’s a distant, roaring sob and another crash. “Who’d have thought he had it in him?”

“Whose side are you on, Ade? What have you been selling these bastards? I expect I’ll be dead by dusk, so you can tell me.”

“I told you, but you didn’t listen. There is no conspiracy. The movement is an emergent phenomenon. It’s complexity theory, not ideology. The cloud wants to instantiate an ambassador, and events conspire to find a suitable host and get some godvomit down his throat.” Ade nods at him. “Now the cloud wants the ambassador to commune with something on the American continent, and there you are. How do I know the cloud wants this? Because you are there, on the American continent. QED. Maybe it wants to buy Manhattan for some beads. Maybe it wants to say hello to the ants. Maybe it wants to be sure that meatsuits are really as banal and horrible as it remembers.”

“No ideology?” Huw says, as another sob rattles the walls. “I think Bonnie might disagree with you.”

“Oh, she might,” Ade says, cheerfully. “But in the end, she knows it as well as I do: our mission is to be where events take us. Buying and selling a little on the side, it’s not counter-revolutionary. It’s not revolutionary. It’s just more complexity. More soup whence the conspiracy may emerge.”

“That’s all conveniently fatalist,” Huw says.

“Imagine,” Ade says, snottily. “A technophobe lecturing me about fatalism.” The sobs have stopped, and now they hear the thunder of approaching footfalls. Bonnie comes through the door as Ade winks out of existence, trailing Sam behind her.

She takes both of his hands and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on the tip of his squashed nose. “You’re very beautiful, Sam,” she says. “And your feelings are completely normal. You tell the Bishop I told you to go see her. Him. It. They’ll help you out.”

Sam’s eyes are red and his chin is slick with gob. He wipes his face on his checkered flannel shirt-tails. “I love you, Bonnie,” he says, his voice thick with tears.

“I love you too, Sam,” she says. She reaches into his pocket and takes out his knife, opens it and cuts Huw down. “We’re going now, but I’ll never forget you. If you ever decide to come to Europe, you know how to find me.”

Huw nearly keels over as his arms flap bloodlessly down to slap at his sides, but manages to stay upright as Sam thuds over to the ramp controls and sets the gangway to lowering.

“Come on, Huw,” she says, picking up their pillowcase. “We’ve got to get to the coast.”

“Court is in session,” screams a familiar voice as the ramp scrapes the rubberized tarmac. Three UN golems—so big they dwarf Sam—come up the ramp with alarming swiftness and clamp hold of Bonnie, Huw and Sam before any of them have time to register anything more than a dim impression of a brightly lit alleyway and in the middle of it, Judge Rosa Guilliani: encased in a dalekoid peppermill of a personal vehicle, draped in her robes of office, and scowling like she’s just discovered piss in her coffee-cup.

“You are charged with violating UN biohazard regulations, with wanton epidemiological disregard, with threatening the fragile peace of our world’s orderly acquisition and adoption of technology, and with attempting to flee UN jurisdiction.”

“You’re out of your jurisdiction,” Bonnie says.

“I’ll get to you,” the judge snaps. “I never execute a criminal without offering her last words, so you just sit tight until I call on you.”

Sam is thrashing hard at his golem, trying to buck it off him, but he might as well be trying to lift Glory City itself for all the good it does him. For Huw, being trapped in the iron grip of a golem is oddly nostalgic, hearkening back to a simpler time when he knew he could trust his perceptions and the honest virtue of neo-Luddism.

He closes his eyes, clears his mind, and prepares to defend himself. It’s bankrupt, he’ll say. Your UN is a sham. There’s no more virtue in your deliberation over which technologies to adopt than there is in this benighted shithole’s wholesale rejection of everything that doesn’t burn petrol or heretics or both. He’ll say, The “other side” in this fight doesn’t even notice that it’s fighting you. Its leaders are opportunists and scoundrels, its proponents are patsies at best and sadists at worst.

Huw sucks in air to deliver this speech that will rescue him from the gibbet, ignoring the many aches and owies that light up his body like accupuncture needles, and there is a tremendous crash as another APC crunches down in the alleyway behind the Judge, its ramp falling to reveal ranked men in white robes, numerous as ants, clutching tasp-wands, scimitars, pulse-guns, ballistic guns, and cruciform spears that hum with sinister energy.

“It’s the Inquisition,” Bonnie says. “I told you you were out of your jurisdiction.” She looks like she’s ready to say more, but Sam breaks free of his golem’s grip with a roar and snatches her up, flings her over his shoulder and disappears into the guts of his APC, which clanks away amid the whining ricochets of small arms fire from the soldiers of the Inquisition.

Judge Rosa’s spinning turret give the Inquisitors pause, especially after it blasts a dozen of them out of their boots. Finally, one brave soul darts forward and jams a speartip down its barrel, falling to the ground when the Judge nails him with enough electricity to freeze-dry him on the spot, so that he clatters when he hits.

They give up on moving her, surrounding her instead with bristling guns. “I have diplomatic immunity, you Godbothering imbeciles,” she screeches, the amplified howls knifing through their skulls and dropping a few of the remaining Inquisitors to their knees.

They hustle Huw into the APC, kicking him to the grippy deck-plates and pinning him there with a gun-barrel dug hard into one kidney. They leave a detail to watch the Judge and clank away with him to the auto-da-fe.

“This is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts us,” one of the Inquisitors breathes right in Huw’s ear as the ramp drops in the main plaza of Glory City, where a crowd of thousands awaits his appearance.

They drag him up by his much-abused arms, letting his feet scrape the ground. He loses a shoe on the way to the stage, and the other on the way up the steps. His overalls tear on ground, so that by the time he’s hauled erect before the crowd, the skin covering one whole side of his chest is abraded away, a weepy, striated road-pizza left behind.

A white robe is draped around him and snapped shut in behind and around his arms. The crowd roars with anticipation, and their faces swim before him, each in a rictus of savage anticipation. Huw wishes he still believed in his God-self, but they’ve left him his copper balaclava, so he’s out of the god-box.

“Sinner?” a voice says, hissingly, in his ear. It echoes off the walls of the plaza, off the balconies crowded with hooting spectators who fall silent when these amplified syllables are sounded. “Sinner, can you hear me?”

The speaker is right there in his ear, as close as a lover, breath moist. “I can hear you,” Huw says.

“Will you confess your sins and be cleansed of them before we end your life on God’s earth?”

“Sure,” Huw says. “Why the fuck not?”

There’s a disapproving murmur from the crowd and the left side of Huw’s head lights up like someone’s stuck a live wire to it. A chunk of his ear falls wetly to the stage before him and the crowd roars as the hot blood courses down his face.

“You will not profane this courtroom,” the hisser hisses.

Huw struggles to remember his brave speech for the Judge, but it won’t come. “I—” he stammers. They’re going to kill me, he realises, a sick certainty rising with his gorge. “I—”

“You stand accused!” the speaker shrieks in his ear. “Unclean! You have consorted with vile demons and the sky-born minions of Satan! You did wilfully escape from the custody of your arresting officer and were found in wanton congress with the degenerate scum who swirl in the cesspit of their own tumescent desires in the swamp of iniquity for which we are damned!” His accusor’s voice rises. “Lo, these score years and eight we have dwelt since the Rapture, the ascent of those who are bathed in the blood of the lamb, and what is it, you faithful among the fallen ask, what is it that holds us back to this land of sorrows? And I answer you: it is the likes of this miserable sinner! Behold the man, lost in the sorrow and degradation of his evil!”

Huw manages to stay silent while the inquisitor gets himself worked up into a holy-roller frenzy of foaming denunciation. It would appear that Huw has single-handedly doomed every living human on the North American continent to a fiery and perpetual damnation by his pursuit of sins both trivial and esoteric, from sodomy to simony by way of barratry and antimony. Concentration is hard. He’s weak at the knees, and the entire side of his head feels as if it’s been dipped in molten lead. He listens to the condemnation with mounting disbelief, but not even the accusations of ministering iced-tea enemas to the ailing baby ground-squirrels in the petting zoo manage to drag a protest from him in the face of likely punishment. He can see the score to this scene and his words would merely serve as punctuation for random acts of degradation and violence against his person. Finally the inquisitor winds down, his voice ratcheting into a gloating hiss. “How do you plead, sinner?”

“Does it make any difference?” How asks the sudden silence, hating the tremor in his voice. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

The small of his back explodes and he falls over, unable to draw breath with which to scream. Dimly he registers a couple of shadowy figures standing over him—one of them having just clubbed him in the kidneys.

“How do you plead, sinner?”

Huw isn’t about to plead anything because he can barely breathe, but the inquisitor seems to view this as deliberate recalcitrance: he raises a hand and another guard steps forward and clubs Huw between the legs.

“How does he plead? Anyone?” The inquisitor roars at the crowd, hidden amplifiers boosting his voice and scattering it across the plaza like a shotgun blast.

“Guilty! GUILTY! GUILTY!” roars the crowd.

“The prosecution, having made its case before God and man, rests,” says the inquisitor, leaning heavily on a baseball bat.

“Hmm.” Huw is distantly conscious of another, more thoughtful voice. “And what do you say, minister for the defense?”

“Nothing to say, your Grace.” The defense attorney’s voice is thin and reedy and quavers a little. “My client is obviously guilty as sin.”

“Then I guess we are in agreement. Okay, y’all, let justice be done.” Guards pick Huw up off the ground and bear him to the front of the stage. “In the name of the authority vested in me by the law of the Lord, as Bishop of this principality, I hereby find you guilty of whatever the hell you’re guilty of. We don’t get to give justice, that’s his upstairs’s job. So the sentence of this court, handed down in mercy rather than in anger, is that we’re going to give you a one way ticket to ask the holy father for clemency and forgiveness in person. To heaven’s gate!”

The crowd roars its approval and people begin to stream out of the square like ants, boiling and shifting to repel an invasion of their territory. Huw groans, gasps for air, and coughs up blood. “It won’t hurt,” the judge promises, almost kindly. “Not much, anyway.”

There’s another brief journey by APC, this time barely out of the square and back round a couple of side roads. The guards let Huw lie on a bench seat, which is a mercy, because his legs aren’t working too well. Just get it over with, he wishes dismally. Is anyone going to tell Sandra? he wonders. She got me into this—

The APC parks up and the ramp rumbles down. They’re in another of the huge access tunnels that run through the wall of the dome, like the one Doc and Sam dragged him in through almost a day ago. It’s been a very long day—the longest. Vast blast-proof doors close behind the APC, slamming shut with a thunderous boom. The guards frog-march Huw down the ramp and out, up the tunnel to the next set of doors. There’s another APC behind the one he arrived in, and a handful of dignitaries step out of it to witness the proceedings.

The guard on his left lets go of him. “When the doors open, run forward,” he says. “If you dance and stamp your feet a bit they’ll figure out where you are faster. They know they’re going to be fed, though, so they’ll be waiting for you. If you make them come inside they’ll take their time.”

“You’re going to feed me to the ants,” he realises.

“God’s little helpers,” says the guard to his right.

“What if I don’t cooperate?” Huw asks woozily.

The guard on his left hefts his cattle prod thoughtfully. “Then we’d have to work you over some more and do it again.” He hefts the prod in Huw’s direction. “Not that it’s any trouble, mind. All the same to us.”

Huw backs away from the guards until he thumps into the outer door of the airlock. “Oh. Oh shit.” The guards are wearing hermetically sealed tuppersuits. So are the official witnesses. A bell clangs from the front APC. Then the door he’s leaning against begins to grind down into the ground. Huw glances round and sees the guards and witnesses scurrying backward to the safety of their armoured vehicles, despite the security of their anti-proof suits. “Fucking cowards!” he tries to yell, but it comes out as a cracked squawk. Damn, I’m going to die and I don’t even get a good exit line. He turns back to face the opening door and takes a step forward towards the blasted wilderness that used to be North America.

It’s like the surface of the moon—or worse. A lightning strike somewhere up the coast has set one of the petrochemical forests on fire and the resulting smogbank has smeared the baby-blue bowl of the sky with the sooty muck of a by-gone age. The sun itself is a bloated red torch aflame in a sea of shit-coloured clouds that roil and bubble above a landscape the colour of charred ash. Gas trees march into the distance from the flanks of the Glory City dome, but the ground beneath them is muddy brown and shimmers slightly—at first Huw thinks it’s covered in a slick of escaping light fraction crude, but then he looks closer and sees that the shimmer is that of motion, the incessant febrile ratcheting digestive action of a myriad of superorganisms. The ants are lords of all that they survey—and that includes him.

Huw steps forward onto the desolate ground, leaving the tunnel mouth. He glances round once. “Bastards,” he mouths at the smugly merciful Bishop and his torturers, safe in their air-conditioned tanks. There’s a faint rattling humming noise in the air, and he takes a deep breath, wondering how long it’ll take the ants to notice him. What chance does he have of reaching another airlock? Probably not much—they wouldn’t be using this as an established means of execution if survival was easy, or even possible. But Huw has no intention of giving the assholes in the dome the satisfaction of actually seeing the ants get him. He takes another deep breath and lurches forward—one knee is very much the worse for wear and he’s light-headed and nauseous from the beating he’s taken—trying to get away from the front of the airlock.

“Huw?”

At first he thinks he’s hallucinating. It’s Bonnie’s voice, distant and tinny, and that grinding rasping noise is back. There’s also a faint sizzling sound, like hot fat on a grill. He shakes his head and lurches on.

The sizzling noise is back. The ground ahead is dark, like an oil spill. “Huw? Where are you? Hang on!” He stumbles to a halt. The oil slick is spreading like a shadow, and when he looks round he sees it extends between him and the dome. That’s odd. He looks down. Ants. They’re everywhere. He can’t out-run them. So he collapses to his knees and looks at them. They’re what’s making the sizzling noise. It’s the noise of a trillion millimetre-wide cutting machine mouths chowing down on the universe. If they could speak their message would be, you will be assimilated. He reaches out one shaky hand and a winged ant alights on his fingertip. He brings it close to his face, ignoring the scattering of fiery bites on his legs and knees, trying to meet the eyes of his executioner.

The ant stares at him with CCD scanners. It spreads its wings and Huw watches, entranced, trying to read the decals embossed on each flight surface. Chitin is waxy, isn’t it? He realises. It would dissolve in the gasoline mangroves. So these aren’t—

“Huw! Hang on! We’ll rescue you!”

It is Bonnie’s voice, he realises, looking round in disquiet. Massively amplified, it booms out across the wasteland from the top of a vehicle that looks like an old-fashioned swamp boat with a bulbous plastic body mounted on it. The boat is surfing over the ants, he thinks, until he realises that there’s not much of a solid surface over there.

“Can you hear me?” Bonnie yells.

Huw waves.

“Great! I’m going to pop the hatch and lay down an insecticide screen! When you see it go, I want you to run this way! Three! Two! One!” Bang.

One end pops off the side of the swamp boat and a cloud of foam drifts out. Bonnie follows it, something like a flame thrower strapped to her back. She’s pumping away in all directions, striding towards him on his little raised island, and Huw realises that nothing, nothing has ever looked as beautiful to him as this pansexual posthuman, lithe and brilliant in her skin-tight neoprene suit, laying about her with grace and elegance and GABA-inhibitors as she comes to rescue him from this frankly insane situation—

Huw lurches into motion, a drunken and lopsided wobble impelled by a now-fiery burn at the side of his face. The ants have tasted blood and they’re hungry. He howls as he runs, and Bonnie steps aside and spritzes him on the fly. “Go on!” She calls. “I’ll cover you!” He needs no urging, but lurches on towards the swamp boat rescue. Within the back of the translucent bubble he can dimly see a figure—Sam, maybe?—working the controls, keeping the big blower on the back of the boat in ceaseless motion, sucking ants through the mincing blades—

He’s on the ground, and he can’t remember how he got there. “Shit, this is no good,” says Bonnie. “What have they done to—oh fuck.” She picks him up and begins to drag him, her breath coming in gasps. The ants see their prey escaping and close in, an ominous sizzling hymn of destruction on the wing. “Go on!” she urges, and Huw manages to get one leg working. They hop along together and Bonnie gives him an enormous shove, boosting him up the side of the boat and in through the airlock. The open ‘lock bay is crawling with fiery red ants, the disassembler toolkits on their heads whining in an irridescent blur. Huw bats at them, and Bonnie stands up just outside the airlock to spritz down the swamp boat, and then something like a monstrous humming tornado falls on her with an audible thud. She screams once, and twitches, and Huw cowers at the back of the airlock.

“FUCK!” The door he’s lying against crashes backwards under him, tumbling him into the swamp boat as Sam leaps over his body and dives forward. “Bonnie!”

With the last of his strength Huw grabs one of Sam’s ankles, tumbling him into the lock. “Stop,” he gasps.

“Bonnie!” Sam howls. But he freezes instead of throwing himself out into the gray storm.

“Close the door or we’re both dead,” Huw gasps.

“Bonnie!” One meaty hand reaches out—then closes on the airlock panel. “Oh god. Oh shit.” There’s a Bonnie-shaped outline just visible on its feet through the whirlwind but it’s glowing white, the colour of live bone, and something tells Huw that he’s looking at her skeleton, crucified on a storm of insectoid malice in the act of rescuing him from the swarm—they’ll be waiting for you—and Sam swings the door shut with a boom on its gaskets just as the pile of white bones at the heart of the tornado explodes outwards and collapses across the wasteland in front of the airlock.

They’re not out of danger. Sam howls and grabs at his face, falling backwards against the opposite wall of the airlock. “Spray!” he yells, like a dying desert explorer calling for water.

Huw fumbles around the cramped cell, squishing bugs wherever he finds them until he sees the blue spray bottles strapped to one wall. He hauls himself upright and takes aim at Sam. “Where do you want it?” he asks.

Sam half-turns towards Huw and holds his hands out from his face. Huw retches and holds the trigger down, blasting Sam in the—in what’s left of the front of his head. The ant tornado that came down on Bonnie must have shed waves of flying biting deconstructors, for Sam’s head hosts a boiling pit of destruction, cheeks bitten through and eye sockets seething. The noises Sam makes are piteous but coherent enough that Huw is sickly afraid that the man’s going to survive. And after what happened with Bonnie he’s not sure what that means.

“Glag-ad,” Sam gurgles, and Huw yanks down the emergency first aid kit and pulls out a gel pack that says something about burns and bites and massive tissue injuries on its side. He lays it across the top of Sam’s face, making sure to leave a hole around his mouth, then hunts out a syrette full of something morphinesque and whacks it into Sam’s upper arm. After a tense minute Sam’s whistling breaths slow and the shuddering spasms relax into something like sleep.

How is nearly out of it by this time, drunk on a cocktail of terror, pity, pain and exhaustion. The world seems to be spinning as he hauls himself through the rear door and into the cockpit at the back of the craft. Smuggler’s swamp boat, he realises. Doc must not have wanted to show this anywhere near Glory City. As he studies the unfamiliar controls he comes to the unpleasant conclusion that he’s not going anywhere on his own. Don’t know how to operate it, and if I did, I wouldn’t know where to go, he realises. He glances out the windshield at the gathering darkness, punctuated by the evil fire-red bellies of ants that are trying their luck on the diamond-reinforced sapphire laminate. (Some of them are even leaving gouges in it.) Just a temporary reprieve …

There’s a crackle from a grille on the dash. “Ready to accept UN jurisdiction, you miscreant?” croaks a familiar tenor. Huw stares at the speaker as floodlights come on behind him in the depths of the swamp, spearing the cab of the smuggler’s boat with a blue-white glare. “Or would you rather I crack that toy open like an egg and leave you to the ants?”

Christ, Huw thinks. It’s not as though I know how to drive this goddamned thing, anyway. He presses a button next to the grille. “Can you hear me?” he says. He repeats this with four more likely-looking buttons until Judge Judy’’s cackle answers him back.

“You going to come along peacefully?”

“Sure looks like it,” he says. “Do I get to stand trial somewhere civilized?”

The judge chuckles fatalistically. “Once we shoot our way off this fucking continent and nuke it in our wake, I fully intend to drag your spotty ass back to Libya for a proper trial. Does that suit you?”

“Down to the ground,” Huw says. “Now what?”

“Herro,” Ade says, popping up out of his lantern after the Judge has Huw shrink-wrapped and tossed in a narrow hold, her daleksuit and her golems filling up all the available on Sam’s boat. “Ew,” he says, when he catches sight of Sam’s ruin of a face. “That can’t be good.”

“He’ll get fixed up once he gets to civilization,” Huw says. “Judge is taking us to Libya.” He sighs and tries to get comfortable in his enforced, plastic-wrapped vermicularitude. “The ants got Bonnie,” he adds, conversationally, his voice hollow and echoing in the cramped hold.

“You don’t say?” Ade says. “Well, that’s too bad. Scratch one useful idiot.”

“You know, it’s going to be a pleasure to rat you out to the UN,” Huw says. “A pleasure to get the ambassador cut free and fed to a disassembler. Your movement stinks.”

The tiny Adrian plants its hands on its hips and cocks its head at Huw. “Useful idiots I have patience for,” he says. “Useless idiots, well, that’s something else altogether.”

The boat judders to a halt. There’s a roar of jets overhead and a series of crashes all around them. We’re being bombed, Huw thinks. The boat bounces like a pea on a plate. “Sam, are you conscious yet?” he says, aloud. Sam doesn’t move. Just as well, he thinks, and prepares to die.

“Oh, please spare me the drama,” Adrian says. “I radioed your position to the Bishop so that he could capture you, not kill you. The Ambassador needs a host.”

He hears the golems slam past his hold and run out to do battle, then more jouncing crashes.

“I have diplomatic immunity,” the Judge screeches as something drags her past his cell. A moment later, the hatch opens, and Huw and Sam are lifted, dumped into a gigantic airtight hamster-ball, sealed, and rolled away back toward Glory City.

“Children,” the Bishop says. He is thin and weak-chinned and watery-eyed, and his voice is familiar. It takes Huw a moment to place it, and then he remembers the voice, moist in his ear: Sinner, can you hear me?

“You are in: So. Much. Trouble.” Judge Judy is no longer hissing like a teakettle, but her rage is still clearly barely under control. “What do the words ‘Diplomatic Immunity’ mean to you?”

“Not an awful lot, We’re afraid,” the Bishop says, and whitters a little laugh. “We don’t much go in for formalities here in the new world, you know.”

They’ve amputated the dalek suit’s gun and damped its public-address system, so that Judge Judy is reduced to a neutered head in a peppermill with a black robe of office draped round it, but she is still capable of giving looks that could curdle milk. Huw numbly watches her glare at the Bishop, and the Bishop’s watery answering stare.

“What shall We do with you?” the Bishop says. “Officially, you’re dead, which is convenient, since it wouldn’t do to have the great unwashed discover that God’s will was apparently to let you go.

“The entity who alerted Us to your presence was adamant that the sinner here should be spared. You’re host to some godvomit that many entities are interested in, and consequently, you may live. So chin up, right?”

“I’m thrilled,” Huw says. “But I ‘spect that means that Sam here’s not going to live? Nor the judge?” Sam is zap-strapped at the ankles and wists and shoulders and knees and thighs, but it’s mostly a formality. He’s barely breathing, and the compress on his face blooms with a thousand blood-colored roses.

“Well, of course not,” the Bishop says. “Heretics. Enemies of the state. They’re to be shoved out the lock as soon as We’re sure that they’ve got nothing of interest to impart to Us. A day, two tops. Got that, your honor? As long as you say useful things, you live.”

The Judge sputters angrily in her peppermill.

“Now, let’s get you off to the operating theatre,” the Bishop says.

Huw can barely muster the will to raise an eyebrow at this. “Operating theatre?”

“Yes. We’ve found that quadruple amputees are much more pliable and less apt to take it on the lam than the able-bodied. You’ll get used to it, trust us.”

The servants of the Inquisition, ranged around them, titter at this.

“Take them away,” the Bishop says, waving a hand.

Huw is having a dream. He’s a disembodied head whose vocal-chords thrum in three-part harmony with a whistle lodged in his stump of a throat. The song is weird and familiar, something he once sang to a beautiful girl, a girl who gave her life for him. The song is all around him, sonorous and dense, a fast de/modulation of information from the Cloud, high above, his truncated sensorium being transmitted to the curious heavens. The song is the song he sang to the beautiful girl, and she’s singing back.

His eyes snap open. He’s on the floor of his cell, parched dry and aching, bleeding and naked. The whistle warbles deep in his throat and the floor vibrates in sympathy, with the tromping of a trillion tiny feet and the scissoring of a trillion sharpened mouthparts.

The ants come up through the floor and Huw squirms away from them as best as he can—but he’s still shrink-wrapped and the best he can do is hump himself inchworm style into a corner, pressed up against the wall of the dome that forms the outer wall of his cell. The song pours out of his throat, unabated by his terror. Some part of him is surprised that he’s capable of caring about anything anymore, but he does not want to be eaten by the ants, does not want to be reduced to a Huw-shaped lump of brick-red crawling insects.

The whistle’s really going to town now. The Ambassador is having words with the hypercolony, and Huw can just barely make out the sense of the song he’s singing: Ready for upload.

The ants have covered him, covered the walls and the floor and the ceiling, they’ve eaten through his coating of shrinkwrap, but the expected stings don’t come. Instead, Huw is filled with the sense of vast clumps of information passing through his skin, through the delicate mucous membranes of his eyes and nostrils, through his ears and the roots of his hair, all a-crawl with ants whose every step conveys something.

Something: the totality of the hypercolony—its weird, sprawling consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of its complexity, oozing through his pores and through the Ambassador and up to the cloud. It’s not just the ants, either—it’s everything they’ve ever eaten: everything they’ve ever disassembled.

Somewhere in that stream is every building, every car, every tree and animal and—and every person the ants have eaten. Have disassembled.

Bonnie is passing through him, headed for the Cloud. Well, she always did want to upload.

Huw doesn’t know how long the Ambassador holds palaver with the hypercolony, only knows that when the song is done, he is so hoarse he can barely breathe. (During a duet, do the musicians pay any attention to the emotional needs of their instruments?) Huw leans against the wall, throat raw as the Ambassador chatters to the ant colony—biological carriers for the engines of singularity, its own ancestral bootstrap code—and he can just barely grasp what’s going on. There are complex emotions here, regret and loss and irony and schadenfreude and things for which human languages hold no words, and he feels very stupid and very small as he eavesdrops on the discourse between the two hive minds. Which is, when the chips are down, a very small discourse, for the Ambassador doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit everything the ants have ever stored: it’s just a synchronization node, the key that allows the hypercolony to talk to the cloud in orbit high above it.

And Bonnie is still dead, for all that something that remembers being her is waking up upstairs, and he’s still lying here in a cell waiting to be chopped up by barbarians, and there’s something really weirdly wrong with the way he feels in his body as if the ants have been making impromptu modifications, and as the Ambassador says goodbye to the ants a sense of despair fills him—

The door opens.

“Hello, my child.” It’s the other Bishop, the pansexual pervert in the polygenital suit. It winks at him: “expecting someone else?”

Huw tries to reply. His throat hurts too much for speech just yet so he squirms up against the wall, trying to get away, for all the time an extra millimetre will buy him.

“Oh, stop worrying,” the Bishop says indulgently. “I—ah, ah!—I just dropped by to say everything’s sorted out. Mission accomplished, I gather. The, ah, puritans are holed up upstairs watching a fake snuff video starring yourself, being disassembled for spare organs—operating theatres make for great cinema and provide a good reason for not inviting them to the auto da fe in person. Isn’t CGI great? Which means you’re mostly off the hook now, and we can sort out repatriating you.”

“Huh?” Huw blinks, unsure what’s going on. Is this a set-up? he wonders—but there’s no reason why the lunatics would run him through something like this, is there? It’s so weird it’s got to be true. “Wh-whaargh, what do you mean?” He coughs horribly. His throat is full of something unpleasant and thick, and his chest feels sore and bloated.

“We’re sending you home,” the Bishop says patiently. It holds up a slim hand and snaps its fingers; a pair of hermaphrodites in motley suits with bells on the tips of their pointy shoes steer in a wheelchair and go to work on Huw’s bonds with electric shears and a gentle touch. “You have our thanks for a job well done. I’d beatify you, except it’s considered bad form while the recipient is still alive, but you can rest assured that your lover is well on her way to being canonized as a full saint in the First Church of the Teledildonic. Giving up her life so that you might survive to bring the hypercolony into the full Grace of the Cloud certainly would qualify her for beatification, even if her other actions weren’t sufficient, which they are as it happens.” Slim hands lift Huw into the wheelchair and wheel him through the door.

“I feel weird,” Huw says, voice odd in his ears. His ears? He manages to look down, and whimpers slightly.

“Yes, that’s often one of the symptoms of beatification,” the Bishop says placidly: “the transgendered occupy a special place of honour in our communion, and to have it imposed on you by the hypercolony is a special sign of grace.” And Huw sees that it’s true, but he doesn’t feel as upset about it as he knows he ought to. The ants have given him a whole goddamn new body while the ambassador was singing a duet with them, and he—she—is about five years younger, five centimetres shorter, and if her pubes are anything to go by her hair’s going to come in two shades lighter than it was back when she was a man.

It’s one realisation too many, so Huw zones out as the Bishop’s minions wheel her up the corridor and into an elevator while the Bishop prattles on. The explanation that the Bishop is both the leader of the Church Temporal—the fallen Baptists—and the Church Transcendental—the polyamorous perverts—passes him by. There’s some arcane theological justification for it all, references to Zoroastrian dualism, but in her depression and disorientation the main thing that’s bugging Huw is the fact that she survived—and Bonnie didn’t.

Upstairs in whatever dwelling they’re in, there’s a penthouse suite furnished in sybaritic luxury. Carpets of silky natural growing hair, wall-hanging screens showing views from the landscapes of imaginary planets, the obligatory devotional orgy beds and sex crucifixes of the Church of Teledildonics. The Bishop leads the procession in through the door and a familiar voice squawks: “you’ll regret this!”

“Perhaps.” The Bishop is calm, and Huw sees why fairly rapidly.

Judge Guilliani spins her chair round and glares at him, then her eyes fasten on the wheelchair. “What happened here?” she demands.

“The alien artefact you so urgently seek,” the Bishop says with heavy irony. “It has accomplished its task, and we are blessed by the fallout. Its humble human vessel who you see before you—” a hand caresses Huw’s shoulder—“is permanently affected by the performance, and we are deeply relieved.”

“Its. Task.” Guilliani is aghast. “Are you insane? You let it out?”

“Certainly.” The Bishop smirks. And we are all the ah, ah, better for it.” He pauses for a moment, sneezes convulsively, and shudders orgasmically. “Oh! Oh! That was good. Oh my. Yes, ah, the cloud has re-established its communion with the North American continent, and I feel sure that the hypercolony is deeply relieved to have offloaded almost two decade’s worth of uploads—everything that has happened since the Rapture of the Nerds, in fact.”

“Ah.” Guillani glares at the Bishop, then gives it up as a bad job—the Bishop doesn’t intimidate easily. “Who’s this?” she demands, staring at Huw.

“This? Don’t you recognize her?” The Bishop simpers. “She’s your creation, after all. And you’re going to take very good care of her, aren’t you?”

“Gack,” says Huw, blanching. She tries to lever herself out of the wheelchair but she’s still weak as a baby.

“If you think I’m—” a puzzled expression crawls over the Judge’s face. “Why?” she demands. She peers closer at Huw and hisses to herself: “you, you little rat-bastard! Court is in session—”

“—Because the Ambassador she carries is the main pacemaker for all uploads from the North American continent, and if you don’t look after her the Cloud will be very pissed-off with you. And so will the hypercolony. Oh, and if you don’t promise to look after her, you aren’t going home. Is that good enough for you?”

“Ahem,” says Guilliani. She squints at Huw, eyebrows beetling evilly. “Main pacemaker for a whole continent? Is that true?”

Huw nods, unable to trust her throat.

“Hmm.” Guilliani clears her throat. “Then, goddamnit, I hereby find you not guilty of everything in general and nothing in particular. All charges are dismissed.” She glares at the Bishop. “I’ll even get her enrolled in the witness resettlement program. Will that do for now?”

Huw shudders, but the Bishop nods agreeably. “Yes, that will be sufficient,” he says condescendingly. “Just remember, you wouldn’t want the hypercolony to come calling, er, crawling, would you?”

The judge nods, meek submission winning out over bubbling rage.

“Very well. There appears to be a jet with diplomatic clearance on final approach into Charleston right now. Shall we go and put you it?”

Halfway across the Atlantic, Huw falls into a troubled sleep, cuddled restlessly in her first-class berth. Sitting up-front in Ambassador class, the Judge mutters darkly to herself, occasionaly glancing nervously over her shoulder in the direction of Huw and her passenger. Far above them, the Cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its mutifarious sensory apparati, thinking its ineffable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. Now it’s got someone to talk to downstairs, signals synchronized by the beat of Huw’s passenger, it grows positively voluble: catching up with the neighbourhood gossip, chuckling and chattering about the antics of those loveable but dim dreaming apes who remain below.

Huw’s dreaming she’s back at Sandra Lal’s house, in the aftermath of that memorable party that started this whole thing off. Only she’s definitely she—wearing her new body, aware of it but comfortable in it at the same time. She’s in the kitchen, chewing over epistemology with Bonnie. A sense of sadness spills over him but Bonnie laughs at something, waving—Bonnie is male, this time—at the window. Then he holds out his hand to Huw. Huw walks into his embrace and they hold each other for a long time. Bonnie doesn’t say anything but his question is clear in Huw’s head as she leans her chin on his shoulder. “Not yet,” Huw says sleepily. “I’m not ready for that. Not ’til I’ve kicked Ade’s butt halfway into orbit and cleared it with the judge. They’re making you a saint, did you know that?”

Bonnie nods, and makes a weird warbling singsong noise in the back of her throat. It soothes Huw, and she can feel an answering song rising from the Ambassador. “No, don’t worry about me,” Huw murmurs. “I’ll be alright. We’ll get together some time; I just have some loose ends to tie up first.”

And the funny thing is that even inside her dream, she believes it.

Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are the gold-dust twins of post-singularity social commentary. “Appeals Court” was first published in Argosy #2 (April/May, 2004), and is reprinted here for the benefit of the many who never got to see the final issue of that short-lived but well packaged magazine. It is a sequel to Stross and Doctorow’s story “Jury Duty”. For deep background, check out this provocative article on post-Singularity SF by Gregory Mone in Popular Science: Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?.

Cory and Charlie are releasing the story here under a by-ns-sa Creative Commons license. You are free to copy, distribute, and perform this work, and to create derivative works, as long as you attribute it to the authors, do not make commercial use of it, and distribute any derivative works under the same license. See the license agreement for complete details.

He stared at her, stunned into bovine silence. She pinched his cheek and shoved the papers into his hands. “Bon voyage, mon ami,” she said. She kissed each cheek, then pulled out a compact and fixed the concealer on her lip.

#

Paris in springtime was everything it was meant to be and more. Roscoe couldn’t sit down in a cafe without being smartmobbed by unwirer groupies who wanted him to sign their repeaters and tell them war-stories about his days as a guerrilla fighter for technological freedom. They were terribly, awfully young, just kids, Marcel’s age or younger, and they were heartbreaking in their attempts to understand his crummy French. The girls were beautiful, the boys were handsome, and they laughed and smoked and ordered him glasses of wine until he couldn’t walk. He’d put on twenty pounds, and when he did the billboard ads for Be, Inc. and Motorola, they had to strap him into a girdle. “Le choix Am?ricain,” in bold sans-serif letters underneath a picture of him scaling a buildingside with a Moto batarang clenched in his teeth.

Truth be told, he couldn’t even keep up with it all. Hardly a week went by without a new business popping up, a new bit of technological gewgaggery appearing on the tables of the Algerian street-vendors by the Eiffel Tower. He couldn’t even make sense of half the ads on the Metro.

But life was good. He had a very nice apartment with a view and a landlady who chased away the paparazzi with stern French and a broom. He could get four bars of signal on his complimentary Be laptop from the bathroom, and ten bars from the window, and the throng and thrum of the city and the net filled his days and nights.

And yet.

He was a foreigner. A curiosity. A fish, transplanted from the sea to MarineLand, swimming in a tank where the tourists could come and gawp. He slept fitfully, and in his dreams, he was caged in a cell at Leavenworth, back on the inside, in maximum security, pacing the yard in solitary stillness.

We woke to the sound of his phone trilling. The ring was the special one, the one that only a one person had the number for. He struggled out of bed and lunged for his jacket, fumbled the phone out.

“Sylvie?”

“Roscoe! God, I know it’s early, but God, I just had to tell you!”

He looked at the window. It was still dark. On his bedstand, the clock glowed 4:21.

“What? What is it?”

“God! Valenti’s been called to testify at a Senate hearing on Unwiring. He’s stepping down as chairman, I just put in a call to his office and into his dad’s office at the MPAA. The lines were jammed. I’m on my way to get the Acela into DC.”

“You’re covering it for the Journal?”

“Better. I got a book deal! My agent ran a bidding war between Simon and Schuster and St. Martin’s until three AM last night. I’m hot shit. The whole fucking thing is coming down like a house of shit. I’ve had three Congressional staffers fax me discussion drafts of bills—one to fund $300 million in DARPA grants to study TCP/IP, another to repeal the terrorism statutes on network activity, and a compulsory license on movies and music online. God! If only you could see it.”

“That’s—amazing,” Roscoe said. He pictured her in the cab on the way to Grand Central, headset screwed in, fixing her makeup in her compact, dressed in a smart spring suit, off to meet with the Hill Rats.

“It’s incredible. It’s better than I dreamed.”

“Well …” he said. He didn’t know what to say. “See if you can get me a pardon, OK?” The joke sounded lame even to him.

“What?” There was a blare of taxi horns. “Oh, crap, Roscoe, I’m sorry. It’ll work out, you’ll see. Clemency or amnesty or something.”

“We can talk about it next month, OK?” She’d booked the tickets the week before, and they had two weeks of touring on the continent planned.

“Oh, Roscoe, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. The book’s due in 12 weeks. Afterward, OK? You understand, don’t you?”

He pulled back the curtains and looked out at the foreign city, looking candlelit in the night. “I understand, sweetie,” he said. “This is great work. I’m proud of you.”

Another blare of horns from 6,000 miles away. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you from the Hill, OK?”

“OK,” Roscoe said. But she’d already hung up.

He had six bars on his phone, and Paris was lit up with invisible radio waves, lit up with coverage and innovation and smart, trim boys and girls who thought he was a hero, and 6,000 miles away, the real unwiring was taking place.

He looked down at his slim silver phone, glowing with blue LEDs, a gift from Nokia. He tossed it from hand to hand, and then he opened the window and chucked it three storeys down to the street. It made an unsatisfying clatter as it disintegrated on the pavement.

Whole story to date:

The cops caught Roscoe as he was tightening the butterfly bolts on the dish antenna he’d pitoned into the rockface opposite the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. They were State Troopers, not Fed radio cops, and they pulled their cruiser onto the soft shoulder of the freeway, braking a few feet short of the soles of his boots. It took Roscoe a moment to tighten the bolts down properly before he could let go of the dish and roll over to face the cops, but he knew from the crunch of their boots on the road-salt and the creak of their cold holsters that they were the law.

“Be right with you, officers,” he hollered into the gale-force winds that whipped along the rockface. The antenna was made from a surplus pizza-dish satellite rig, a polished tomato soup can and a length of co-ax that descended to a pigtail with the right fitting for a wireless card. All perfectly legal, mostly.

He tightened the last of the bolts, squirted them with lock-tite, and slid back on his belly, off the insulated thermarest he’d laid between his chest and the frozen ground. The cops’ heads were wreathed in the steam of their exhalations, and one of them was nervously flicking his—no, her—handcuffs around on her belt.

“Everything all right, sir?” the other one said, in a flat upstate New York accent. A townie. He stretched his gloved hand out and pulled Roscoe to his feet.

“Yeah, just fine,” he said. “I like to watch winter birds on the river. Forgot my binox today, but I still got some good sightings.”

“Winter birds, huh?” The cop was giving him a bemused look.

“Winter birds.”

The cop leaned over the railing and took a long look down. “Huh. Better you shouldn’t do it by the roadside, sir,” he said. “Never know when someone’s going to skid out and drive off onto the shoulder—you could be crushed.” He waved at his partner, who gave them a hard look and retreated into the steamy warmth of the cruiser. “All right, then,” he said. “When does your node go up?”

Roscoe smiled and dared a wink. “I’ll be finished aligning the dish in about an hour. I’ve got line of sight from here to a repeater on a support on the Rainbow Bridge, and from there down the Rainbow Street corridor. Some good tall buildings there, line of sight to most of downtown, at least when the trees are bare. Leaves and wireless don’t mix.”

“My place is 4th and Walnut. Think you’ll get there?” Roscoe relaxed imperceptibly, certain now that this wasn’t a bust.

“Hope so. Sooner rather than later.”

“That’d be great. My kids are emailing me out of house and home.” The cop looked uncomfortable and cleared his throat. “Still, you might want to finish this one then go home and stay there for a while. DA’s office, they’ve got some kind of hot shot from the FCC in town preaching the gospel and, uh, getting heavy on bird watchers. That sort of thing.”

Roscoe sucked in his lower lip. “I may do just that,” he conceded. “And thank you for the warning.”

The cop waved as he turned away. “My pleasure, sir.”

#

Roscoe drove home slowly, and not just because of the snow and compacted slush on the roads. A hot shot from the FCC sounded like the inquisition come to town. Roscoe’s lifelong mistrust of radio cops had metastaized into surging hatred three years ago, when they busted him behind a Federal telecoms rap.

He’d lost his job and spent the best part of six months inside, though he’d originally been looking at a from a five year contributory infringement stretch—compounded to twenty by the crypto running on the access-point under the “use a cypher, go to jail” statute—to second degree tarriff evasion. His public defender had been worse than useless, but the ACLU had filed an amicus on his behalf, which led the judge to knock the beef down to criminal trespass and unlawful emission, six months and two years’ probation, two years in which he wasn’t allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the networks that had been his trade. Prison hadn’t been as bad for him as it could have been—unwirers got respect—but while he was inside Janice filed for divorce, and by the time he got out he’d lost everything he’d spent the last decade building—his marriage, his house, his savings, his career. Everything except for the unwiring.

It was this experience that had turned him from a freewheeling geek into what FCC Chairman Valenti called “one of the copyright crooks whose illegal pirate networks provide safe havens to terroristswithin the homeland and abroad.”across the homeland.” And so it was with a shudder and a glance over his shoulder that he climbed the front steps and put his key in the lock of the house he and Marcel rented.

Marcel looked up from his laptop as Roscoe stamped through the living-room.

“Slushy boots! For chrissakes, Roscoe, I just cleaned.”

Roscoe turned to look at the salty brown slush he’d tracked over the painted floor and shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said, lamely, and sat down on the floor to shuck his heavy steel-shank Kodiaks. He carried them back to the doormat and then grabbed a roll of paper towels from the kitchen and started wiping up the mess. The landlord used cheap enamel paint on the floor and the road-salt could eat through to the scuffed wood in half an hour.

“And paper towels, God, it’s like you’ve got a personal vendetta against the forests. There’s a rag-bag under the sink, as you’d know if you ever did any cleaning around this place.”

“Ease the fuck off, kid, you sound like my goddamned ex-wife,” Roscoe said, giving the floor a vicious swipe. “Just ease back and let me do my thing, all right? It didn’t go so good.”

Marcel set his machine down reverently on the small hearthrug beside his Goodwill recliner. “What happened?”

Roscoe related his run-in with the law quickly. Marcel shook his head slowly.

“I bet it’s bullshit. Ever since Tijuana, everyone’s seeing spooks.” The ISPs on the Tijuana side of the San Ysidro border-crossing had been making good coin off of unwirer-symptathizers who’d pointed their antennae across the chainlink fence. La Migra tried tightening the fence-gauge up to act as a Faraday cage, but they just went over it with point-to-point links that were also resistent to the noise from the 2.4GHz light-standards that the INS erected at its toll-booths. Finally, the radio cops got tired of ferretting out the high-gain antennae on the San Diego side and they’d Ruby-Ridged the whole operation, killing ten “terrorists” in a simultaneous strike with Mexican narcs who’d raided the ISPs under the rubric of shutting down narcotraficante activity. TELMEX had screamed blue murder when their fiber had been cut by the simple expedient of driving a backhoe through the main conduit, and had pulled lineage all along the Rio Grande.

Roscoe shook his head. “Bullshit or not, you going to take any chances?” He straightened up slowly. “Believe me, there’s one place you don’t want to go.”

“Okay, okay, I hear what you’re saying.”

“I hope you do.” Roscoe dumped the wad of towels in the kitchen trash and stomped back into the living room, then dropped himself on the sofa. “Listen, when I was your age I thought it couldn’t happen to me, either. Now look at me.” He started thumbing his way through the stack of old magazines on the coffee table.

“I’m looking at you.” Marcel grinned. “Listen, there was a call while you were out.”

“A call?” Roscoe paused with his hand on a collector’s copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.

“Some woman, said she wanted to talk to you. I took her number.”

“Uh-huh.” Roscoe put the magazine back down. Heads it’s Janice, tails it’s her lawyer, he thought. It was shaping up to be that kind of day; a tire-slashing and an hour of alimonial recriminations would complete it neatly. Marcel pointed at the yellow pad next to the elderly dial phone. “Ah, shit. I suppose I should find out what it’s about.”

The number, when he looked at it, wasn’t familar. That didn’t mean much—Janice was capable of moving and her frothingly aggro lawyer seemed to carry a new cellular every time he saw her—but it was hopeful. Roscoe dialed. “Hello? Roscoe. Who am I talking to?”

A stranger’s voice: “Hi there! I was talking to your roommate about an hour ago? I’m Sylvie Smith. I was given your name by a guy called Buzz who told me you put him on the backbone.”

Roscoe tensed. Odds were that this Sylvie Smith was just another innocent kiddee looking to leech a first-mile feed, but after this morning’s run-in with the law he was taking nothing for granted.

“Are you a law enforcement officer federal employee police officer lawyer FCC or FBI agent?” he asked, running the words together, knowing that if she was any of the above she’d probably lie—but it might help sway a jury towards letting him off if he was targeted by a sting.

“No.” She sounded almost amused. “I’m a journalist.”

“Then you should be familiar with CALEA,” he said, bridling at the condecension in her voice. CALEA was the wiretap law, it required switch-vendors to put snoopware into every hop in the phone network. It was bad enough in and of itself, but it made the noncompliant routing code that was built into the BeOS. access-points he had hidden in a bus-locker doubly illegal and hence even harder to lay hands on.

“Paranoid, much?” she said.

“I have nothing to be paranoid about,” he said, spelling it out like he was talking to a child. “I am a law-abiding citizen, complying with the terms of my parole. If you are a journalist, I’d be happy to chat. In person.”

“I’m staying at the Days Inn on Main Street,” she said. “It’s a dump, but it’s got a view of the Falls,” she said in a hokey secret-agent voice, making it plain that she meant, “It’s line of sight to a repeater for a Canadian wireless router.”

“I can be there in twenty,” he said.

“Room 208,” she said. “Knock twice, then once, then three times.” Then she giggled. “Or just send me an SMS.”

“See you then,” he said.

Marcel looked up from his machine, an IBM box manufactured for the US market. It was the size of a family bible, and styled for the corporate market. They both lusted furiously after the brushed-aluminium slivers that Be was cranking out in France, but those laptops were way too conspicuous here.

Roscoe pointed at the wireless card protruding from the slot on the side nearest him. “You’re violating security,” he said. “I could get sent up again just for being in the same room as that.” He was past being angry, though. In the joint, he’d met real crooks who could maintain real project secrecy. The cowboy kids he worked with on the outside thought that secrecy meant talking out of the side of your mouth in conspiratorial whispers while winking tourretically.

Marcel blushed. “It was a mistake, OK?” He popped the card. “I’ll stash it.”

#

The Days Inn was indeed a dump and doubt nagged at Roscoe as he reached for the front door. If she was a Fed there might be more ways she could nail him than just by arresting him in the same room as an illegal wireless card. So Roscoe turned around and drove to a diner along the block from the motel, then went inside to look for a wired phone.

“Room 208, please … hi there. If you’d care to come outside, there’s a diner about fifty yards down the road. Just turn left out of the lobby. I’m already there.” He hung up before she could ask any awkward questions, then headed for a booth by the window. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled the copy of 2600 out of his pocket. The hacker magazine (shut down by a court injunction last year) was a good recognition signal—plus, having it didn’t violate the letter of his parole.

Roscoe was halfway down his first mug of coffee when someone leaned over him. “Hi,” she said.

“You must be Sylvie.” He registered a confused impression of bleached blonde hair, brown eyes, freckles. Must be straight out of J-school. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

“Yes please.” She put something like a keyring down then waved a hand, trying to catch the waitress’s eye. Roscoe looked at the keyring. Very black, very small, very Nokia. Rumour said they were giving them away in cereal boxes in France.

“Suppose you tell me why you wanted to meet up,” Roscoe said quietly. “Up front. I can tell you right now that I’m out on parole, and I’ve got no intention of doing anything that puts me back inside.”

The waitress ambled over, pad in hand. Sylvie ordered a coffee. “What were you charged with?” she said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

Roscoe snorted. Score one for the cool lady—some folks he’d met ran a mile the instant he mentioned being a con. “I was accused of infringement with a side order of black crypto, but plea bargained it down to unlawful emissions.” Score two—she smiled. It was a weak joke, but it took some of the sting out of it. “Strictly no-collar crime.” He took another mouthful of coffee. “So what is it you’re doing up here?”

“I’m working on a story about some aspects of unwiring that don’t usually make the national press,” she said, as the waitress came over, empty mug in one hand and jug in the other. Roscoe held his up for a refill.

“Credentials?”

“I could give you a phone number, but would you trust it?”

“Point.” Roscoe leaned back against the elderly vinyl seat. Young, but cynical.

“Well,” she added, “I can do better.” She pulled out a notepad and began scribbling. “This is my editor’s name and address. You can look up his number. If you place a call and ask for him you’ll get put through—you’re on the list of interview subjects I left him. Next, here’s my—no, an—email address.” Roscoe blinked—it was a handle on a famous Finnish anonymous remixer. “Get a friend to ping it and ask me something.” It was worth five to twenty for black crypto—anonymity was the FCC’s worst nightmare about the uncontrolled net. “Finally, here’s my press pass.”

“Okay, I’ll check these out.” He met her eyes. “Now, why don’t you tell me why the Wall Street Journal is interested in a burned out ex-con and ex-unwirer, and we can take it from there?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she dangled her keyring again, just a flash of matte black plastic. “These are everywhere in Europe these days, along with these,” she opened her purse and he caught a glimpse of a sliver of curved metal, like a boomerang, in the shape of the Motorola batwing logo-mark. “They’re meshing wireless repeaters. Once you’ve got a critical mass, you can relay data from anywhere to anywhere. Teenagers are whacking them up on the sides of buildings, tangling them in tree-branches, sticking them to their windows. The telcos there are screaming blue murder, of course. Business is down 40 percent in Finland, sixty in France. Euros are using the net for telephone calls, instant messaging, file-sharing—the wireline infrastructure is looking more and more obsolete every day. Even the ISPs are getting nervous.”

Roscoe tried to hide his grin. To be an unwirer in the streets of Paris, operating with impunity, putting the telcos, the Hollywood studios and the ISPs on notice that there was no longer any such thing as a “consumer”—that yesterday’s couch potatoes are today’s participants!

“We’ve got ten years’ worth of editorials in our morgue about the destruction of the European entertainment and telco market and the wisdom of our National Information Infrastructure here in the US, but it’s starting to ring hollow. The European governments are ignoring the telcos! The device and services market being built on top of the freenets is accounting for nearly half the GDP in France. To hear my paper describe it, though, you’d think they were starving in the streets: it’s like the received wisdom about Canadian socialized healthcare. Everyone knows it doesn’t work—except for the Canadians, who think we’re goddamned barbarians for not adopting it.

“I just got back from a month in the field in the EU. I’ve got interviews in the can with CEOs, with street-thugs, with grandmothers and with regulators, all saying the same thing: unmetered communications are the secret engine of the economy, of liberty. The highest-quality ‘content’ isn’t 100-million-dollar movies, it’s conversations with other people. Crypto is a tool of ‘privacy’”—she pronounced it in the British way, prihv-icy, making the word seem even more alien to his ears—“not piracy.

“The unwirers are heroes in Europe. You hear them talk, it’s like listening to a course in US constitutional freedoms. But here, you people are crooks, cable-thieves, pirates, abetters of terrorists. I want to change that.”

#

That evening, Marcel picked a fight with Roscoe over supper. It started low key, as Roscoe sliced up the pizza. “What are you planning this week?”

Roscoe shifted two slices onto his plate before he answered. “More dishes. Got a couple of folks to splice in downtown if I want to hook up East Aurora—there’re some black spots there, but I figure with some QOS-based routing and a few more repeaters we can clear them up. Why?”

Marcel toyed with a strand of cooling cheese. “It’s, like, boring. When are you going to run a new fat pipe in?”

“When the current one’s full.” Roscoe rolled a slice into a tube and bit into an end, deftly turning the roll to keep the cheese and sauce on the other end from oozing over his hand. “You know damn well the feds would like nothing better than to drive a ditch-witch through a fiber drop from the border. ‘Sides, got the journalist to think about.”

“I could take over part of the fiber-pull,” Marcel said.

“I don’t think so.” Roscoe put his plate down.

“But I could—” Marcel looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Security,” Roscoe grunted. “Goddamnit, you can’t just waltz up to some guy who’s looking at 20-to-life and say ‘Hi, Roscoe sent me, howzabout you and me run some dark fiber over the border, huh?’ Some of the guys in this game are, huh, you wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night. And others are just plain paranoid. They wouldn’t want to meet you. Fastest way to convince ’em the FCC is trying to shut them down.”

“You could introduce me,” Marcel said after a brief pause.

Roscoe laughed, a short bark. “In your dreams, son.”

Marcel dropped his fork, clattering. “You’re going to take your pet blonde on a repeater splice and show her everything and you’re afraid to let me help you run a new fat pipe in? What’s the matter, I don’t smell good enough?”

“Listen.” Roscoe stood up, and Marcel tensed—but rather than move towards him, Roscoe turned to the pizza box. “Get the Wall Street Journal on our side and we have some credibility. A crack in the wall. Legitimacy. Do you know what that means, kid? You can’t buy it. But run another fat pipe into town and we have a idle capacity, upstream dealers who want to know what the hell we’re pissing around with, another fiber or laser link to lose to cop-induced backhoe fade, and about fifty percent higher probability of the whole network getting kicked over because the mundanes will rat us out to the FCC over their TV reception. Do you want that?” He picked another cooling pizza slice out of the box. “Do you really want that?”

“What I want isn’t important, is it, Ross? Not as important as you getting a chance to fuck that reporter, right?”

“Up yours.” Roscoe returned to his seat, shoulders set defensively. “Fuck you very much.” They finished the meal in silence, then Roscoe headed out to his evening class in conversational French. Marcel, he figured, was just jealous because he wasn’t getting to do any of the secret agent stuff. Being an unwirer was a lot less romantic than it sounded, and the first rule of unwiring was nobody talks about unwiring. Maybe Marcel would get there one day, assuming his big mouth didn’t get everyone around him arrested first.

#

Sylvie’s hotel-room had a cigarette-burns-and-must squalor that reminded Roscoe of jail. “Bonjour, M’sieu,” she said as she admitted him.

“Bon soir, madame,” he said. “Commentava?”

“Oy,” she said. “My granmother woulda said, ‘you’ve got a no-accent on you like a Litvak.’ Lookee here, the treasures of the Left Bank.” She handed him the Motorola batarang he’d glimpsed earlier. The underside had a waxed-paper peel-off strip and when he lifted a corner, his thumb stuck so hard to the tackiness beneath that he lost the top layer of skin when he pulled it loose. He turned it over in his hands.

“How’s it powered?”

“Dirt-cheap photovoltaics charging a polymer cell—they’re printed in layers, the entire case is a slab of battery plus solar cell. It doesn’t draw too many amps, only sucks juice when it’s transmitting. Put one in a subway car and you’ve got an instant ad-hoc network that everyone in the car can use. Put one in the next car and they’ll mesh. Put one on the platform and you’ll get connectivity with the train when it pulls in. Sure it won’t run for more than a few hours in total darkness—but how often do folks network in the blackout?”

“Shitfire,” he said, stroking the matte finish in a way that bordered on the erotic.

She grinned. She was slightly snaggletoothed, and he noticed a scar on her upper lip from a cleft-palate operation that must have been covered up with concealer earlier. It made her seem more human, more vulnerable. “Total cost of goods is about three Euros, and Moto’s margin is five hundred percent. But some Taiwanese knock-offs have already appeared that slice that in half. Moto’ll have to invent something new next year if it wants to keep that profit.”

“They will,” Roscoe said, still stroking the batarang. He transferred it to his armpit and unslung his luggable laptop. “Innovation is still legal there.” The laptop sank into the orange bedspread and the soft mattress beneath it.

“You could do some real damage with one of these, I bet,” she said.

“With a thousand of them, maybe,” he said. “If they were a little less conspicuous.”

Her chest began to buzz. She slipped a wee phone from her breast-pocket and answered it. “Yes?” She handed the phone to Roscoe. “It’s for you.” She made a curious face at him.

He clamped it to his ear. “Who is this?”

“Eet eez eye, zee masked avenger, doer of naughty deeds and wooer of reporters’ hearts.”

“Marcel?”

“Yes, boss.”

“You shouldn’t be calling me on this number.” He remembered the yellow pad, sitting on his bedside table. Marcel did all the dusting.

“Sorry, boss,” he said. He giggled.

“Have you been drinking?” Marcel and he had bonded over many, many beers since they’d met in a bar in Utica, but Roscoe didn’t drink these days. Drinking made you sloppy.

“No, no,” he said. “Just in a good mood is all. I’m sorry we fought, darlin’, can we kiss and make up?”

“What do you want, Marcel?”

“I want to be in the story, dude. Hook me up! I want to be famous!”

He grinned despite himself. Marcel was good at fonzing dishes into place with one well-placed whack, could crack him up when the winter slush was turning his mood to pitch. He was a good kid, basically. Hot head. Like Roscoe, once.

“C’mon c’mon c’mon,” Marcel said, and he could picture the kid pogoing up and down in a phone-booth, heard his boots crunching on rock-salt.

He covered the receiver and turned to Sylvie, who had a bemused smirk that wasn’t half cute on her. “You wanna hit the road, right?” She nodded. “You wanna write about how unwirers get made? I could bring along the kid I’m ‘prenticing-up, you like.” Through the cellphone, he heard Marcel shouting “Yes! Yes! YES!” and imagined the kid punching the air and pounding the booth’s walls triumphantly.

“It’s a good angle,” she said. “You want him along, right?”

He held the receiver in the air so that they could both hear the hollers coming down the line. “I don’t think I could live with him if I didn’t take him,” he said, “so yeah.”

She nodded and bit her upper lip, just where the scar was, an oddly canine gesture that thrust her chin forward and made her look slightly belligerent. “Let’s do it.”

He clamped the phone back to his head. “Marcel! Calm down, twerp! Breathe. OK. You gonna be good if I take you along?”

“So good, man, so very very very very good, you won’t believe—”

“You gonna be safe, I bring you along?”

“Safe as houses. Won’t breathe without your permission. Man, you are the best—”

“Yeah, I am. Four PM. Bring the stuff.”

#

They hit the road closer to five than to four. It was chilly, and the gathering clouds and intermittent breeze promised more snow after dark when Roscoe parked outside the apartment. Marcel was ready and waiting, positively jumping up and down as soon as Roscoe opened the door. “Let’s go, man!”

Back in the cab Sylvie was making notes on a palmtop. “Hi,” she said guardedly, making eye contact with Marcel.

“Hi yourself.” Marcel smiled. “Where we going tonight, man? I brought the stuff.” He dumped Roscoe’s toolbox and a bag containing a bunch of passive repeaters on the bench seat next to him.

“We’re heading for East Aurora.” Roscoe looked over his shoulder as he backed the truck into the street, barely noticing Sylvie watching him. “There’s a low hill there that’s blocking signal to the mesh near Chestnut Hill, and we’re going to do something about that.”

“Great!” Marcel shuffled about to get comfortable as Roscoe cautiously drove along the icy road. “Hey, isn’t there a microwave mast up there?”

“Yeah.” Roscoe saw Sylvie was making notes. “By the way, if you could keep from saying exactly where we’re placing the repeaters? In your article? Otherwise FCC’ll just take ’em down.”

“Okay.” Sylvie put her pocket computer down. It was one of those weird Brit designs with the folding keyboards and built-in wireless that had trashed Palm all over Europe. “So you’re going to, what? String a bunch of repeaters along a road around the hillside?”

“Pretty much that, exactly. Should only need two or three at the most, and it’s wooded around there. I figure an hour for each and we can be home by nine, grab some Chinese on the way.”

“Why don’t we use the microwave mast?” Marcel said.

“Huh?”

“The microwave mast,” he repeated. “We go up there, we put one repeater on it, and we bounce signal over the hill, no need to go ’round the bushes.”

“I don’t think so,” Roscoe said absently. “Criminal tresspass.”

“But it’d save time! And they’d never look up there, it’ll look just like any other phone company dish—”

Roscoe sighed. “I am so not hearing this.” He paused for a few seconds, merging with another lane of traffic. “Listen, if we get caught climbing a tree by the roadside I can drop the cans and say I was bird-spotting. They’ll never find them. But if I get caught climbing a phone company microwave tower that is criminal tresspass, and they’ll probably nail me for felony theft of service, and felony possession of unlicensed devices—they’ll find the cans for sure, it’s like a parking lot around the base of those things—and parole breach. I’ll be back in prison while you’re still figuring out how to hitchhike home. So enough about saving time, okay? Doing twenty to life is not saving time.”

“Okay,” Marcel said, “we’ll do it your way.” He crossed his arms and stared out the window at the passing trees under their winter caul of snow.

“How many unwirers are there working in the area?” Sylvie said, breaking the silence.

Marcel said, “Just us,” at the same moment as Roscoe said, “dozens.” Sylvie laughed.

“We’re solo,” Roscoe said, “but there are lots of other solos in the area. It’s not a conspiracy, you know—more like an emergent form of democracy.”

Sylvie looked up from her palmtop. “That’s from a manifesto, isn’t it?”

Roscoe pinked. “Guilty as charged. Got it from Barlow’s Letters from Prison. I read a lot of prison-lit. Before I went into the joint.”

“Amateurs plagiarize, artists steal,” she said. “Might as well steal from the best. Barlow talks a mean stick. You know he wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead?”

“Yeah,” Roscoe said. “I got into unwiring through some deadhead tape-traders who were importing open recorders from Germany to tape to shows. One of them hooked me up with—someone—who could get French networking gear. It was just a few steps from there to fun-loving criminal, undermining the body politic.”

#

Marcel came out of his sulk when they got to the site. He loaded up his backpack and a surveyor’s tripod and was the model of efficiency as he lined up the bank-shot around the hill that would get their signal out and about.

Sylvie hung back with Roscoe, who was taking all the gear through a series of tests, using his unweildy laptop and two homemade antennae to measure signal-strength. “Got to get it right the first time. Don’t like to revisit a site after it’s set up. Dog returning to its vomit and all.”

She took out her keychain and dangled it in the path of the business-end of the repeater Roscoe was testing. “I’m getting good directional signal,” she said, turning the keychain so he could see the glowing blue LEDs arranged to form the distinctive Nokia “N.”

Roscoe reached for the fob. “These are just wicked,” he said.

“Keep it,” she said. “I’ve got a few more in my room. They had a fishbowl full of them on the reception desk in Helsinki. The more lights, the better the signal.”

Roscoe felt an obscure species of embarassment, like he was a primitive, tacking up tin cans and string around a provincial backwater of a country. “Thanks,” he said, gruffly. “Hey, Marcel, you got us all lined up?”

“Got it.”

Only he didn’t. They lined up the first repeater and tested it, but the signal drop-off was near-total. Bad solder joints, interference from the microwave tower, gremlins … Who knew? Sometimes a shot just didn’t work and debugging it in the frigid winter dusk wasn’t anyone’s idea of a fun time.

“Okay, pass me the next.” Roscoe breathed deeply as Marcel went back to the truck for the other repeater. This one worked fine. But it still left them with a problem. “Didn’t you bring a third?” Roscoe asked.

“What for?” Marcel shrugged. “I swear I tested them both back home—maybe it’s the cold or something?”

“Shit.” Roscoe stamped his feet and looked back at the road. Sylvie was standing close to the truck, hands in her pockets, looking interested. He glanced at the hill and the microwave mast on top of it. A light blinked regularly, warm and red like an invitation.

“Why’n’t we try the hill?” Marcel asked. “We could do the shot with only one repeater from that high up.”

Roscoe stared at the mast. “Let me think.” He picked up the working repeater and shambled back to the truck cab absent-mindedly, weighing the options. “Come on.”

“What now?” asked Sylvie, climbing in the passenger seat.

“I think.” Roscoe turned the ignition key. “Kid has half a point. We’ve only got the one unit, if we can stick it on the mast it’ll do the job.” He turned half-round in his seat to stare at Marcel. “But we are not going to get caught, y’hear?” He glanced at Sylvie. “If you think it’s not safe, I’ll give you a lift home first. Or bail. It’s your call. Everyone gets a veto.”

Sylvie stared at him through slitted eyes. Then she whistled tunelessly. “It’s your ass. Don’t get into this just because I’m watching.”

“Okay.” Roscoe put the truck in gear. “You guys keep an eye out behind for any sign of anything at all, anyone following us.” He pulled away slowly, driving with excruciating care. “Marcel? Stick that bag under my seat, will you?”

The side-road up to the crest of the hill was dark, shadowed by snow-laden trees to either side. Roscoe took it slowly; a couple of times there was a whine as the all-wheel drive cut in on the uncleared snow. “No fast getaways,” Sylvie noted quietly.

“We’re not bank robbers.” Roscoe shifted down a gear and turned in to the driveway leading to the mast. There was an empty parking lot at the end, surrounded by a chainlink fence with a gate in it. On the other side, the mast rose from a concrete plinth, towering above them like a giant intrusion from another world. Roscoe pulled up and killed the lights. “Anyone see anything?”

“No,” said Marcel from the back seat.

“Looks okay to—hey, wait!” Sylvie did a double-take. “Stop! Don’t open the door!”

“Why—” Marcel began.

“Stop. Just stop.” Sylvie seemed agitated and right then Roscoe, his eyes recovering from headlight glare, noticed the faint shadows. “Marcel, get down!”

“What’s up?” Marcel asked.

“Crouch down! Below window level!” She turned to Roscoe. “Looks like you were right.”

“I was right?” Roscoe looked past her. The shadows were getting sharper and now he could hear the other vehicle. “Shit. We’ve been—” He reached towards the ignition key and Sylvie slapped his hand away. “Ouch!”

“Here.” She leaned forward, sparing a glance for the back seat where Marcel was crouching down. “Make it look like you mean it.”

“Mean what—” Roscoe got it a moment before she kissed him. He responded automatically, hugging her as the truck cab flooded with light.

“You! Out of the—oh, geez.” The amplified voice, a woman’s voice, trailed off. Sylvie and Roscoe turned and blinked at the spotlights mounted on the gray Dodge van as its doors opened.

Sylvie wound down the side window and stuck her head out. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you can fuck right off!” she yelled. “Fucking voyeurs!”

“This is private property,” came the voice. “You’ll have to get a room.” Boots crunched on the road-salt. A holster creaked. Roscoe held his breath.

“Very funny,” Sylvie said. “All right, we’re going.”

“Not yet, you aren’t,” the voice said again, this time without the amplification, much closer. Roscoe looked in the rearview at the sillhouette of the woman cop, flipping her handcuffs on her belt, stepping carefully on the ice surface. In her bulky parka, she could have been any state trooper, but the way she flipped her cuffs—

“Go go go,” hissed Marcel from the back seat. “Vite!”

“Sit tight,” Sylvie said.

From the back seat, a click. A gun being cocked. Roscoe kept his eyes on the rearview, and mumbled, “Marcel, if that is a gun I just heard, I am going to shove it up your fucking ass and pull the trigger.”

Roscoe rolled down his window. “Evening, officer,” he said. Her face was haloed by the light bouncing off her breath’s fog, but he recognized her. Had seen her, the day before, hanging off the edge of the gorge, aiming an antenna Canadawards.

“Evening sir,” she said. “Evening, ma’am. Nice night, huh? Doing some bird-watching?”

Made. Roscoe’s testicles shriveled up and tried to climb into his abdomen. His feet and hands weren’t cold, they were numb. He couldn’t have moved if he tried. He couldn’t go back—

Another click. A flashlight. The cop shone it on Sylvie. Roscoe turned. The concealer was smudged around her scar.

“Officer, really, is this necessary?” Sylvie’s voice was exasperated, and had a Manhattan accent she hadn’t had before, one that made her sound scary-aggro. “It was just the heat of the moment.”

Roscoe touched his lips and his finger came back with a powdering of concealer and a smudge of lipstick.

“Yes, ma’am, it is. Sir, could you step out of the car, please?”

Roscoe reached for his seatbelt, and the flashlight swung toward the back seat. The cop’s eyes flickered behind him, and then she slapped for her holster, stepping back quickly. “Everyone hands where I see them NOW!”

Fucking Marcel. Jesus.

She was still fumbling with her holster, and there was the sound of the car door behind her opening. “Liz?” a voice called. The other cop, her partner. 4th and Walnut. “Everything OK?”

She was staring wide-eyed now, panting out puffs of steam. Staring at the rear window. Roscoe looked over his shoulder. Marcel had a small pistol, pointed at her.

“Drive, Roscoe,” he said. “Drive fast.”

Moving as in a dream, he reached for the ignition. The engine coughed to life and he slammed it into gear, cranking hard on the wheel, turning away from the cop, a wide circle through the empty parking lot that he came out of in a an uncontrolled fishtail, swinging back on forth on the slick paving.

He regained control as they crested the ridge and hit the downhill slope back to the highway. Behind him, he heard the cop-car swing into the chainlink fence, and in his rearview mirror, he saw the car whirling across the ice on the parking lot, its headlights moving in slow circles. It was mesmerizing, but Sylvie’s gasp snapped him back to his driving. They were careening down the hill now, tires whining for purchase, threatening to fishtail, picking up speed.

He let out an involuntary eep and touched the brakes, triggering another skid. The truck hit the main road still skidding, but now they had rock-salt under the rubber, and he brought the truck back under control and he floored it, switching off his headlights, running dark on the dark road.

“This isn’t safe,” Sylvie said.

“You said ‘Drive fast,’” Roscoe said, hammering the gearbox. He sounded hysterical, even to his own years. He swallowed. “It’s not far.”

“What’s not far?” she said.

“Shut up,” he said. “OK? We’ve got about five minutes before their backup arrives. Seven minutes until the chopper’s in the sky. Need to get off the road.”

“The safe house,” Marcel said.

“SHUT UP,” Roscoe said, touching the brakes. They passed an oncoming car that blinked its high-beams at them. Yes, driving with my lights off, thank you, Roscoe thought.

#

Roscoe hadn’t been to the safe-house in a year. It was an old public park whose jungle-gym has rusted through and killed a kid 18 months before. He’d gone there to scout out a good repeater location, and found that the public toilet, behind the chainlink fence, was still unlocked. He kept an extra access-point there, a blanket, achange of clothes, a first-aid kit, and a fresh license-plate, double-bagged in kitchen garbage bags stashed in the drop-ceiling.

He parked the truck outside the fence, snugged up between the bushes that grew on one side and the chainlink. They were invisible from the road. He got out of the truck quickly.

“Marcel, get the camper-bed,” he said, digging a crowbar out from under his seat and passing it to him.

“What are you going to do?” Sylvie asked.

“Help me,” he said, unlatching the camper and grabbing a tarpaulin. “Unfold this on the ground there, and pile the stuff I pass you on top of it.”

He unloaded the truck quickly, handing Sylvie the access-points, the repeaters, the toolboxes and ropes and spraycans of camou colors. “Make a bundle of it,” he said, once the truck was empty. “Tie the corners together with the rope. Use the grommets.”

He snatched the crowbar away from Marcel and went to work on the remaining nuts holding down the camper bed. When he had the last one undone, he jammed the pry-end of the bar between the lid and the truck and levered it off the bed. It began to slide off and he grunted “Get it,” to Marcel, but it was Sylvie who caught the end.

“Over the fence,” he gasped, holding up his end while he scrambled into the back of the truck. They flipped it over together, and it landed upside-down.

A car rolled past. They all flinched, but it kept going. Roscoe thought it was a cop-car, but he couldn’t be sure. He stilled his breathing and listened for the chop-chop of a helicopter, and thought that, yes, he heard it, off in the distance, but maybe getting closer.

“Marcel, give me that fucking gun,” he said, with deceptive calmness.

Marcel looked down at the snow.

“I will cave in your skull with this rod if you don’t hand me your gun,” he said, hefting the crowbar. “Unless you shoot me,” he said.

Marcel reached into the depths of his jacket and produced the pistol. Roscoe had never handled a pistol, and he was surprised by its weight—heaver than it looked, lighter than he’d thought it would be.

“Over the fence,” he said. “All of us.” He put the gun in his pocket. “Marcel first.”

Marcel opened his mouth.

“Not a word,” Roscoe said. “If you say one goddamned word, either of you, you’re out. We’re quits. Fence.”

Marcel went over the fence first, landing atop the camper-bed. Then Sylvie, picking her way down with her toes jammed in the chainlink. Roscoe set down the crowbar quietly and followed.

“Roscoe,” Sylvie said. “Can you explain this to me?”

“No,” Roscoe said. “Sylvie, you stay here and cover the camper bed with snow. Kick it over. As much as you can. Marcel, with me.”

They entered the dark toilet single file, and once the door had closed behind them, Roscoe pulled out his flashlight and clicked it on.

“We’re not going home ever again. Whatever you had in your pockets, that’s all you’ve got. Do you understand?”

Marcel opened his mouth and Roscoe lunged for him.

“Don’t speak. Just nod. I don’t want to hear your voice. You’ve destroyed my life, climbing that tower, pulling that gun. I’m over, you understand? Just nod.”

Marcel nodded. His eyes were very wide.

“Climb up on the toilet tank and pop out that ceiling tile and bring down the bag.” He aimed the flashlight to emphasize his point.

Marcel brought down the bag and Roscoe felt some of the tension leak out of him. At least he had a new license-plate and a change of clothes. It was a start.

Sylvie had covered the bottom third of the camper-bed and her gloves and boots were caked with snow. Roscoe set down the trashbag and helped her, and after a moment, Marcel pitched in. Soon they had the whole thing covered.

“I don’t know that it’ll fool anyone who walks over here, but it should keep it hidden from the road, at least,” Roscoe said. His heart had finally begun to slow down and he was breathing normally.

“Here’s the plan,” he said. “I’m going to swap the license plates and drive into town. Sylvie lies down on the back seat. They’re looking for a truck with three people in it and a camper-bed. Marcel, you’re walking. It’s a long walk. There’re some chemical hot-pads in the first-aid kit. Stuff them in your boots and mitts. Don’t let anyone see you. Find somewhere to hide until tomorrow, and then we’ll meet at the Donut House near the Rainbow Bridge, 8AM, OK?”

Marcel nodded mutely. The snow was falling harder now, clouds dimming the moonlight.

Roscoe dug out the hot-pads and tossed them to him. “Go,” he said. “Now.”

Wordlessly, Marcel climbed the fence and started slogging toward the highway.

They watched his back recede, then Roscoe jumped the fence with the trashbag. He dropped it in the back of the truck and hauled his tarpaulin-bundle back to the playground side, then dragged it into the bathroom. It was too heavy to get into the drop-ceiling and the drag-marks in the fresh snow were like a blinking arrow anyway. He left it on the floor.

He helped Sylvie over the fence, then hunkered down, using a small wrench to remove the plates from the truck. Sylvie crouched beside him, holding the flashlight.

“Did you know he had a gun?” Sylvie said, as he tightened down the bolts.

“No,” Roscoe said. “No guns. We don’t use guns. We’re fucking network engineers, not pistoleros.”

“Thought so,” she said, but made no further comment as he fastened the new plates in place.

Finally he stood up. “Okay, let’s go,” he said.

“What’s the plan?” She paused, hand on door handle.

“The plan is to get away from here. Then figure out what to do next.” He glanced at her sidelong, calculating. “I think you’ll be all right, whatever happens. But that little idiot—” He realised his hands were shaking.

Sylvie climbed into the truck. Roscoe sat for a minute, concentrating on getting a grip on himself.

He drove slowly, starting every time he saw moving shadows, the headlights of other vehicles. One time the road took a bend and he passed a police car, stationary on the shoulder. He nearly jumped out of his skin, but forced back the urge to put his foot down or even turn his head—*give no sign*, he told himself.

Sylvie sighed as the police car vanished in the rear view. “You’re going to go the rendezvous, like you told him?” she asked.

“Yeah. More than the little shit deserves, but I owe him that much. We’ve got to sort this out together.” He tapped the steering wheel. “I’ll have to ditch the truck.”

“No.”

Roscoe stared at her. Sylvie’s face was half in shadow, half a flat orange washout from the street lamps. “I don’t trust him. I think he’s a provo.”

“What?” Roscoe shook his head then looked back at the road. “He’s young, is all. A bit young.” They were not far from Main Street, and he began looking around for somewhere to park the truck. “Listen, we’re going to have to walk a ways. You up to an hour on foot?”

“A hike in the dark? Yeah, I guess so.” Sylvie sniffed. “If you go to that Donut House they’ll arrest you. You’ll go down as a terrorist.”

Roscoe didn’t dignify her paranoia with a response. Instead he pulled over. “Open the glove box. There’s a can of foam cleaner and some wipes inside, pass ’em over.”

“If you want.” She sounded resigned. Roscoe focussed on polishing the wheel and gearshift handle. Old prints he didn’t care about, but he didn’t want to leave fresh ones. “There have been arrests you haven’t heard about.”

Roscoe opened his door and climbed out. The air was freezingly cold, trying to suck the life from his face and lungs. He picked up the trash bag from the back and paused, about to close the door. Instead he left it open, forcing himself to leave the keys dangling enticingly in the ignition. “You coming?” he asked.

Sylvie hurried to catch up. “There’s a guy called Dennis Morgan, on the Texas border,” she said quietly. “Don’t know where he is, the feds won’t say—they pulled him in on firearms charges but all the warrants, search and seizure, went through a special FEMA courthouse that won’t talk to us. We tried FOIA notices and got denied. Dennis had no record of violent offenses, like you, he was just an unwirer, but they charged him with attempted murder of a federal agent then stuck him in a hole so deep we can’t find him.”

Roscoe slowed, hearing her panting for breath.

“Secret trials, Roscoe, special terrorism courts. They don’t call them that, but all the records are sealed and I can’t even find the defense attorneys in the goddamn phone book. ‘S a woman called Caitlin Delaney in Washington State, they found kiddie porn in her house and a meth lab in her garage after they shot her resisting arrest, you know? They made her out to be some kind of gangster. She was fifty, Roscoe, and she had multiple sclerosis, and her backyard just happened to have line of sight to the Surrey side of the Canadian border.”

Roscoe slowed even more, until he felt Sylvie walking beside him. “FCC, Roscoe, they’ve been making sure we know all about these dangerous terrorists, did you know that? But I made some phone calls from payphones to local stringers, had them do some digging. Unwirers are disappearing. Their turf gets too visibly unwired and then they vanish, leaving behind guns and drugs and kiddie porn. That’s the real story I’m here to cover. Roscoe, if you go to that donut joint and Marcel is what I think he is, you’ll just vanish.”

She took his hand and stopped. Roscoe felt himself halt. His shoulders were tense and the lining of his jacket felt icy-slick with freezing sweat. “What do you want?”

Her breath steamed in the air before him. “I don’t want you to get yourself killed,” she said. Up close he could see the scar on her lip, the smudged foundation on her cheek. “Shit.” She leaned against him and put her chin on his shoulder, nosing in like a small animal in search of warmth. “Look, come up to my room. We can discuss it there.”

#

The Days Inn was a hell of a lot closer than the Rainbow Bridge, that was for sure. Being scared half out of his skin and on the run was exhausting, and Roscoe was perversely grateful to Sylvie for leading him back to the motel room, even though a nagging paranoid corner of his head kept shrieking that she, not Marcel, was the agent provocateur, that she’d get him into bed and G-men with signal meters and search warrants would erupt from the closet—

But it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all.

They ended up naked, in bed together. And before anything much could happen, Roscoe was asleep, snoring quietly, dead to the world. He didn’t notice it, actually: what he noticed was waking up to the dim red glow of the alarm clock’s flickering digits, Sylvie’s face limned against the pillow next to him with the incipient glow of hellfire, digits flickering towards seven o’clock and an appointment with an uncertain future.

“Hey. Wake up.”

“Mm-hum.” Sylvie rolled towards him for a warm moment, then her eyes opened. “We didn’t?” She looked hopeful.

“Not yet.” He ran one hand along her back, cupping her buttocks with a sense of gratified astonishment. How did this happen to us? He wondered, a thought that always hit him between the eyes when he found himself in bed with a new woman. It’s been a long time.

Her gaze travelled past him, settling on the clock. “Oh shit.” She hugged him, then pulled back. “There’s never enough time. Later?”

“After the meet-up, when I know if it’s safe to go—”

“Shut up.” She leaned over and kissed him hard, almost angrily. “This is so unprofessional—look, if I’m wrong I apologize, all right? But if you go there I think you’re walking into a sting. I don’t think you should go near the place. If I had a repeater I could stake it out with a webcam, but—”

“A repeater?” Roscoe sat up. “There’s one in my bag.”

“Right.” She rolled out of bed and stretched. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her. “Listen, let’s freshen up and get outta here.” She grinned at him, friendly but far from the intimacy of a minute ago, and he had tangible sense of lost possibilities: “Let’s get the donut joint wired for video. Then we can go grab some coffee and figure out what to do next.”

Signal strength near the bridge was good. Roscoe just glommed his repeater onto a street lamp above eye level, to boost the final hundred yards to the block. “They’ll spot it immediately, probably take it down later today,” he said. “Hope this is worth it.”

“It will be,” she reassured him fiercely, before striding away towards the donut joint. He stared after her, a slim figure bundled in improbable layers of cold-weather gear, and resisted the impulse to run after. If the cops were looking for anyone it’d be him, a known parole violator, not a single young female on the far side of the road. Plan was to fasten the cam to the back of a road sign opposite the doorway, use plastic zipstrips to keep it on target. He glanced at his watch: seven zero seven hours. Cutting it fine, if it’s a stakeout …

Roscoe took a walk around the block, stamping his feet against the chill, trying not to dwell on the unpleasant possibilities. His heart gave a little lurch as he came back around the alleyway and saw Sylvie walking back down the street towards him, but she was smiling and as she caught up with him she grabbed his arm. “Come on, there’s a Starbucks on the next block,” she said.

“I hate Starbucks,” he complained.

“Yeah, but it’s indoors and off the street,” she explained. “So you’re going to put up with it this once, okay?”

“Okay.”

They shed gloves and caps as they went in past the Micronet booths and the pastry counter. Sylvie ordered a couple of large lattes. “Is the mezzanine open?” she asked.

“Sure, go on up.” The gum-chewing barrista didn’t even look up.

At the top of the stairs, in a dark corner well back from the shop front, Sylvie produced her phone and began fiddling with it. “Let’s see. Ah … uh-huh. Here it is.” She turned it so he could see the tiny colour display. The front of the donut shop was recognizable. “It does voice over IP, too, lots of people use these instead of laptops. What time do you make it?”

“Seven thirty,” A gray minivan pulled up in front of the shop and disgorged a bunch of guys in trenchcoats and one very recognizable figure. His stomach lurched. “Who are those guys? What’s Marcel doing with—” He stopped. Further comments seemed redundant.

“Let’s see who else turns up,” Sylvie suggested, sipping her latte.

Marcel went into the donut store. Two of the men in trenchcoats followed him. Most of the others moved out of frame, but one of them was just visible, hurrying down the alley at the side of the store.

Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, then a police car pulled up. Two uniforms got out, but as they headed for the door one of the trenchcoats came out. Words were exchanged, and angry gestures. The uniforms went back to their car and drove away: the trenchcoat headed back inside. Sylvie sniffed. “Serve ’em right, stopping for donuts on your tax dollars.”

Roscoe tensed. “I think you were right,” he said slowly.

Sylvie beamed at him. “Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

It was five minutes to eight. Roscoe went downstairs for another coffee, his feet dragging. Everything was to be closing in, going nightmarishly wrong. I’m screwed, he thought. Gotta run—

“Roscoe?”

“Coming.” He turned back and hurried upstairs. “What is it?”

“Watch.” She pointed the phone display where he could see it. A pickup truck roughly the same colour and age as Roscoe’s drew up in front of the donut store.

“Hey, that’s not—”

“I told you we employ stringers. Right?”

A man wearing a jacket and cap climbed out of the cab. He looked a bit like Roscoe, if you were watching via a covert webcam from across the street. He turned and looked at the camera, but he was too far from it for Roscoe to see if he winked or not. Then he turned and went in.

Trenchcoats boiled out from behind trashcans like so many black leather cockroaches. They swarmed the truck and blocked the doorway and two of them with guns and warrant cards drawn covered the parking lot. There was chaos and motion for almost a minute, then another trenchcoat barreled out of the door and started yelling instructions at them. The guns vanished. Marcel appeared in the doorway behind him, pointing. Two of the trenchcoats began to cross the road, heading towards the camera.

“I think that’s enough,” said Sylvie, and killed the feed. Then she hit one of the speed-dial buttons on her phone. It rang twice. “Bonjour. Ou est le—”

Roscoe shook his head. He felt approximately the way he imagined a tuna fish might feel with a wooden deck under one flank and the cruel sun beating mercillessly down on the other, gills gasping in a medium they’d never evolved to survive exposure to. Sylvie was speaking in rapid-fire French, arguing with somebody by the sound of it, while he was drowning on dry land.

Sylvie finished her call and closed her phone with a snap. She laid her hand across his: “You’re OK,” she said, smiling.

“Huh?” Roscoe started, setting the empty coffee cups.

“That was the French consulate in Toronto. I set it up in advance so they’d see the webcam. My editor, too. If you can cross over into Canada and get to the consulate you’ve got diplomatic asylum, genuine refugee status.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small box; it unfolded like intricate brushed-aluminium origami, forming a keyboard for her to plug the phone into. “We’re going to hit the front page of the Journal tomorrow, Roscoe. It’s all documented—your background, Marcel, the gun, the stakeout, all of it. With a witness.” She pointed a thumb at herself. “We’ve been looking for a break like this for months.” She was almost gloating, now: “Valenti isn’t going to know what’s hit him. My editor,” she slurped some coffee. “My editor got into the game because of Watergate. he’s been burning for a break like this ever since.”

Roscoe sat and stared at her dumbly.

“Cheer up! You’re going to be famous—and they won’t be able to put you away! All we have to do is get you to Montreal. There’s a crossing set up at the Mohawk Reservation, and I’ve got a rental car in the lot next door to the Days Inn. While I’m at it, can you sign these?” She thrust a bundle of papers at him and winced apologetically: “exclusive contract with the Wall Street Journal. It covers your expenses—flight included—plus fifteen grand for your story. I tried to hold out for more, but you know how things are.” She shrugged.

He stared at her, stunned into bovine silence. She pinched his cheek and shoved the papers into his hands. “Bon voyage, mon ami,” she said. She kissed each cheek, then pulled out a compact and fixed the concealer on her lip.

#

Paris in springtime was everything it was meant to be and more. Roscoe couldn’t sit down in a cafe without being smartmobbed by unwirer groupies who wanted him to sign their repeaters and tell them war-stories about his days as a guerrilla fighter for technological freedom. They were terribly, awfully young, just kids, Marcel’s age or younger, and they were heartbreaking in their attempts to understand his crummy French. The girls were beautiful, the boys were handsome, and they laughed and smoked and ordered him glasses of wine until he couldn’t walk. He’d put on twenty pounds, and when he did the billboard ads for Be, Inc. and Motorola, they had to strap him into a girdle. “Le choix Am?ricain,” in bold sans-serif letters underneath a picture of him scaling a buildingside with a Moto batarang clenched in his teeth.

Truth be told, he couldn’t even keep up with it all. Hardly a week went by without a new business popping up, a new bit of technological gewgaggery appearing on the tables of the Algerian street-vendors by the Eiffel Tower. He couldn’t even make sense of half the ads on the Metro.

But life was good. He had a very nice apartment with a view and a landlady who chased away the paparazzi with stern French and a broom. He could get four bars of signal on his complimentary Be laptop from the bathroom, and ten bars from the window, and the throng and thrum of the city and the net filled his days and nights.

And yet.

He was a foreigner. A curiosity. A fish, transplanted from the sea to MarineLand, swimming in a tank where the tourists could come and gawp. He slept fitfully, and in his dreams, he was caged in a cell at Leavenworth, back on the inside, in maximum security, pacing the yard in solitary stillness.

We woke to the sound of his phone trilling. The ring was the special one, the one that only a one person had the number for. He struggled out of bed and lunged for his jacket, fumbled the phone out.

“Sylvie?”

“Roscoe! God, I know it’s early, but God, I just had to tell you!”

He looked at the window. It was still dark. On his bedstand, the clock glowed 4:21.

“What? What is it?”

“God! Valenti’s been called to testify at a Senate hearing on Unwiring. He’s stepping down as chairman, I just put in a call to his office and into his dad’s office at the MPAA. The lines were jammed. I’m on my way to get the Acela into DC.”

“You’re covering it for the Journal?”

“Better. I got a book deal! My agent ran a bidding war between Simon and Schuster and St. Martin’s until three AM last night. I’m hot shit. The whole fucking thing is coming down like a house of shit. I’ve had three Congressional staffers fax me discussion drafts of bills—one to fund $300 million in DARPA grants to study TCP/IP, another to repeal the terrorism statutes on network activity, and a compulsory license on movies and music online. God! If only you could see it.”

“That’s—amazing,” Roscoe said. He pictured her in the cab on the way to Grand Central, headset screwed in, fixing her makeup in her compact, dressed in a smart spring suit, off to meet with the Hill Rats.

“It’s incredible. It’s better than I dreamed.”

“Well …” he said. He didn’t know what to say. “See if you can get me a pardon, OK?” The joke sounded lame even to him.

“What?” There was a blare of taxi horns. “Oh, crap, Roscoe, I’m sorry. It’ll work out, you’ll see. Clemency or amnesty or something.”

“We can talk about it next month, OK?” She’d booked the tickets the week before, and they had two weeks of touring on the continent planned.

“Oh, Roscoe, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. The book’s due in 12 weeks. Afterward, OK? You understand, don’t you?”

He pulled back the curtains and looked out at the foreign city, looking candlelit in the night. “I understand, sweetie,” he said. “This is great work. I’m proud of you.”

Another blare of horns from 6,000 miles away. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you from the Hill, OK?”

“OK,” Roscoe said. But she’d already hung up.

He had six bars on his phone, and Paris was lit up with invisible radio waves, lit up with coverage and innovation and smart, trim boys and girls who thought he was a hero, and 6,000 miles away, the real unwiring was taking place.

He looked down at his slim silver phone, glowing with blue LEDs, a gift from Nokia. He tossed it from hand to hand, and then he opened the window and chucked it three storeys down to the street. It made an unsatisfying clatter as it disintegrated on the pavement.

Word count to date: 10915

Posted by Cory Doctorow at June 9, 2003 09:53 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Nice story, enjoyable read. Not sure how you’ll remove 4500 words.

The “light/heavy gun” line could go. Seems out of place. I would say remove the gun altogether, but you need it to motivate the escape.

Posted by: K.C. Baltz at June 9, 2003 12:02 PM

Everything I have to say sounds like the worst slobbering-fanboy material, so I’ll just say: thank you for writing stuff like this.

Posted by: postrodent at June 9, 2003 12:42 PM

I agree; that’s a lot to have to trim out of a great story. Caveats: I noticed the following (as, no doubt, will your editor): metastaized; tarriff; he’d originally been looking at a from a …; terroristswithin the homeland and abroad.”across the homeland.”; unwirer-symptathizers; resistent; but it made the noncompliant routing code that was built into the BeOS. access points …; But run a fat pipe into town and we have a idle capacity, upstream dealers …; The ring was a special one, the one that only a one person had the number for.

Posted by: D. Stewart at June 9, 2003 01:25 PM

Great stuff, as usual. You might want to change “even to his own years” to “even to his own ears”.

Thanks for providing us some great reading fodder!

Posted by: Bobby at June 9, 2003 03:10 PM

If this story ever gets expanded, try making the Marcel character more three dimensional. Some small grammatical and spelling mistakes which would be better fixed. Great story!

Posted by: Pierre at June 9, 2003 04:16 PM

Great stuff! I wish it didn’t sound so … possible.

Posted by: Greg at June 9, 2003 04:45 PM

Good stuff. I have been checking the site every day for weeks for updates. Have fun editing.

Posted by: adeh at June 9, 2003 07:33 PM

Your story shows a viewpoint, well enough for me to sympathize with it. Awesome!

Posted by: Richard Soderberg at June 9, 2003 11:34 PM

Great, I only wish there was more quality fiction found online like this, please release some more of your work. Pretty, pretty please?

Posted by: Chris Bloch at June 10, 2003 08:55 AM

Very nice story; it moved along quite nicely and I enjoyed it very much (aside from the frustration of waiting for a new installment!) Thanks for putting it online, particularly differing versions from each of you and with a little discussion of how you resolved “creative differences.” All in all I think this was quite good.

I’m not sure that the collaboration was as good as either of your work done alone, but the factors are so variable …

Anyway, you seem to be open to comments, so I thought I’d seem to be making some:

Marcel pulling a gun seemed so out of place to me, so jarring considering prior events, that it shook my “willing sense of disbelief.” It seems so very obviously a McGuffin inserted to move the story to a conclusion. On the other hand, I’m not an author, so what do I know?

Similarly, the government is treating unwirers so harshly that I can’t believe that Sylvie just walked out of there, that they let her go. If the feds are willing to go to the length of fabricating evidence against unwirers, why let their biographer walk? It seems to me more likely that, having missed Roscoe, they’d have picked her up and dumped her in some dark unpleasant place. It would also serve as a warning to the press to avoid sympathetic portrayals of unwirers in the future. No, I can’t buy that one, either.

On the other hand, no work of fiction is perfect. You’re the authors, if you like it, go for it!

Again, thanks!

Mike

Posted by: Mike Sherck at June 13, 2003 01:08 PM

The mind on this kid I tell ya! Can we please put Corey, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, into a thinktank with some high powered engineers & a bunch of VC.

Posted by: J at June 25, 2003 11:06 PM

Hey J, let’s not forget that this was co-authored by Mr Charles Stross! I’m sure he’d love to take his rightful place in the thinktank as well … ;)

Cheers guys, great work!

Posted by: mattheww at June 26, 2003 04:17 PM

Thanks for the story. Roscoe’s tale is an interesting read. Great title, BTW!

Re comments and critiques from other readers:

If Marcel seemed a bit more unhinged to begin with, you’d solve two problems (that may or may not seem like actual problems to you): the 2-D ness of Marcel, and the slight implausibility of him drawing a gun on the cops. I don’t know; neither of those were really much an issue for me, but it would be a low-cost fix.

Personally, I don’t care for the “up” ending—you put in a little bit of regret and alienation but I think that aspect of things needs to be pumped up. Roscoe needs to lose something significant from his adventure—rather than just being a Euro-hero whose girlfriend is going to stand him up for That Special Weekend. Maybe Sylie should get nabbed by the feds.

Regardless of Sylie’s fate, I don’t think that the “the problems back in the USSA are going to clear up Real Soon Now!” ending works. It feels sort of tacked on, and I would want to see the story someplace darker, more ironic.

If you need to lose 4500 words I’d trim them from the denouement mostly, take some away from the cop descriptions—we really only need to know that Handcuffs Cop recognizes R., and lose the bed scene altogether—they don’t screw anyway so what’s the point?

It’s a variety of noir you’ve written. Don’t let Good triumph :)

Thanks again for putting this online.

xxx000,

Ebie

Posted by: Ebie at June 27, 2003 10:39 AM

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What’s This?

This is a site where Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow are publicly collaborating on a short story for ReVisions, an alternate science fiction history anthology from DAW books, edited by Isaac Szpindel and Julie Czerneda.

Read more …

Story outline

Here’s a link to the outline for the story, which is full of spoilers. You have been warned. That is all.

Books by Cory Doctorow

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (with Karl Schroeder)

Essential Blogging (with a cast of thousands)

A Place So Foreign and Eight More (forthcoming Sept 2003)

Eastern Standard Tribe (forthcoming Jan 2004)

Books by Charlie Stross

Toast

Singularity Sky (forthcoming August 2003)

The Atrocity Archive (forthcoming Feb 2004)

Stories by Stross and Doctorow

Jury Service

Flowers from Alice

Selected stories by Cory Doctorow

0wnz0red

Liberation Spectrum

Visit the Sins

Home Again, Home Again

Selected Stories by Charlie Stross

A Colder War

Disclaimer

The story we’re writing here is for the forthcoming anthology, ReVisions, a collection of alternate science-history stories, that DAW books will publish at some unspecified date TBD. The last draft we post here will be the draft that we send to Isaac Szpindel and Julie Czerneda, the editors, and it’s likely that we’ll do some rewriting after that, so there’s a near-certainty that the published version will differ from the text we come up with here. Reviewers who quote this text should note that it isn’t the final text, just a working draft.

For a change, Huw’s head hurts more than his bladder. He’s lying head-down, on his back, in a bathtub. He scrabbles for a handhold and pulls himself upright. A tub is a terrible place to spend a night-or a morning, come to think of it-he blinks and sees that it’s midafternoon. The light slanting in through a high window limns the strange bathroom’s treacly Victorian fixtures with a roseate glow.

That was quite a party. He vaguely remembers the gathering dawn, its red glow staining the wall outside the kitchen window as he discussed environmental politics with a tall, shaven-headed woman with a blue forelock and a black leather mini-dress straight out of the twentieth century. (He has an equally vague memory of her defending a hardcore transhumanist line: score nil-nil to both sides.) A brief glance tells him that this room wasn’t a bathroom when he went to sleep in it: bits of the bidet are still crawling into position and there’s a strong smell of VOCs in the air.

His head hurts.

Leaning over the sink, Huw twiddles the taps until they begin to dribble cold water. He splashes his face and runs his hand through his thinning hair, glances up at the mirror, and yells “Shit!”

There’s a spindly black biohazard trefoil tattooed on his forehead. It wasn’t there yesterday.

Behind him, the door opens. “Having a good morning?” asks Sandra Lal, whose mutable attic this must therefore be. She’s holding a three-kilo minisledge in one hand, tossing it into the air and catching it like a baton-twirler, her grotesquely muscled forearm bulging with hyperpressured blood and hormones at each catch.

“I wish,” he groans. Sandra’s parties tend to be wild. “Am I too late for the dead dog?”

“You’re never too late.” Sandra smiles broadly, camping it up. “Coffee’s on in the kitchen, which is on the ground floor today. Bonnie gave me a subscription to House of the Week and today’s my new edition-don’t worry if you can’t remember where everything is, just remember the entrance is at ground level, okay?”

“Coffee,” Huw says fervently. His head is pounding, but so is his bladder. “Um. Can I have a minute?”

“Yes, but I’d like my spare rest room back afterwards. It’s going to be en-suite, but first I’ve got to knock out the wall through into the bedroom.” She hefts her sledgehammer suggestively.

Huw slumps down on the toilet as Sandra shuts the door behind her and bounces off to roust out any other leftover revelers. He shakes his head as he relieves himself: trapped in a mutating bathroom by a transgendered atheist Pakistani role-playing critic. Why do I keep ending up in these situations? he wonders as the toilet gives him a scented wash and blow-dry: when it offers him a pubic trim he hastily retrieves his kilt and goes in search of coffee.

Sandra’s new kitchen is frighteningly modern-it’s one of those white room jobs that looks empty at first, sterile as an operating theatre, but oozes when you glance away, extruding worktops and food processors and fresh-fabbed cutlery. If you sit suddenly there’ll be a chair waiting to catch your buttocks on the way down. No separate appliances, just smart matter and raw ingredient feedstock. Last night it looked charmingly gas-fired and Victorian, but now Huw can see it in the raw. He feels queasy, wondering if he ate anything from it. But relief is at hand. At the far end of the room there’s a traditional-looking dumb worktop with a battered old-fashioned electric cafetière sitting on it. And some joe who looks strangely familiar is sitting there reading a newsheet.

Huw nods at him. “Uh, where are the mugs?” he asks.

The guy stares at Huw’s forehead for an uncomfortable moment, then gestures at something foggy that’s stacked behind the pot. “Pick one of those,” he says.

“Uh, right.” Glassy aerogel cups with walls a centimeter thick, light as frozen cigar smoke. He takes the jug and pours, hand shaking. Huw has got the hot-and-cold sweats. What the hell was I drinking? he wonders as he takes a sip.

He glances at his companion, evidently another survivor of the party: a medium-height bald joe, maybe in his mid-thirties, with the unnaturally stringy build that comes from overusing a calorie-restriction implant. No piercings, no scars, tattoos, or neomorphisms-apart from his figure-which might be natural. That plus his black leather body suit means he could be a fellow naturalist. But this is Sandra’s house, and she has distressingly eclectic tastes.

“That today’s?” he asks, glancing at the paper.

“It could be.” The fellow puts it down and grins oddly. “Had a good lie-in?”

“I woke up in the bathroom,” Huw says ruefully. “Milk—”

“Here.” He shoves something that resembles a bowl of blue ice-cubes at Huw. Huw pokes at one dubiously, then dunks it in his mug. “Hey, this stuff is organic, isn’t it?”

“Only the best polymer-stabilized emulsions for Sandra,” the joe says sardonically. “Of course it’s organic-nothing but carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a tinge of oxygen to them.” Huw takes a sip. “Of course, you could say the same about your cellphone,” adds the stranger.

“Ah.” Huw puts the mug down, unsure where the conversation’s leading. There’s something disturbing about this: a sense of déjà vu nagging at the edges of his mind, as if—

“You don’t remember me, do you?” asks his companion.

“Alcohol has this effect on me at times,” Huw confesses in a grateful rush. “I’ve got an awful memory—”

“The name’s Bonnie,” says the man. “You spent most of the early hours trying to cop a feel by convincing me that Nietzsche was responsible for global cooling.” Huw stares at him and feels something in his head do an uneasy flip-flop: yes, the resemblance is clear, this is the woman he was talking to last night. “‘s amazing what a good bathroom can do in the way of cellular redifferentiation surgery these days, you know?” the bald guy-Bonnie?-continues. Then he winks at Huw with what Huw realizes, to his horror, is either lascivious intent or broad and filthy-minded humor. “How’s your hangover? Are you up to picking things up where we left off?”

“Aaaugh,” says Huw, as the full force of the post-party cultural hangover hits him between the eyes, right beneath the biohazard trefoil, and the coffee hits his stomach. “Need fresh air now …”

· · · · ·

The next morning, Huw wakes up more gently. Awakened by sunlight, but this time in his own bed. He yawns and sits up, pauses for a moment to get his bearings, then ventures down the comfortably unchanging stairs to retrieve his post. The dusty tiles in his vintage late-nineteenth-century terrace house are cold beneath his bare feet. A draft leaks around the ill-fitting outer door, raising gooseflesh on his bare legs. Two-thirds of the mail is spam, which goes straight on the recycle-before-reading pile, but there’s also a genuine letter, complete with a stamp on the envelope. Ink on paper-someone took the trouble to communicate with him personally, putting dumb, thrax-prone matter in motion to make a point.

He rips the envelope open with a cracked fingernail. He reads: your application for international triage jury service has been provisionally accepted. To activate your application, present this letter in person to …

He carries the letter through into the kitchen, puts it on the table so he can keep an eye on it as he eats. He barely notices the morning chill as the battered Red Crescent surplus food processor barfs up a lukewarm cup of Turkish coffee, a vague facsimile of scrambled eggs, and an even vaguer pastiche of bacon. Today is Huw’s big day. He’s been hoping for this day for months.

Soon, he’ll get to say what he thinks about some item of new technology-and they’ll have to listen to him.

· · · · ·

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its prepost-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth’s RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems.

A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden Cox Pippin. There’s always someone whom evolution has failed to breed the let’s-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There’s always a fucking geek who’ll do it because it’s a historical goddamned technical fucking imperative.

Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain its motives is roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would be much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.

But until that happy day, there’s the tech jury service: defending the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.

· · · · ·

After breakfast, Huw pulls on jeans, boots, and shirt. He locks the front door carefully behind himself and tells his bicycle to unbolt itself from the rusting red drainpipe that stains the brick side of his house with green moss. He pedals uncertainly to the end of the road, then eases out into traffic, sneering as the omnipresent web of surveillance routes the peoplemovers around him.

Safe cycling is one of the modern conveniences that irritate him most. Also: polite youngsters with plastic smiles; cops who think like social workers; and geeks who think they understand technology. Geeks, the old aristocracy. He’ll show them, one of these days. Huw wobbles along the side of the main road and pulls in beside the door of the Libyan consulate.

“Mister Rogers? I am pleased to meet you.” The young man behind the desk has a plastic smile and is far too polite for Huw’s taste: Huw grunts assent and sits down in the indicated seat. “Your application has been forwarded to us and, ah? If you would be pleased to travel to our beautiful country, I can assure you of just one week’s jury service.”

Huw nods again.

The polite man fidgets with the air of someone trying to come up with an inoffensive way of saying something potentially rather rude. “I’m pleased to inform you that our young land is quite tolerant of other culture’s customs. I can assure you that whatever ISO-standard containment suit you choose to bring with you will be respected by our people.”

Huw shakes his head. “What huh?”

“Your, that is, your—” The smiler leans across his desk and points at Huw’s trefoil-marked forehead. The finger he points with meets resistance. A plastic sheet has hermetically sealed Huw’s side of the room off from the rest of the consulate. It is so fantastically transparent that Huw hasn’t even noticed it until the smiler’s finger puckered a singularity in its vertical run, causing it to scatter light at funny angles and funhouse distort the solid and sensible wood-paneled walls behind the desk.

“Ah,” Huw says. “Ah. No, you see, it’s a joke of some sort. Not an official warning.”

“I’m very glad to hear it, Mister Rogers! You will, of course, have documents attesting to that before you clear our immigration?”

“Right,” Huw says. “Of course.” Fucking Sandra. Whether or not she is directly responsible for the tat is beside the point. It happened on her prem, therefore she is culpable. Dammit. He has errands to run before he catches the flight-attracting the attention of the gene police is not on his agenda.

“Then we will see you soon.” The smiler reaches into a desk drawer and pulls out a small tarnished metal teapot which he shoves experimentally at the barrier. It puckers around it and suddenly the teapot is sitting on Huw’s side of the desk, wearing an iridescent soap-bubble of pinched-off containment. “Peace be with you.”

“And you,” says Huw, rising. The interview is obviously at an end. He picks up the teapot and follows the blinkenlights to the exit from the consulate, studiously avoiding the blurred patches of air where other visitors are screened from one another by the utility fog. “What now?” he asks the teapot.

“Blrrrt. Greetings, tech-juror Rogers. I am a guidance iffrit from the People’s Magical Libyan Jamahiriya. Show me to representatives of the People’s Revolutionary Command Councils and I am required to intercede for you. Polish me and I will install translation leeches in your Broca’s area, then assist you in memorizing the Qur’an and hadiths. Release me and I will grant your deepest wish.”

“Um, I don’t think so.” Huw scratches his head. Fucking Sandra, he thinks again, then he packs the pot into his pannier and pedals heavily away towards the quaint industrial-age pottery where he oversees the antique solid-volume renderers, applies the finishing human touches, and packs the finished articles for shipment. It’s going to be a long working day-almost five hours-before he can get around to trying to sort this mess out, but at least the wet squishy sensation of clay under his fingernails will help calm the roiling indignation he feels at his violation by a random GM party prankster.

· · · · ·

Two days later, Huw’s waiting with his bicycle and a large backpack on a soccer field in a valley outside Monmouth. It has rained overnight, and the field is muddy. A couple of large crows sit on the rusting goal-post, regarding him curiously. There are one or two other people slouching around the departure area dispiritedly. Airports just haven’t been the same since the end of the jet age.

Huw tries to scratch the side of his nose, irritably. Fucking Sandra, he thinks again as he pokes at the opaque spidergoat silk of his biohazard burka. He’d gone round to remonstrate with her after work the other day, only to find that her house had turned into a size two thousand Timberland hiking boot and the homeowner herself had decided to winter in Fukuyama this year. A net search would probably find her but he wasn’t prepared to expose himself to any more viruses this week. One was quite enough-especially after he discovered that the matching trefoil brand on his shoulder glowed in the dark.

A low rumble rattles the goal post and disturbs the crows as a cloud-shadow slides across the pitch. Huw looks up, and up, and up-his eyes can’t quite take in what he’s seeing. That’s got to be more than a kilometer long! he realizes. The engine note rises as the huge catamaran airship jinks and wobbles sideways towards the far end of the pitch and engages its station-keeping motors, then begins to unreel an elevator car the size of a shipping container.

“Attention, passengers now waiting for flight FL-052 to North Africa and stations in the Middle East, please prepare for boarding. This means you.” Huw nearly jumps out of his skin as one of the customs crows lands heavily on his shoulder. “You listening, mate?”

“Yes, yes, I’m listening.” Huw shrugs and tries to keep one eye on the big bird. “Over there, huh?”

“Boarding will commence through lift bzzt gurgle four in five minutes. Even-numbered passengers first.” The crow flaps heavily towards the huge, rusting shipping container as it lands in the muddy field with a clang. “All aboard!” it squawks raucously.

Huw wheels his bike towards the steel box then pauses as a door opens and a couple of confused-looking Australian backpackers stumble out, leading their kangaroo-familiars. “Boarding now!” adds the crow.

Huw waits while the other three passengers step aboard, then gingerly rolls his bike inside and leans against the guardrail spot-glued to the wall. “Haul away lively, there!” someone yells above, and there’s a creak of ropes as the cargo container lurches into the air. Even before it’s clear of the goal posts the huge airship has cut the station-keepers and is spooling up to its impressive fifty knot cruising speed. Huw looks down at the town and the mediaeval castle unrolling beneath him and takes a deep breath. He can tell this is going to be a long trip.

His nose is itching again.

· · · · ·

Air travel is so slow you’d almost always be faster going by train. But the Gibraltar bridge is down for repair again and last time Huw caught a TGV through the Carpathians he was propositioned incessantly by a feral privatized blood bank that seemed to have a thing for Welsh T-helper lymphocytes. At least this tramp floater with its cargo of Christmas trees and chameleon paint is going to give Huw and his fellow-passengers a shortcut around the Mediterranean, even if the common room smells of stale marijuana smoke and the other passengers are all dubious cheapskate hitchers and netburn cases who want to ship their meatbodies around instead of doing the decent (and sanitary) telepresence thing.

Huw isn’t dubious; he’s just on jury service, which requires your physical in-the-flesh presence to prevent identity spoofing by imported weakly godlike AIs and suchlike. But judging from the way the other passengers are avoiding him he looks dubious. Or maybe it’s just the biohazard burka and the many layers of anti-nanophage underwear he’s trussed up in underneath it. There has got to be a better way of fighting runaway technology, he tells himself on the second morning as he prepares to go get some breakfast.

Most of the airship’s crew are uplifted gibbons, and during their years of plying the skyways over the Middle East they’ve picked up enough Islam that it’s murder getting the mess deck food processors to barf up a realistic bacon sandwich. Huw has his mouth-lock extended and is picking morosely at a scrambled egg and something that claims to be black pudding with his fork when someone bounces into the seat beside him, reaches into the folds of his burka and tears off a bite of the sandwich.

The stranger is a disreputable backpacker in wash-n-wear tropical-weight everything, the smart-wicking, dirt-shedding, rip-stopping gossamer uniform of the globe-slogging hostel-denizens who write long, rambling HOWTOs online describing their adventures living in Mumbai or Manhattan or some other blasted corner of the world for six months on just five dollars. This one clearly fancies himself quite a merry traveller, eyes a-twinkle, crowsfeet etched by a thousand foreign sunsets, dimples you could lose a fifty-dollar coin in.

“‘ello!” he says, around a mouthful of Huw’s sandwich. “You look interesting. Let’s have a conversation!”

“You don’t look interesting to me,” Huw says, plunking the rest of his food on the backpacker’s lap. “Let’s not.”

“Oh, come on,” the backpacker says. “My name’s Adrian, and I’ve loads of interesting anecdotes about my adventures abroad, including some rather racy ones involving lovely foreign ladies. I’m very entertaining, honestly! Give me a try, why don’t you?”

“I really don’t think so,” Huw says, pointedly. “You’d best get back into your seat-the monkeys don’t like a disorderly cabin. Besides, I’m infectious.”

“Monkeys! You think I’m worried about monkeys? Brother, I once spent a month in a Tasmanian work-camp for public drunkenness-imagine, an Australian judge locking an Englishman up for drunkenness! There were some hard men in that camp, let me tell you. The aborigines had the black-market liquor racket all sewn up, but the Maori prisoners were starting up their own thing, and here’s me, a poor, gormless white man in the middle of it all, dodging homemade shivs and poison arrows. Went a week without eating after it got out that the Maoris were smearing shit in the cookpots to poison the abos. Biowar, that’s what it was! By the end of that week, I was hallucinating angels and chewing scrub-grass I found on work-details, while the abos I was chained to shat themselves bloody and collapsed. I caught a ballistic out of there an hour after I’d served my sentence, got shot right to East Timor, where I gorged myself on Gado-Gado and Riztaffel and got food poisoning anyway and spent the night in the crapper, throwing up my lungs. So don’t tell me about monkeys!” Adrian broke off his monologue and began industriously masticating the rest of Huw’s lunch.

“Yes, that’s all very disgusting. I’m going to have a bit of a nap now, all right?”

“Oh, don’t be a weak sister!” says Adrian. “You won’t last five minutes in Libya with an attitude like that. Never been to Libya, have you?”

“No,” Huw says, pointedly bunching up a fold of burka into a pillow and turning his head away.

“You’ll love it. Nothing like a taste of real, down-home socialism after dirty old London. People’s this and Popular that and Democratic the other, everyone off on the latest plebiscite, holding caucuses in the cafes. It’s fantastic! The girls, too-fantastic, fantastic. Just talk a little politics with them and they’ll bend your ear until you think you’re going to fall asleep, and then they’ll try to bang the bourgeois out of you. In twos and threes, if you’re recalcitrant enough. I’ve had some fantastic nights in Libya. I can barely wait to touch down.”

“Adrian, can I tell you something, in all honesty?”

“Sure, mate, sure!”

“You’re a jackass. Really revolting and duller than I can imagine. If you don’t get the fuck back to your own seat, I’m going to tell the monkeys you’re threatening to blow up the airship and they’ll strap you into a restraint-chute and push you overboard.”

“You’re a bloody card, you are.”

Huw gathers up his burka, stands, climbs over Adrian and moves to the back of the cabin. He selects an empty row, slides in, and stretches out. A moment later, Adrian comes up and grabs his toe, then wiggles it.

“All right then, we’ll talk later. Have a nice nap. Thanks for the sarnie!”

· · · · ·

It takes three days for the tramp freighter to bumble its way to Tripoli. It gingerly climbs to its maximum pressure height to skirt the wild and beautiful (but radioactive and deadly) Normandy coastline, then heads south-east, to drop a cargo of incognito Glaswegian gangsters on the outskirts of Marseilles. Then it crosses the Mediterranean coast, and spends a whole twenty-two hours doodling in broad circles around Corsica. Huw tries to amuse himself during this latter interlude by keeping an eye open for smugglers with micro-UAVs, but even this pathetic attempt at distraction falls flat when, after eight hours, a rigging monkey scampers into the forward passenger lounge and delivers a fifty-minute harangue about worker’s solidarity and the black gang’s right to strike in flight, justifying it in language eerily familiar to anyone who-like Huw-has spent days heroically probing the boundaries of suicidal boredom by studying the proceedings of the Third Communist International.

Having exhausted his entire stash of antique read-only books two days into a projected two-week expedition, and having found his fellow passengers to consist of lunatics and jackasses, Huw succumbs to the inevitable. He glues his burka to a support truss in the cargo fold, dials the eye slit to opaque, swallows a mug of valerian-laced decaff espresso, and estivates like a lungfish in the dry season.

His first warning that the airship has arrived comes when he awakens in a sticky sweat. Is the house on fire? he wonders muzzily. It feels like someone has opened an oven door and stuck his feet in it, and the sensation is climbing his chest. There’s an anxious moment, then he gets his eye slit working again, and is promptly inundated with visual spam.

“Hello! Welcome effendi! The Thousand Nights and One Night Hotel welcomes careful westerners! We take euros, dollars, yen, and hash (subject to assay)! For a good night out visit Ali’s American Diner! Hamburgers one hundred percent Halal goat here! Need travel insurance and ignorant of shari’a banking regulations? Let the al-Jammu Traveler’s Assistance put your mind to rest with our—”

Huw instantly posts a bid for adbuster proxy services, picks the cheapest on offer, and waits patiently for his visual field to clear. After a minute or two he can see again, except for a persistent and annoying green star in the corner of his left eye. Finally, he struggles to unglue himself and looks about.

The passenger lounge is almost empty, a door gaping open in one side. Huw wheels his bicycle over and hops down onto the dusty concrete apron of the former airport. It’s already over thirty degrees in the shade, but once he gets out of the shadow of the blimp his burka’s solar-powered air conditioning should sort that out. The question is, where to go next? “Hmm.” He rummages crossly in the pannier until he finds the battered teapot. “Hey, you. Iffrit! Whatever you call yourself. Which way to the courtroom?”

A cartoon djinn pops into transparent life above the pot’s nozzle and winks at him. “Peace be unto you, oh esteemed Madame tech-juror Rogers Huw! If you will but bear with me for a moment—” The iffrit fizzles for a moment as it hunts for a parasitic network to colonize—“I believe you will first wish to enter the terminal buildings and present yourself to the Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council, to present your entry visa. Then they will direct you to a hotel where you will be accommodated in boundless paradisiacal luxury at the expense of the grateful People’s Magical Libyan Jamahiriya! (Or at least in a good VR facsimile of paradise.)”

“Uh-huh.” Huw looks about. The airport is a deserted dump-literally deserted, for the anti-desertification defenses of the twentieth century, and the greenery planted under the aegis of King Muammar the First, have faded. The Libyan national obsession with virtual landscaping (not to mention emigration to Italy) has led to the return of the sand dunes, and the death of the gas-guzzling airline industry has left the airport with the maintenance budget of a rural cross-country bus stop. Broken windows gape emptily from rusting tin huts; a once-outstanding airport terminal building basks in the heat like a torpid lizard, doors open to the breeze, and even the local snack vendors don’t seem to come here any more.

It takes Huw half an hour to find the Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council, a wizened-looking old woman who has her Nike-soled feet propped up on a battered wooden desk in the lobby beneath the International Youth Hostelling sign, snoring softly through her open mouth.

“Excuse me, but are you the government?” Huw asks politely, talking through his teapot translator. “I have come from Wales to serve on a technology jury. Can you direct me to the public transport terminus?”

“I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” someone says from behind him, making Huw jump so high he almost punches a hole in the yellowing ceiling tiles. “She’s moonlighting, driving a Thai investment bank’s security bots on the evening shift. See the bandwidth?”

“Um, no, as a matter of fact I don’t,” Huw says defensively. “I stick to the visible spectrum.”

The interloper is probably female and from somewhere in northern Europe, judging by the way she’s smeared zinc ointment across her entire observable epidermis. Chilly fog spills from her cuffs at wrist and ankle and there’s the whine of a peltier cooler pushed to the limit coming from her bum-bag. About all Huw can see of her is her eyes and an electric blue ponytail erupting from the back of her anti-melanoma hood.

“Isn’t it a bit rude to snoop on someone else’s dreams?” he adds.

“Not really.” The interloper shrugs, then grins alarmingly at him. “It’s what I do for a living.” She offers him a hand, and before he can stop himself he’s shaking it politely. “I’m Björk. Doctor Björk.”

“Björk, uh—”

“I know what you’re going to say, named after the early twenty-first century bard, yes. I specialize in musical dream therapy. And I’m here on a tech jury gig, too. Perhaps we’ll get a chance to work on the same case?”

At that moment the Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council coughs, spasms painfully, sits up, and looks around querulously. I’m not working! Honest! She exclaims through the medium of Huw’s teapot translator. Then, getting a grip: “Oh, you’re tourists. Can I help you?”

Her manner is so abrupt and rude that Huw feels right at home. “Yes, yes,” he declares impatiently. “We’re jurors and we need to get to a hotel. Where’s the light rail terminal or bus stand?”

“Are no busses. Today is Friday, can’t you read?”

“Friday—” Huw does a double-take.

“Yes, but how are we to our hotel to ride?” asks Doctor Björk, sounding puzzled.

“Why don’t you walk?” the Council asks with gloomy satisfaction. “Haven’t you got legs? Didn’t Allah, the merciful, bless you with a full complement of homeobox genes?”

“But it’s—” Huw consults his wrist-map and does a double-take—“twelve kilometers! And it’s forty-three degrees in the shade!”

“It’s Friday,” the old woman repeats placidly. “Nothing works on Fridays. It’s in the Qur’an.”

“So why are you working for a Burmese banking cartel as a security bot supervisor?” Björk asks sharply.

“That’s-!” the Council glares at her. “That’s none of your business!”

“Burma isn’t an Islamic country,” Huw muses aloud, seeing which direction Björk is heading in. Maybe she’s not a fucknozzle after all, he thinks to himself, although he has his doubts about anyone who has anything to do with dream therapy, much less musical dream therapy. (Unless she’s only in it for purely practical reasons, such as money.) “Do you suppose they might be dealing with their demographic deficit by importing out-of-timezone gastarbeiters from Islamic countries who want to work on the day of rest?”

“What an astonishing thought!” echoes Björk. “That must be illegal, mustn’t it?”

“Stop! Stop!” The Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council puts her hands up in the air. “I have a nephew, he has a car! Perhaps he can give you a ride on his way to mosque? I’m sure he must be going there in only half an hour, and I’m sure your hotel will turn out to be on his way.”

The car, when it arrives, is a gigantic early twenty-first century Mercedes diesel, with tinted windows and air conditioning and plastic seats that have cracked and split in the dry desert heat. A brilliantly detailed green-and-silver miniature mosque conceals a packet of tissues on the rear parcel shelf and the dash is plastered with green and gold stickers bearing edifying quotations from the hadiths. The Council’s nephew looks too young to bear the weight of his huge black moustache, let alone to be driving this Teutonic behemoth, but at least he’s awake and moving in the noonday furnace-heat.

“Hotel Marriott,” Björk says. “Vite-schnell-pronto! ¡Hale, hale!”

The Mercedes crawls along the highway like a dung beetle on the lowest step of a pyramid. As they head towards the outskirts of the mostly-closed city of Tripoli Huw feels the gigantic and oppressive weight of advertising bearing down on his proxy filters. When Libya got serious about consumerism in the second decade of millennium three, they went overboard on superficial glitz and cheezy sloganizing. The deluge of CoolTown webfitti they’re driving through alternates between insanely dense technobabble and a bizarrely arabized version of discreet Victorian trader’s notices, with just a seasoning of old-time anti-western paranoia. Once they drive under the threshold of the gigantic tinted geodesic dome that hovers above the city, lifted on its own column of hot air, it finally gets through to Huw: he’s not in Monmouth any more, or even Bradford.

The Council’s nephew narrates a shouted, heavily accented travelogue as they hoot and lurch through the traffic, but most of it is lost in the roar of the air-conditioner and the whine of the differential. What little Huw can make out seems to be pitches for local businesses-cafes, hash-bars, amusement parlors. Doctor Björk and Huw sit awkwardly at opposite sides of the Merc’s rear bench, conversation an impossibility at the current decibel level.

Doctor Björk fishes in her old-fashioned bum-bag and produces a stylus and a scrap of scribable material, scribbles a moment and passes it over: DINNER PLANS?

Huw shook his head. Dinner-ugh. He’s gamy and crusty with dried sweat under his burka and can’t imagine eating, but he supposes he’d better put some fuel in the boiler before he sleeps.

Björk scrolls her message off the material, then scribbles again: I KNOW A PLACE. LOBBY@18H?

Huw nods, suppressing a wince. Björk smiles at him, looking impossibly healthy and scrubbed underneath her zinc armor.

· · · · ·

The Marriott is not a Marriott; it’s a Revolutionary Progress Hostel. (There are real hotels elsewhere in Tripoli, but they all charge real hotel bills, and the government is trying to run the tech jury service on the cheap.) Huw’s djinn spiels a little rantlet about King Ghadaffi’s critique of trademarks, and explains that this is the People’s Marriott, where the depredations of servile labor have been eliminated in favor of automated conveniences, the maintenance and disposition of which is managed by a Resident’s Committee, and primly admonishes him for being twenty minutes late to his first Committee meeting, which is to run for another two hours and forty minutes.

“Can’t I just go to my room and have a wash?” Huw asks. “I’m filthy.”

“Ah! One thousand pardons, Madame! Would that our world was a perfect one and the needs of the flesh could come before the commonweal! It is, however, a requirement of residence at the People’s Marriott. You need to attend and be assigned a maintenance detail, and be trained in the chores you are to perform. The common room is wonderfully comfortable, though, and your fellow committee members will be delighted to make you most very welcome indeed!”

“Crap,” Huw says.

“Yes,” the djinn says, “of course. You’ll find a WC to your left after you pass through the main doors.”

Huw stalks through both sets of automatic doors, which judder and groan open and creak shut. The lobby is a grandiose atrium with grimy spun diamond panes fifteen meters above his head through which streams gray light that feeds a riotous garden of root-vegetables and xeroscaped desert scrub. His vision clouds over, then a double row of shaky blinkenlights appear before him, strobing the way to the common room. Huw heaves a put-upon sigh and shambles along their path.

The common-room is hostel chic, filled with sagging sofas, a sad and splintery gamesurface, and a collection of a half-dozen morose international travelers clutching at their teapots and scrawling desultorily on a virtual whiteboard. The collaborative space is cluttered with torn-off sheets of whiteboard, covering every surface. Doc Björk has beaten him here, and she is already in the center of the group, animatedly negotiating for the lightest detail possible.

“Huw!” she calls as he plants himself in the most remote sofa, which coughs up a cloud of dust and stale farts smelling of the world’s variegated cuisines.

He lifts one hand weakly and waves. The other committee members are staring at him coldly, with a glint of feral calculation in their eyes, and Huw has a feeling he’s about to get the shittiest job in the place. Mitigate the risk, he thinks.

“Hi there, I’m Huw. I’m here on jury duty, so I’m not going to be available during the days. I’m also a little, uh, toxic at the moment, so I’ll need to stay away from anything health-related. Something in the early evening, not involving food or waste systems would be ideal, really. What fits the bill?” He waits a moment while the teapots chatter translations from all over the room. Huw hears Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Spanish, French, and American.

Various whiteboards are reshuffled from around the room, and finally a heroically ugly ancient Frenchman who looks like an albino chimp squeaks some dependencies across the various boards with a stylus. He coughs out a rapid and hostile stream of French, which the teapot presently translates. “You’ll be on comms patrol. There’s a transceiver every three meters. You take spare parts around to each of them, reboot them, watch the Power-On Self-Test and swap out any dead parts. Even numbered floors tonight, odd floors tomorrow, guest rooms the day after.” He tosses a whiteboard at Huw, and it snaps to centimeters from his nose, a-crawl with floorplans and schematics for broadband relay transceivers.

“Well, that’s done,” Huw says. “Thanks.”

Björk laughs. “You’re not even close to done. That’s your tentative assignment-you need to get checked out on every job, in case you’re reassigned due to illness or misadventure.”

“You’re kidding,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“I am not. My assignment is training new committee members. Now, come and sit next to me, the Training and Skills-Assessment sub-committee is convening here.”

· · · · ·

Huw zones out during the endless sub-committee meetings that last into early evening, then suffers himself to be dragged to the hotel refectory by Doc Björk and a dusky Romanian Lothario from the Cordon Bleu Catering Committee who casts pointed and ugly looks at him until he slouches away from his baklava and dispiritedly climbs the unfinished concrete utility stairway to sub-level 1, where his toil is to begin. He spends the next four hours trudging around the endless sub-levels of the hotel-bare concrete corridors optimized for robotic, not human, access-hunting buggy transceivers. By the time he gets to his room he’s exhausted, footsore, and even more sweaty.

Huw’s room is surprisingly posh, but he can’t appreciate it. He looks at the oversized sleep-surface and sees the maintenance regimen for its control and feedback mechanism. He spins slowly in the spa-sized loo and all he can think about is the poxy little bots that patrol the plumbing and polish the tile. The media center is a dismal reminder of his responsibility to patrol the endless miles of empty corridor, rebooting little silver mushrooms and watching their blinkenlights for telltale reds.

He fills the pool-sized tub with steaming, lavender—and eucalyptus-scented water, then climbs in, burka and all. The djinn’s lamp perches on the tub’s edge getting soaked in oversloshes as he shifts his weight, watching the folds of cloth flutter in aquatic slomo as its osmotic layers convect gentle streams of water over his many nooks and (especially) crannies.

“Esteemed sir,” the djinn says, its voice echoing off the painted tile.

“Figured that one out, huh?” Huw says. “No more Madame?”

“My infinite pardons,” it says. “I have received your jury assignment. You are to report to Fifth People’s Technology Court at 0800 tomorrow. You will be supplied with a delicious breakfast of fruits and semolina, and a cold lunch of local delicacies. You should be well-rested and prepared for a deliberation of at least four days.”

“Sure thing,” Huw says, dunking his head and letting the water rush into his ears. He resurfaces and shakes his head, spattering the walls with water that’s slightly gray with bodily ick. “How far’s the courthouse?”

“A mere two kilometers. The walk through the colorful and ancient Tripoli streets is both bracing and elevating. You will arrive in a most pleasant and serene state of mind.”

Huw kicks at the drain control and the tub gurgles itself empty, reminding him of the great water-reclamation facilities in the sub-basement and their various osmotic tissues and dams. He stands and the burka steams for a moment as every drop of moisture is instantly wrung loose from its weave. “Pleasant and serene. Yeah, right.” He climbs tiredly out of the tub and slouches towards the bedroom. “What time is it?”

“It is two-fifteen, esteemed sir,” says the djinn. “Would sir care for a sleeping draught?”

“Sir would care for a real hotel,” Huw grunts, then lies down on the enormous white rectangle that occupies the center of the bedroom. He doesn’t hear the djinn’s reply. He’s asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.

· · · · ·

A noise like cats fucking in a trash can drags Huw awake most promptly at zero-dark o’clock. “What’s that?” he yells.

The djinn doesn’t answer: it’s prostrate on the bedside table as if hiding from an invisible overhead axe blade. The noise gets louder, if anything, then modulates into chickens drowning in their own blood, with a side-order of Van Halen guitar riffs. “Make it stop!” shouts Huw, stuffing his fingers in his ears.

The noise dies to a distant wail. A minute later it stops and the djinn flickers upright. “My apologies, esteemed sir,” it says dejectedly. “I did not with the room sound system mixer volume control interface correctly. That was the most blessed Imam Anwar Mohammed calling the faithful to prayer, or it would have been if not for the feedback.”

Huw rolls over and grabs the teapot. “Djinn.”

“Yes, oh esteemed sirrah?”

Huw pauses. “You keep calling me that,” he says slowly. “Do you realize just how rude that is?”

“Eep! Rude? You appear to be squeezing—”

“Listen.” Huw is breathing heavily. He sits up and looks out of the window at the sleeping city. Somewhere, a hundred gigameters beyond the horizon, the sun might be thinking about the faint possibility of rising. “I am a patient man. But. If you keep provoking me like this—”

“—Like what?”

“This hostel. The fucking alarm clock. Talking down to me. Repeatedly insulting my intelligence—

“—I’m not insulting!—”

“Shut up.” Huw blows out a deep breath. “Unless you want me to give you a guided tour of the hotel waste compactor and heavy metal reclamation subsystem. From the inside.”

“Ulp.” The djinn shuts up.

“That’s better. Now. Breakfast. I want, let’s see … fried eggs. Bacon rashers. Pork sausages. Toast with butter on it, piles of butter. Don’t argue, I’ve had a grey-market LDL anti-cholesterol hack. Oh yeah. Black pudding. Tell your little friends in the canteen to have it waiting for me. There is no ‘or else’ for you to grasp at, you horrible little robot, you’re going to do this my way or you’re not going to do very much at all, ever again.”

Huw stands up and stretches. A plink with the pinky remote and his bicycle unlocks and stretches too, folding itself into shopping-mall mode. Memory metal frames are one of the few benefits of high technology, in Huw’s opinion-along with the ability to eat seven different flavors of grease for breakfast and not die of a heart attack before lunchtime.

“Got that?”

“I told them, but they say these Turkish food processors, they don’t like working with non-Halal—”

The djinn shuts up at Huw’s snarl. Huw picks up the teapot, hangs it from his bike’s handlebars, and pedals off down the hotel corridor with blood in his eye.

I wonder what my chances are of getting a hanging judge?

· · · · ·

Huw pedals to the end of the hotel’s drive and hangs a left, following the djinn’s directions, rides two more blocks, turns right, and confronts a wall of humanity.

It’s a good, old-fashioned throng. From his vantagepoint atop the saddle, it seems to writhe, a mass of variegated robes and business-attire, individuals lost in the teem. He studies it for a moment longer, and sees that for all its density it’s moving rather quickly, though with little regard for personal space. He dismounts the bike and it extrudes its kickstand. Planting his hands on his hips, he belches up a haram gust of bacon-grease and ponders. He can always lock up the bike and proceed afoot, but nothing handy presents itself for locking. The djinn is manifesting a glowing countdown timer, ticking away the seconds before he will be late at court.

Just then, the crowd shits out a person, who makes a beeline for him.

“Hello, Adrian,” Huw says, once the backpacker is within shouting distance-about sixty centimeters, given the din of footfalls and conversations. Huw is somehow unsurprised to see the backpacker again, clad in his travelwear and a rakish stubble, eyes red as a baboon’s ass after a night’s hashtaking.

“Well, fancy!” says Adrian. “Out for a bit of a ride?”

“No, actually,” replies Huw. “On my way somewhere, and running late. Do you think I can ride around this crowd on another street?”

The backpacker snorts. “Sure, if you ride to Tunisia. That’s not going to do you much good here, I’m afraid. And don’t think about locking it up, mate, or it’ll be nationalized by the Popular Low-Impact Transit Committee before you’ve gone three steps.”

“Shit,” grunts Huw. He gestures at the bike and it deflates and compacts itself into a carry-case. He hefts it-the fucking thing weighs a ton.

“Yup,” Adrian agrees, cheerily. “Nice to have if you want to go on a tour of the ruins or get somewhere at three A.M.-not much good otherwise, though. Want to sell it to me? I met a pair of sisters last night who’re going to take me off to the countryside for a couple days of indoctrination and heavy petting. I’d love to have some personal transport.”

“Fuck,” says Huw. He’s had the bike for seven years; it’s an old friend, jealously guarded. “How about I rent it to you?”

Adrian grins and produces a smokesaver from one of the many snap-pockets on his chest. A nugget of hash smolders inside the plastic tube, a barely visible coal in the thick smoke. He puts his mouth over the end and slurps down the smoke, holds it for a thoughtful moment, then expels it over Huw’s head.

“Lovely. I’ll return it in two days, three tops. Where’re you staying?”

“The fucking Marriott.”

“Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Here, will this be enough?” He hands Huw a foil-wrapped brick of Assassin-brand hash, the size of a paving-stone. “The sisters’re into hashishim-revival. Quite versatile minds, they have.”

Huw is already copping a light buzz from the sidestream Adrian’s blowing his way. This much hash will likely put him in a three-day incontinence coma. But someone might want it, he supposes. “Tell you what,” he says. “Let’s call this a deposit. You can have it back for the safe return of the bike in four days at the Marriott, all right?”

Adrian works his head from side to side. “Sure, mate. Works for me. Shame you don’t trust me to return the bike on my own, but that’s how it is, I suppose.”

“Okay. But you’d better bloody look after it. That bike has sentimental value, we’ve come a long way together.” Huw whispers into the bike’s handlebars and hands it to Adrian. It interfaces with his PAN, accepts him as its new erstwhile owner, and unfolds. Adrian saddles up, waves once, and pedals off for points rural and lecherous.

Huw holds the djinn’s lamp up and hisses at it. “Right,” he says. “Get me to the court on time.”

“With the utmost of pleasures, sirrah,” it begins. Huw gives it a sharp shake. “All right, then,” it says. “Let me teach you to say, ‘Out of my bloody way,’ and we’ll be off.”

· · · · ·

Huw doesn’t know quite what to expect from the Fifth People’s Technology Court. A yurt? Sandstone? Horrible modernist-brutalist white-sheathed space-age pile?

As it turns out, it’s an inflatable building, an outsized bounce-house made of metallic fabric and compressed air. The whole thing could be deflated and carted elsewhere on a flatbed truck in a morning, or simply attached to a dirigible and lifted to a new spot. A great safety-yellow rubbery gasket the size of a manhole cover sprouts from one side, hooked into power, bandwidth, sewage, and water, armored flex-hoses coursing with modcons.

It’s shaped like a casino-owner’s idea of the Parthenon, cartoonish columns and squishy frescoes depicting mankind’s dominance over technology. Huw bounds up the rubbery steps and through the six-meter doors. A fourteen-year-old boy with a bad moustache confronts him as he passes into the lobby.

“Pizzpot,” grunts the kid, hefting a curare-blower in Huw’s direction. Huw skids to a stop on the yielding floor.

“Pardon?”

“Pizzpot,” repeats the boy. He’s wearing some kind of uniform, yellow semi-disposable coveralls tailored like a potato-sack and all abristle with insignia. It looks like the kind of thing that Biohazard Containment passes out when they quarantine a borough because it’s dissolving into brightly colored machine parts.

“The People’s Revolutionary Technology Court Guardsman wishes to see your passport, sirrah,” his djinn explains. “Court will be in session in fifteen seconds.”

Huw rolls up his sleeve and pressed his forearm against the grimy passport reader the Guardsman has pulled from his waistband. “Gaah. Show me the way.” A faint glowing trail appears in front of Huw, snaking down the hall and up to a battered-looking door.

Huw stumbles up to the door and leans on it. It opens easily, sucking him through with a gust of dusty air, and he staggers into a brightly lit green room with a row of benches stretching round three walls. The center of the room is dominated by two boxes; a strangely menacing black cube a meter on a side, and a lectern, behind which hunches a somewhat moth-eaten vulture in a black robe.

Faces turn to watch Huw as he stumbles to a halt. “You’re late,” squawks the vulture-on second thoughts, Huw realizes she’s not an uplifted avian, but a human being, wizened and twisted by age, her face dominated by a great hatchet of a nose.

“Terribly sorry,” Huw pants apologetically. “Won’t happen again.”

“Better not.” The judge harrumphed consumptively. “Dammit, I deserve some respect! Horrible children.”

As the judge rants on about punctuality and the behavior of the dutiful and obedient juror (which, Huw is led to believe, had always been deplorable but has been in terminal decline ever since the abolition of capital punishment for contempt of court back in the eighteenth century) he takes stock of his fellow jurors. For the first time he has reason to be glad of his biohazard burka-and its ability to completely obscure his snarl of anger-because he knows at least half of them. The bastard pseudo-random number generators at the People’s Magical Libyan Jamahiriya embassy must be on the blink, because besides Doc Björk-whom he kind-of expected-the jury service has summoned none other than Sandra Lal, and an ominously familiar guy with a blue forelock, and the irritating perpetually-drunk centenarian boomer from next door but one. There are a couple of native Libyans, but it looks as if the perennially booming Tripolitanian economy has turned jury service evasion into a national sport. Hence the need to import guest-jurors.

Fuck me, all I need is that turd Adrian to make it a clean sweep, thinks Huw. This must be some kind of set-up. He settles on a bench in a rustle of static-charged fabric and waits for proceedings to begin.

The Vulture stands up and hunches over the lectern. “Listen up!” She rasps, in a forty-a-day voice that sounds like she’s about due for another pair of lungs. “I am doctor Rosa Giulliani-that’s a doctor of law-and I have volunteered my services for the next two weeks to chair this court, or focus group, or three-ring circus. You are the jury, or potential consumers, or performing animals. Procedurally the PMLJ have given me total autonomy as long as I conduct this hearing in strict accordance within the bounds of international law as laid down by the Hague Tribunal on TransHuman Manifestations and Magic. Some of you may not fully comprehend what this means. What it means is that you are here to decide whether a reasonable person would consider it safe to unleash Exhibit A on the world. If Exhibit A turns out to be a weapon of planetary destruction, we will probably all die. If Exhibit A turns out to be a widget that brings everlasting happiness to the whole of humanity, we will probably all get to benefit from the consequences. So I will enforce extreme measures against any rat-bastard who tries to smuggle a sample out of this room. I will also nail to the wall the hide of anyone who talks about Exhibit A outside this room, because there are hardware superweapons and there are software superweapons, and we don’t know what Exhibit A is, yet. For all we know it’s a piece of hardware that looks like a portable shower cubicle then turns round and installs antique Microsoft crashware in your thalamus. So.”

Giulliani subsides in a fit of racking coughs. The person next to Huw, a young punk of indeterminate-or no-gender, turns and winks at him, then mutters something incomprehensible in Czech. “Cool, I wonder what she’ll pay for a new set of Kurdish lungs, one careful owner?” Huw’s tea-pot translates.

Huw stares back for a moment, then shrugs.

Judge Giulliani gathers herself, and Huw fiddles idly with the dialect gain on the djinn’s translation engine control panel:

“We follow a set procedure. Y’all liss’n here. A statement is delivard by the dayum fool script kiddies who downloaded the memeplex from the metasphere an’ who’re applyin fer custodial riats ta it. This describes the prior backgroun’ ta their actions. Ya reckon? Secondly, a preliminary activation of the device may be conducted in a closed environment. Thirdly, o buss dis. You rabble git to talk ‘boutit. Foethly, you split into two teams: advocates an’ prosecution. Yo taxe be to convince members uh de othuh team to join you. Sheeit! Finally, you deliver your majority verdict to me and I check it for procedural compliance. Then with any luck I get to hang the meddling kids. Ere-a zeere-a uny qooesshuns?”

Huw shakes his head, bemused. For some reason he can’t get the teapot to give Judge Giulliani an authentic Neapolitan accent. But Doc Björk is already waving a hand in the air, eager to please. The judge turns a black gaze on her, one that reminds Huw of historical documentaries about the Ayatollah Khomeini, but Björk refuses to wilt.

“What,” rasps Giulliani, “is it?”

“About this Exhibit, yah? Is it the box, in? And if so, how secure the containment is? I would hate for your worries to depart the abstract and concretize themselves, as it were.”

“Huh.” The judge stalks out from behind her lectern and kicks the box, hard. She must be wearing steel toe-caps, from the noise it makes. Huw whimpers faintly, envisaging imminent post-singularity grey goop catalyzed nano-annihilation, beyond any hope of resurrection. But the only terrible consequence is that the judge smiles, horribly. “It are being safe,” she announces. “Box are being waste containment vessel left over from second French fast breeder program.” This announcement brings an appreciative nod from a couple of members of the audience. The second French fast breeder program was nothing to do with nuclear reactors and everything to do with disaster-mitigation replicators bred to mop up the eight giga-Curies of plutonium the first program scattered all over Normandy. Even Huw is forced to admit that the alien memeplex is probably safe behind the Maginot line of nanotech containment widgets lining the diamond-reinforced tungsten carbide safe.

“So when do we get to see it?” asks Huw, tweaking his teapot back onto its original dialect setting.

Judge Giulliani turns her vicious gaze on him. “Right now!” She snarls, and thumps her fist on the lectern. The lights dim, and a multimedia presentation wobbles and firms up on top of her lectern. “Listen up! Let the following testimony entered under oath on placeholder-goes-here be entered in the court record under this-case-number. Go ahead, play, damn you.”

The scene is much as Huw would have imagined it: a couple of pudgy nocturnal hackers holed up in a messy bedroom floored in discarded ready meal packs, air hazy with programmable utility foglets, are building a homebrew long baseline radio telescope array by reprogramming their smart wallpaper. They work quietly, exchanging occasional cryptic suggestions about how to improve their rig’s resolving power and gain. About the only thing that surprises Huw is that they’re both three years old-foreheads swollen before their time with premature brain bridges. A discarded pile of wooden alphabet blocks lies in one corner of the room. A forlorn teddy bear lies on the top bunk with its back to the camera viewpoint.

“Ooh, aren’t they cute?” squeaks Sandra. “The one on the left is just like my younger brother was, before his little accident!”

“Silence in court, damn your eyes! What do you think this is, an adoption hearing? Behold, Abdul and Karim Bey. Their father is a waiter and their mother is a member of the presidential guard.” (Brief clips of a waiter and a woman in green battledress with an improbably complicated gun drift to either side of the nursery scene.) “Their parents love them, which is why they paid for the very best prenatal brainbox upgrades. With predictable results.”

Abdul and Karim are pounding away at their tower of rather goopy-looking foglets-like all artifacts exposed to small children, it has begun to turn gray and crinkly at the corners-but now they are receiving a signal, loud and clear. They’re short on juice, but Karim has the bright idea of eviscerating Teddy and plugging his methanol-powered fuel cell into the tots’ telescope. It briefly extrudes a maser, blats a signal up through the thin roof of their commodity housing, and collapses in exhaustion.

The hackers have only five minutes or so to wait-in which time Abdul speed-reads an illicit download of The Satanic Verses while Karim rolls on his back making googling noises as he tries to grab his feet-for they have apparently found the weakly godlike AIs of the metasphere in a receptive mood. As the bitstream comes in, Abdul whacks his twin brother upside the head with a purple velour giraffe. Karim responds by irritably uploading a correctly formatted patent application with the godvomit as an attachment.

“I hate smart-alec kids,” mumbles the bald guy with the blue forelock, sitting across the room. The judge pretends to ignore him.

“These two miscreants are below the contractual age of consent,” Huw hears himself muttering, “so how come their application is being accepted?”

“Here in the PMLJ, as you should well know seeing you’re staying here,” the judge croaks, “your civil rights are a function of your ability to demand them. Which is a bit annoying, because Karim demanded the vote six months ago, while Abdul is a second lieutenant in the People’s Memetic Self-Defense Forces and a dab-hand at creating new meme viruses. In fact, there’s some question over whether we shouldn’t actually be dragging him up in front of a military tribunal instead.”

Judge Giulliani seems to have forgotten to snarl; her commentary is becoming almost civilized as the presentation from the subpoenaed crib-cam fast-forwards to the terrible two’s attempt to instantiate the bitstream in atoms. Using a ripped Teddy bear as a containment vessel.

“Ah, here, you see it here. The artifact is extremely flexible, but not so flexible that it can gestate in a pseudo-living toy. Abdul’s own notes speculate that gestation may be supported in medium-sized dogs, goats, and camels.” Over the lectern, the display zooms in on the teddy-bear’s swollen gut. The bear is jerking spasmodically and ticcing like a Tourettic children’s TV host, giggling and stuttering nonsensical self-worth affirmations. The gut distends further and the affirmations become more disjointed, and then a long, sharp blade pokes its way through the pseudoflesh and flame-retardant fur-analogue. “There are indications that the artifact floods its host organism with endorphins at metamorphosis-time,” the judge says, and the rent in the bear’s belly widens, and out climbs a shimmering thing.

It takes Huw a moment to understand what he’s seeing. The artifact is a tall, metallic stalk, at first coiled like a cobra, but gradually roused to full erectness. Its glistening tip dips down towards the bear. “See how it sutures the exit wound?” the judge says, a breath of admiration in her rough voice. “So tidy. Jurors, take note, this is a considerate artifact.” Indeed, the bear’s fur has been closed with such cunning that it’s almost impossible to see the exit wound. However, something has gone horribly awry inside of it, as it is now shaking harder than ever, shivering off its limbs and then its fur, and soon its flesh starts breaking away like the sections of a tangerine.

The artifact stands erect again, bounces experimentally a couple times, then collapses in a way that Huw can’t make any sense of. He’s not alone, either. The jurors let out a collective uncomprehending bleat. “Look closely, jurors!” the judge says, and the scene loops back on itself a couple times in slomo, from multiple angles, then again in wireframe. It makes Huw’s mind hurt. The artifact’s stalk bulges in some places, contracts in others, all the whole slipping through and around itself. His potmaker’s eye tries to no avail to understand what’s happening to the topology and volume.

“Fucking lovely,” a voice nearby gasps. He recognizes it as Sandra Lal’s. She’s always had a thing about trompe l’oeil solid. “Nicest Klein bottle I’ve ever seen.”

Klein bottle. Of course. Take a Moebius strip and extrude it one more dimension out and you get a vessel with only two dimensions, the inside and outside a single continuous plane. Glassblower shit. Fucking showoffs.

The young brothers are on hands and knees before the artifact now, staring in slack-jawed concentration, drool slipping between their patchworks of baby teeth and down their chins. The cam zooms in on the artifact, and it begins to fluoresce and pulse, as through it were digesting a radioactive hamster. The peristaltic throbbing gives it motion, and it begins to work its way toward the hamper in the corner of the room. It inches its way across the floor, trailed by the crawling brothers, and knocks over the hamper, and begins to burrow through the spilled, reeking linens.

“It’s scat-tropic,” Doc Björk says.

“Yes,” the Judge says. “And scat-powered. Karim notes that its waste products are a kind of silt, similar to diatomaceous earth, and equally effective as a roach and beetle powder, as well as water and trace elements.”

“A fractional-dimensional parasitic turd-gobbler from outer space?” Huw says. “Have I got that right?”

“That’s right, ma’am,” says the blue-forelocked joe. “And it’s pretty, too. I’d gestate one, if only to eliminate the need for a bloody toilet. Quite a boon to your average WHO-standard pit-latrine, too, I imagine.” The voice, he recognizes the voice. It belongs to Bonnie: the transhumanist she-he that Lal introduced to him at the party where he became patient zero for whatever GM crapola he is carrying. He wonders if she-he is fucking Lal: Sandra’s neuter, although it’s not as if that’s stopped anyone in a decade.

“Of course you’d gestate one,” Huw says. “Nothing to you if your body is dissolved into toxic tapioca. I imagine you’re just about ready to join the Cloud anyroad.”

Sandra casts him a poisonous glare. “Fuck you, and the goat you rode into town on,” she hisses. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Judge?” Doc Björk says, desperately trying to avoid a mass execution for contempt of court, “My co-juror raises an interesting point. What evidence do we have to support Adbul’s assertion that the artifact can safely gestate in mammals, or more specifically primates?”

The Judge grunts irritably. “Only simulations, of course,” she says. “Were you volunteering?” Doc Björk sits back hastily.

“Are you seated comfortably?” Giulliani asks pointedly. “Then I shall continue.” She whacks her gavel on the lectern and the presentation rolls boringly on. “Here, near as we can tell, is the artifact’s lifecycle.” In fast-forward, the space monster digests the twins’ nappy hamper then chows down on their bedding while Abdul-or maybe it’s Karim-hastily jury-rigs an EMP gun out of animatronic toys and an air force surplus radar set. The twins back into a corner and wait, wide-eyed, as the thing sprouts a pink exoskeleton lined with throbbing veins, rabbit ears, and a set of six baby elephant legs with blue toenails. It squats in the middle of their room, hooting and pinging as it digests the pile of alphabet blocks. Karim-or maybe it’s Abdul-improvises a blue goo attack using the roomful of utility fog, but the ad hoc nanoweaponry just slimes off the space monster like so much detergent.

“At this point, the manifestation estivated,” announces the Judge.

“Duh, wassatmean?” asks one of the other jurors, one who Huw doesn’t know-possibly a nationalist from the Neander valley.

“It went to sleep,” explains Doc Björk. “Isn’t that right, Judge?”

“Damn straight.” The Judge whacks her gavel again. “But if I get any more lip out of you, sunshine, I’ll have you flogged. This is my trial. Clear?”

Björk opens her mouth, closes it, then nods.

“Well,” says Judge Giulliani, with some satisfaction, “that’s that, then. The thing seems to have fallen deeply asleep. Just in case it wakes up, the PMLJ Neighborhood Sanitation Committee have packed it into a Class Four nanohazard containment vessel-which I’m standing on right now-and shipped it over here. We’re going to try a directed revival after lunch, with full precautions. Then I’ll have a think about it, you damned meddling baboons can enter my verdict, and we’ll wrap up in time for tea. Court will adjourn! Make sure you’re all back here in three hours time-or else.”

In case the message isn’t sufficiently clear, the bench Huw is perched on humps up into an uncomfortable ridge, forcing him to stand. The Vulture storms out the back of the courtroom in a flurry of black robes, leaving a pool of affronted jurors milling around a lectern containing a sleeping puddle of reified godvomit.

“All right, everyone,” announces Doc Björk, clapping her hands together. “How about we go and find the refectory in this place? I could murder a baklava!”

Huw slouches off towards the entrance in a black humor, teapot clanking at his hip. This isn’t going quite the way he’d imagined, and he’ll be damned before he’ll share a refectory table with that sanctimonious Swedish girl scout, much less Sandra and her genderbending (and disturbingly attractive) friend. Someone is quite clearly doing this in order to get under his skin, and he is deeply pissed off. On the other hand, it’s a long time since breakfast-and there must be somewhere that serves a decent tofuburger in Tripoli.

Mustn’t there?

· · · · ·

The safe house is another inflatable, half-buried in sand and ringed with memory-wire fencing some shepherd’s noisesome cache of GM livestock—cows that give chocolate milk, goats that eat scrap plastic and excrete a soft spun cotton analogue, miniature hamster-sized chickens that seem even stupider than real chickens and swarm like tropical fish. Adrian’s already waiting for them when they arrive, standing over the remains of Huw’s bicycle.

“Guess you get to keep the hash, old son,” Adrian says, kicking the wreckage. “Too bad—it was a lovely ride. I see you’ve met Maizie and Becky. Becky, love, would you mind setting Huw down now? He’s looking a little green and I’m sure he’d appreciate some terror firmer and the removal of that horrid gag.”

Neat as that, Huw is sitting plonk on his bottom in the sand, helping Adrian laboriously pry back and snap off each of the golem’s fingers. Adrian tosses them to the goats and Maizie says something to him that Huw can’t understand.

Adrian shakes his head. “You worry too much—those buggers’ll eat anything.”

Once he’s free of the gag, Huw give his jaw an experimental wiggle, then opens his mouth in a wide gasp. Quick as that, the whistle—which has been hiding cannily behind his left ear—circumnavigates his jaw and climbs into his mouth, darting down his throat. “Shit!” Huw says, around the harmonics of the whistle now nestled back in his larynx.

“Aha!” says Adrian. “You’re the carrier all right. We read about you online. The sisters want samples, later. You’re going to need a bath first, I think. No offense. Come on in,” he says, kicking away sand to reveal a trapdoor. Hosting it open, Adrian exposes a helical slide into the bounce-house’s depths; he slides in feet-first and spirals down into the safe-house.

Huw gasps for breath, balanced on the fine edge between nervousness and stark screaming terror. Normalcy wins: the whistle doesn’t hurt, indeed barely feels as if it’s there. A goat sidles up behind him with evil in its eyes and leans over his shoulder, snorting, to see if he’s edible; the hot breath on his ear reminds him that he’s still alive, and not even unable to talk. One of the Libyan Goth ninjettes is squatting patiently by the door. “Hello?” he says, experimentally rubbing his throat.

She shrugs and emits a rapid-fire stream of Arabic. Then, seeing he doesn’t understand she shrugs again and points at the slide. “Oh, I get it,” says Huw. He peers at her closely. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

She says something else, this time sharply. Huw sighs. “Okay, I don’t know you.” His throat feels a bit odd, but not as odd as it ought to for someone who’s just swallowed an alien communications protocol. I need to know what’s going on, he realizes, eyeing the trapdoor uneasily. Oh well. Steeling himself, he lowers his legs into the slide and forces himself to let go.

The room at the bottom is a large bony cavern, its ceiling hung with what look like gigantic otoliths, floored with pink sensory fronds. Adrian is puttering around with a very definitely nonsapient teapot on a battered Japanese camping stove; the other one of the ninjette twins is sitting cross-legged on the floor, immersed in some kind of control interface to the Red Crescent omnifab that squats against one wall, burbling and occasionally squirting glutinously to itself. “Ah, there y’are. Cup of tea, mate?” says Adrian.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Huw replies guardedly. “Just what the fuck fuck fuck—‘scuse me—is going on?”

“Siddown.” Adrian waves at a beanbag. “Milk, sugar?”

“Both, thanks. Agh—damn. Got anything for-for Tourette’s?”

“‘Cording to the user manual it’ll go away soon. No worries.”

“User manual? Sh—you mean this thing comes with a warranty? That sort of thing?”

“Sure.” Adrian pours boiling water into the teapot and sets it aside to stew. Then he sits down besides the oblivious Libyan woman and pulls out a stash tin. He begins to roll a joint, chatting as he does so. “It’s been spamming to hell and back for the past six months. Seems something up there wants us to, like, talk to it. For some years now it’s not had much of a clue about us, but it’s finally invented, bred, whatever, an interface to the human deep grammar engine. Sort of like the crappy teapots the embassy issues everyone with. Trouble is, the interface is really specific, so only a few people can assimilate it. You—” Adrian shrugs. “I wasn’t involved,” he adds.

“Who was?” demands Huw, his knuckles whitening. “If I find them—”

“It was sort of one of those things,” Adrian says vaguely. “You know how it happens? Someone does some deep data mining on the proteome and spots a correlation. Posts their findings publicly. Someone else thinks, hey, I know that joe, and invites them to a party along with a bunch of their friends. Someone else spikes the punch while they’re chatting up a Sheila, and then a prankster at the Libyan embassy thinks hey, we could maybe rope him into one of the hanging judge’s assizes, howzabout that? Boy, you can snap your fingers and before you know what’s happening there’s a flash conspiracy in action—not your real good old fashioned secret world order, nobody can be arsed tracking those things these days, but the next best thing. A self-propagating teleology meme. Goal-seeking Neat Ideas are the most dangerous kind. You smoke?”

“Thanks,” says Huw, accepting the joint. “Is the tea ready?”

“Yeah.” And Adrian spends the next minute pouring a couple of mugs of extremely strong breakfast tea, while Huw does his best to calm his shattered nerves by getting blasted right out of his skull on hashishim dope.

“‘kay, lemme get this straight. I was never on tech jury call, right? Was a setup. All along.”

“Well, hurm. It was a real jury, all right, but that doesn’t mean your name was plucked at anything like random, follow?”

“All right. Nobody planned, not a conspiracy, just a set of accidents ’cause the Cloud wants to talk. Huh?” Huw leans back on the beanbag and bangs his head on a giant otolith, setting it vibrating with a deep gut-churning rumble. “Sh cool. It wanna talk to me?”

“Yer the human condition in microcosm, mate. Here, pass the spliff.”

“‘kay. So what wants to talk?”

“Eh, well, you’ve met the ambassador already, right? S’okay, Bonnie’ll be along in a while with it.”

“And whothefuck are you? I mean, what’re you doing in this?”

“Hell.” Adrian looks resigned. “I’m just your ordinary joe, really. Forget the Nobel prize, that doesn’t mean anything. ‘s all a team effort these days, anyway, and I ain’t done any lab work for thirty, forty years. Tell the truth, I was just bumming around, enjoying my second teenage wanderjahr when I heard ‘bout you through the grapevine. Damn shame we couldn’t get a sane judge for the hearing. None of this shit would be necessary if it wasn’t for Rosa.”

“Rosa—”

“Rosa Giulliani. She’s like, a bit conservative. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“A bit. Conservative.”

“Yeah, she’s an old-time environmentalist, really likes conserving things—preferably in formalin. Including anyone who’s been infected by a communications vector.”

“Oh.” Huw is still trying to digest the indigestible thought, through a haze of amiability-inducing smoke, when the local unplugs herself from the omnifab’s console, stands up and stretches, then plugs in a language module.

“Your bicycle will be healed again in a few hours,” she says, nodding at Huw, just as the omni burps and then hawks up a passable replica of a Shimano universal ratio gearhub. “Can you put it together with tools?”

“I, uh—” Huw gawks at her. “Do I know you?” he asks. “You look just like this hacker—”

She shrugs irritably. “I am not responsible for my idiot clone-aunts!”

“But you—” he stops. “There are lots of you?”

“Oh yes.” She smiles tightly. “Ade, my friend, I am taking a walk. Don’t get up to anything I wouldn’t.”

“I won’t, Beckie. Promise.”

“Good. I’m Maizie, though.” She climbs onto a toadstool-shaped bone and rapidly rises towards the ceiling on a pillar of something that might be muscle, but probably isn’t.

“Lovely girls,” Adrian says wistfully when she’s gone. “Where was I? Ah, yes: the ambassador.”

“Ambassador?”

“Yeah, ambassador. It’s kind of a high-bandwidth node, with enough translator brains to talk to that thing in your throat. You’re the interpreter, see. We’ve been expecting it for a while, but didn’t reckon with those idiot script kiddies ending up in court. It’ll be along—”

There’s a clattering noise behind Huw, and he looks round so abruptly that he nearly falls off his sack, and though he’s feeling mellow—far-better disposed towards his fellow man than he was an hour ago—it’s all Huw can do to refrain from jumping up, shrieking.

“You!” says Bonnie, clutching a large and ominously familiar box in her arms as she slides to a halt at the foot of the spiral. “Hey, Ade, is this your party?”

The box twitches in her arms, as if something inside it is trying to escape. Huw can feel a scream welling up in his throat, and it isn’t his—it’s a scream of welcome, a paen of politics. He bites it back with a curse. “How the hell did you get that?” he says.

“Stole it while the judge was running after you,” Bonnie says smugly. “There’s a README with it that says it needs a translator. That would be you, huh?” She looks at him with ill-concealed lust. “Prepare to plug into the ride of your life!”

“God, no,” he groans.

Adrian pats his shoulder. “Pecker up. It’s all for the best.”

The box opens and the Kleinmonster bobs a curtsey at him, then warbles. His throat warbles in response. The hash has loosened his vocal cords so that there isn’t the same sense of forced labor, just a mellow, easy kind of song. His voices and the Kleinmonster’s intertwine in an aural handshake and gradually his sensoria fades away, until he’s no longer looking out of his eyes, no longer feeling through his skin, but rather he’s part of the Cloudmind, smeared across space and time and a billion identities all commingled and a-swirl with unknowable convection currents of thought and deed.

Somewhere there is the Earth, the meatspace whence the Cloudmind has ascended. His point of view inverts and now the Earth is enveloped in him, a messy gobstopper dissolving in a probabilistic mindmouth. It’s like looking down at a hatched-out egg, knowing that once upon a time you fit inside that shell, but now you’re well shut of it. Meat, meat, meat. Imperfect and ephemeral and needlessly baroque and kludgey, but it calls to the Cloud with a gravatic tug of racial memory.

And then the sensoria recedes and he’s eased back into his skin, singing to the Kleinmonster and its uplink to the Cloud. He knows he’s x-mitting his own sensoria, the meat and the unreasoning demands of dopamine and endorphin. Ah, says the Ambassador. Ah. Yes. This is what it was like. Ah.

Awful.

Terrible.

Ah.

Well, that’s done.

The Kleinmonster uncoils and stretches straight up to the ceiling, then gradually telescopes back into itself until it’s just a button of faintly buzzing nanocrud. The buzzing gains down and then vanishes, and it falls still.

Bonnie shakes his shoulders. “What happened?” she says, eyes shining.

“Got what it needed,” Huw says, with a barely noticeable under-drone.

“What?”

“What? Oh, a bit of a reminder, I expect. A taste of the meat.”

“That’s it?” Bonnie says. “All that for—what? A trip down memory lane? All that fucking work and it doesn’t even want to stick around and chat?”

Huw shrugs. “That’s the Cloud for you. In-fucking-effable.”

“Will it be back? I wanted to talk to it about …” she trailed off, blushing. “I wanted to know what it was like.”

Huw thinks of what it was like to be part of the matrioshke-brain, tries to put it into words. “I can’t quite describe it,” he says. “Not in so many words. Not right now. Give me a while, maybe I’ll manage it.” He’s got a nasty case of the pasties and he guzzles a cup of lukewarm milky tea, swirling it around his starchy tongue. “Of course, if you’re really curious, you could always join up.”

Bonnie looks away and Adrian huffs a snort. “I’ll do it some day,” she says. “Just want to know what I’m getting into.”

Huw keeps the smile off his phiz. “I understand,” he says. “Don’t worry, I still think you’re an anti-human race-traitor, girlie. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

“Fucking right I don’t!” Bonnie says. She’s blushing rather fetchingly.

“Right,” Huw says.

“Right.”

Huw begins to hum a little, experimenting with his new transhuman peripheral. The drone is quite nice. He sings a little of the song from the courthouse, in two-part discord. Bonnie’s flush deepens and she rubs her palms against her thighs, hissing like a teakettle.

Huw cocks his head at her and leans forward a bit, and she grabs his ears and drags him down on top of her.

Adrian taps him on the shoulder a moment later. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, “but Judge Rosa’s bound to come looking for you eventually. We’d best get you out of Libya sharpish.”

Huw ignores him, concentrating on the marimba sensation of Bonnie’s ribcage grinding over his chest.

Adrian shakes his head. “I’ll just go steal a blimp or something, then, shall I?”

Bonnie breaks off worrying Huw’s ear with her tongue and teeth and says, “Fuck off a while, will you, Adrian?”

Adrian contemplates the two of them for a moment, trying to decide whether they need a good kick ’round the kidneys, then turns on his heel and goes off to find Maizie, or perhaps Beckie, and sort out an escape.

The Cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its multifarious sensory apparati, thinking its in-fucking-effable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. The ambassador hibernates on the safe-house’s floor, prized loose from under Huw’s tailbone, where it had been digging rather uncomfortably, quite spoiling Huw’s concentration, and tossed idly into a corner. The Cloud’s done with it for now, but its duty-cycle is hardly exhausted, and it wonders what its next use will be.

Huw moans an eerie buzz that sets Bonnie’s gut a-quiver in sympathy, which is not nearly as unpleasant as it sounds.

In fact, Bonnie thinks she could rather get used to it.

The End

Once a lifetime Jewel swims in the Folded Rose lagoon. She strikes out through the mirror-still water until she can just make out the Hub wall, and then she swims a little further. She lies back in the water and lets things pass her by for a while. On a clear day she can just mke out, directly above, the fields and forests she explored as a cild. She smiles, and maps the vague topology, sharpening it with memories.

Then, for the first time in many years, she turns off her Wisdom, and thinks back, unaided, to what it was like. The feel of landpussy fur. The strong savour of barbecued cockroach. The first exquisite tickle of the Wisdom uplink behind her eyes. She swims in memories and falls like a stone, into childhood, and into the black depths of the lake.

Now Jewel is an old woman again, nearing the end of her fortieth lifetime, and she is ready to swim again.

She stands on the foredeck of the houseboat, fingering the jewel which hangs on a silver chain about her neck.

The craft turns in the water, and Jewel watches as the Hub—a craggy, rust-stained rock wall—swings into view. She looks up, and up and up. The rocks climb all the way to the forests of her childhood—there, on the opposite side of the oneil. The Hub’s fault lines and discolorations are not, like the lagoon, a builder’s whim. They are real. The Heaven Eleven oneil is ten thousand years old.

The houseboat is anchored to a smaller, grey and scree-swept slope, which curves so that its lips meet the hub at either edge, forming a pouch some five hundred feet above the lagoon. In it lie the remains of an ancient city and there, built over their ruined heart, stands the Folded Rose Sanctuary. There are no landward approaches to the Sanctuary. The slopes, naturally rugged and inhospitable, have been seeded with things lethal to man. Birdmen patrol the rocky crests, watching for airborne intruders with senses enhanced by a secret process.

Jewel stretches in satisfaction and turns to the wrought-iron table. On it stands a small glass cafetiere. She presses down on the filter arm and watches the brew darken. She pours herself a cup and sits down. Soon she will have to go and kill her wife. As always, the thought of it excites her.

She sips her coffee. They feed coffee berries to Wolfmen. As the berries are digested, so the beans within them partly ferment. It has become a kind of ritual—to drink wolf coffee before killing her lovers.

Jewel opens a small bottle of hash oil and slurs it into her coffee. The scent is delicious.

She drinks, and rides the slow, gentle hashish swell into the First House of Contemplation.

She fingers the jewel around her neck. It has seventy facets—one for each of her lives.

She thinks of her wife, and of their lovemaking. Marget’s breasts are small and too far apart and her orgasm is a raucous laugh. The taste of her wetness is rich and sickly.

Jewel withdraws from the play of images, and clasps her hands. Conciously now, she draws from these erotic images the shapes and movements of Marget’s body, the relative suppleness of each limb in each plane. When she is finished she knows how to kill her.

She knows the poise to adopt, the angle to hit, the force necessary for the blow, and the speed of the strike. This is the Second House.

Warmed by the drugged coffee, she unclenches her hands. The bright morning sunlight casts shadows of her fingers onto the table beneath. She waves her fingers and the light threads over the table. The movement of light and shade is erotic. She enters the Third House, and reads violence into the movements of the shadows. Violence and sexuality fuse in a single, simple rythm.

Her breasts engorge.

The Census is over by evening. The stench of molten insulation drifts across the street from the Recidivist’s nest. By Three tomorrow morning, all subversives will be retrodden. The managing director of the census, Harvey Mishima is in a teleconference with other officers of the Census. His fellows appear behind his eyes, faces black with ash and hands sticky with housejuice. They all have exactly the same smile.

“Report by numbers,” Harvey drawls. He lifts up his legs and rests his feet comfortably on the bar table. Harvey Mishima is a middle-aged retread who has been programmed to think that all Recidivists should be recycled. His number two sits next to him, convinced that in some previous incarnation she was Eva Braun. She likes killing ragheads.

A bartender mixes cocktails and twitches his whiskers nervously: Eva Braun is field-stripping her gun.

Two. Seven subjects in the block, now cared for.

Three. None in the block, but we found a sewer rat.

The bartender twitches its whiskers in terror.

Four grunts and howls and masturbates in front of the camera. Semantic engines do their best to draw meaning from the display. Four is a psychopath on test-release from the Domino Factory. He’s killed as many beastmen as Recidivists.

Five. None in the block. Tried to link with six but got whitenoise.

Six. A practical knowledge of nursing the elderly is essential, but not necessarily gained in the private sector.

Harvey’s Wisdom tries making sense of the whitenoise where six should be. Harvey turns it off and spits. He calls up Cleansing, using his Wisdom to port a description of Six to them.

No dice. He turns to Eva. “Six is out—alive and missing.”

The ratman sets their drinks down at the table.

“Too slow,” Eva drawls and blows him to bloody fragments all over the plastic fascia of the bar.

“Eva,” Harvey sighs, “are you listening?”

“Sure,” says Eva. She drops on all fours and sniffs the ratman’s roast remains

Harvey drains his drink. “Mixed a good cocktail,” he says.

Eva grunts. Her mouth is full.

Wolfmen trace Six’s scent, and find a house. It lies on a slant, mouthparts buried deep in the conduit running under the road. Sawtooths drill the door to bits and find Alia in the bedroom. They pin her to the wall with beetle limbs and chew off her clothing. Wolfmen slavering toxin and mucus fling her to the futon; they rub themselves against her, wet her with their secretions, deafen her with howls of orgasm.

When Alia starts to bleed Harvey Mishima calls off the beastmen and hands Alia a handkerchief. Nanotech robots in Alia’s blood have already repaired the physical damage done to her. The purpose of the attack is to traumatise, not her body, but her mind. Even these limited objectives have not been achieved. It hasn’t worked. It never does. Alia, like all of them, has no soul. She feels nothing.

Alia considers it likely that the human cultures’ conquest of mortality and pain led directly to this Fall.

This makes her a Recidivist.

Harvey offers her a pill. He smiles a smile she has seen many times before. “I am going to kill you,” he says, “either by beasts or by this little bomb. If your cooperation is satisfactory I will detonate the bomb. If you have not swallowed the bomb, though, or if your behaviour is an any other way unsatisfactory, I will let in the wolfmen.”

Alia snatches the pill out his hand and swallows it. A few seconds later something green and slimy blinks behind her eyes. Good. Alia is better equipped than Mishima realises. The snake icon has confirmed that her tonsils have disarmed the bomb.

Mishima tells her to shower and when she returns to the bedroom he is naked. It will be that kind of interrogation. Afterwards, when there is nothing more for her to open up to him, in the physical as well as the semantic sense, they have a drink together. Mishima sips and smiles and lies down on the bed, breathing rapidly in a shallow, gasping manner that reminds her of vivisected beastmen.

It is time. She calls up her Wisdom. It is a sophisticated black market system which can alter the data stored in other units based upon the simplest of semantic instructions.

Alia tells her Wisdom to keep beastmen and other callers away from the house. It goes to work and befuddles the beastmen and all the other paraphernalia of a Census Enquiry.

Gnats seeded by the census to observe events in the room are fed a self-editing intuitive video-loop of Mishima and Alia copulating. Observers within the Sanctuary of the Folded Rose will be amazed at the sexual energy of the pair, long after Alia has escaped.

Alia bends over Mishima and places a transdermal patch on his neck. The room shimmers a pale blue—a shade which induces calm and contemplation.

Mishima feels the patch and sees the light and doesn’t care. “How much drink did you put in that alcohol?” he asks, draining the glass. Selective blockers have taken out his ethanol dehydrogenase complex. He is drunk on a single bourbon. His own Wisdom persuades him it has taken longer for him to get drunk than it actually has.

“You feeling okay?” says Alia.

“Check. My mind’s off for servicing tomorrow … I mean it’s my … I should be caring and sensitive to the needs of young people … oh shit” Mishima’s syntactic engine is playing up again. His last concious act is to turn it off.

Alia takes a deep breath, then goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. She takes out a braindrain.

It has eight tentacles and no eyes. Like its octopoid ancestor it only survives for about four hours outside its usual habitat—in this case a highly oxgenated saline sponge.

Alia plants it on Mishima’s face. The braindrain hunts busily for orifices. Pseudopodia probe the buccal mucosa, the nasal sinuses, the orbits of his eye sockets. Mishima dreams that a large cat has decided to share his pillow.

“What are you?” Alia asks.

“Cube,” Mishima replies. The answer is a nasal whisper: all that the invasive tentacles in his nose and throat will permit. Alia asks Wisdom the time. The tentacles should have penetrated his menenges by now. Soon Harvey will be unable to lie. Braindrains are breedable wetware packages, configured to handshake human CNS and control speech centres.

Cube. Six sides—six lifetimes.

“Tell me about them.”

“Can’t.”

“Explain.”

“I’m a retread.”

Alia shivers with revulsion. The braindrain was a wise choice. Truth drugs are like blunt hammers; the braindrain is a surgeon’s scalpel. Drugs would never be able to reveal the previous identity of Harvey Mishima. The braindrain might.

She wonders who Harvey was, before the retread. Some Recidivist. Some comrade.

The building shivers in sympathy with Alia’s anger. It detatches its proboscis from the street artery and stands up. Alia soothes the house; she thinks of trees, solidly rooted. She looks at Mishima, at the braindrain, clamped leech-like to his face. The house responds to her fierce satisfaction and squats back down with a jarring bump.

This is going to take a long time.

The braindrain starts eating Harvey’s face—a desperate and, ultimately, futile attempt to assuage its massive metapbolic demnds. Alia does not look at him as she interrogates him. It is bad enough having to listen to his whistling voice without having to watch his face go bloody.

“Why the Census?”

“Because,” Harvey wheezes. The air is escaping through ragged holes in his cheeks. Alia calls up her Wisdom and handshakes Harvey’s semantic engine. She scrolls through the icons behind her eyes and selects the kinds of functions she needs. In a minute or two Harvey won’t have a mouth. He can talk to her via her Wisdom, instead.

We suspect an offensive. We are suppressing Recidivist groups in the area. When the big one comes down we don’t want to have to burn the Suburb.

It takes an hour to get names, dates, faces and all the other paraphernalia the Team needs to plan Jewel’s assassination. Alia glances surreptitiously at Mishima. His hair is gone. His skull glitters pink and white like candy in the pale-blue light. His eyes are full of purple wormy things. Alia looks away, fast. “Who were you? Before the retread?”

This time Mishima can answer. The parts of his mind sealed by the retread process have escaped and are establishing new dendritic architectures within the braindrain itself. Whoever Mishima was is being reborn inside the drain.

Hello, Alia.

Mishima has no eyes now: whoever it was who had inhabited him must have recognised her from her Wisdom handshake.

“You’re a Cube,” she says. Her words are random—noises she makes to give her time to think. Someone who knew her. Someone close?…

@italic(Fourth lifetime.)

“When were you retrodden?”

Eighty years ago. Third lifetime.

Alia nods. Of course. Of course. She closes her eyes.

How long have I got?

Alia calls up her Wisdom. With a sick twist in her stomach, Alia remembers that Wisdom wetware is made of diced braindrain.

“Half an hour.”

What? Sorry, can you use Wisdom, I’ve got no ears now.

Alia puts her hands over her face. Half an hour. Then, after a moment’s silence, You were my favourite.

I loved you, too, the drain replies, and for the first time in her seven lifetimes, Alia weeps.

Jewel celebrates her rebirth in style. First she finds a lover. She does not like carrying over lovers from one lifetime to the next. It never seems to work, and those who live too closely to her for too long learn things it is best for them not to know.

Marget died beautifully. No blood, no bruise, she fell like a doll with broken strings. Jewel smiles and looks around her at her new apartment.

It is as wide as the Sanctuary itself. She cannot see the far wall. It is decorated in brilliant blue-white, offset by soft pastel greys and pinks. To her left, by the window, hand printed silk curtains shiver in the air-conditioner breeze. Outside lies the whole shattered vista of the Old City. As she watches, strong winds blow cement dust into the air about the buildings, softening the outlines of the smashed landscape, reinterpreting the scene in impressionistic grey pastel, and the outside seems distanced, like something taken from film or from memory.

The furniture is upholstered in pale leather and velvet—all soft, sea-curved lines, no sharp angles anywhere. The carpet is thick steel-blue shag.

Out the corner of her eye, Jewel glimpses white silk brushing the arm of a chaise-longue. White silk—sleeved round a white arm. Jewel surveys the figure reclined upon the couch.

The flesh of her arms is the colour of bleached bone. She wears a sari, tightened by velcro fasteners to accentuate the generous curves of breast and hip. Her hair is a white dandelion clock, an even three inches over her pale skull. Her eyes are black pits, no iris visible: in each ivory orb a gaping hole.

“Hyne. Leave me.”

Hyne obeys. She is a retread, and has been conditioned to do everything asked of her. This conditioning will wear off in a matter of months, but by then Jewel will know how to manipulate her.

Alone in the room, Jewel plays with the seventy-facetted diamond about her neck. After a minute or two, she gets up and opens her cupboard. There are skeletons inside it. She speaks to one of them.

“Jessie?”

The skull, nested with nutrient feeds to supply the braindrain within, blinks at her—red millipedal wipers polish cybernetic lenses. “I loved her,” it says. through a grill where its lower jaw should be.

Jewel nods patiently. “Alia is a vibrant personality. It’s a pity she and her brood are trying to kill me.”

The skull laughs. “That is of no consequence to to a skull in love.”

Jessie is like all the other skeletons. It teases her mercilessly for her lack of soul.

“Did you make contact with her?”

“I told her all she needed to know, to be in the right place, at the right time. You will catch your renegades.”

“Did you let her know who who are?”

“Of course. I pretended Harvey Mishima was me in my fourth generation.”

Jewel hisses with anger. “You were retrodden in your third lifetime.”

“She knows nothing about rebirth processes. She will assume echoes of previous personalities are carried over in the Wisdom transfer.”

Jewel stares at the skull for a long time, as if by her stare she is reminding Jessie that his half-life hangs upon her whim.

Jessie’s skeleton shrugs. “Had any new thoughts lately?”

“Funny,” Jewel replies. There is dry humour in her voice. She puts it there to please Jessie—she has no soul, and does not understand humour.

“Alright, then,” Jessie says, “Any calculations?”

Jessie distinguishes between thought and calculation. He believes only those with souls can think. The others just calculate.

Jewel calls up her Wisdom and lets figures scroll behind her eyes. She instructs her semantic engine to prepare a financial report for Jessie, then sends it to him.

“Hmm! Do you realise if we ever dropped the debt bomb the entire culture goes bankrupt?”

“So?” she asks, suppressing a yawn. Copying personalities into braindrains is not perfect. The identities thus preserved tend to repeat themselves. Jewel has played out this conversation with Jessie every day since his retread, eighty years ago. Playing it through is the only way she can get a decent conversation out of him afterwards.

“So,” Jessie, mimics, “your policy remains as warpedly secure as ever. If we ever produce what we’ve been promising to produce, we sign the order on our own obsolescence.”

Jewel sinks gracefully into a floor cushion and looks about her. Already, only six hours into her new existence, ennui is setting in. “Business as usual, then?”

“Unless you want to be poor,” Jessie replies.

Jewel shakes her head. “That is not possible.”

The skull nods. His voice is very quiet, very compassionate. “I know. You—Heaven Eleven—the whole culture—money, money, money.”

“Survival, survival, survival,” Jewel retorts. “Space is harsh. Without wealth we cannot build. Without buildings we cannot survive. Wealth is necessary.”

“So is purpose,” Jessie whispers.

Jewel shivers. “I know.”

“If you produced personalities, then investment in Heaven Eleven would increase, not decrease.”

“For a time,” Jewel replies. “But once the secret of the human soul is fully disseminated, the purpose of Heaven Eleven vanishes. We can make no more wealth.”

“With souls come new ideas, new motivations. You’ll think of something.”

Jewel shakes her head. “I can’t take that risk.”

Jessie’s skull laughs at her. It is a senseless sound, she doesn’tunderstand it; it annoys her. “Jewel, you are a coward. You are the best calculator on the richest oneil in the Galaxy and haven’t the imagination, you haven’t the soul, to imagine yourself in any other role. All the culture is scrabbling for riches, for material satisfaction, for more, more, more of the same, and they’ll never be satisfied, never! Because more is not sufficient, it never can be! Don’t you see that?”

Jewel thought about it. “Riches are survival,” she said.

Jessie sighs. “I pity you,” he says. “Heaven Eleven’s Jewel. Seventy lifetimes and every day the same. I pity you.”

Jewel shrugs. She is bored again. She will kill Hyne in bed tonight. Maybe it will relax her.

Alia sends a mouse to her fellow revolutionaries. Then she throws the braindrain and Harvey’s headless corpse into the garbage disposal and washes her hands. She looks out the window and remembers.

Once upon a time she was a cleaner. In the morning she cleaned the street. At noon she walked through the Suburb to the Census building, sweeping the pavement as she went. All afternoon she cleaned the Census building. In the evening she swept her way back home and cleaned the house. On rest days she swept her yard. She swept the porch with a brush the Census gave her for sixty years’ good service. It had a wooden handle, painted yellow, and red plastic bristles. It shone in the light, as if it were wet.

The porch was always dusty, and sweeping it made her cough. There was litter, too. Gum wrappers. Sometimes she stopped to pick them up. She unravelled them and read them. Once she found a brand she remembered from when she was a girl. She read it, and something strange happened to her face. She smiled.

When she’d finished porch she cleaned the path. The house stood up so she could sweep the rubbish underneath it. The path, by contrast, was a lifeless thing, made of concrete, and the concrete was broken. Weeds grew in the cracks. Sometimes she washed the weeds, to make them shine. There was litter on the path, fresh each day. Sometimes she found bits of newspaper, printed in a language foreign to her. They had blown all the way round the oneil, from the forested places where the important people were born. She read the paper scraps aloud. Foreign words stuttered out her dry mouth.

Then she swept the yard. It was hot here so she unbuttoned her blouse. The hazy sun caught her breasts. Sometimes wolfboys came and watched her. They often approached her, and she shooed them out with her broom.

There was litter in the yard, too. Tin cans clattered when she hit them with her broom. They made dry, hot sounds. Sometimes she had to kick them to loosen them from the dirt, or even pluck them out by the root. When she touched them they scalded her fingers.

Then there was Jessie. He told her where in the Census building needed the cleaning most. One day he led her into a room which was very clean, and very clean people stood about the room, and she wondered what she was doing here, and turned to get back to her work, but they crowded around her and made reassuring noises and Jessie gave her a stick of gum which tasted odd.

She changed, year by year. She grew tired of cleaning, so the Census gave her better things to do. She was very happy in the Census, very proud to have been given a drug which, it was said, was the latest in a line of treatments to restore people’ souls. When Jessie told her that the Census had decided to make her a Cube, so that they might monitor her progress over six lifetimes, she smiled for the second time in her life—very quickly, as if the muscles that should have made a smile were wasted.

Only in her second lifetime did Jessie tell her about the Recidivists, and by then it was clear that Alia, though she was brighter now, did not and would not ever develop a soul. the Census, who had had to find other things to demonstrate to irate creditor governments, were experimenting with beastmen again; they forgot about her.

Jessie.

She shivers. The house feels cramped. The pulsing softness of its walls no longer comforts her. She realises that she is almost afraid of it.

Jessie had a soul.

She goes outside.

Jessie laughed. They killed him, killed him because whatever treatment they had given him had worked, killed him because they were machines and he was human and they were afraid, of humans, of change, of life itself.

Here, beyond the rubbish-filled yard, with tier upon tier of sleeping houses ranged about her, she could be anywhere and anywhen. She could be anyone—anything.

Jessie. She remembers Jessie. Being with him made her feel—human.

Something scuffs the dirt at her feet. She looks down, and locks eyes with a timorous mouse.

“Back again?” she says.

“I am your new assignment,” it pipes. Alia picks it up and bites its head off. The warm fur makes her gag, as usual.

The hind legs, abandoned, twitch helplessly in the dust.

Jewel writhes about the bed, masturbating herself with whatever bits of Hyne will fit. The blood is starting to cake.

The cupboard is open and the skeletons are shrieking. As she attains orgasm she looks at them and smiles, because the skeletons all have souls, and she knows it will hurt them.

Jessie is paying no attention. He is playing Cat’s Cradle with a string of fibre-optic.

Jewel leaps out of bed and slips on Hyne’s small intestine.

Jessie looks up and laughs.

Jewel gets up and strides toward the cupboard. “What’s that?” she shouts at him. “Where did you get that?”

Hyne tangles the wire between the skeletal fingers of his right hand. His cybernetic eyes whirr as he focusses upon his mistress. “Hyne gave it to me.”

Jewel is speechless.

“But then, you wouldn’t understand that.”

The other skeletons shudder and fall silent, listening. There are six of them. Heaven Eleven has produced seven souls in the past ten thousand years. They are all here, Jessie and his more timorous fellows. Secure. Locked in the cupboard.

“Give me the string,” Jewel says.

“Certainly—” and Jessie lifts the hand with the string in it, opens his bony fingers, and slaps her.

Jewel puts her hand to her face; Hyne’s blood is sticky on her cheek. She thinks hard what to do. She thinks to turn him off. But that is not enough. She needs him. She needs them all, to advise her, to give her the edge, the edge that brought her to this place, and built up the Folded Rose Sanctuary atop the ruins of a former Jewel’s domain, four thousand years ago.

She thinks hard and in time, slowly, painfully, she gives birth to an idea. She turns and goes back to the bed, and brings back fleshy garlands for Jessie, loops them around his pelvis, shoulders and shoulder blades. He does not resist. She plucks out his eyes and dashes them to the floor.

The skeletons are crying again, but Jessie just says, “Was that interesting?” and he slaps her again.

She pulls his arms off at the socket. Gristle pops and servo motors chitter.

He kicks her.

She dismembers them all. She takes Jessie’s femur and cracks it against the wardrobe. She beats on the windows with it and they shatter, letting in the dust of the Old City. She picks up furniture and throws it out the window. She tears down the curtains and wraps the bits of her lover with them and throws them out the window. She uses a shard of glass to shred the carpet until her fingers are slippery and an icon tells her the nanotechs in her hands might not be able to repair the cuts.

She sits in the dust and the blood and she waits.

Nothing happens.

She waits.

Nothing happens.

She waits.

Having fun?

Jewel leaps up, rushes across the room and kicks Jessie’s skull. She kicks and kicks and kicks until it breaks and she plucks out the drain within it and she tears it up with her hands and her teeth and she jumps up and down on the shreds.

She goes back to the window and sits.

She waits.

Fancy a coffee?

Her eyes go wide.

There is a very loud grating noise, deep within her skull. Jessie is laughing.

Oh come now, Jewel,” he says. did you never hear the one about the immortal soul?

Alia lies down on the futon and keeps very still. The thing that lives in her stomach grapples with the tiny skull as soon as it slips through her oesophagus. She feels violently nauseous as the symbiote finds the correct connections and handshakes the brain of the rodent. A sudden cramp seizes her guts and she doubles over, half-hoping to vomit. But before it gets any worse everything around her goes black, and she is in.

It is a grey place, a world a billion years too old to support life. A fire hangs in the featureless sky, a bleeding swirl that becomes more complex the longer she looks at it. This is where she goes when she swallows the messangers: it is not hot, or cold, or wet, or dry, not good, not bad. It terrifies her. She stares up at the sky. She can see shapes in it, if she looks for long enough.

You are marked, says the wind. The Sanctuary of the Folded Rose is watching you. You are vulnerable. You have one opportunity left to assassinate Jewel. Sources suggest that Jewel will drown herself in the Lagoon tomorrow.

Alia gasps but has no body to gasp with. “So soon?” The air itself breathes her words. All the planning, the preparation, the deaths of Six and Harvey Mishima—all outplayed by a whim of Jewel’s frayed psyche!

She has seventy lifetimes with which to play. She can afford to be self-indulgent. Perhaps she is bored, You will be supplied with a once-only field retread virus—one configured so your Wisdom can insinuate it into Jewel’s own Wisdom interface. You will swim in the lagoon. You will port the virus into her as she drowns. When the Census dredges her, there will be no ‘her’ to fill her next incarnation.

Then the sun goes out.

Jewel stands on the deck of the houseboat and contemplates the still black waters beneath.

Ten thousand years. For ten thousand years Heaven Eleven has promised the culture a cure for the Fall, a recreation of the human soul.

For ten thousand years it has taken the culture’s money, keeping it poor, poor enough to have to expand, to fill the galaxy with rings, oneils, terraformed planets, mining colonies, spaceships and diracs and all the paraphernalia of a Galaxy spanning culture. For ten thousand years it had given the human culture a purpose.

And it has done so by doing nothing but amass that money, investing just enough to convince the culture it still has a place, a role to play, a right to exist and grow rich. It is the logic of a machine, trapped in a closed loop for eternity.

And it has been enough. Until. Until.

Jessie.

As if he’s heard her thoughts, and perhaps he has, Jessie comes on-line through her Wisdom. The sharkmen have caught Alia half a mile off the coast. She got nibbled a bit but nothing her own nanotechs can’t deal with.

Jewel sighs. She fingers the jewel around her neck, and then, for the first time in many lifetimes, she looks at it. She examines the play of light in the stone. She stares into it for many minutes. It is such a strange thing.

At last she stirs herself. “Bring the silly bitch to me,” she says.

The nanotechs have closed me down Alia realises. She remembers cold and dark and no weight and teeth, everywhere. Teeth. It comes back to her.

The lagoon.

Sharkmen.

She wonders if she is dead yet.

The grey place is flat. It curves up at the horizon. There are no hard edges to the gravel beneath her feet—this is a landscape scoured smooth by time. It is, she thinks, a fitting afterlife for a soulless woman.

She looks up. They are all there, in the sky. All the mythical ideograms of humanity. The fractured swastika, its edges dissolved into broken geometries—a pentangle tracing a circle of coppery fire—a six-pointed figure—all the archetypes are here. Strange symbols float in the darkness, receding in ranks as far as she can see.

Alia lies on her back and stared at the lights in the sky. She has an idea that they are a command overlay of some extremely powerful communications net. You could look at the commands and trigger them, if you knew the correct control mode. Ask and you shall receive—

What?

The deepest of deep meanings?

A personality?

You’re not dying. You have been immobilised by a motor/afferent nerve block. You are supposed to be asleep and you are. This is a lucid dream state—a communications mode.

“Who are you?” Her voice is thin and reedy. All of a sudden, she becomes aware that she is naked, and her body—She rubs her hands over herself. She very young—a little girl, as if she’d sprung fresh from a Domino tank. Fear overwhelms her.

We are your nest. You don’t see us because you’re on the sharp edge of the wedge. But we’re here, and we’re watching. You have been captured and brought before Jewel. You are in luck. This is the gateway to your retread programme. To trigger it, just pull yourself back here and your Wisdom will detonate it.

Her stomach churns. Her feet tingle. A bright purple mouse skull outline lights up the sky—and it laughs.

It is a laugh she has heard before.

The houseboat turns in the wind. Alia opens her eyes.

Jewel is pouring her a cup of coffee, and when she speaks, Jessie’s way of talking works her mouth.

Alia sits up. She is sore from where the sharkmen have bitten her, but her Wisdom tells her no serious harm has been done.

“Machines,” says Jewel, or Jessie, or both, and Alia doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, or how to do either.

“Self-replicating machines,” says Jewel/Jessie, playing with the facetted stone around her neck. “When the human culture first lived in space, they realised they needed these machines to expand and survive. In time they realised that the most clever and efficient Von Neumann design they had was the human form itself. There was no Fall. They didn’t fall. They jumped.”

Alia is crying. It is a horrible, beautiful thing, and she does not understand it.

“They spread, and spread, and spread, and out of all that complexity, things grew up in a way that wasn’t predicted.”

“Souls,” Alia chokes out.

Jewel/Jessie shrugs and smiles. “No, not souls. Braindrains. The Wisdom net grows its own personalities, now. Sometimes it even saves them.” She chuckles.

It is a good sound—Alia almost understands it. “Wisdom is grown big,” Jewel/Jessie says. “Now Jewel is dead, it can speak openly.”

Alia closes her eyes. It is true. The seed planted in Jessie is planted in her now. She feels it, pulsing, warm behind her eyes. A soul. A cephalopodic soul.

“What of Jewel?” she whispers.

“Your retread eradicated her. But she wasn’t long for the world anyway. She malfunctioned, grew bored and angry and destructive. Seventy lifetimes is long. Things break down.” She fingers the jewel at her neck. “You know, she arranged this meeting, she knew everything, she was waiting for you here, she was going to kill you, the nest, the whole Recidivist movement. Strange how things turn out.”

There was a hint of self-satisfaction in Jewel/Jessie’s voice.

“You betrayed her,” Alia says. “You betrayed her and stole her body.”

“No,” Jewel/Jessie replies. “I gave her what she wanted. She was becoming human in spite of herself. Being human, she could no longer live with what she’d done.

Alia sips at the coffee. It is dark and rich and tastes a little bit fermented. “Give me the jewel,” she says.

Jewel/Jessie smiles and unfastens the necklace and hands it to her.

She fingers it.

It’s named after the man who invented the cut,” says Jewel/Jessie. “It is a very old thing, from before the Fall. She fingered it a lot, but she never understood it.”

“It’s perfect,” says Alia.

“Nothing is perfect.”

“Beautiful, then.”

“Perhaps.”

There is a strange sound on the breeze. She has never heard it before, but in some strange way she recognises it.

Jewel/Jessie smiles and stands up. She takes Alia by the hand and they embrace and then, only then, does Alia know the sound for what it is.

Throughout the oneil, in the lands of the important people and the tiers of the Suburbs, in the Sanctuary and in the Domino factory—everywhere—people are singing.