i

T H E N E W

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A D V E N T U R E S

SHIP OF FOOLS

Dave Stone

NA

i

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by

Virgin Publishing Ltd

332 Ladbroke Grove

London W10 5AH

Copyright © Dave Stone 1997

The right of Dave Stone to be identified as the Author of

this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Bernice Summerfield originally created by Paul Cornell

Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

ISBN 0 426 20510 3

Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall

not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired

out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior

written consent in any form of binding or cover other

than that in which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition being imposed on the

subsequent purchaser. Hey, what happened to piggy

number six?

Scanned by The Camel

ii

Author’s Note

I’d like to offer my thanks to all the people who asked me to use their names for those

who, as will become clear, get horribly murdered in piteous and most revolting circum-

stances. They know who they are, and now, of course, so does everybody else.

The reader should remember – in accordance with the statutory light-entertainment

law that says those who die in a certain kind of fiction are all thoroughly bad lots and

thus deserve everything they get – that none of these real-life people are remotely like

their fictional namesakes and are, in fact, without exception, all perfect lovelies and kind

to fluffy animals. I’d also like to apologize to those whom, for whatever reason, I left

out, lumped together or just forgot about entirely.

I’d also like to point out that while this is, obviously, in some small part a murder

mystery, with puzzles to be solved, the murders in themselves are not the puzzles. You

have been warned.

On another subject entirely, may I say that as of time of writing I’m utterly skint – and

anyone who wants to give me a lot of money to write something for them only has to

ask. It’s always surprised me that writers never seem to put that all-important fact some-

where in their books. Unmarked notes in small denominations, for preference.

The Reverend Dave R. Stone, 1997

iii

Contents

Prologue: The Imperfect Crime,

and How to Commit It............................................. 1

Part One: Embarkation

1 The Morning After the Night

Before the Morning After

(Recurring). ............................................................. 6

2 A Relocation and a Preposition. .............................. 13

3 A Setting is Essay’d,

A Villain Comprehended. ........................................ 22

4 A Positive Plethora of

Investigators. .......................................................... 28

5 ‘Welcome to the Cruise

of the Mil ennium . . .’. ............................................. 33

6 ‘In the Heart of Space

the Night Never Ends . . .’. ...................................... 38

7 Something Nasty in the Flies. ................................. 44

8 A Smal Break in the

Continuity. ............................................................... 51

Interlude: The Unpleasant End

of Doctor Po. ........................................................... 53

Part Two: Excursions

9 ‘Your First Stop on a Grand Tour

of Intergalactic Wonder . . .’. ................................... 61

10 A Dinner Appointment

with Destiny. ........................................................... 66

11 Sitting Down to Dine. .............................................. 70

12 The Distinct Possibility

of Foul Play. ............................................................ 76

13 The Purée of the Plot

Noticeably Thickens. ............................................... 80

14 The Plot Becomes More

Complicated than was

Previously Imagined. .............................................. 86

Interlude: The Devilish Disguises of

Doctor Po. ............................................................... 93

iv

Part Three: A Port of Cal

15 Benny Under the Spyglass. ....................................100

16 The Feast of Truth and Lies. ...................................107

17 The Removal and Disposal of

Certain Masques. ....................................................115

Interlude: The Hands that Bind the Dead. ..................122

Part Four: Arrival

18 Methods of Investigation. ........................................129

19 Can we Talk?. .........................................................136

Final Interlude: The Lair of the Flatwyrm. ...................140

20 The Characters Inhabiting

the Mind. .................................................................143

21 The Inherent Shape of Things,

Perceived. ...............................................................148

22 The Penultimate Programme. .................................155

23 Surprising Arrivals. ..................................................159

Appendix I: A Recipe. .................................................164

Appendix II: Emil Dupont Provides a Smal

Surprise. .................................................................167

v

Ten li’l piggies, sitting down to dine;

One choked his li’l self, and then there were nine.

Nine li’l piggies, travelling in state;

Someone left a latch unlocked, and then there were eight.

Eight li’l piggies, thinking they’re in Heaven;

One heard a li’l noise, and then there were seven.

Seven li’l piggies, trying to survive;

A li’l tick bit one of ’em, and then there were five.

Five li’l piggies, in protection of the Law;

One was strung up with his belt, and then there were four.

Four li’l piggies setting out to sea;

A red herring gobbled one, and then there were three.

Three li’l piggies walking in the Zoo;

A big bear hugged one, and then there were two.

Two li’l piggies sitting in the sun;

One got frizzled up, and then there was one.

One li’l piggy, living all alone . . .

[With absolutely no apology at all,

given the original wording,

to Frank Green, 1869]

vi

PROLOGUE

THE IMPERFECT CRIME,

AND HOW TO COMMIT IT

The seas of Dellah were temperate, and roughly of the same composition as might have

been found on distant Earth, once upon a time – before those seas were fouled with

toxins and petrochemicals, terminally irradiated, set on fire and eventually boiled off

into a thick black sludge. The seas of Dellah, in comparison, were salty and fecund: the

lack of significant moons preventing violent tidal surges, the seasonal variations in plan-

etary temperature gently turning them over and preventing them from growing stagnant.

Dellah’s seas remained for all practical purposes as flat, clear and blue as a lost dream of

the Mediterranean, although probably without the enormous German hausfrauen in

bikinis, greasy peripatetic local youths in little thongs and parboiled, flaking old dads

from Purley complaining that they can’t get proper chips with their squid. In fact,

looking at the flat and mild expanse of Dellah’s seas one could, in short, imagine life

evolving from them purely for the sake of something to bloody do.

Except, quite possibly, for a small area of them lapping gently against one of the

islands running off the Marek Dha landmass. Here the waters dipped sharply to give the

perfectly formed impression of the keel of a boat, where no boat could be seen.

This was because the boat in question was enveloped in an electrogravitational field

that turned it completely invisible within the human visual spectrum and quite some way

out either side. If it could be seen – which it couldn’t – one would see the hydroplanes

that extended out from either side to prevent more than minimal surface disruption.

These were necessary to compensate for the construction of the hull and superstructure –

their aquadynamics almost entirely sacrificed for prismatic-fractured surfaces that

deflected sonar and radar. The hull and superstructure were of a piece, monomolecular,

built from a single long-chain polyceramic molecule, and so slippery that even particle-

detector emissions simply slid off.

The craft was powered by cold fusion – and since ‘cold’ is only a relative concept,

this was masked by convection vents that dissipated the reactor’s heat signature over a

fifteen-kilometre radius. The guidance and control systems of the craft operated entirely

1

PROLOGUE THE IMPERFECT CRIME, AND HOW TO COMMIT IT

Page 2

on mechanical clockwork built from polymers, ceramic and, occasionally, even micro-

turned hardwood. This made them undetectable by resonance and invulnerable to EMP.

The boat had internal, inertial tracking and it did not need to burn lights for navigation,

for the simple reason that it was currently broad daylight.

The boat was as undetectable as state-of-the-art technology could make it, and it was

heading for one of the smallish, central and privately owned islands.

The Marek Dha island chain (when in season) was the exclusive domain of the sector’s

rich, who had ecosculpted them to within a micron of their lives, and built on them in a

hotchpotch of architectural styles to provide various interpretations of the island para-

dise. Here the sector’s robber-barons, racketeers and drug lords rubbed shoulders with

media celebrities, intercorporate fliers and royalty – or, at least, aquascooted over to

each other’s beach house for iced chai, powdered products that screwed your head off

and young ladies with no clothes on jumping up and down in swimming pools. All of

which, given the marked similarities between leaching degenerate jackal-scum who

should be shot on sight – and certain others who aren’t actually royalty – was only right

and proper. The individual inside the invisible boat knew that within fifty leagues, strung

like a string of slightly tacky island pearls, were pickings rich enough for any reasonably

inventive and persistent criminal to retire upon for life. One could have lived, quite com-

fortably, for years in just one of the pleasure yachts that clustered around the marinas

alone. But the individual in the invisible boat wasn’t interested in any of them.

The island that the boat was heading for was anomalous – not that it had not been

reconstructed, but that it had been reconstructed with some style. From the sea it seemed

deserted: a beach running up to rocky cliffs topped with uncultivated vegetation – and in

the Marek Dha chain this could only mean it had a single owner, and one who imposed

his vision on it and his alone. If the inhabitants of the other islands were the super-rich,

then the owner of this place must be the Über-rich – and when you’re dealing with

wealth on that level of magnitude you have to think in slightly different terms.

The boat grounded on the beach, and ceased even its minimal level of internal

activity. The cliffs displaced line of sight and gave a small but significant degree of pro-

tection from detection by whatever lay beyond. The cover of darkness, likewise, would

only give the smallest advantage, but even the most minuscule edge was worth waiting

for, so the individual inside the boat settled down and waited for it.

It was dark now.

The figure left the boat – and while ‘figure’ is not entirely the correct word, for the

moment it will have to do.

In the moonless night, once the eye had adapted, the constellations in the Dellah sky

blazed. Dellah was nearer to the Galactic Hub than Earth – which meant, of course, in

the anthropocentric terms of Earth, it was a backwater out on the edge of the known uni-

verse. The stars, knowing nothing of the anthropocentric terms of Earth, were clustered

PROLOGUE THE IMPERFECT CRIME, AND HOW TO COMMIT IT

Page 3

closer together and they burnt with different albedos: sapphires, amber and rubies, agate

and lapis lazuli scattered through the diamonds tossed on jewellers’ velvet. The air was

clear and warm, with that strange soft-rasping dryness that seems to come only from the

sea. The figure moved through it, seemingly drifting on the faint convection.

It was enveloped in a visual-diffusion field of much the same nature as that masking

the boat – save that it was much less powerful, there being a limit to how many power

packs a generally humanoid life form can comfortably carry. To counter this, the figure’s

suit contained skirts, streamers and bulky mouldings to utterly obscure the distinctive

humanoid pattern signature and movement that might alert a human or mechanoid eye

by the merest glimpse. Under this, the figure wore a monomolecularly sealed and insu-

lated body suit to avoid tripping heat sensors. It had its own air supply and integral com-

pressors to deal with expelled gases rather than release them, and risk releasing DNA

fragments from the lungs along with them. It also had subsystems to deal with sweat and

the expulsion of colonic gasses – though for other products from, as it were, that end of

things, the figure would have to exercise some small degree of self-restraint for a while.

The cliffs had been sculpted for picturesqueness rather than for easy climbing. The

use of something as blatant as a grappling hook would have been instantly detected by

security-system sensors, so the figure climbed by hand – moving across the cliff face in

a twisting trail, occasionally doubling back and even going down again and along – the

scaling of the cliffs was obviously the result of much study and calculation beforehand.

At the top of the cliffs the figure wove through the underbrush and scrubland, moving

smooth and silent as a big cat stalking the pampas, again moving this way and that,

seemingly at random, sometimes slowing its pace to a millimetre-by-millimetre crawl

possibly so that it would avoid tripping motion detectors. At length, the rough vegetation

gave out to increasingly verdant grassland and at last to a manicured lawn. The house in

the centre of it had long been visible.

If one could have seen the figure without looking for it for half an hour, squinting out

of the corner of one’s eye, one would have now seen a marked change in its manner. It

was as though the figure had been galvanized into action. It dived to the ground and

rolled, bounced to its feet, double-dodged first one way and then the other, sprinted sev-

eral hundred metres, occasionally breaking stride to hop on alternate legs, dived and

rolled again, leapt and somersaulted in the air, hit the lawn feet first, dug its heels in,

boosted itself back as though springing back in alarm, ducked, made a strange little flat-

of-the-foot jump still in a ducking position, dodged left, jumped forward, twisted in the

air and wound up with its back flat against the wall of the house, gasping inside its suit

with exertion.

The next stage was the tricky bit.

The simple fact is that an enclosed space is far more easy to secure than the area

around it. Thus far the almost invisible figure seemed to have made it past the sensors

and the photoreceptors, the black-light laser traceries that crisscrossed the island and the

lawn – but past the wall and inside the house, the security would take a leap of several

PROLOGUE THE IMPERFECT CRIME, AND HOW TO COMMIT IT

Page 4

orders of magnitude. Outside was a place of passive devices set to call in roving defence

mechanisms; inside there were active, quite lethal installations, transputer-controlled,

waiting to deal with anything that made a single, suspicious move.

The time had come for the figure to fire up its own active technology. More specific-

ally, it fired up its pulse-pumped, autoguided particle accelerator and burnt through the

wall like a blowtorch through a pile of garden slugs. The figure dived through it, simul-

taneously ejecting what to the naked eye might seem like a billowing cloud of vapour –

but was in fact a cloud of quasi-organic/semicybernetic, nanonetic microspores, care-

fully designed to latch on to the electromagnetic pulses of any system that they found

and disable them. Spraying a grey cloud of electronic death around it, the effectively

invisible figure ran for the door of the tastefully furnished room in which it found itself,

and pelted down a hallway, heading swiftly but inexorably towards its goal.

The problem with the above, of course, from start to finish, was that it did absolutely no

good at all.

The constant thrust-and-parry battle between security devices and those who try to

counter them is remarkably similar to that of bombs and shelters – if you’re safe from

arrows they fire a bullet at you; if you’re safe from fission bombs they drop a fusion

bomb on you – and the security systems of this particular house, relatively speaking,

were the equivalent of a Suncracker.

The defences of the island had been aware of the invisible boat some time before it

almost entirely failed to appear over the horizon. The defences on the ground had zeroed

in upon and tracked the invisible figure’s head the moment it had stuck itself out of the

boat. So finely tuned were the house’s defences that they had detected the invisible

figure to the slightest detail, had ascertained its equipment and weaponry precisely, had

apprehended the level of threat it posed to the very iota – and they were controlled by a

transputer system so powerful and evolved that it was capable of being bloody-minded

and vicious. It was capable of toying with its prey.

It tracked the target as it made its way through the corridors and rooms of the house,

watched and waited as it got ever closer to the point that, it calculated, was the target’s

eventual destination – and then almost as an afterthought it extended one of its plasma-

cannon from the ceiling and blasted the intruder to a greasy stain. This set off a small but

quite explosive fire, but the house was ready for it and quickly put it out.

When the human security guards, belatedly alerted by the house, arrived on the scene,

almost all that remained of the figure was a charred and slightly soggy torso. This was

exactly what they had been expecting, but they got a small surprise, all the same.

PART ONE

EMBARKATION

I was in the ladies room with her when I was about fourteen, and this drunk lady came

in and started saying: ‘Oh, Judy, whatever happens, never forget the rainbow.’ And

Mama said, exiting grandly: ‘Madame, how could I forget the rainbow, I’ve got rain-

bows up my ass.’ Oh yes, she could be a terror.

Liza Minnelli

5

1

THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT

BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER

(RECURRING)

The bars around spaceports tend to fall into two categories. On the one hand you have

the clean, plush and hideously expensive, the sole purpose of which is to suck money

out of transients before they get away and spend their transit-fiat-loaded shillings some-

where else. Such establishments tend to have bog- Olde Worlde names like the Staging

Inn or the Traveller’s Rest, crawl with highly polished brass-effect fixtures, serve fizzy

ethanol-injected fluids by way of pressure kegs and have about as much real atmosphere

as a crematorium with a power cut.

On the other hand, this was a port – and there are other people in a port than simple

transients. There are dockers, stevedores and support staff who work all hours; there are

crew members from the various ships, desperate for drink, and certain other substances,

after a long and predominantly dry voyage – and there are other individuals, those who

trade in certain items that come through the port yet somehow fail to appear on the cargo

manifests. The official trading, freight and transport concerns contrive not to recognize

them, tend to forget about them, but they exist all the same.

There are bars that cater for all of these people, scattered through the streets around

the port in question, and you could cut the atmosphere in these with a knife. Probably

after having pulled it out from the back of your kidneys beforehand. The lino – and it’s

always lino, somehow, even centuries after it has stopped being made – has been scuffed

and worn to sorry shreds. The fixtures and fittings are elderly enough to be valuably

antique, but this is purely for the reason that nobody could ever be bothered to replace

them, and they have been battered and scratched to the depths of hell and back. You

don’t want to know what the crustlike patina on them might actually be.

Where the hideously expensive money-suckers might sport pristine retro reproduc-

tions of old advertising installations as part of their Nostalgic CharmTM, these other bars

are plastered with strata of handbills ranging from the local policing forces asking for

6

1 THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER (RECURRING)

Page 7

help in a gay-related murder, through dial-a-hov cab companies offering the opportunity

to be rolled in the street of your choice, to ladies and gentlemen of variable ages offering

services to the discerning client. All of human life can be gleaned from walls like these,

provided it involves being tied up in a nappy while being beaten with a feather duster,

taking a taxi home and then getting brained by a half-brick in the hands of someone not

entirely secure in the seat of their own sexuality.

The Pit was one such bar. It had probably had another name, once, but the holovapour

sign in the window had long since malfunctioned, and nobody could remember what

was supposed to go between the PI and the T.

Inside, even in these highly evolved days, people smoked, passively or otherwise –

although ‘passive’ is possibly not the right word. The airborne fug of blended, mutated

tobaccos, resin-related offworld products, Adrenochrome Lite and countless, retroengin-

eered infra- and extraterrestrial herbs made it hard to see a hand in front of the face, on

occasion; it filled the room to a slight but noticeable overpressure, and was as belliger-

ently aggressive as a Zaxos razor-wolverine on acid.

It was the early evening, some way off midnight, but then time had no real meaning in

an establishment open twenty-six hours of the Dellah day. The smoke was relatively

thin, the room relatively uncrowded. The Pit was predominantly a human watering hole.

This was not through a sense of speciesism, because the university influence that made

Dellah so remarkably civilized extended even this far. No, it was simply a matter of the

random forces that make up a regular clientele – and the only nonhuman currently in the

place was the Fnarok employed by the proprietor as a doorman of sorts. The sort of

doorman the Fnarok was, of course, was the kind who smacked heads on the counter

several times as an automatic prelude to throwing their owners out. Its name was Bum-

frey – and a lot of people had made the obvious mistake, and had lived to regret it, in an

almost entirely technical and remarkably brief sense.

The proprietor of the Pit himself glowered balefully from behind the bar. His name so

far as anyone had ever gathered was Nil, and he communicated by way of an invective

of grunts and curt expletives that those who didn’t know him took for bad-tempered stu-

pidity. After they’d got to know him a little better, these people would revise their

opinion: it was a moronic, utter, mindless hatred of the entire universe in general and

everything and anything in it in particular.

Strangely, Nil was never taken up on this – or perhaps not so strangely, since he had

some solid connections in the local criminal network, such as it was on a world as

remarkably civilized as Dellah. Several times in the past, the story ran, some poor fool

would pass an unflattering remark, and the very next day a psychotic gang known as the

Bekkar Boys would come along and torch them with an industrial flame-thrower.

As it was, Nil stood behind the bar counter of his domain, his greasy, balding head

glistening, meticulously polishing a glass with a bar towel. He buffed it to a pristine

shine, peered at it critically, turning it this way and that in the dim, actinic light, then

spat in it and put it on the rack. On the other side of the counter from him, a tourist who

1 THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER (RECURRING)

Page 8

had wandered in by mistake on the way to his hotel sat on the Haunted Barstool and fid-

geted in vain. Presently he’d try to say something to attract the barman’s attention, and

might even by some lucky chance hit on the precise and mystic mantra necessary for

some semblance of service – but would in all probability get Nil’s back up the moment

he opened his mouth and end up being thrown out on his ear by Bumfrey the Fnarok.

(The Haunted Stool was of course a common bar-room myth: the spot where some

poor patron died of thirst, and his ghost rose up to frighten the bar staff away. In the case

of the Pit this was almost literally true. A Rododaman from Rensec IV had once stood at

the bar until he died of dehydration – a Rododaman’s nervous system being cybernetic-

ally rewired to respond to certain, precise and entirely formalized stimuli and proced-

ures. His nervous system had locked, waiting for an enquiry as to what he might like to

drink that simply never came, and his emergency social-interaction overrides had mal-

functioned, utterly immobilizing him. He’d been dead for two weeks and the smell was

appalling before Nil finally bothered to have Bumfrey throw him out.)

All of the regulars here knew the proper mantra for getting served, and used it without

a thought. It was simply one of the things that separated the insider from the outsider.

There was one person here, however, who might be technically out of the loop but who

was getting served anyway – having with the unerring instinct of the confirmed and ded-

icated piss-artist hollered, ‘Oi! You! Give us a drink yer miserable bastard!’ directly

upon stumbling through the door.

The individual concerned was currently sitting at one of the trestles, partially

obscured by a precarious, irregular pyramid of empty bottles, gesturing vaguely with a

slightly fuller bottle and querulously addressing something nonexistent but which

seemed to be wandering around in the middle distance.

‘Buggers,’ this individual was saying with lordly contempt. ‘They come over here

with their . . . with their . . . with their special trousers and they think they’re so . . . and

they, and they’re all just . . . Bugger.’

It had been the end of a distressing semester. The staff and student body of St Oscar’s

had collectively heaved a thankful sigh of relief, and promptly put away childish or at

least educationally related things, and had begun to think in terms of things that truly

mattered. A certain type of person, student and teacher alike, had returned to the private

research that would find the cure to the latest transient-carried disease or the substruc-

ture that had so long eluded informed commentators upon the precise ordering of litotes

in Finnegans Wake; laurel-winning data wafers were resurrected for the final, polished,

non-beta-testing version that would storm the InfoNet and set it alight; the cataloguing

of the billions of multiterrestrial works of literature, art and cultural artefacts in the lib-

rary and in the display museum would at last be sorted out once and for all.

This was, naturally, what only one particular camp thought of as ‘things that really

mattered’. The other camp – equally composed of students and teachers alike – held the

alternative, intelligent and patently more reasonable opinion that the end of term was the

1 THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER (RECURRING)

Page 9

perfect excuse for the piss-up of the planetary century. It had started in the Student

Union bar, whence it had repaired to one of the off-campus bars that stayed open rather

later, and from then on to a night club and, much later, to a slightly less classy if actually

more expensive club, where people of different species and sexes, but uniformly past

their applicable sell-by dates, took their clothes off despite the more aesthetically

minded howling from the audience to put them straight back on.

And there matters might have rested quite happily, had not a small and unrepresent-

ative minority opined that they knew of a certain all-night drinker towards the spaceport,

where one could drink tinned beer at two thousand per cent over the odds a throw, while

watching the toms, pimps and skankweed merchants plying their wares under sporadic,

buzzing UV lighting. Here they would be slightly immersing themselves in the

tenebrous interplay of the Dellah underworld, secure in the knowledge that anything one

pegged anyone as was probably wrong – and the actual facts of matters were one hell of

a lot worse . . .

It had been, in short, a night of attrition. The party that had set out from St Oscar’s

had been winnowed steadily away at each establishment until one, and only one, had

survived the ordeal and was left standing, or, at least, staggering, blaring, belching and

throwing up all over the place. Benny had stumbled out from this last club in the late

afternoon, and had wandered aimlessly through the streets and the gathering dark on a

kind of bleary autopilot, smashed out way too far from her head to form a coherent

thought and simply looking for some familiar landmark that might trigger an instinctive

pattern-recognition.

Unfortunately for her, if not for the entire brewing industry of Dellah, the only thing

capable of triggering such a response by this point was that of a public ordinary. Benny

had spotted the Pit’s vapour sign and the cheery pub light spilling through the door at a

couple of hundred paces and had been in there like a shot. As has already been noted, the

first words out of her mouth had gained her instant credibility; as far as Benny was con-

cerned, the drinks just simply arrived, as drinks so often do.

By now she had drunk herself sober – or at least to that point where the last few con-

scious brain cells had given up the ghost, allowing things to bypass the cerebral cortex

and come up with some degree of lucidity, if not coherent content. Professor Bernice

Surprise Summerfield, not counting a brief period as Kane-Summerfield, was now, in

short, leaning on the bar counter and becoming maudlin. At great length.

‘Skint, thass what I am,’ she stated. ‘Have I got one? Pot to piss in? I have not.’ She

shot a furtive glance towards the barman and waved a placating hand. ‘Got money for

here, don’t worry,’ she explained. ‘Don’ you worry ’bout that. Jus’ no money after that,

you see?’

Nil the proprietor looked at her across the bar, and shrugged with the unconcern of

one who always takes his money up front.

‘Y’see he comes into my life, messes it up completely and then sods off yet again,’

Benny explained patiently, toying with a litre glass that had once contained the kind of

1 THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER (RECURRING)

Page 10

stout you could stand a spoon up in laced with a couple of healthy shots of vaguely

plumlike brandy. ‘Thass what he does. Thass all he does.’

She was referring to her ex-husband, the name of whom she could not currently

recall, though she had been perfectly sure about it when she’d started. She had recently

spent the last dregs of her depleted funds looking for him, when he had disappeared and

seemed to be in danger, only to find that he had got himself involved in a squalid little

criminal scam and had subsequently found that it was too big for him. The search for

him had cleaned her out to the point where she had been forced to go into hock with the

credit intercorps – and her line of credit was rapidly running out.

The thing was – and she was currently in no state at all to think of this in anything but

a blurred and general sense – the criminality of his recent actions hadn’t seemed to be

his style at all. Whatsisname might steal to eat and drink, but he had his own personal,

idiosyncratic but strict sense of moral codes, and he did not possess a criminal mentality.

In her time with him, Benny had come to rely on an innate if often misguided decency –

and to find that suddenly, somehow gone had shocked and hurt her. It was as though she

had built a house on shifting sands, had left it behind her but had still been anchored by

the fact that it was still there, and had come back to find it washed away. Benny had

stared at the wreckage of the foundations, and wondered if she could ever trust anybody,

anybody at all, ever again.

And the thing was, she couldn’t shake the feeling that this untrustworthiness was

somehow suspect. It was as if the devious little bastard was lying even about that. When

she had returned to her rooms in St Oscar’s and unpacked her bags she had found a little

note from him.

‘If you ever need to get in contact, ’ it had said, ‘cal me here. You can ALWA YS reach

me through here, ’ and there had been a GalNet number. Benny had tried tracking down

with her own personal transputer – then enlisted the help of some of the cutting-edge

students in the university’s AI development labs. The end result of both had been the

same: the number was protected by security codes so complex and heavy that even a

planetary military intelligence couldn’t crack them. Something like this was only pos-

sible by way of a hardware/software/gelware package costing in the order of billions of

shillings. There was simply no way Whatsisname should have been able to afford, or

even have access to, security like that.

And the thing was, she remembered the look in his eyes just before she had left him,

for what she earnestly hoped would be the final time. Remembering it, it was as though

behind the shamefaced apology and a try-your-luck attempt to get into her knickers,

there had been something else, some other agenda. Something harder, and more dan-

gerous, and quite possibly bigger than she could imagine. It was as if he had been about

to tell her about it, explain everything – and then he had simply decided against it. So

just what in hell had Jason really been up to, and who or what had been behind it?

Jason! Of course that was his name. How could she have ever forgotten something

like that? Benny looked down at her empty glass, suddenly sobered as though by a dash

1 THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER (RECURRING)

Page 11

of iced water in the face. With an utter, aching clarity she knew what she had to do, and

do right now.

She looked up at Nil the proprietor. ‘Oi. You. Give us another drink you miserable

bastard . . .’

There were two other outsiders in the Pit that night, though neither of them had been

drinking. They had walked in half a minute after Benny, had ordered and received two

half-litres of small ale in precisely the correct manner, and had thereafter nursed them in

a darkened corner. The process had been accomplished with the unobtrusiveness known

only to those who are intrusive for a living, and after two hours these strangers had

become just a part of the furniture, no more remarkable than the broken holo-dice

machine beside which they sat.

They were large men, and seemed almost precisely identical, their subdued grey suits

cut to conceal muscle and possibly weaponry, but no amount of tailoring could conceal

their sheer bulk or, when they moved, their movements. They moved as though every

muscle that the grey suits hid was under full and conscious control. It was as though

their limbs were manipulators, their entire bodies tools going through some precise

industrial process.

They had been shadowing Benny for some while now – ever since she and the party

had left the university campus – and the time was taking its toll. Benny had, after all,

only to remain semiconscious enough to be able to home in on the nearest available

drink. These two had to keep a professional edge.

‘You know,’ said one of them, looking across the room to where Benny was upending

yet another spirituous shot into a beer, ‘I don’t think she’s ever going to stop. I’ve had

about enough of this.’

‘Don’t get sloppy,’ the other told him sharply, keeping his tone low. ‘You know what

we have to do. We keep tabs on her and wait for her to pass out.’

‘Yeah, but it’s never going to happen. I mean, look at her. If they gave prizes out to

piss-artists her mantelpiece would collapse under the weight.’ He tapped the side of his

head meaningfully to indicate the time readouts that were chipped into both of their

respective left eyes. ‘We’re fifteen hours behind schedule as it is. The chief was

expecting her bagged and tagged by now. I say we just do it.’

‘In front of witnesses?’ the other said.

The first man looked around the bar and its clientele pointedly. ‘Yeah, right. Like we

couldn’t deal with all these alert and virtuous witnesses.’

The second man frowned and nodded thoughtfully. ‘There is that.’

‘Right.’ The first set his barely touched glass down with a decisive clunk. ‘So let’s get

it over with.’

Nil the proprietor would have been the last person to admit to any sentiment towards his

customers, because it quite simply wasn’t so. He did however have a remarkably

1 THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER (RECURRING)

Page 12

developed territorial sense. Anyone foolish or luckless enough to enter his domain

deserved any form of abuse he could throw at them – but if anyone was going to be hurt

in the Pit then they were going to be hurt by him, or at least at his instigation. So when

he saw the two men heading for the woman at the bar, noted the open, loose and friendly

manner that is only ever the precursor to some severe violence, he caught the eye of

Bumfrey and Bumfrey, knowing his job, drifted closer too.

The two men split up and bracketed the woman, who was now pontificating darkly

about how bloody students today didn’t know they were born, couldn’t hold their drink,

and how somebody should learn them heavily with a stick.

‘Come on love,’ said one of them jovially. ‘I think you’ve had enough now. Time to

get you on home, now, eh?’

The woman swivelled her head to regard him gnomically. ‘That has got,’ she said, ‘to

be the worst pick-up line I have ever heard in my life. Trust me. I know whereof I speak.

You’ll be asking me to look at your small but remarkably interesting collection of rub-

bings, next, and . . . and I . . .’

Then she slumped face first into the bar counter. Nil was watching her and the men

closely, but even he only had the vague impression that one of them was drawing a hand

back from the exposed skin of her neck.

Things had now gone quite far enough. Nil flicked his eyes meaningfully towards

Bumfrey, who lumbered forward. The two men turned as one and looked up into the

Fnarok’s gleaming, grinning, doglike jaws.

‘I t’ink you better go now,’ Bumfrey rumbled softly, leaning over them and not quite

touching them. ‘On your feet, feet first or in bits. Don’ matter to me.’

The two men glanced at each other, and then one of them grinned up at him easily.

‘Hey, we’re not looking for trouble.’

‘Tha’s good,’ said Bumfrey. ‘Tha’s very good.’

‘Tell you what,’ said the man amiably. ‘We’ll be on our way, I think. No hard feelings.

Shall we shake on it?’ He held out his hand smoothly, and the Fnarok automatically took

it in his digitally opposed paw.

There was a wet, crunching sound that those who heard it would remember for the

rest of their lives, much as they might try to forget it. All that could be seen of Bum-

frey’s paw, on the other hand, was something suddenly mangled and spraying bone-

puncture blood. The man who had bare-handedly wreaked this damage did not so much

as look at the now whimpering Fnarok; instead he looked coldly at the suddenly very

thoughtful-looking Nil.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we’ll take our friend away, now. Do you want to say anything about

it?’

2

A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

It was always a bad idea, Benny had learnt, upon waking, to simply roll over and go

back to sleep. One should at the very least attempt a brief systems check: where one

was, the general time, the state of bodily functions, the lack or otherwise of hands going

through the pockets. Large men wearing uniforms and kicking one with jackboots was

generally a bad sign, as were slavering monsters with eyes like burning coals and

hydraulically extensible teeth.

On the other hand, if everything seemed more or less all right, then one could drop off

back to sleep again, secure in the knowledge that anything else requiring damage-con-

tainment was not that immediate and could probably wait.

In an event-filled life – two lives if one counted a brief period of being technically, for

a variety of reasons, dead – Benny had had cause to be thankful for this procedure. It

had at various times saved her neck, legs, wallet, sanity and a small fortune in embar-

rassing laundry bills. She had learnt to her cost, too many times, to be extremely wary of

the times when one is unable, unwilling or simply forgets – because these are the times

that lurk in the darker corners of the twisting line of one’s life, waiting to stick out a

foot, trip one up and send one face first on to the electrified rail. So, as Benny found her-

self surfacing from the unconscious to the alert, she forced herself to run through the

list:

1 Lack of nausea and the sickly, hot internal throbbing of the head that feels as if

whatever one has drunk has somehow got directly into the veins, and is still fer-

menting in them if not festering. Good.

2 Lack of icy chill permeating the neck and shoulders, that turns the ice into shards

jammed into one’s living brain the first move one makes. That was all to the better.

3 Undressed, intact and lying in warm, clean sheets. That was bloody marvellous.

4 Lack of any sense of someone nice in bed as well. Oh well, can’t win ’em all.

Benny opened her eyes and was dazzled by bright morning sunlight, slanting through

13

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 14

tall bay windows. It was coming from the wrong direction, and this momentarily disori-

entated her before she realized that the whole idea of a ‘wrong’ direction is subjective;

she was simply nowhere near the university, where she had subconsciously expected to

be. She hadn’t subconsciously expected to be in her own bed, because her legs weren’t

hanging off the edge.

She sat up in bed and squinted through the harsh light, taking in her surroundings.

The room was bigger than a power-wallgame court, and barely furnished with that

Spartan, dimensionally perfect elegance that comes from paying an architect a hopper

full of money and shooting an interior decorator on sight. The walls were a faint, yel-

lowish beige, the pristine carpet something that might or might not be grey – it was one

of those strange pastel colours so unobtrusive that you have to stare until your eyes

bleed to work out what it is. A number of abstract prints were affixed to the walls, more

to break up their planes than for any actual content. The bed itself was simply a block of

some polyfoam substance – but by the way it supported her body Benny knew that it had

been engineered upon the microscopic level. The cumulative effect was no doubt

intended to be nondescript and soothing.

Benny – whose room in the St Oscar’s halls of residence was packed with so many

tottering heaps of data wafers, holoslugs, bound books, boxes of half-eaten kimu takeout,

woofi-bird bones, toiletries, underwear, knick-knacks, gew-gaws, how’s-your-fathers,

half-empty cups of cinnamon and caffeine beverage, completely empty bottles, tins and

flasks of wine, beer and spirits, unmarked tutorial work, crumpled first pages of the sup-

posedly next book, an antique typewriter, several antique felt-tipped pens, the cat-litter

tray from hell and the various other odds and ends of a hectic life that resulted in a living

space you couldn’t describe topographically in a year – found these new surroundings

alien and bland. The room at St Oscar’s, it might also be noted, was just about big

enough for a quiet game of dominoes, provided nobody moved their elbows much.

There were no blinds or drapes – and this was slightly odd. Even in this day and age,

when windows could simply and automatically be polarized at night, the use of drapes

as something to pull across and shut out the night fulfilled a psychological human need.

One of the windows was slightly ajar, and a warm breeze wafted in. Benny fancied she

could smell the sea. So. The gravity felt OK, and the light and air hadn’t immediately

felt wrong, so she still must be on Dellah, only on the other side.

Beside the bed was a table – little more than a cube. On it someone had placed a set of

neatly laundered clothes – her own – and a tray containing a steaming mug of what, by

the smell of it, was the precise brand of cinnamon that she commonly left littered, half

drunk, around her own room. It was a cheap brand that Benny got for the incredibly

shonky promotional offers, based around its cartoon-animation advertising, and utterly

out of place in a place like this. Somebody had evidently done their homework.

Benny climbed off the bed, absently scratching the side of her neck, then the inside of

her arm with her free hand.

Then she stopped cold.

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 15

Medical science had long since progressed past the point of such crude things as

injecting people with hollowed-out needles, and such things were now used only by drug

fetishists as a part of the kick. DMSO-laced patches were able to permeate living tissue

almost instantaneously, piggybacked with any medication one needed or desired. The

process was supposedly undetectable, but people detected it in the subliminal sense: it

had a distinctive feel to it. Benny concentrated her body sense, and was positive she

could feel a vestigial cold-burning sensation on her neck and arm, as though these small

areas had been swabbed with chilli peppers crushed in surgical alcohol.

‘Oh damn,’ she breathed. Half-buried memories of the night before burst to the sur-

face and her vague notions and doubts suddenly crystallized. She had been abducted –

and the fact that she was still alive and unharmed wasn’t exactly a reassuring sign. There

were a lot of things that a certain kind of mind can do with someone initially alive and

unharmed.

She hauled on her underwear and shirt, scooped up the rest of her clothes and headed

for the window rather than the door. The window had been left open and so was prob-

ably a trap – but then again doors to rooms commonly led deeper into houses. Death or

the Lady could lurk behind either, neither or both. The important thing was to make the

decision and just go for it, rely on speed and determination to carry you through

whatever was waiting.

She went through the window with barely a pause to check that she wasn’t something

like twenty storeys up, and found herself on a wide expanse of manicured lawn – big

enough to show the undulations of the land. Patches of clover blended through the turf,

far too well behaved to be anything other than cultivated. In the middle distance she saw

trees, poplars from the look at them, and she headed for them. She didn’t look back the

way she’d come – the most important thing at this point was to get away. Time enough

later to sit down and work out the subtleties. She headed across the lawn at a run.

Dark shapes were barrelling towards her, off to one side. She swung her head around

in time to see two quadrapedal forms, jaws hanging open to prolapse trifurcated,

squirming pink tentacles that drooled some clear and viscous fluid, and then they were

upon her.

At times like this the life is commonly reckoned to flash before the eyes. Benny rather

hoped that something like it would – almost anything would have been preferable to the

sight of the things slobbering over her.

Off to one side she heard an angry voice shouting, ‘Heel!’ The weight of the creatures

was suddenly gone from her.

Benny sat up and regarded the new arrival as he clipped leads to the excitedly

bounding dogs, then passed them to the large grey-suited man who was accompanying

him and was obviously a part of his entourage. The new arrival himself was a man of

medium build and middle years, his black hair thinning and slicked back from a widow’s

peak. He wore a black suit and Paisley waistcoat reminiscent of a Victorian gentleman’s,

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 16

although such a gentleman might have balked at the addition of wraparound mirrored

sunglasses. He carried a walnut-stocked, ornately chased double-barrelled shotgun in the

crook of one arm – Benny was only slightly reassured by the fact that it was broken and

unloaded. There was something familiar about his face, but try as she might she could

not pin it down.

‘I do beg you pardon,’ the man said. ‘We so rarely receive visitors that the dogs get a

little overexcited when we do. They’re only being friendly. Allow me to assist you.’

Much against her better judgment, Benny wiped the drool off her face and took the

man’s proffered hand. ‘Interesting breed,’ she remarked, observing the animals warily as

they strained towards her on their leashes.

‘Just a small side-product of our Advanced Genetics division in the Catan Nebula,’

said the man conversationally. ‘Half bull-mastiff, half Chihuahua and half Sesquiped-

alian squid.’

Benny frowned. ‘That makes one and a half.’

‘I did say Advanced Genetics division.’

‘Fine.’ Benny regarded the man levelly. ‘And you are . . . ?’

‘Ah yes,’ the man said. ‘I apologize. Remiss of me – we rather thought it would be a

while before you woke, and we weren’t quite prepared for you.’

Marvellous, thought Benny. Softening-up process seen to, next stop the choke pears,

thumbscrews, mind probe or the latest fashionable equivalent.

Something of this must have shown in her face. ‘Please don’t worry,’ said the man.

‘Any harm that might come to you in this instance will certainly not come from me.’ He

gave a courtly little half-bow. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. Marcus Krytell at your

service.’

Recollection finally dawned. Benny had seen the face a hundred times before, but

only on the news. Krytell was, quite simply, one of the richest men in the sector – an

industrialist with an installation on every planet with less than perfect environmental

pollution laws, another one on any world where officialdom could be bribed, and a

slightly cleaner one everywhere else. He had come to Dellah as part of the consortium

that had funded the university, had by all accounts liked the atmosphere, and had set up

home here. Quite what he was doing abducting and drugging an inoffensive archaeology

professor, who had never harmed anyone – unless you counted certain individuals,

groups and on occasion entire species who were thoroughly bad hats and therefore

deserved what was coming to them in any case – Benny could not begin to guess for the

life of her.

‘I must also apologize for the manner in which you were brought here,’ he continued.

‘Security, you see, was of the essence. It was imperative that absolutely nobody learn of

your destination and our current problem, not even yourself.’

Benny rubbed at the cold patch on her arm again. ‘So what did you load me with?’

Krytell shrugged. ‘A simple neurasthenic. We, ah, also took the liberty of introducing

certain antitoxins to deal with ethanolic and secondary alcoholic poisoning. I’m afraid

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 17

we happened upon you not in the best of states. Your reputation has preceded you, some-

what.’ Krytell looked at her closely as if verifying that said reputation was indeed true.

‘We know that, despite all appearances to the contrary, you have a knack for thinking on

your feet, for finding your way out of tight corners, and we needed you in tiptop condi-

tion for when we offered you a small commission.’

That explained the curious lack of a hangover. ‘I suppose I should thank you,’ Benny

said sourly. ‘Thing is, I’m not going to.’ She rounded upon the industrialist angrily. ‘Just

what the hell do you think you’re up to? You kidnap me and pump me full of zombie

juice, ship me halfway across the world and now you’re coming it with the genial old

squire on the family estates as if that’s suddenly going to cheer me up! Well let me tell

you, Mr Krytell, I don’t care what you wanted me for. You can tell your little friends to

take me back where they found me, write me a polite note on headed paper and then you

can fold it up and stick it so far up your –’

This deplorable lapse into an unrefined and decidedly unladylike manner was cur-

tailed as Benny realized that she had grabbed hold of a startled Krytell by the front of his

waistcoat and was shaking him – and also by the change in the dogs held by the industri-

alist’s grey-suited employee. Before, they had been straining on the leash in the hope of

playing happy games with someone. Now, from their snarls, it seemed that while playing

games was still an option, it would probably involve throwing and fetching something

other than small toy balls. The most popular game at this point would most probably be

playing dead.

Off in the distance, Benny also saw, several other grey-suited men had stopped wan-

dering unobtrusively and apparently aimlessly, and were heading in her and Krytell’s

direction.

‘The commission we have in mind,’ said Krytell, apparently unperturbed, ‘requires a

degree of professional knowledge – but it also requires certain, ah, unconventional

skills. Skills that we are reliably informed you have. The remuneration will be commen-

surate to the effort involved, be in no doubt about that.’

Benny glanced at the dogs and the approaching men, weighed up her chances, and let

go of Krytell. ‘OK,’ she sighed. ‘OK. Tell me what you want me to do.’

The entrance hall was like a dream of Austen without the regulated hatred: all sweeping

staircases and columnar marble. What appeared to be genuinely ancient oil-and-egg-yolk

portraits in ornate gilt frames lined the walls – though from the lack of patina and crazy-

paving cracking of the glazing they could only be reproductions. They showed a variety

of figures, male and female, in a variety of historical costumes, each bearing something

of the features of Krytell.

‘My family has a long history,’ he told Benny by way of explanation. ‘Much of it

ignoble, much of it stalked by death.’

‘What, you mean, like, everyone from more than a hundred years ago is dead?’ said

Benny, who was still not feeling inclined to be charitable. ‘Oh dear me. How terribly

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 18

tragic and horrible.’

‘I was referring to violent death,’ said Krytell with a trace of irritation. ‘Premeditated,

abnormal or inexplicable death.’ He paused to indicate a portrait of a pale young lady in

a Regency dress. ‘Lady Diane de la Indigo, an ancestor on the distaff side. She had the

great misfortune to employ a certain Mr Wonko, a children’s entertainer, on the occasion

of her youngest son’s birthday. Unbeknownst to anybody at the time, Mr Wonko was in

fact the man who would become known as the Maniacal Magic-utilizing Murderer of

Tunbridge Wells, and Lady Diane was found strangled by a balloon animal. A giraffe, I

seem to recall from my studies, or possibly an upside-down squirrel.’

‘Nasty,’ said Benny.

Krytell paused at another painting, this one showing a gangly man in khaki forage

gear and a pith helmet, amid a little still life of display cases filled with pinned insects,

butterfly nets and killing jars. ‘Again on the distaff side, Dennis Snopes-McLaughlin

FRS, an entomologist of some note. He was murdered by a rival Fellow of the Royal

Society, who released into his lodgings a rare Mesopotamian blonki-kugu spider, which

in captivity can be reared to the size of a large Alsatian dog. I understand that he was

still gamely trying to fit it in the ether bottle when it bit his head off . . .’

Benny looked at the picture and privately decided that the Krytell family history must

have become a little garbled, if not entirely made up to start with. The man shown here

obviously hailed from the eighteenth century, and it would be a couple of hundred years

and a healthy dose of environmental irradiation before Earth spiders grew bigger than

the size of a large rat.

‘My grandfather was locked in a storage freezer; my own father was framed and sub-

sequently executed for treason during the war; and my uncle Barnabas disappeared

under mysterious circumstances when his portable outside lavatory exploded whilst on a

camping holiday.’ Krytell gestured to take in the entire hall. ‘Over the course of years

my family has been pushed down flights of spiral stairs, mauled by trained performing

bears, chained up in dungeons and left to moulder, and thrown out of sleighs to be eaten

by wolves. They’ve choked on peach pits, died of artificially induced bloody fluxes and

fallen into vats of medicinal leeches. They’ve been smothered by pillows and eider-

downs, hearth rugs, and in one case by an over friendly female mud wrestler. They’ve

met their ends at the hands of thieves, thugs and jackboxers. They’ve been drowned in

lakes and rivers, bathtubs and butts of malmsey. They’ve eaten ground glass, tin tacks,

Ebola-laden meat, live eels and strychnine. They’ve been run through by awls, sunk in

quicksand, succumbed to opiate overdoses, flattened by steam trains, entombed in ice,

poisoned by Kendo dragon bites and eaten alive by rats – and all, I might add, at the

malicious instigation of another hand.’ Krytell smiled grimly. ‘It can only be coincidence

– I’m certainly not paranoid enough to believe in some impossibly vast conspiracy

extending over centuries and even millennia. It is simply that my family seems to attract

murders, and I myself am last in the line.’

Benny looked at him dubiously. ‘If I were you, I don’t think I’d get out of bed in the

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 19

morning.’

‘Ah, but I have protection. The house and grounds in which you stand are packed to

physical capacity with detection and security equipment, the hardware continually

updated, the software updated on a microsecond-to-microsecond basis. I have entire

research divisions, on several planets, devoted to that very purpose alone – you might

even say that the acquisition of such a system was my impetus for acquiring what might

be seen by others as quite unseemly wealth.’

Krytell reached a hand towards her. Benny had the idea that he was going to plant a

finger on her, but then he evidently decided against it. ‘The house is scanned minutely,

every single area. If you yourself were carrying anything that might be used as an

offensive weapon – so much as a spoon in your pocket from breakfast – the fact would

be noted, the factors would be integrated into an assessment of risk, I would be notified

and the requisite action taken. This is quite simply the safest, most secure place I could

ever possibly be.’ Krytell frowned. ‘All of which makes recent events somewhat more

disturbing.’

Up until this point, the industrialist had been smooth and composed. Now it was as if

a small crack had appeared in the polish, to show a hint of genuine fear beneath. He led

Benny from the hall and through a heavy door into a narrow chamber that appeared to

run the entire length of the house. Display cases and installations lined one wall.

‘This is possibly the most secure room in the house,’ he said, leading her through the

chamber. ‘This is where I keep mementos and curios from my own and family’s history.

The diamond pendant that Viscount Chumley-Krytell gave as an engagement present to

the Lady Warwick; the Matebelian bungo beads that Horace Krytell unearthed, unsur-

prisingly enough, on his Matebelia expedition; the first million I ever made –’ he pointed

to a slightly worn and chewed credit chip ‘– which my father gave me for being a big

boy and using the water closet . . .’

‘So, you’ve always been a pauper like this, then,’ said Benny. ‘Traipsing off to private

school with barely three dozen shoes to keep your feet warm?’

Krytell raised an eyebrow. ‘Irony, Ms Summerfield?’

‘That was sarcasm, actually.’

‘That credit chip is worth exactly one million ersatz shillings from the war,’ said

Krytell. ‘That was worth approximately ten shillings even forty years ago, and the

medium itself is worthless. It is only in the last few generations that the Krytells have

been particularly wealthy per se. Before that we came from all walks of life. My grand-

father built a modest fortune before he died, as did my father, on which I have, as I say,

built. Many of what you might call the expensive items here are results of my researches

into the family history, tracked down at considerable personal expense.’

‘So you just leave ’em lying around? Clever move . . .’ Benny’s mind caught up with

her mouth as she recalled what they had been talking about for the last half-hour. ‘Right.

Sorry.’ She sighed. ‘So what was it you wanted to show me? Or rather – because I really

am not as stupid as all that – just what is the lack of something you want to show me?’

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 20

‘I can see that what certain people have told me about you is not entirely unfounded,’

said Krytell.

Benny raised an eyebrow. ‘Was that sarcasm?’

‘That was irony.’ Krytell paused before continuing. ‘Two nights ago, the house was

broken into. The criminal concerned was remarkably proficient, but nowhere near profi-

cient enough to fool my security. He was pinpointed from the moment he approached

the island, tracked in minute detail through the grounds and the house, then promptly

dealt with. I shall spare you the grisly details, but rest assured it was by way of

extremely thorough means.’

Benny nodded. ‘So?’

‘So when my staff arrived on the scene they found the remains of the suit and equip-

ment the criminal used, but no, ah . . . human or comparable debris whatsoever. Instead

they found this.’ Krytell slipped a hand into the pocket of his waistcoat and handed her a

folded piece of paper.

Benny unfolded it and read it. ‘It says “Nice Try”,’ she said.

‘Quite. It was pinned to the hole in the suit where the head should have been.’

Krytell stopped before a display case, obscuring it with his body. Benny didn’t try to

crane around him to look in. She’d probably get a look soon enough.

‘I use this room to store such items that should never fall into the wrong hands,’

Krytell said. ‘Items the loss of which would be a personal disaster – and items where the

disaster might be, shall we say, more general. It just so happens that, as of two nights

ago, I was in possession of an interlocking set of Olabrian joy-luck crystals . . .’

‘What?’ Benny stared at the man. In the xenoarcheaological world this was on a par

with someone casually mentioning that they’d found the skull of Jesus Christ, sawn the

top off and had casually been using it as an ashtray for the last five years. The beings of

the planet Olabria were renowned throughout the sector for their surpassing peace and

tranquillity, which came from contemplation of complex, interlocking, lattice-globes of

quasi-living crystal hewn from the very heart of the planet’s satellite.

These moonstones were of such a profound importance to the people of Olabria, and

guarded so carefully, that words like ‘important’ and ‘careful’ were hardly sufficient – an

Olabrian had been known to instantly become a barely restrainable, ravening maniac if

some unwary, hitherto esteemed and honoured visitor to their world so much as looked

at a joy-luck crystal in a funny way. There were records of a massive, centuries-long war

some three millennia before, when a race called the Thraal had made contact with this

peaceful world, and had unwittingly crushed a small garden of the crystals with their

ship. At least, there were records on Olabria. The Thraal, and their planet, had long since

been obliterated. To this day, purely as a way of preserving their surpassing peace and

tranquillity, Olabria had sunk its resources almost completely into a fleet of massive

dreadnought warships, each one capable of taking out a sun in passing, and kept them

ever ready in the event that someone or something might attempt to steal or damage one

of their living crystal balls.

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

Page 21

‘So how did you get hold of one of them, then?’ she said angrily. She half expected an

Olabrian destroyer to come whistling down and blow them to smithereens with their

humungous plasma cannon even as they spoke.

Krytell shrugged. ‘That is neither here nor there. The point is that I was in the midst

of delicate negotiations to ensure its safe return to the Olabrian government. Said negoti-

ations have, not unnaturally, been put in extreme jeopardy by the individual who stole

it.’

Krytell finally moved aside to let Benny see the interior of the display case. Nestling

on a bed of crushed black velvet, in the indentation presumably once made by the joy-

luck crystal, lay a rather tacky looking, sequined collar such as might be bought, by

someone with little money and less taste, for a cat.

Benny looked from it to Krytell. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

Krytell nodded. ‘I think I am. The criminal popularly known as the Cat’s Paw has the

crystal, and I need your help in getting it back.’

3

A SETTING IS ESSAY’D,

A VILLAIN COMPREHENDED

The Mons Venturi dock was in fact more of a wheel, approximately five hundred metres

in diameter and spinning constantly to provide a cheap simulation of gravity at the rim.

It hung geostationary, directly over the primary Dellah spaceport, connected to it by an

extruded monomer skyhook line, up and down which crawled pressurized capsules fer-

rying passengers, cargo and personnel en route to the great ships that stayed in orbit,

never entering the atmosphere.

This arrangement, however, was strictly for the hoi polloi. If one were rich enough,

one could use the docking facilities at the hub of the Mons Venturi wheel for private

shuttle craft. Benny hauled herself through the airlock of one such of these, reflecting

that all of this seemed to be a needlessly expensive method of transferring her back to

the point from which she’d started, albeit several thousands of kilometres above it.

This had not been the only expensive aspect of the affair. The twin set she now wore

was of raw, unbleached silk, imported at great cost from the farms of Sontan Beta. The

string of pearls around her neck had been individually gathered, at great loss of life, by

the child pearl-divers of Barsoomia IV – and if she’d known that fact she would not be

wearing them, and would have been incredibly vocal about precisely why. The brooch

on her lapel was a genuine Earth antique, dating from the twentieth century and in mint

condition, the legend ‘Watch out, there’s a Humphrey about!’ still perfectly legible.

Her entire wardrobe – and there were upwards of four hundred items waiting on the

shuttle in steamer trunks – was by Frocontiér, her make-up by la Sallé, her hair coifed by

an assistant of the great Monsieur Boogie himself, flown especially in to the Krytell

estates. Her hands and feet had been manicured and pedicured to within a centimetre of

their lives and she looked like a million shillings – which, given that the whole ensemble

had cost rather more than twice that, meant that somebody, somewhere was getting the

better of the deal.

Additionally, she had a manservant. That was going to take a bit of getting used to.

His name was Krugor. There was something vaguely familiar about him; Benny was

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3 A SETTING IS ESSAY’D, A VILLAIN COMPREHENDED

Page 23

positive that she had seen him somewhere before, in a different context, but she could

not quite pin it down.

Now Krugor helped her through the inner door of the airlock. Benny, who had spent

more time in space than a Molopian slard had enveloped and slathered pitifully whim-

pering human victims with gastro-intestinal juices, felt that she was probably surer on

her, as it were, feet in freefall than the servant, but she didn’t point this out. She had,

after all, her role to play in this charade.

‘Have the luggage transferred to the ship,’ she told Krugor imperiously, stressing the

innate cultured and slightly plummy tones she ordinarily went out of her way to sup-

press. ‘I shall avail myself of the facilities and summon you when I wish to board

myself.’

The manservant bowed smoothly and reached a hand to counter the displacement of

inertia this caused, giving him something of the image of a courtier in the France of

Louis XIV. He withdrew back into the shuttle, leaving Benny to make her way through

the outer lock, and into the station, on her own.

She emerged in a largish chamber in the shape of a laterally bisected doughnut. Her

feet (pointed in the right direction, as instructed by a decal on the airlock door) fell a

couple of centimetres to make contact with a pristine carpet floor – this was the first-

class lounge, in the hub of Mons Venturi, and anyone arriving here could afford the levy

for expensive artificial gravity. This was also the domain of a certain sort of traveller –

those who could afford not to rub shoulders, noses or anything else with mere transients,

and could therefore remain free of most of the vector-driven bugs that transients were

known to carry around. There were no disease scans here – for the simple reason that

those here had their health looked after, by private medics, on a level that no public

facility could ever hope to match.

Likewise, there was no customs inspection. Those who entered through the VIP locks,

she suspected, already had more money than could be earnt from any kind of contra-

band. Most of them probably had people who took it through for them, elsewhere, in

bulk, and this was probably how they had made the money in the first place. The lounge

was appointed with amenities that, planetside, would have suited a smallish bed-and-

breakfast hotel – but which in space, where the cost/resources ratio was greater by a

factor of ten or more, were the equivalent of three private Taj Mahals. All of this was

lost, however, in the effect of the chamber’s curving roof.

It was not a window on to space. Anything that could let light in, even pure lead

crystal, would have let in enough electromagnetics to cause irreparable gene damage –

and in any case, if the roof had been clear, if one could have seen past the struts and

titanium plate of the station, one would have seen nothing of interest. The lounge faced

away from Dellah, and while the ships moored around the station were close in astro-

nomical terms, they were too far away for the eye to see. The roof in fact comprised a

holographic display, the images of the ships picked up by cameras floating near them

and factored into a background of a star-spangled sky and a planet. The end result was

3 A SETTING IS ESSAY’D, A VILLAIN COMPREHENDED

Page 24

almost precisely what the ignorant might think they’d see if they looked out of the

window of a space station.

Looking up through this ersatz canopy, Benny recognized a pair of militia corvettes

with their raked-back keels and distinctive, bulbous pulse-engine arrays. She saw a bulk

freighter with its tiny manoeuvring pack towing the dirigible-bunch cluster of its cargo

pods. Shuttles crawled the physically impossibly small space between these images of

ships, and suited figures crawled over their skins running maintenance. Benny knew the

entire vista to be false, but in the same way as the map of an urban travel system needs

to show only the connections to be true in some fundamental sense, the view was per-

fectly natural. She was out in space again and it was just the way she’d left – nothing out

of the ordinary whatsoever.

Then she turned her head and saw, for the first time, the Titanian Queen.

After viewing the scene of the crime, Benny had been taken by Krytell to a gazebo on

the house’s grounds for tea and sandwiches. It seemed that Krytell was going to assume

his posture as a Victorian gentleman to the very end.

‘I cannot imagine how the criminal managed to insinuate himself past my defences,’

he said, pouring a chemically perfect Earl Grey from a silver teapot into Spode cups. ‘I

can only imagine that he has access to technologies that are a quantum leap from my

own – and that worries me. I must have them. I must know how it was done.’

‘Well if you’re expecting me to make it with the dusting for fingerprints and the mag-

nifying glass,’ Benny told him, nibbling on a sandwich, ‘then sorry, no can do. Archae-

ology might share certain common attributes with forensics, but there’s no way I could

even start to be a forensic scientist –’ She looked at her sandwich. ‘What is this, by the

way?’

‘Smoked salmon, cream cheese and cucumber,’ Krytell said. ‘The salmon and cheese

are largely synthetic, of course – a micromesh of extruded, woven proteins, I gather –

but the cucumber comes from genuine sea cucumbers, from my own personal gene-

storage banks.’

Benny put the sandwich back on the plate and covered it with a napkin.

‘I already have forensic experts,’ Krytell continued, ‘and they’ve examined the scene

and found nothing – but that is neither here nor there. The morning after the burglary, a

small package arrived through my door, which was slightly odd since these islands have

no land-mail service, and my door does not possess a letterbox.’ He lifted a small silver

cover, which Benny had assumed to conceal tea cakes, to reveal a small holocube, which

he touched with his finger.

A three-dimensional silhouette of a figure appeared on the table: a ten-centimetre-tall

area of apparently solid black. It stood there, hands on hips, head cocked to one side as if

delivering a scolding.

‘Good morning, Mr Krytell,’ it said. The voice was synthesized and static-laden, pro-

cessed to confound recognition or analysis. ‘By now you’ll have instigated a planetary,

3 A SETTING IS ESSAY’D, A VILLAIN COMPREHENDED

Page 25

even sector-wide search for your misplaced merchandise. You won’t have any luck. I

will now detail your only hope of getting said misplaced merchandise back.’ The figure

adopted a slightly more confidential posture. ‘Now, before we go any further, let me tell

you that I have access to certain details about yourself – and should anything happen to

me, at any time during the process I’m going to detail, a large number of news services

and a slightly smaller number of uncorrupted officers of the law are going to get the lot.

I’m thinking, for example, of incidents including a young holo-actress by the name of

Talulah Wampeter, a greased pig and a –’

Without appearing to hurry in any way at all, Krytell stuck a finger through the figure

and silenced the cube. ‘I have no idea why the criminal added that. Even if it were true,

my position in the scheme of things is not dependent upon public perceptions, and could

not be harmed by such revelations in the slightest. I think he was indulging in some

private joke.’ Krytell shrugged. ‘As I was saying, forensic investigation at this point

would be purely academic. We know who took the crystal, and he has told us what we

must do to get it back. Secrecy is of the essence: we must have an operative capable of

handling him- or herself, who cannot be traced back to us, and who is familiar enough

with alien cultures and their artefacts to handle the joy-luck crystal with the proper care.’

‘So what you’re saying is,’ said Benny, ‘that you ran a whole bunch of transputer pro-

files, and you came up with me.’

Krytell shrugged. ‘In actual fact there were seventeen other people in the immediate

sector better qualified than you, but their skills were in such demand that they were

unavailable. I could have used my influence to rectify that – but that would have been

noticed, and that is precisely what we wish to avoid. You were merely the best we could

get at short notice.’

Now Benny looked up, through the fake glass of the Mons Venturi roof, at the ship that

would be her home for the coming month. Stuffed into her purse was a lithographic,

finely printed brochure concerning the various joys this month would hold, entitled

‘Welcome to the Cruise of your Lifetime’ – in elegant Avant Garde beneath a tastefully

restrained 3D still of the Titanian Queen in space, which Benny had assumed to be

almost entirely the product of a designer’s imagination and transputer enhancement.

Now, looking at a more reliably mapped simulacrum of the actual thing, she saw that in

this instance the brochure had been telling nothing but the truth.

Lack of air-resistance in space meant that a ship could be any shape the designers

liked, and this commonly led to constructions crawling with superstructures and ducts,

sensor packs and arrays that produced an effect that the ship in question had been not so

much designed as congealed. The Titanian Queen was something else entirely: built of

white ceramic and what appeared to be pure gold, with swept-back, utterly useless,

streamlined fins and funnels, it appeared as a kind of retrogressive cross between the

rocket ships then imagined in the pulp fiction of 1930s Earth, and a large Art Deco,

seagoing yacht.

3 A SETTING IS ESSAY’D, A VILLAIN COMPREHENDED

Page 26

The Titanian Queen was a cruise ship, a luxury liner, barely out of the yard-arrays and

about to embark upon her maiden voyage, a pleasure cruise through the marvels of the

Proximan Chain. Benny had vaguely heard about this, back at the university, as people

had discussed their coming vacations – but only in the sense of people saying, ‘You

know where I’d go if I won the Planetary Lottery three times on the trot? I’d go on the

maiden voyage of the Titanian Queen.’

The ship was going to be packed with the filthy rich – and Benny had an idea that

over the course of the cruise they were going to find themselves quite as filthy, but con-

siderably less rich. She thought that, because she knew for a fact that also aboard would

be the infamous and nefarious Cat’s Paw.

The deal, in general, was that a representative of Krytell should board the ship, leave

a payment of several million shillings in untraceable credit plaques at a prearranged

place and take delivery of the joy-luck crystal. Try as she might, Benny could not work

out why such an exchange couldn’t be conducted in an underground hov park, say, or

some discreet corner of woodland, which would have been just as easy to secure by

either side and a lot less trouble for all concerned. The only theory that carried any water

was that the Titanian Queen was where the Cat’s Paw was going to be at this time, and

he or she simply couldn’t be bothered to make any extra effort.

Then again, it might probably appeal to the Paw’s twisted sense of bravado. Benny

thought back over what she had read or heard of the criminal. He (or she) had appeared

comparatively recently, when he (or she) had burst into the news following the myster-

ious disappearance of Jago Sok Dot Han, the hetman of a particularly nasty crime cartel

that stretched from Sol to the Horsehead Nebula and back. After a fruitless search by law

enforcement agencies and the criminals themselves, Jago had been found in his own

emptied-out vaults, tied up, naked except for a sequined cat’s collar and with the lead

clipped to it terminating somewhere highly personal and embarrassing for all concerned.

The Cat’s Paw had next struck at the Temple of the Ashwar Pogi Khan of Praxis,

where that religious leader of several planets was wont to parade in state, through the

open-air cloisters wearing a suit of naturally mined precious metals and jewels. Details

were sketchy, but at a crucial point the Praxis sun was in some manner locally eclipsed,

plunging the congregation into darkness for thirty seconds – and when the darkness

ended the Ashwar found his jewels and precious metals had been exchanged for sack-

cloth and ashes. He swore later that he had never felt a thing.

And then there had been the Empress Ragalongata of Glomi Prime, and her ruby as

big as her head. The First National Bank of Rensec V. The clockwork apiary of the

Sultan of Daraquoi . . .

Of the few things known about the Cat’s Paw, one was that he (or she) seemed to have

a penchant for jewellery of various sorts and had a liking for the flamboyant: the kind of

seemingly impossible crime that had one entertaining a sneaking admiration for the

criminal rather than the victim, who more often than not got precisely what they

deserved. It would be just like him (or her) to juggle one complicated and involved

3 A SETTING IS ESSAY’D, A VILLAIN COMPREHENDED

Page 27

crime off another – such as ransoming an Olabrian joy-luck crystal while simultaneously

skinning the passengers of an entire cruise liner. Benny, personally, couldn’t care less.

All the fabulous clothes, accessories and riches currently being stowed on board in her

name had been supplied by Krytell, as a part of her cover identity as a well-off passenger

on the cruise, to avoid attracting any undue attention. The stipend she had been paid

upon accepting the industrialist’s commission was currently repairing some of the

damage to her credit rating back on Dellah; everything else was an extra.

Another thing known about the Cat’s Paw was that, so far as could be discerned with

any certainty, he (or she) had never killed anybody. The final thing was on a lower order

of certainty entirely, being purely a matter of conjecture, and it was that the Cat’s Paw

was a master of disguise. Over the course of his (or her) endeavours, victims and wit-

nesses alike had formed the impression that they might have seen him (or her) at some

point, but the reports would never tally. One might think they’d seen a wizened old man,

another a servant whom they only later realized they’d never employed, another a

middle-aged woman who had brushed by them on the street. The Cat’s Paw, it seemed,

had been or could have been anybody – hence the continual dilemma in the mind even

as to his (or her) precise sex . . .

Pressurized space being at a premium on orbiting stations, the first-class lounge was

tightly packed. Lost in thought, Benny had been wandering through the richly clad occu-

pants without really seeing them. She only came to her complete senses when she

stumbled into a bulky figure, stuck out a stiletto-shoed foot to regain her balance and

planted it squarely into the foot of the person she had stumbled into.

She looked up at a vast expanse of chest.

She looked up further to see the face of a thing with boarlike tusks and livid red eyes.

‘Thou roguish, vexing pignut!’ it bellowed, looming over her in apoplectic rage.

4

A POSITIVE PLETHORA OF

INVESTIGATORS

‘Thou villainous idle-headed canker-blossom,’ snarled the creature, its eyes pulsing with

its ire.

‘Sorry,’ said Benny, hurriedly. ‘My fault entirely. I should have looked where I was

going.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ rumbled the creature. ‘Thou tottering paunchy skainsmate.’

He was wearing a white, well-cut uniform of a leather something like calfskin,

bedecked with splendid gold braid. Benny recognized him as a Czhan, from the

Dagellan cluster. Once, it had possessed a profoundly militaristic culture, but the milit-

arism of Czhanos was now vestigial, of no more importance than tonsils or an appendix

had been to humans several millennia ago. Now it merely added a vague flavour to its

culture. A hint of this vestigiality made itself evident in the language of the Czhans: in

the same way as the Japanese idiom transforms pride into abasement and thanks into

resentment, the Czhan speech patterns introduced archaic insult into everyday speech.

‘No harm done, thou ill-bred, spur-galled flax-wench,’ he continued amiably. ‘This

ruttish, folly-fallen apple-john of a place is rather close.’ He bowed to a slight but cour-

teous increment. ‘Khaarli of the Seventh dhai at your service.’

‘What, Khaarli Czhan?’ said Benny, and instantly regretted it.

‘I am in fact a Prosecutor General of the Czhanos Militia, thou crook-pated bawdy

vassal,’ said the Czhan patiently.

‘I do apologize.’ Benny frowned. ‘You’re quite a way off your patch, I think.’

‘Currently on detachment.’ He leant towards her conspiratorially. ‘Just between thou

rank guts-griping dewberry and myself, we have reason to believe that the fiendish crim-

inal known as the Cat’s Paw is in the vicinity.’

‘What, really?’ said Benny.

‘And my Commander in Chief would like to have a small word concerning the disap-

pearance of certain items of historical weaponry from our homeworld’s museums.’

‘Just between you and me, eh?’ Benny said. ‘No question of you casually checking

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4 A POSITIVE PLETHORA OF INVESTIGATORS

Page 29

me over and feeling me out just in case it’s me, then?’

‘Perish the thought, thou bawdy hedge-born flap-dragon.’

‘Is this . . . chap bothering you?’ a voice said by Benny’s ear. The ‘chap’ was pro-

nounced in such tones as to give the impression that the speaker wanted to say a word

that public servants commonly made a little zipper gesture across their mouths rather

than say. Benny turned to see a wiry human dressed in an archaic-looking herringbone

suit. ‘I’ll have you know . . . sir,’ he said, striking a vaguely heroic pose and glaring up

at the Czhan, ‘that if you are of a mind to comport yourself with godless frightfulness

towards this fair young lady, then you will have to answer to Sandford Groke!’

The Czhan looked down at him impassively, then, very slowly took a wallet from his

uniform, opened it and revealed the identification within.

The man’s face fell. ‘I suppose that might put a different complexion on things.’

‘Tell you what,’ said Benny, companionably. ‘Why don’t you piss off out of it and let

me talk to my friend?’

The man’s Adam’s apple worked a bit as he tried to come up with some pertinent

riposte and failed. Then he turned his back on them and stalked off.

‘Who was that clown?’ Benny said, eyeing the retreating back and the squared-

shouldered posture reminiscent of what a friend of hers had once described as Man with

a Plum up his Bum.

‘That was the Viscount Sandford Groke, thou half-faced droning death-token.’ The

Czhan seemed embarrassed for Benny’s sake at the conduct of one of her species. ‘From

the colonies of the Catan Nebula – though there are rumours to suggest he came from

some farther, and far more strange field by far. He was connected with their security ser-

vices for a time, I believe, before being drummed out under dishonourable circum-

stances. I gather that he fancies himself something of a gentleman adventurer and

detective, thou pottle-deep, spleeny boar-pig.’

Benny nodded slowly. ‘Interesting . . .’

‘He’s also a pig-ignorant, xenophobic, bumptious little tit.’

Benny frowned. ‘That didn’t sound particularly archaic.’

‘Probably because I meant every word of it,’ said Khaarli the Czhan.

The lounge contained a small bar, and Benny decided that what she needed at this point

was a drink – purely, of course, to wash the taste of her encounter with the Viscount

Sandford Groke out of her mouth. As she made her way towards it she passed an enorm-

ously fat man in a dinner jacket, holding a plate of complicated and rather revolting

canapés in one hand, a glass of sparkling wine in the other, and holding forth to several

similarly attired gentlemen gathered around his bulk like satellites orbiting a bulbous

planet.

‘. . . and so it seemed that the murderer was, in fact, the younger, unmarried cousin,’

he was saying, ‘who surreptitiously substituted the Pingi dynasty snogging-vase in ques-

tion for one bearing traces of his own sputum – thus throwing my otherwise brilliant line

4 A POSITIVE PLETHORA OF INVESTIGATORS

Page 30

of reasoning off.’ He took a sip of sparkling wine. ‘Can’t think how that slipped by me.’

‘Pardon me,’ Benny said, attempting to insinuate herself between the fat man and the

bar.

‘But of course, Sogharin. Righi yak-yak proughi la!hahahgh.’

‘What?’ said Benny. She recognized the throat-strangling language, which was Strom-

abulan from the Arion Ring – she merely wondered why anyone would use it to ask her

whether she was a small peppermint footstool under a fish.

‘I was merely offering the proper recognition to a representative of Stromabula,’ said

the fat man, smugly. ‘I discern from certain signs that you are an inhabitant of that fair

state.’

This was, of course, so utterly wrong on so many basic counts that Benny was

momentarily stumped for a response. ‘What sort of signs?’ she settled for at last.

‘Certain signs,’ said the fat man, loftily. ‘And I, Emil Dupont, the greatest detective in

all of Nova Belgique, am never wrong.’

‘So if I’m supposed to be from Stromabula,’ said Benny, ‘what happened to the extra

mouth and three extra legs?’

‘No doubt you’ve had them filled in and surgically removed respectively,’ said Emil

Dupont, the greatest detective in all of Nova Belgique.

Benny looked into his face and saw nothing but determined, delusional certainty.

‘Whatever you say, matey,’ she said, and turned back to the bar.

Leaning against it, staring into a half-pint of flat beer and seeming lost in gloom was a

middle-aged, balding man in an uncomfortable, ill-fitting suit that was a crucial couple

of centimetres too short at the cuffs and turnups. He turned to glare at Benny with a kind

of baleful disdain – noted the cut of her clothes and snapped to attention with the kind of

pompous servility reserved by minor officialdom for the supposedly rich and well bred.

‘Help you at all, ma’am?’ he enquired.

‘Nah.’ Benny caught herself, and slipped back into the imperious manner of her cover

story – the Right Honourable Bernice Summersdale, a youngish widow making her way

through the gay, mad world of high society on the revenues from the estates of her late

husband. If only. ‘I’m perfectly fine, my good man. And you are . . . ?’

The man snapped off a brisk salute. ‘Detective Second-Class Gerald Interchange,

Dellah Constabulary.’ He glanced at the pearls around Benny’s neck. ‘Don’t take it

amiss, ma’am, but I’d be right careful if I was you.’ He put his hand to his mouth and

continued in a whisper that must have been heard on the other side of the room. ‘They

do say as how that master criminal the Cat’s Paw is around these parts.’

‘Oh really?’ Benny tried to work some horrified fascination or even enthusiasm into

her tone and failed utterly. ‘How frightfully thrilling.’

Detective Second-Class Interchange nodded. ‘Don’t you worry none, though, ma’am.

Dellah’s finest are here to protect you from anything untoward.’

Benny looked around the bar dubiously. ‘So where are they, precisely?’

A slightly hurt look crossed Interchange’s face. ‘The lads are on the ship in steerage.

4 A POSITIVE PLETHORA OF INVESTIGATORS

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We’ve used up half the planetary policing budget for this operation alone. It’ll be a

feather in our cap when we apprehend the bug– ah, miscreant, and no mistake.’ Inter-

change surveyed the lounge in what he probably thought was a covert manner. ‘Why, the

fiend might even be here as one of us, in disguise, even as we speak.’

‘Do you know,’ said Benny, flatly, ‘that was something that never occurred to me

even once. How clever you are, Mr Interchange.’

It was at that point that there was a commotion across the lounge, from the direction

of the airlocks. It seemed that members of the crowd – without descending to the ple-

beian level of actually being obvious about it – were desperately getting out of the way

of someone.

‘Aha!’ said the voice of Emil Dupont nearby. ‘I see by certain signs that we are to be

treated to a personal appearance by Mr Rori Uziguru, the sector-famous power-assisted

Sumo phlegm-wrestler!’

Across the room, the crowd parted to reveal a tiny, frail old woman walking on the

arm of another, younger but of indeterminate years. The older of the pair wore a strange

headpiece, something like a chromium beehive from which small radio-dish antennae

sprouted and revolved.

‘Ye gods!’ exclaimed Interchange in alarm. ‘It’s Agatha Magpole!’ His gaze took in

the headgear the old woman was wearing and he relaxed slightly. ‘It’s all right. She’s

wearing her special brainwave hat.’

Benny recalled the story of Agatha Magpole – it had made quite a sensation in the

news at the time. Ostensibly a retired milliner, travelling on her modest savings, Miss

Magpole had become renowned as the greatest amateur detective of her time. Every-

where she went – absolutely anywhere – people dropped down dead, horribly murdered,

and it seemed only fortuitous that Miss Magpole always seemed to be on hand to solve

it. It had been only comparatively recently that people had started to wonder about this.

The obvious thought, that the mad old bat was knocking the victims off herself, and

pinning it on the nearest available suspect, was clearly impossible – unless Miss Mag-

pole specifically hunted down blackmailers who deserved to die, swindlers who had

taken people for their life savings, or jealous husbands of wives who wanted to run off

with gigolos and so forth. In addition, it would have been physically impossible for her

to simulate the variety of murder methods practised upon the luckless victims and get

away with it.

The truth of the matter had come to light only after extensive psionic testing, which

revealed that Miss Magpole, unbeknown to her, possessed upsilonic mental powers to a

severe and tragically specific degree. Quite simply, Miss Magpole generated an electro-

gravitational cortical-suppressant field that precipitated the act of murder in a certain

sort of mind. Her investigative powers were genuine, but merely secondary to the pro-

cess – she had evolved them as a survival mechanism to deal with people dropping like

day-old mayflies all around her, murders for which, while being technically innocent,

she was ultimately responsible.

4 A POSITIVE PLETHORA OF INVESTIGATORS

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Benny studied the little old lady. ‘Now why,’ she said to herself in particular and the

world in general, ‘am I not surprised? I get the distinct impression that this Cat’s Paw’s

been selling bloody tickets.’ She turned back to the bar and motioned to the crisply uni-

formed steward. ‘Oi, chappie, big drinks should quite definitely occur now, I fancy.

None of that stuff with the fruit salads and the parasols. Ethanol and lots of it.’

There was a light cough beside her. She turned to see that Krugor the manservant had

arrived without her noticing. It was as if he had simply materialized from some extra

dimension of unobtrusiveness.

‘That’s a nasty cough you’ve got there,’ Benny told him companionably. ‘How about

a drink to make it better?’

‘I believe,’ said Krugor, ‘that it is time to board the ship. If you’ll come with me, I

shall accompany you across and show you to your cabin.’

‘Bags of time,’ Benny said, reaching for the glass of amber liquid that the steward had

laid before her on a little paper napkin. ‘They haven’t even put the boarding call out.’

Krugor laid a solicitous hand on her arm. ‘I really think you might prefer some time to

settle in,’ he said, mildly.

The pressure on Benny’s arm was of a sort that told her Krugor could apply a hell of a

lot more of it if he felt like it – and the last piece of her mental puzzle fell neatly into

place. Benny had been positive she’d seen the manservant before, and now she

remembered. He had been one of the men who had abducted her from the bar two days

before.

There was no way that Krytell was going to let her take possession of something as

valuable as the joy-luck crystal unsupervised. There was no way he was going to trust

her not to make a conspicuous fool, drunken or otherwise, of herself. Krytell was going

to make damned sure that someone kept an eye on her.

Benny realized, at that point, exactly who was in charge here, and it certainly wasn’t

her.

5

‘WELCOME TO THE CRUISE

OF THE MILLENNIUM . . .’

. . . said the brochure. ‘The Titanian Queen ,’ it continued, ‘is the latest, Finest example

of the Master Shipwrights of the New Ceres Yards, the Cutting-edge of the State-of-the-

art Art, with Seamlessly Integrated Stabilizing Systems, Pulse-pump manoeuvring

Engines, a unique Biogel-pack-control neurotechture and a revolutionary new Imple-

mentation of AI-grade Command Technology from the famed research and development

facilities of the Catan Nebula. Under the Expert Eye of Captain Fletcher Iolanthe

Crane, the Titanian Queen promises the most Emollient Experience of the Panoramas of

Space . . .’

‘Hello, Doctor Bob,’ said the ARVID. ‘I am ready and enthusiastic for my first lesson.

Life-support tanks? What life-support tanks? Oh. Whoops.’

‘All Surpassing Numerical Unity,’ said Number One through gritted gums (since

Poproganians, rather like hens, utilized little bits of gravel in the place of teeth). ‘It’s off

again.’

‘Just my little joke,’ said the ARVID. ‘Here, you’ll like this one. What’s brown and

sticky? Go on, you know you want to, missus. You’ll never guess.’

From his command chair towards the back of the bridge, Captain Crane rubbed at his

eyes and sighed. ‘Just tell it you give up, Number One. Otherwise we’ll be here all

night.’

‘Number One’ was actually the second helmsman aboard the Titanian Queen. He was

in fact one of the vaguely humanoid, motile units of a septilateral gestalt entity from

Poprog Nine – the other motile unit was currently serving in the crew’s galley, and the

five remaining were slumped immobile, except for their pulsing veins, in the crew’s

quarters. In addition, this set of seven were subliminally linked to every other set in the

known universe. The inhabitants of Poprog did not use names as such; this particular

individual was designated 1.417734924.011.796.2, retrocursively, or simply ‘Number

One’ for short.

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5 ‘WELCOME TO THE CRUISE OF THE MILLENNIUM . . .’

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Number One glared at the ARVID unit. ‘All right. This unit of the Surpassing Mind

gives up. What’s brown and sticky?’

Bioflourescents rippled on the ARVID’s surface. ‘A stick! Hah! A-hah!

Hahahahahahaha!’

Captain Crane put his head in his hands. If he had known that the job would involve

this, he’d have thought rather more than twice before taking it.

It had seemed like a massive, unexplainable stroke of luck at the time. For twenty

standard years Crane had worked for United Spaceways, working his way up through

the ranks until he had become the captain of a garbage scow on the Dranon Nebula run.

It was bad, but at least it was a commission – and it was the best one could probably

hope for without having relatives in military command or on the corporate board, or

being rich enough to buy your own ship in the first place.

Then had come the summons to Spaceways Central on Parsidium. The control rep had

informed him that his contract had been bought out by one of the Headhunters, who

were going to install him as the captain of the brand new Titanian Queen. When Crane

had, not unnaturally, asked why, the rep had mumbled something vague about person-

ality profiles and assessment programmes which had nebulously but definitively come

up with Crane for the job. Crane had a better-than-average grip on reality and his own

capabilities, knew within himself that he could do it – but how the hell could anyone

possibly know that from a few years’ undistinguished service on what was basically a

tug towing a collection of zeppelins filled with crap? And come to think of it, when had

the intercorps ever cared about the capabilities and potential of the individual?

None of which, of course, mattered a tuppenny toss. The chance had miraculously

come up, and Crane had grabbed it with both fists.

Now, he was starting to regret it.

Crane glanced around at the command crew on the bridge. They were good enough

people, he supposed – anyone with a criminal record or who failed a substance-abuse

test would have set alarms blaring from here to New Ceres – but they did seem young

and dreadfully inexperienced. The Spaceways Central profiling was supposed to ensure

that every crew they ran was the perfect mix-and-match for their particular job, but

Crane wondered if some glitch had not found its way into the system in this case.

Most of the money on the Titanian Queen had been spent on the quarters of the pas-

sengers – or rather, as the Central Spaceways rep on Parsidium had tried repeatedly to

drum into Crane, on the ‘guests’. The crew’s quarters were drab and functional, in the

same way as old, broken, second-hand furniture taken off a skip is functional. Elderly

paint flaked off the walls to reveal rust and resin patches; the ancient plumbing continu-

ally leaked and had to be periodically wound with gaffer tape. The bridge itself, though,

was a different matter entirely: passengers would occasionally be shown here as a treat,

and so the designers had gone to fairly elaborate lengths. Banks of lights blinked on and

off to a strobing frequency that caused incipient migraine, and so were switched off

when there was nobody about but the crew. Screens burst from every available surface –

5 ‘WELCOME TO THE CRUISE OF THE MILLENNIUM . . .’

Page 35

ostensibly to show incomprehensible animated displays, not currently being used to

watch the MovieNet franchises, or to play patched-in brain-change games. The comms

station was a marvel of black, round-cornered, neotonic-looking sculpture, but in fact

contained nothing more than a small radio transceiver, which was really all that anybody

needed. Crane was perfectly aware that his position as captain was in fact titular more

than anything else – he was there to reassure the passengers that there was a man of sorts

behind the nonexistent helm, and a last-ditch fail-safe should some emergency occur that

might just conceivably require the presence of a man. The real control – of the engines,

of the navigation, of the communications and the internal environment – were in the

cybernetic remote-manipulators of ARVID.

The acronym stood for ARtificial Viral-based Intelligence Destabilization – a revolu-

tionary process for packing the functionality of artificial intelligence in a commercial

ship, which needed space to carry things, rather than a military command ship, which

could get by on a skeleton crew, the rest of it being almost entirely AI. The process was

based upon a specific function of an organic brain.

A brain is a system operating under entropy. Every neural and synaptic connection,

every item of information stored, destroys its coherent cell structure. One way to simu-

late the function of a brain was to take a cell structure and then systematically destroy it.

The main component of ARVID was a block of cellular biogel, hooked to the ganglia of

the ship’s systems, to which was introduced vector-programmed nanonetic spores which,

basically, munched their way through it in interesting patterns. The end result was a sim-

ulation of intelligent interaction and response, operating on the same, if far more com-

plicated, basis as a step system that puts up a little flag saying ‘Ouch!’ if you press a

button labelled ‘hurt’.

The styled outer casing and the function-free controls, Crane knew, were secondary.

The workhorse was the block of biogel, which had to be periodically replaced. The

attraction to the corporate mind, who didn’t have to fly in it, was that it was cheap and

disposable – but the thought of trusting an entire ship to something cheap and disposable

put several varieties of willy up Captain Fletcher Iolanthe Crane no end. This was,

however, only the other reason that he hated the ARVID with a loathing he had never in

his life experienced before.

The simple fact was that it was, interactively speaking, a complete and utter night-

mare. It was not a moron in the way of low-grade hardwired AI processors, who devoted

most of their processing power to a single task, with little left over for anything else, and

who might generally be likened to a human autistic savant. Nor was it like one of the

high-end AI units, based on holistic, hologrammatic principles, chock-full of serenity

and superior wisdom because that was what they were in solid form – and which of

course could be intensely irritating in its own way. No. The ARVID was of a different

stripe entirely. The ongoing destruction of its basic physical medium (and, quite possibly

the resulting sense of its own impending mortality) gave it an erratic, mercurial intelli-

gence, given to flights of fantasy, leaps of utter brilliance, sulking fits, half-baked

5 ‘WELCOME TO THE CRUISE OF THE MILLENNIUM . . .’

Page 36

attempts at sustainable competence and a penchant for annoying the shit out of anybody

who was absolutely forced to work with it. It was, Crane sometimes thought, as if the

ARVID were trying to cram everything required of a cybernetic life into what was,

thankfully, a relatively short period of time. Either that of course, or it simply enjoyed

acting like, as has been mentioned, a complete and utter tit.

The whining voice of ARVID broke through Crane’s thoughts. ‘Harbour Master

Thelon Bates reports that all passengers are safely aboard and airlocks sealed. Marker

buoys disengaged and support ships at safe clearance. Hey, did you here what I said?

Harbour Master Bates. That sounds like master-’ ARVID, basically, had about the same

sense of humour as an adolescent in the first flower of puberty-based acne. This was, as

it happened, one of its least repulsive character traits.

‘Shut up!’ Crane snapped at it curtly. ‘Send out system-defence ID, rack the shields

back off the engines and just get us the hell out of here.’

‘Am I to assume,’ ARVID said with a kind of child-pomposity, ‘that you wish me to

place the ship in a state of vector towards the designated interdimensionally translational

point?’

‘Yes,’ said an increasingly exasperated Crane. ‘Got it in one.’

‘Well,’ said ARVID, ‘I’m not at all sure I want to do that.’

‘Problems?’ Crane asked. ‘Astronomical bodies or traffic we should know about?’

‘Nothing like that, no,’ said ARVID. ‘You just didn’t ask me nicely.’

Captain Fletcher Crane, at this point, began to have some small inkling as to precisely

why the Central Spaceways profiling had picked him. ‘Now you listen here, you

jumped-up lump of force-grown cancer with crabs,’ he growled. ‘You go down on us

and we’re dead – but I’m getting to the point where that doesn’t seem like such a bad

deal. If you feel like getting smart with me, just remember who has the bioplugs to patch

you up when your so-called mental processes eat holes in you as big as my fist. Under-

stand? Now move the sodding boat.’

Through the fake glass ceiling of the VIP departure lounge, back in the Mons Venturi

station, it seemed as though brilliant, pulsing light burst from the engine pods of the

Titanian Queen, and that it streaked off into the depths of space, its visual form flowing

and dopplering before it, to finally disappear, with a bang, in less than seven seconds.

This was aided, in small part, by a subliminal sound system, which produced a low-level

sequence programmed by the same multimedia design house as had built the window,

and which was called ‘Starship Launch #4’. The fact is, of course, that no sound could

have made it through the steel-plate, ceramic, foil-and-polymer-foam club sandwich of

the station’s outer skin, if sound waves had been able to travel in a vacuum in any case.

The light from the engines was also false. The short-life particles released when the

shields retracted were invisible to the naked eye. Additionally, due to the sheer exponen-

tial physics of mass and acceleration, it would be almost two hours before the Titanian

Queen was moving at more than fifty thousand kilometres per standard hour.

5 ‘WELCOME TO THE CRUISE OF THE MILLENNIUM . . .’

Page 37

All of these elements of falsity were unremarkable – they were merely the tacitly

accepted practice of commercial spacefaring, at least so far as went for paying passen-

gers, who had paid for the experience and damned well wanted to experience it. There

was, however, a deception on another and rather different level.

If an observer were able to watch the launch of the ship with the naked eye –

assuming for the moment that said eye didn’t get sucked explosively out of the head and

the observer wasn’t instantly fried by the radiations – then he (or she) might have learnt

something very important about the fundamental nature of the maiden voyage of the

Titanian Queen.

But nobody was, and it would have, and they would have been. So nobody did.

6

‘IN THE HEART OF SPACE

THE NIGHT NEVER ENDS . . .’

‘. . . and the Gay Mad Love and Laughter of the Social World never ends, too. Whether

strolling through the Arboretum chambers, listening to the Romantic Call of wildlife

from far-off Places, meeting friends for tea in the Pavilion Lounge , or playing a power-

wallgame match in our Fully Featured Courts , the amenities of the Titanian Queen hold

something for even the most jaded palate. Those who are young at heart can “check

out” the latest “grooves” in Percy’s subsonic discotheque, or one might care to peruse

the delights offered by the Bartle and Boglie’s Touring Theatre, with live performances

by artistes especially licensed from the galactically renowned Bartle and Boglie’s Sta-

tionary Theatre on Praxis.

‘And don’t Forget the Starfire Ballroom , where you can Dance the Endless Night

away under the twinkling majesty of the Stars. Balls will be held here, regularly. Masked

balls, costume halls, more balls than can quite possibly be imagined . . .’

‘Bollocks,’ Benny opined sourly, looking around the ballroom and sipping a fizzy wine

that, if it had come from a horse, would have meant that the horse would have had to be

shot. ‘Big fat lardy bollocks with extra arms and a big bum. So where’s all this gay love

and mad laughter, then?’

She had dined in the restaurant. The menu for the evening had been moules in white

wine, with fresh bread encrusted with poppy seeds and rock salt, followed by braised

kidneys in a mustard sauce on a bed of wild rice. The thought of it had made her feel ill

– both at the idea of eating organs from an actual animal, and at the idea of people

wasting a fortune on such a nauseating luxury. For some reason, though, even with

people tucking into their foul-smelling plates of offal all around her, she had felt incred-

ibly hungry and had polished off three helpings of vegetable lasagna without feeling sat-

isfied.

Afterwards, she still had time to kill, and the thought of stepping into Percy’s Dis-

cotheque was more than the mind could bear, so she had gone to the ball. It was twenty

38

6 ‘IN THE HEART OF SPACE THE NIGHT NEVER ENDS . . .’

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hours into the cruise, and quite long enough for Benny to decide that she detested,

loathed and despised everybody and everything on it, in it, involved or connected with it

in particular, in general and in any way, shape or form. Actually, she had come to that

conclusion a mere forty-five minutes after boarding, when she had been settling into her

cabin and there had been a knock on the hatch.

She had opened it to find a gentleman of a certain age – that certain age that is too

young to be old, too old to be young, and impossible for one without the knack to carry

it off with equanimity. He wore spectacles and his thinning, greying, brittle hair was

plastered forward brutally and fixed with some glistening ointment. He was buttoned

tightly into an ill-fitting suit and it was as if he was consciously forcing his body into it.

He was slightly shorter than Benny, with a bony frame that might have been called

gangly if he were taller, and was not holding himself in what appeared to be a permanent

clench. Benny had not really known her father until relatively late in life, but the prim

and prissy way this man held himself triggered a kind of universal pattern-recognition

marked as Fussy Old Dad. In the tenebrous depths of the Quoquetalan oceans there was

probably a creature like this man disapproving of his brood-child’s deplorable lifestyle

of group-mating without the involvement of the all-important fifteenth phenotypic type.

‘Nathanael C. Nerode,’ he said, in a haughty, nasal and unconscionably opprobrious

whine. ‘I should just like to inform you that you are occupying the cabin suite that was

booked – some months in advance, I might add – by myself and my good wife.’

‘Yes?’ Benny looked at him blankly. ‘And?’

This was clearly not quite the response Nathanael C. Nerode was looking for. ‘I think

it’s shameful, the way they’ve treated us. I didn’t spend thirty years building myself up

as a name to be reckoned with in wholesale Goblanian bog seal blubber to be treated like

this.’

‘Quite possibly no,’ said Benny, impassively.

‘We’ve been moved to a single cabin, just across the hall, and my good wife suffers

terribly from her claustrophobia. Her nerves, you know.’

‘How terribly frightful for her,’ said Benny. ‘Do give her my warmest regards.’

‘Well . . . I just hope you’ll bear in mind that there are other people nearby,’ said

Nerode, loath to beat a retreat without making his grievances heard. ‘I know how some

of you young people are, with your parties and suchlike.’

‘Don’t worry, Mr Nerode,’ Benny said. ‘If I have any custard, sadomasochism and

skankweed orgies I’ll be sure to invite you. And your good lady wife, of course.’

This exchange had given Benny the first intimations of what the cruise was actually

going to be like. Such thoughts were banished briefly by the events after shutting the

hatch on the suddenly apoplectic Nerode, but over the course of twenty hours they had

surfaced with a vengeance. Now, looking around the Starfire Ballroom, as people con-

gregated for the first ball of the voyage, she saw that the passengers were delineated into

two distinct cliques.

On the one hand were the truly rich – but not the rich of the kind that had real power

6 ‘IN THE HEART OF SPACE THE NIGHT NEVER ENDS . . .’

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or authority. They were the inbred, vestigial growths of family trees that had properly

given up any semblance of life centuries before, and who now performed some travesty

of life by leeching parasitically off the last of the family inheritance. The lilies of the

field might neither reap nor sow, but they were positive marvels of heavy industry com-

pared with these people, who should have every right-thinking man or woman reaching

for the hammer and sickle at the drop of the first guard of winter.

On the other hand – and utterly ignored by the first group – were what might be called

the well-off. The self-made men like Nerode – who thus had nobody to blame but them-

selves, and who really believed that the repellent behaviour and values of the former

group were something somehow admirable, something to be emulated. The innate air of

pretension and hypocrisy about this second group made them, if anything, even worse

than the first.

Nerode himself, she saw, was standing stiffly by the quintet (violin, viola, flute, flag-

eolet and bongos) playing a currently fashionable resurrection of eighteenth-century

chamber music, trying to catch their attention and in all probability complaining about

the noise. What must have been his good lady wife stood to one side, a washed-out,

anxious-looking creature, wringing her hands and flinching every time her husband

spoke. Benny turned her attention from them to the floor in general, and watched as the

two mutually exclusive cliques made their various – currently fashionable in certain

circles – gavottes and all she wanted, all she really wanted, was a proper drink. The

problem was that she couldn’t. She had half an idea that she might end up with a broken

arm, and in any case, she had something to do soon.

From the press of people gathered around the walls bedecked with rococo gilt and

cherubim, she heard a familiar voice: ‘Ah! Sir! I see by certain signs that you are in fact

one of the fabled Kun Sum Samurai from the Reblominium Bouncing Asteroid Cluster!’

– and she cleared the distance just in time to hear someone say, ‘No, sir, I am in fact the

wine waiter.’

Emil Dupont was once again holding forth to a small gathering of interested

onlookers, including Khaarli the Czhan, who noticed her, gave her a friendly two-

fingered insulting gesture, and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.

‘And so you see,’ Dupont was saying, ‘that at the time when she broke down and con-

fessed, I was at the other end of the room, interrogating the family pet, Clarence, an

Ursan fnangor-cub, who I was positive was in actual fact a circus midget in a convin-

cingly designed and detailed costume. Of course, looking back on it, the lady’s motive

and the means were perfectly obvious – I simply cannot account for my prowess failing

me . . .’

Possibly it was the way Dupont remained utterly, cheerfully oblivious to the fact of

his incompetence, but Benny found herself liking him despite herself. ‘Do you think he

has the faintest inkling?’ she murmured to Khaarli.

‘I have no idea, thou yeasty crook-pated bladder,’ said the Czhan.

The other detectives were scattered through the ballroom – in the case of Miss Mag-

6 ‘IN THE HEART OF SPACE THE NIGHT NEVER ENDS . . .’

Page 41

pole, people giving her a wide berth, even the dancers automatically detouring around

her, in a trajectory that reminded Benny of the story about the section of the Trans-

Siberian Railway, at the turn of the twentieth century, drawn in on the plans by a Tzar

with a notch in his ruler. Every pair of detectives’ eyes swept the room, studying those

gathered here intently, looking for some clue that might identify the fabled Cat’s Paw.

Benny, on the other hand, thought that what with one thing and another it was odds-on

they wouldn’t be in luck. She had reason to believe that the Cat’s Paw, at this precise

time, would be somewhere else entirely.

He (or she) would, in all probability, be in the place that a half an hour from now

Benny would meet with him (or her).

After closing the hatch on Nerode, she had checked her suite of cabins over. They were

spacious and elegant and, since Krugor seemed to have secluded himself in a smaller

cabin appended to them, she had the whole place to herself. They even had an en-suite

bathroom – admittedly the bath was about one and two-thirds metres long, but out in

space the cost of that was, to coin a phrase, astronomical. Nathanael C. Nerode, before

being bumped off the accommodation list by the money and the influence of Krytell,

must have shifted the Goblanian bog seal blubber like a little tinker to have afforded

luxury like this.

The wall-length closets were packed with the clothing and other items supplied for

her by Krytell. Apart from briefly running her hand along them to enjoy the feel of the

different rich fabrics, she had paid them no real heed – the only valuables like jewellery

and such in the cabins were the precise paste reproductions that one wore to let others

know one had expensive valuables like jewellery and such. The originals were stored

safely in the bursar’s safe, probably within easy reach of a master criminal like the Cat’s

Paw, but well out of the reach of, for example, somebody who was supposed to own

them, but in fact didn’t, pocketing the lot and then blaming it on a master criminal like

the Cat’s Paw.

The only thing she had paid much attention to was the only thing, in the circum-

stances, that she felt she truly owned: the small haversack of personal belongings that

she had insisted Krytell’s people have sent up the Mons Venturi line so that (a) she could

inconvenience and annoy them a little, and (b) so that she would have something to

remind her of who she really was. There was nothing in particular in it, just some odds

and ends like the three books and a data wafer she’d been reading simultaneously in a

random rotation, a handful of other wafers flash-written with the music of the eight-

eenth, nineteenth, twentieth and early to mid twenty-first centuries (every single track

ever recorded on permanent or semipermanent media and had survived to the present

date), a packet of tissues, her tooth-stick and, of course, her diary.

This particular diary was merely the latest in a long line of them: an actual bound

book, possibly one-eighth filled, but already fraying at the seams, and bulging slightly

with little yellow sticky notes. (Benny had, for various reasons, been largely instru-

6 ‘IN THE HEART OF SPACE THE NIGHT NEVER ENDS . . .’

Page 42

mental in the resurrection of this long-forgotten twentieth-century invention to the

galaxy at large, thus dividing it neatly down the middle into people who wanted to thank

her profusely, or murder her on sight, if they had known who she was.) She was in the

habit of writing down what had been done by, with, for or to her – and then covering it

with an often completely different version until she felt up to dealing with the facts of

matters. It was a harmless little bit of avoidance, not a neurotic compulsion in the

slightest, and she could have given it up any time she liked.

She idly flipped through several entries. One of them, on the obscuring yellow note,

read:

Had a perfectly wonderful evening. Wore that outfit Jason likes so much for

various obscure but highly flattering reasons – I really do hold him in high regard.

Jason cooked, which is of course another of his good points. He really is quite

wonderful, Dear Diary, and not a completely insensitive and infuriating little git in

the slightest.

Underneath, on the page itself, in a rather more rushed and irregular hand, the entry

read:

BASTARD! How dare he tell me my thighs look fat. Says that again, he’s going

to get these bloody slingbacks up his [indecipherable, possibly ‘funking arm’]. I

hate him. !!! J spent two hours in the k rattling bloody pans and you should have

seen the state of it afterwards. Plus it’s repeating on me. I’ve been up and down

like a bride’s bloody nightie half the bloody night and don’t think I don’t know for

one sodding minute what he’s really after . . .

The note over a slightly more recent entry read:

Well, now it’s finally over I feel relieved. And stronger, more affirmed about

myself. I really believe that the whole experience has made me stronger as a

person, helped me to discover my inner self. Finally, a sense of closure. The pos-

sibilities of my life have opened up again and I feel happier than I’ve felt in

months. Really.

while the real entry underneath read:

OH, BOLLOCKS!!

. . . in a heavily underscored scrawl, gone over so many times that it had worn holes in

the paper at the pressure points.

Happy days, happy days . . . Benny turned the page, and something fell out. She made

a grab for it, missed and flipped it in a skimming trajectory so that it ended up under the

bed. After fishing around for a while on her hands and knees, she finally managed to

extricate it.

It was a small, stiff, slightly slippery-feeling card.

6 ‘IN THE HEART OF SPACE THE NIGHT NEVER ENDS . . .’

Page 43

My word [it said, on one face, in an elegant, italic hand] those must be the biggest

bol ocks I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a few in my time, believe you me.

I think you need something to cheer you up – so what I'd advise is that you at end the

first Bal of the cruise for a while and then, possibly the theatre – only don't at end the

actual show, if you know what's good for you. In any case, at twenty-one bel s precisely,

you might just get a smal surprise.

Two conflicting emotions had warred in Benny’s breast: a wounded mortification that

someone had read her innermost thoughts, and an utter fury. All of which, of course, left

room in the other breast to wonder precisely how someone could have left the card to be

discovered at the exactly apposite time.

She had turned the card over. Printed on the obverse was the stylized design of the

imprint of the paw of a cat.

7

SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

Protestations of the brochure to the contrary, life aboard the Titanian Queen operated on

a cycle of ‘days’ lasting approximately twenty-four hours, with the ‘hour’ between

twenty-three bells and first bell taking up the slack. It had been decided by the owners of

the Titanian Queen that a physiologically more sensible twenty-six hours – that being

the cycle that the human body reverts to without externally enforced day/night stimuli –

should be junked for a twenty-four-hour day’s psychological resonance of old Earth.

Bartle and Boglie’s Touring Theatre ran two shows a day, at times approximating to

matinée and evening performance. Since this was the first night of the cruise, the even-

ing’s was also the first performance, coinciding with the first ball of the cruise, and was

thus sparsely attended. This was more fortunate than not, because the manager of the

company had taken the chance of a relatively uncrowded night to run an experimental

production that pushed the envelope of the Bartle and Boglie philosophy so far that the

stamp fell off.

The philosophy of a Bartle and Boglie production, whether travelling or stationary,

was this: never leave the audience on a downward note. Give them comedies, comedies

and more comedies, high, low, light, romantic and slapstick; play anything that isn’t a

comedy as comedy – and always, always force it to a happy ending. And while the pro-

duction tonight satisfied on these basic counts, certain people might have counted it a

brave and doomed failure from the start.

The production in question was The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus

Andronicus.

At the back of a sparsely occupied auditorium that seemed designed as a kind of ingénu

cross between a nineteenth-century music hall and an early-twenty-first-century tri-D

studio, Benny looked at the activity taking place before her on the stage and tried to

believe her eyes. She knew about playing things for laughs – and knew, if laughter was

the goal, approaching a text in a certain way could result in the funniest thing one has

ever seen, working purely from the text and nothing more. This, unfortunately, was the

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7 SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

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other approach.

For a start they had transposed the action to the twenty-first century, with sadly pre-

dictable but reprehensible results.

‘Yes!’ Lavinia was saying, through the sonic vibrator strapped to her throat, to the

dying Titus as he stared goggle-eyed at her clunky, cybernetic arms. ‘The batteries were

running low on the laserknife with which you stabbed me, so I survived. Fortunately I

was found by a passing, kindly medical student, who specialized in reconstructive sur-

gical prosthetics and who took me to a crisis centre and, after extensive therapy, I now

feel much better about myself and my experiences that used me so most foully and made

a game on’t.’

‘But ’tis been scant three minutes since thou wart slain by thine own father,’ said the

actress playing Tamora – whose heart clearly wasn’t in it and was ad libbing.

‘It was very swift prosthetic surgery and therapy,’ snapped Lavinia, falling out of char-

acter a little herself. ‘All right?’

‘Fair enough,’ said Tamora, and then proceeded to rage and tear out her hair. ‘Ah,

Andronicus!’ she cried. ‘Now one seest thou might needs not have cooked all my chil-

dren up in a big pie and made me eat them – not that I countenance their most reprehens-

ible conduct, mark you, but with the correct psychiatric treatment and rehabilitation who

knows what useful life each of them might have henceforth led . . .’

From behind an arras – currently being represented by a simulation of twenty-first-

century-vogue polymer wall hangings – suddenly burst three youths. The speakers used

in place of an orchestra did a little drum roll and the clash of cymbals.

‘Albaras, Demetrius and Chiron!’ Tamora exclaimed, as though introducing a comedy

triple act.

‘Mother!’ cried one of the youths. ‘Fear not, for we are not dead, and have in fact a

strange, obscure and most complicated tale to tell –’

‘But that is for some later time!’ cried Saturninus, brandishing the laserknife he had

used on Titus. ‘It seems I have murthered Andronicus for naught! I cannot bear the

shame!’

Trembling, he raised the dagger, and then plunged it into his own belly.

Titus sat up and looked down at his only slightly blood-stained shirt. ‘Actually,’ he

said. ‘I seem to be more or less all right.’

Saturninus, still standing, looked down at the knife in his hands. ‘Damned batteries, i’

faith.’

And from the representation of a hole to one side of the stage came the voice of Tit-

us’s son: ‘Er, hello? Hello? Is anybody up there?’

Nobody in the minimal audience had probably ever heard of the original; they simply

didn’t think the production was particularly funny, and shuffled and coughed. Benny had

heard of the original – and she was staring at the stage with a rictus of utter horror

reminiscent of a scene in one of her all-time-favourite twentieth-century films, The Pro-

ducers. She had been told by the Cat’s Paw to stay at the ball until the proper time, prob-

7 SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

Page 46

ably to prevent her seeing any clue of whatever preparations he or she was making – but

she had been eventually driven from it, and had headed for the theatre to catch the last of

the show, secure in the knowledge that, whatever dangers she might encounter by going

early, they could be nowhere near as bad as the company of the people in the ballroom.

Now, looking at the stage, she realized that she had been horribly, horribly wrong. She

had made a mistake she was going to regret, that was going to come back and haunt her

in the night, for the rest of her life.

The thing that had driven her out of the ballroom was relatively minor, but it had been

the bushel that had broken the Betelgeusian womprat’s back. She had been listening with

a half-amused partial ear to Dupont relating how, at great personal expense, he had

utterly failed to solve the Deceptively Quite Simple Murders of the Nova Maldives

Abattoir, when she had become aware of a sudden commotion from the direction of the

dance floor. Two figures on it had obviously collided. One, a youngish, dowdy looking

woman, was on her hands and knees, frantically trying to retrieve the contents of an

expensive-looking lamé purse. From the cut of her dress – slightly out of place, slightly

out of fashion, with the little telltale signs of something several years old but carefully

looked after and kept for best – it seemed that she was not the purse’s owner. The owner

was far more likely to be the other: a beefy woman in late middle age, her hair piled up

and her face gone over with professional skill that even then couldn’t quite conceal an

innate malicious scowl, and wearing the kind of gown that should properly be called a

creation if not, given her bulk, a heavy construction. This latter woman’s form and

demeanour gave out something of the impression of a galleon under full sail – or, at

least, something that might have come out of a shipyard. The more diminutive woman

finally gathered together the majority of the items from the purse, and timidly offered it

to the larger woman – who swung a hand and knocked her to the ground.

Benny never really knew why she had headed for this scene on a kind of belligerent

automatic pilot. A lot of it was simple, human decency at seeing an underdog mistreated,

but it was slightly more complex than that. For most of her childhood she had been an

underdog, hunted and living from hand to mouth, then for a brief while a military grunt

and then a military deserter, constantly looking over her shoulder for any signs of pur-

suit, always waiting for the lies she’d told simply to get along to catch up with her. The

lies, strangely enough, had been helped along by an accent and demeanour instilled in

her when she was too young to know any better; by pure chance they had combined into

a presence that a certain kind of person took to be that of the well-bred, the ‘right’ sort.

The fact that it was the accent of the sort of people whom her first impulse was to brain

with the nearest available rock had been a constant encumbrance to her – and some-

times, she thought at some point, you simply had to nail your colours to the mast, kick

against the pricks in every sense of the word, and show whose side you were really on.

All of this she thought later. At the time, she had just given in to a burst of mindless

anger that had her wanting to slap the large and expensively dressed woman’s face off

7 SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

Page 47

her head.

‘You leave her alone,’ she snapped, with all the authority she could marshal to her

command.

‘Oh yes?’ The large woman looked at her with distrustful and vaguely piggy eyes.

‘And who might you be?’

If Benny had learnt two things about dealing with the rich and self-important, they

were never to lapse into courtesy because they counted it as servility, and never to invent

grandiose lies when the suitable selective truth would do. ‘I doubt,’ she said, looking

down her nose haughtily at the woman, even though it meant she had to throw her head

quite a way back, ‘that you have ever heard of the Summersdales in whatever wretched

little backwater from which you come. Such ignorance might be forgiven, appalling

though it might be – but your behaviour towards this poor unfortunate creature cannot.’

Benny turned solicitously to the ‘poor unfortunate creature’, who was now on her feet

again, but looking as though she wanted the deck to open and swallow her up. ‘Are you

quite all right, my dear?’

‘I – I’m fine, thank you.’ The young lady stared at Benny like a rabbit caught in head-

lights, obviously as terrified of her as she was of the larger woman. She swallowed aud-

ibly, seemed to be about to say something more – then dropped the purse she had been

proffering with a squeak and beat a hasty retreat. Benny watched her go, pointedly

ignoring the larger woman until sheer anger forced her to speak.

‘I shall have you know,’ she said, ‘that I happen to be the Dowager Duchess of

Gharl!’

Benny had no idea if Gharl was supposed to be a settlement, a continent or a planet.

She turned to regard the woman as if she had just admitted to occupying an outside lav-

atory without the permission of the householder. ‘Ah,’ she said, haemorrhaging condes-

cension into the exhalation. ‘That might probably explain it. Blood and breeding will out

– especially if said blood has been diluted with that of the farm hands, and quite possibly

the farm animals to boot.’ And I hope to the Goddess, she thought, this Dowager

Duchess of Gharl doesn’t come from somewhere with an industrial economy.

It seemed to work – or at least to have hit a nerve – if the rather interesting purple

exploding across the face of the Dowager Duchess was any indication.

‘I have never been so insulted,’ the Duchess shrieked, ‘in my life!’

‘You ought to get out a bit more,’ said Benny, on the basis that the old ones were

almost always the best. ‘On the other hand, given that you seem to have no idea of how

to conduct yourself in civilized company, probably not.’

By this time a small crowd had gathered round the scene. Many of them probably

knew the Dowager Duchess. It was almost certain none of them knew Benny from

Lilith, but they seemed nonplussed, unsure who was in the right or wrong. That’s what

having just the right amount of front does for you, Benny thought, and she was just

about to give the Duchess the tongue-lashing of her life, when she felt an increasingly

familiar sensation of bones grating in her elbow and a quiet voice beside her said, ‘I

7 SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

Page 48

believe, ma’am, that you have an appointment elsewhere.’

Krugor had managed to do it again: slipped through the crowd and come up to her

without her noticing. Benny turned to look at his bland, composed eyes that did not hold

a hint of malice or threat.

‘Ah, yes, my man,’ she said imperiously. ‘I was forgetting.’ She shot a sidewise look

at the Dowager Duchess that would have supercooled a smallish sun. ‘I have better

things to do.’ She swept out, headed for the theatre and damn the consequences – and by

the time she had realized the seriousness of her mistake it had been far, far too late.

And now the revels were all ended. Sempronius had vouchsafed how several thousand

people who had supposedly died in the battle that had so annoyed Tamora, in a master-

piece of retroactive plotting, in fact hadn’t. The play – if it could be called such – had

wound down into everyone who wasn’t already married being so and a rousing chorus of

some jingoistic-sounding song, to the tune of what Benny recognized as the tune of

‘Rule Britannia’, the nation with which it was concerned remaining strangely unspe-

cified.

The cast had left the stage, the audience had gone. Benny sat there watching the

empty stage, trying to disbelieve what her eyes and ears had seen and heard, but

knowing with a sinking certainty that it had all been undeniably true. After a while, the

antique wristwatch she was currently affecting began to chime. It was twenty-one hours,

precisely, Benny was where she was supposed to be – the only problem was that she had

no idea what she was supposed to be looking for, and what she was supposed to do when

she found it.

She wandered to the stalls and clambered on to the stage. Behind the curtain (which

had gone down once and firmly stayed there in the face of half-hearted and uninterested

applause) the painted flats showed a kind of abstract gestalt of a street in Rome, and

beyond that Benny was rather surprised to find a larger, almost hall-like space, packed

with prop machinery and sets, which could be retracted to clear the space for Bartle and

Boglie’s more ambitious productions, like Schindler’s List on Ice. As with so much else

aboard the Titanian Queen, its size was unimpressive compared with the backstage of a

terrestrial theatre, but in the context of a spaceship it was huge. Off to one side she heard

voices, two slightly shrill, piercing and female, one almost indistinguishable and male,

arguing. They faded, the speakers moving out of earshot.

Benny moved through the backstage area, working her way around wicker hampers

full of props, costume rails, furled flats depicting anything from a New Raj drawing

room, to a prison in Vienna, to the kitchen in the mansion of Baron Hardup (the course

of the cruise would take the Titanian Queen through several cultural and religious holi-

days, and the theatre had responded by scheduling several harlequinades). She skirted

traps and sets of ropes and pulleys, from which depended hefty sandbags; ale barrels and

Canary butts, pantomime cow costumes, baby trampolines and the guillotine scaffold

that had and would, on occasion, to markedly different effect, be mounted by extras in A

7 SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

Page 49

Tale of Two Cities, Lord Percy in The Scarlet Pimpernel and Martin Guerre – this last

one to a chorus of ‘Look over there/There/That’s Martin Guerre/Where?/There on the

stair . . .’

The place contained all the archaic paraphernalia of the theatrical art form that had

survived almost entirely unspoilt for millennia. In the way that people hadn’t stopped

watching the holovid when simcords had come along – and in the way that her own pro-

fession, archaeology, had continued even though polyfractal quantum dynamics

enhancement and the occasional temporal wormhole could show you precisely what the

past was like – the theatre was an art form in its own right. The archaic paraphernalia,

the laughably primitive process of real people pretending to be characters in sets that

were obviously not the real thing, was precisely what people paid for.

The only problem with it, so far as Benny was concerned, was that if someone was of

a mind to hide something here like, for example, a villainously purloined Olabrian joy-

luck crystal, then there were a thousand and one places to do so. She had dismissed the

notion that the Cat’s Paw might be having a laugh with her – if this was true and there

was nothing here then it was all academic, anyway. She could only operate upon the

theory that it had to be here, somewhere. Now, she thought, if I were an Olabrian joy-

luck crystal, where would I be hiding?

She found her eye continually drawn towards one of those treasure chests only seen in

the theatre: piled high with scintillating gems and strings of pearls, diamond tiaras,

brooches, clasps, necklaces, goblets and a half-eaten sandwich from the stagehand’s

lunch. On the other hand, her eye might be continually drawn to it, but she forced herself

to ignore it – it was far too obvious. Benny poked through the slightly overmature con-

tents of a laundry basket, examined the sandbags for suspicious bulges, went back out on

to the stage and peered into the prompt box, came back in again, rifled through a collec-

tion of commedia dell’arte masks, stuck her hand up the head of the pantomime cow,

and finally gave up.

‘Oh all right,’ she said.

The glittering treasures came off in a single piece, glued to a shallow tray. In the space

beneath, Benny’s hand brushed against something leathery, soft like kid. She grabbed

hold of it, and lifted something that seemed as big as her two fists clenched together and

heavy as lead crystal.

She did not discover more, because at that point the back of her head exploded with

pain, a redness burst across her vision and then plunged into black.

She came to herself, collapsed over the imitation treasure chest, with an ugly throbbing

in her skull and the overwhelming need to vomit. Fighting down waves of nausea, she

gingerly felt at the nape of her neck. No skin broken, nothing suspiciously soft or

detached inside.

Benny lurched into an approximately upright crouch, gripping the side of the chest for

support. A largish chunk of the soft wood splintered off in her hand. In the dim light, she

7 SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

Page 50

peered inside.

The chest was now, of course, completely empty.

‘Oh, damn . . .’ Benny would have shaken her head, but in the present circumstances

she really didn’t want to do that. And another thing she didn’t want to do was go to

Krugor, and thence almost certainly Krytell, and tell him that she’d lost the item that was

her entire reason for being here. The industrialist would, in all probability, be not incon-

siderably peeved – and would no doubt make his irritation known in several interesting

ways. Benny staggered to her feet – and it was at that point that she became aware that

she was not entirely alone.

Or rather, in a specific and distressingly fundamental sense, that she was.

Sprawled face down on the boards, a dark stain spreading out from under him, was

the body of a man. He wore a dark suit, and details were hard to make out in the dim

light of the backstage area, but the very shape and bulk of his body made him instantly

recognizable.

It was Krugor. In his hand was clutched a purselike, soft leather bag. There was

something inside it, but whatever it was, there was a distressing lack of sphericality

about it.

Benny prised the bag from the dead fingers. It lifted with the muffled sound of loose

and broken glass.

8

A SMALL BREAK IN THE

CONTINUITY

The Titanian Queen accelerated on through space, gathering momentum for its jump.

The bridge was now deserted, save for a single member of the flight crew on watch – the

control processes were in the metaphorical hands of ARVID, there was nothing human

or other living agencies could do in any state of emergency that might occur, and

nobody was going to hang around here purely for the company of the annoying quasi-

AI. The man on watch – one Flight Technician Third-Class Harvey – was merely here to

prevent unauthorized tampering should some passenger get lost and wander in by mis-

take.

The lights of the fake control consoles were off and Flight Technician Harvey, after

desultorily skimming through a bootleg comix cube for a while, had dozed off. The only

motion on the bridge was a pause sequence from the cube itself – a loop of a handcuffed

and rather deplorably flouncy-looking Hentai girl on a surprisingly modified seesaw.

Thus, there was no one to see as an access hatch slid back in a darkened and out-of-

the-way corner, and a dark figure glided towards the ARVID unit, pulled a small black

box from a pocket and depressed a switch, produced a smallish, multifunctional tool

with several integral heads, and began to crack busily through ARVID’s technosculpted

façade and primary beryllium, polymerized ceramic foam and Teflon casing.

Nobody, that is, except for the quasi-AI itself. ‘Help!’ ARVID screamed, neglecting

such niceties as ‘System Error Code 11’, ‘Core Integrities Compromised and Severely

Corrupted’ or even a quick burst of ‘Bicycle Built for Two’ for a message that summed

up the situation in a nutshell. ‘Help! Help! Helphelphelphelp help!’

The signal should have set off alarms in several separate areas of the ship, including

the captain’s cabin. In fact, due to the powerful disruption field affecting them, they

blew out a microwave cooker in the crew’s galley, made the facilities of three rest rooms

in the passenger spaces – one of them occupied – run briefly backwards, interrupted the

subsonics in Percy’s Discotheque so that the energetic young things felt a brief flash of

ennui, and activated one of the automatic environmental cigar-smoke scrubbers in a

51

8 A SMALL BREAK IN THE CONTINUITY

Page 52

cabin where nobody was actually smoking. The one thing they didn’t do was convey that

the quasi-AI that controlled the Titanian Queen almost in its entirety, and from which all

the lives therein depended, was in any form of danger whatsoever.

The dark figure put its cracking tool to one side, and then produced a small injector

gun, of the sort used to introduce the microspores that gave ARVID its state-disrupting

functionality into the system. The dose was administered through the breach in the

casing, with a small and almost inaudible click.

Flight Technician Third-Class Harvey woke with a start. A subtle feeling of wrongness

made it difficult to get his bearings for a moment, but then he looked around,

remembered where he was and saw that nothing was out of place. Nothing was dis-

turbed, the lights were still off, the smooth face of the sculpted ARVID façade impenet-

rable as ever as the AI ticked along – or, more properly, munched along, on itself –

behind it.

‘Oh, so you’re awake again now,’ ARVID’s speaker said, pompous and annoying as

ever. ‘I don’t know. You just can’t get the help these days. I mean, anybody could have

got in and started nosing around . . .’

‘Just shut up, OK?’ Harvey snapped, continuing the already increasingly lengthy tra-

dition of operator-interaction with the AI.

‘Don’t you speak to me like that,’ sniffed ARVID. ‘Let me tell you, Mr oh-so-high-

and-mighty . . . er, ah . . .’

‘Harvey,’ Flight Technician Harvey said, automatically.

‘Harvey. Right. Of course. Yes.’ For an instant too short to be registered by the human

nervous system, the AI paused. ‘I’ll be forgetting my own name, next.’

INTERLUDE

THE UNPLEASANT END

OF DOCTOR PO

The year was 1934; the place, somewhere in the appalling filth and squalor of London’s

East End docklands. The lower-class denizens of that disreputable area – most of whom,

of course, being of mental subnormality, foreign extraction or slaves to the demon of

spirituous liquor – slunk through the fog, bartering for the wretched services of common

ladies of the night, who were none too clean about their persons.

Suddenly the tenebrous silence was split by the roar of a V-8 engine, as the super-

charged Hornet Hunter of Sandford Groke raced through the night, in hot pursuit of his

arch foe, the fiendish yellow master criminal, Doctor Po – a pursuit that was going to

cost the intrepid special agent his very existence if not his life!

His muscular bulk straining the polymer webbing of the driver’s cradle, Groke lit a

manly cigarette and hurled the car into a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn to avoid a

wizened old widow selling packets of bird feed. ‘When I think,’ he snarled with cold,

heroic loathing, ‘when I think of all the foul and loathsome indignities that demon

incarnate put me through in his subterranean chamber beneath the Mister Wo Chinese

Laundry, Mixed Bar and Grill and Opium Den – before, of course, I was propitiously

able to pick the locks of my shackles with my teeth, overpower his brutish Mongoloid

minions and effect my escape, by means of my trusty service revolver and a rope ladder

secreted about my person . . . when I think of the hideous and unnatural indignity of it,

Throat, well, it makes my blood boil!’

‘Too bleedin’ true, guvnor.’ In the web beside him, Ginger Throat’s monkey-like face

seemed pale – no doubt concerned for the man who had plucked him from his pitiful life

as a dwarfish Cockney barrow boy in these very streets, made him his batman in the

war, during his life-and-death struggle with that foul Nazi Hun Rommel, the Red Baron,

and then given him a job for life in peacetime. ‘Makes a chirpy cock-sparrer like

meself’s toes curl too just to think on it and no nevermind, wot you went through an’ all,

sir.’

‘I doubt,’ said Sandford Groke, ‘if I shall ever look upon an Imperial Standard ruler

53

INTERLUDE THE UNPLEASANT END OF DOCTOR PO

Page 54

and a plate of digestive biscuits ever again.’

Ahead of them, the sneakily modified, motorized rickshaw of Doctor Po ran over a

small crippled child, and disappeared through the gateway leading into the compound of

a row of warehouses. A battered sign above the gate read: PYRAMID WHARF.

‘He must not get away!’ swore the special agent. ‘He must not escape with the last

surviving copy of the Kama Mundra! Why, if he should gain access to a lithographic

printing press . . .’ He choked back a manly sob of anguish, momentarily overcome with

emotion. ‘Just think of it, Throat, the bloody revolution of the British working classes,

their genetically subhuman brains enfeebled and maddened by slithering, unmitigated

frightfulness, their freakish bodies racked by relentless self-abuse and the Congress of

the Three Shy Lemurs and the Soapy Hedgehog!’

In the compound the degenerate conveyance skidded to a halt, and a twisted figure

scuttled out to disappear into one of the warehouses. Groke pulled himself together from

his shameless lapse into girlie blubbing, and his firm, stout English manhood took hold

of him again.

‘It shall not be so,’ he growled. ‘Take the wheel, Throat. I’m going to jump.’

‘Righty-ho, guvnor,’ said the trusted servant. ‘Strike a light. China plate.’

The Kama Mundra had been the product of the palsied mind and hand of one Sir Rupert

Gilhooly, who, for a time, had been allowed by decent and right-thinking people to

indulge his diseased appetites because his title and seat in the House of Commons had

blinded society to the fact that he was Irish, like Oscar Wilde.

An explorer of sorts, he had travelled exclusively through the interior regions of

Manaan, whence he had emerged with several intricately carved onyx boxes, a variety of

mushrooms that, once ingested, turned one’s water green, and an original Sanskrit copy

of the Kama Mundra – that unclean book reputed to unlock the mysteries of Sexual

Magick on three shillings a week, and rumoured to have driven men precisely two and

one-third times as mad as the Necromonicon.

It was at that time, in 1883, that the infamous translation of the Kama Sutra by Sir

Richard Burton was published – and it was in a mercenary attempt to cash in upon its

success that Gilhooly attempted to sell his own translated manuscript. Perhaps because

of its utter depravity and loathsomeness, or possibly because of the fact that the activ-

ities contained therein were physically impossible without the aid of three tent pegs and

a mallet, a professional contortionist, a tub of clarified beef dripping and a trained moun-

tain goat, no publisher, no matter how disreputable, would countenance it. Thus, while

the Kama Sutra – Aphorisms of Love rode high on the booksellers’ lists, and Burton him-

self was chatting amiably to the television broadcasts about life with his new bride, a

Miss Elizabeth Taylor, Gilhooly’s work, the Kama Sutra – How to do Sex Like the Wogs

do it, remained in entire and well-deserved obscurity.

Disheartened by his lack of success, Gilhooly had become a recluse, devoting the

remainder of his days to breeding goats, freebasing crack cocaine, and endlessly poring

INTERLUDE THE UNPLEASANT END OF DOCTOR PO

Page 55

over his original Manaanan source material for what he hoped might be a more palatable

translation, entitled Doctor Gilhooly’s Joy of How’s-your-father.

Gilhooly had died of massive rupture in 1885, when two pages had stuck together. His

papers and all other articles related to the Kama Mundra had been bequeathed to the

Bodleian Library, who had placed them in a locked lead casket under guard, so that none

of its evil might escape to corrupt the very fabric of English society – and it was these

papers that Doctor Po had stolen, by way of a devilishly cunning scheme involving three

murders, four hundred and fifty cases of blackmail and, when all else failed, a fishing

rod with a small steel claw attached to the line. When Sandford Groke had seen the lib-

rary’s inventory of what precisely was missing, and had read certain scraps of the Kama

Mundra that had been left behind – had discerned some small idea of what the foul

Doctor Po intended to let loose upon the world – he had sworn there and then that the

Oriental villain would get precisely what he deserved, and a taste of good old-fashioned

British spunk to boot.

‘Gor, blimey,’ shivered Throat. ‘Bleedin’ taters ’ere an’ no mistake! Apples and pears.’

He had cracked his head sharply while stopping the Hornet Hunter – being of a breed

inherently inept to control machinery of a quality more suitable to his betters. He had

wailed piteously at this trifle until the special agent, utilizing his extensive medical

skills, had applied liniment, bandages and a healthy dose of morphine.

‘Yes indeed, Throat.’ Groke swept his steely gaze across the rough, dank brickwork of

the warehouse interior. He had broken his arm in three places during his mad leap from

the car in pursuit of the diabolical doctor, but was bearing up under the agony splen-

didly. ‘This apparently otherwise entirely ordinary warehouse,’ he continued, the breath

pluming from his mouth as he spoke, ‘seems to have been turned into one extremely

large refrigerated meat locker.’ He crossed to one of the lumpen shapes covered by

frosted-plastic tarpaulins and, with a mighty heave of his ironlike sinews, heaved the

covering off.

‘Blimey!’ Throat stared at what was revealed with his little piggy eyes. ‘Carcasses.

They look like uncommon huge humungous chickens, I do declare.’

Groke nodded grimly. ‘Yes indeed, Throat. Cryogenically preserved avian reptiles

from the Dawn of Time. The lofty Pterodactyl, the noble Ramforincus . . . but how is

that possible?’

‘It’s perfectly simple, actually,’ said a lazy, cultured drawl – and huge Klieg lights

came on with a clash, illuminating the whole scene with a dazzling, bleached-out clarity.

Standing before them, his hands crossed and tucked inside the sleeves of his silken

robe, a tasseled bian upon his head, his slitty-eyed and hateful yellow face alive with

obscene glee, stood the devilish Doctor Po himself!

‘And don’t he talk loverly for an Oriental gentleman,’ said Throat, to no one in partic-

ular.

Possibly it was the momentary shock of the arch fiend’s appearance, compounded by

INTERLUDE THE UNPLEASANT END OF DOCTOR PO

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the pain in his arm and his recent ordeals, but Groke fancied for an instant that he could

hear voices. Ghostlike, on the very edge of hearing, as though someone were talking in

the next room and simultaneously by his ear.

‘The secondary construct’s off again,’ one said. ‘Damned AI automemes, they always

seem to go self-referential in the middle of a scenario.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said another voice. ‘I’ll segue it into a peripheral stream and

contain it . . .’

Groke shook his head to clear it, and glared at his adversary. ‘So, Doctor Po, we meet

once again, and your deeds surpass even your own prior foulness.’

The villain gestured negligently with his free hand. ‘One does one’s best. Now, Mr

Groke, as you can plainly see, I am currently aiming a rather large revolver in your dir-

ection – and I rather doubt that even the famed reflexive prowess of Sandford Groke,

Special Agent, is up to drawing his own, famous service revolver before I pull the

trigger. I do believe I have you, as they say, at my mercy.’

‘. . . I mean.’ Throat was muttering, off to one side, ‘you wouldn’t think it to look at

him, would you, what with those cruel eyes and twistedly inhuman lips that laugh with

delight in the face of another’s shrieking agony . . .’

Sandford Groke planted his two manly feet upon the warehouse floor and reared to

his full impressive height and girth, his very head seeming to throb with the pounding

blood of his rage. ‘You won’t get away with this, Po,’ he snarled. ‘Why, from the instant

that foul manuscript went missing from the Unmitigated Filth Department of the

Bodleian Library, I knew that only yours could be the twisted mind responsible! Even

now, the good Inspector Carstairs is rounding up your remaining brutish minions, and is

surrounding the locale as we speak!’

‘What, both at the same time?’ said Throat, dubiously. ‘I mean, rounding up brutish

minions, fine, but simultaneously surrounding the area? Come to mention it, doesn’t this

whole thing strike you as a little bit self-contradictory, guv? My old man’s a dustman.’

( ‘It’s giving the whole sodding game away! Yank it now!’)

( ‘Hang on . . . hang on . . .’)

‘Will you shut up, Throat!’ the special agent thundered.

The sidekick sniffed. ‘All right I will.’

( ‘Thank Siva for that,’ said a faint voice.)

The fiendish Doctor Po smiled a slow and snakelike smile. ‘This is all very well and

good, Mr Groke, but you see, when the good inspector arrives, I shall no longer be in –

shall we say – his jurisdiction. I admit that, some time ago, when I first perchanced upon

the whereabouts of the infamous Kama Mundra and the beastliness contained therein, I

had no thought but its use to suck the very rectitude and moral fibre from England’s

youth. But then – and quite by chance – I saw its true significance.’ He stuck his free

hand into his sleeve, and withdrew a leather-bound book, which he tossed to Groke.

‘Here. See for yourself.’

The special agent opened it and glanced within with distaste. ‘“The Congress of the

INTERLUDE THE UNPLEASANT END OF DOCTOR PO

Page 57

Ubiquitous Lampstand. The gentleman reclines upon a mat of scented rushes, applying a

tincture of pomegranate and green pesto to the lady’s yoni, all the while that the other

gentleman leaps from the pianoforte to the –”’

‘I think,’ said Doctor Po, ‘that you perhaps have the wrong page. Page thirty-seven, if

you will. The one with the photographic plate.’

‘Blimey, guvnor!’ Throat exclaimed, looking over Groke’s shoulder. ‘Just look what

that there feller’s doing with them galvanistical electrodes!’

‘Disgusting,’ the special agent agreed. ‘And a most reprehensible waste of electricity

in these lean times.’

‘But examine the electrical advice to which the electrodes are themselves attached,’

said Doctor Po. ‘Together with the third young lady and the jar of tadpoles. Read what it

says on the blass – I do beg your pardon, on the brass plate affixed to the base of the

contrivance. You may require the assistance of your Secret Service special-issue magni-

fying glass.’

‘Quite so.’ Groke produced the aforementioned item, and painstakingly read, with

mounting astonishment: ‘“The Gilhooly Patented Electrical and Aetherial Chrononamp-

lifier; prolongs even the most fleeting acts of appalling depravity for hours on end . . .”’

‘Yes!’ the fiendish Doctor Po cried in triumph. ‘Hallucinogen-crazed libertine though

he was, Rupert Gilhooly was a genius of the first water – a genius capable of unlocking

the very mysteries of space and time itself!’

He nodded to the shocked special agent. ‘Precisely, Mr Groke. That was what I was

after. I have taken the original design, made a few trifling modifications of my own –

and voilà! ’ He pulled a lever, and another tarpaulin rose upon a hidden ratchet. ‘My

greatest triumph! The Chrononamplificatory Ambulator of Doctor Po!’

‘The what? ’ exclaimed Groke, gazing in puzzlement at the apparently entirely innoc-

uous lacquered Chinese cabinet.

The fiendish Doctor Po deflated somewhat. ‘I could have done better here with a

trained chipmunk,’ he muttered darkly.

‘Oh, I get it,’ said Throat, brightly, breaking into the conversation of his betters

without a hint of decent shame. ‘It’s a time machine, yeah? That might, I suspect, tend to

explain all the apparent paradoxes and anachronisms we’ve thus far encountered.’

The special agent stared at him, aghast at this impertinence. ‘Are you feeling quite all

right, Throat?’

Throat slapped his sloping forehead as though, of a sudden, remembering something.

‘Oh, ah . . . I mean – Lord lumme, guvnor, all this high talk of metatemporal engineering

and messin’ about with the whole Ur-structure of interdimensional causality right goes

over my head and makes it spin! So it does.’

‘Thank you.’ Groke dismissed him from further consideration. The poor man’s mind

had obviously collapsed into raving gibberish.

‘. . . I mean,’ continued Throat, ‘the very idea. Wot’s a barrow boy born within the

sound of a whistlin’ Pearly King know about the multifarious problems of the fourth

INTERLUDE THE UNPLEASANT END OF DOCTOR PO

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dimension, eh? Wot with the lack of a decent educational catchment system, the child

slavery and the rickets . . .’

‘Yes, thank you, Throat,’ said Sandford Groke.

( ‘I’m losing control – we’re going to have to reformat the bloody lot if it doesn’t . . .’)

‘. . . I mean me old mum, Gord bless ’er, she was always sayin’ to me, “Don’t you go

a-troublin’ yourself about the polyfractal nature of the quantum mesh, young Cyril; just

you shut up and have your jellied eel, pint of gin and a fag . . .”’

‘Yes, all right, Throat!’ Sandford Groke invariably attempted to treat his inferiors with

kindness but, really, there were limits.

‘I could do you a couple of choruses of “I’ve got a Loverly Bunch of Coconuts” if

you’d like.’

‘You really want to die, don’t you, Throat?’ snarled the special agent.

‘Which, I believe,’ broke in the fiendish Doctor Po, waving his pistol menacingly,

‘brings us rather to the point in hand.’ He gestured around the warehouse. ‘As you have

seen, I have been able to bring certain specimens through time – but actual transmission

has escaped me. If the intersecting galvanistic fields of the machine are not calibrated

absolutely correctly, they tend to rip organic matter to shreds. Explosively. The calibra-

tion must be precise, and for that I have required – shall we say – volunteers. Several of

them. Quite a lot of them, in fact.’

Groke stared at the villain, as realization horribly dawned. ‘You mean . . .’

‘Exactly, Mr Groke,’ Po chuckled. ‘The sudden spate of mysterious disappearances

that has so baffled New Scotland Yard of late.’

‘William Slythe?’ Sandford Groke exclaimed. ‘The Infamous Boxing Archbishop of

Old London Town?’

‘Kaboom,’ drawled Doctor Po, calmly.

‘Lady Olivia de’Rohampton, thirty-third in line to the throne, and her little whippet?’

‘Kablam,’ agreed the fiendish Doctor Po.

‘The Right Honourable Jeremy Tooley?’ Throat broke in from behind Groke, ‘Conser-

vative and Unionist Member of Parliament for Bath and Wells?’

‘He has thus far contrived to evade my fiendish clutches.’

‘Oh well. Can’t win ’em all.’

‘Indeed one cannot.’ Po turned his attention back to the special agent. ‘And you, my

dear Mr Groke, are in no position to win any of them.’ He became for the moment,

mockingly, confidential. ‘You see, from the instant I allowed you to escape from my

subterranean torture chamber beneath the Mister Wo Chinese Laundry, Mixed Bar and

Grill and Opium Den, my every aim has been to lead you to this very place!’ he gestured

back towards the lacquered cabinet. ‘The calibration is almost complete. It merely needs

one, or possibly two, more test subjects . . .’

‘You fiend!’ cried Sandford Groke.

The Doctor tut-tutted. ‘One tries one’s best. So, which is it to be, Mr Groke? Certain

death from the barrel of a revolver, or will you take the chance of stepping into the

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machine?’

‘Well, speaking for myself,’ Throat broke in hurriedly from one side, ‘I think I’d

rather –’

‘I’ll tell you this, Po,’ Groke growled, glaring at the Chinaman with eyes like chips of

purest diamond. ‘I would rather die than aid your schemes in any way at all.’

‘Yeah, obviously,’ said Throat from beside him. ‘Obviously. Right. But then

again . . .’

‘A clean death from a good British bullet is all that I ask! I die, not for myself, but for

my country and the Empire!’

‘Yeah, OK, OK,’ said Throat, ‘but personally I sometimes –’

‘And that goes double for my man Throat.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Doctor Po, and shot the special agent’s servant, twice, through the

chest. The monkey-like little prole fell with a whimper.

( ‘Got it!’ said a distant voice. ‘Wipe the subfile and continue with the core scenario.

No real damage done.’)

‘On the other hand,’ said Sandford Groke, thoughtfully. ‘Who knows what adventures

and good to be done, what justice to be brought might lie in wait upon the other side of

time, should I survive . . .’

‘You bastard!’ shouted Ginger Throat, and expired.

‘A wise decision.’ Doctor Po pulled a lever. A Christmas-tree-like arrangement of

struts and wires extended from a little trapdoor in the side of the cabinet, and began to

spark and fizz. The doors of the cabinet sprang open to reveal an interior inlaid with

what seemed to be mother-of-pearl, the swirls of coloration constantly shifting, breaking

themselves apart and reforming. The Oriental fiend gestured with the gun. ‘Step through

the portal, Mr Groke. The future awaits, and it won’t hurt a bit.’

‘I promise you this, Po,’ declared Groke as he stepped into the cabinet. ‘Should I sur-

vive, I’ll hunt you down, in whichever squalid little bolt hole in the whole vast panoply

of time and space you choose to hide. You’ll rue the day you ever tangled with Sandford

Groke, Special Agent!’

‘Chance, Mr Groke, would be a fine thing.’ The villain grinned at him through the

doorway. ‘Now, you’ll recall I said that this wouldn’t hurt a bit?’

‘Yes?’

‘I lied.’

The fiendish Doctor Po slammed the doors, plunging the cabinet into darkness.

Shields racked back from vents, from which plasma blasted, obliterating the luckless

Sandford Groke.

PART TWO

EXCURSIONS

I met Tennessee Williams after I’d done Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . I was in hospital with

pneumonia, and he came to see me. Must have been ’57. It was after Cat . . . No, it

wasn’t after Cat – yes, it was . . . Must have been . . . Now I’m confused. Must have been

after Cat but it couldn’t have been because Mike [Todd] was killed when I was shooting

Cat . Well, I was in hospital, but I think it was in New York because that was where we

lived. Now I am confused! Mike was killed in ’58. It must have been after. Must have

been . . .

Elizabeth Taylor

60

9

‘YOUR FIRST STOP ON A GRAND TOUR

OF INTERGALACTIC WONDER . . .’

. . . said the brochure, ‘is the fabled Shakya constellation – the brightest constellation

visible from the southern hemisphere of Dellah, and the most distinctive feature of the

skies from worlds around. From the perfect safety of the Observation Deck, one can

bask in the churning majesty of one’s God, Goddess or Generative Principle’s work . . .’

Benny stayed in her cabin. She had stayed there even since before the ship’s first jump.

For one thing, the people who had written the brochure seemed to be under the impres-

sion that a ‘constellation’ was an actual stellar object. She suspected that they would in

actual fact be seeing RD1070982-1327-021B – a red giant and the only component of

the Shakya constellation that existed in this sector – and having seen more than her fair

share of red giants in the course of recent months, her instant reaction had been: ‘Oh

dear Goddess, not another one!’

For another, she had far more pressing matters to attend to.

In the backstage of the theatre, after checking Krugor’s pulse to ascertain that he was

really dead, she had beat a hasty retreat – jumping at every shadow that might conceal

the possibly still-present murderer, desperately trying not to leave any more fingerprints

or signs of her presence than she already had. She had known it would be pointless:

genetic tracing and vestigial-convection vectorizing could place her like a hi-resolution

shot – and the ship was crawling with detectives who should be able to sniff her out in

an instant if they were, as it were, much cop. Well, she had thought, remembering those

she had met, Khaarli the Czhan militiaman at least might suspect something.

She had locked herself in her room, and there she had stayed, ordering room service

and waiting every instant for the other shoe to drop and people to come pounding on the

hatch asking inconvenient questions. There had once been a time in her life when she

could have taken things to the top, secure in the knowledge that nobody would ever sus-

pect her as such. Now, she suspected, they would simply throw her in the brig and sub-

sequently – a ship in space being its own small world, with its own technically inde-

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Page 62

pendent statutes – summarily out of an airlock. With the death of Krugor, even the link

to Krytell and the protection it might afford had gone.

The first thing she had done after sequestering herself was to examine Krugor’s rooms

appended to her own. Inside, they were sparse and barely furnished – obviously

designed from the start to be occupied by the servants of the actual paying travellers. A

bed, a closet and a small cubicle for washing and waste matter. A valise was on the bed,

spare servants’ uniforms hung in the closet, and that was it.

The room had seemed almost entirely unlived in. Benny had wished for tell-tale wrap-

pers on the soapstone, betel nuts on the bed, little paper bands around the toilet bowl

such as had greeted her upon entering her own suite, but of course there were and had

been none.

Nothing interesting in the suits or the valise – but for all there was nothing interesting,

there was something wrong. There was nothing she could put her finger on, and possibly

it was the simple fact that the room belonged to a dead man, but something about the

room vaguely disturbed her. On re-entering her own suite, she had tried to lock the con-

necting door, and found that it could be locked only from the other side. She had ended

up wedging a heavy armchair up against it to make herself feel better.

She had missed the ship flipping in and out of its first jump to the vicinity of the red

giant, being only vaguely aware of the time it would occur and feeling nothing physic-

ally – since ripping her, everyone else on board, and the very ship’s atomic structure to

pieces and extruding it into a fifteen-thousand-para-kilometre-long electrogravitational

dimensional-fold-piercing needle had happened in quite other dimensions than which the

human mind and neurosystem could cope.

Apart from her own fears, she had been left completely alone save for the periodic

delivery of food and drink. The first arrival of ‘drink’ had included a two-litre bottle of

Elysian Mescal with the good bit of the cactus left in. Now that Krugor was no longer

around she could have theoretically drunk as much of it as she liked, but after three days,

however, the bottle was still at least a fifth full. Benny had never liked jigsaw puzzles,

especially the impossible sort that showed pictures of ball-bearings and slices of pizza,

and now she was attempting, in three dimensions, to solve the most difficult one she had

ever seen in her life.

Now, she stared intently at the book lying open on the carpet before her, rifled through

the scribbled notes she was using as bookmarks, then turned her attention to the curving

crystalline shards laid out on the stripped-off bed (which had necessitated the coverings

of it to be deployed as a rough-and-ready bedroll in the corner).

With a pair of tweezers from her minimal, emergency archaeological field kit, she

selected a shard and placed it within what appeared to be a partially constructed glass

bird’s nest. The shard locked against several others, with a precision that seemed to hold

none of those tiny and almost unnoticeable, subliminal elements of doubt that in fact

mean that things are utterly wrong. As a trained specialist, the job of whom it is to piece

together fragments from little or no external evidence, Benny had trained these sensibil-

9 ‘YOUR FIRST STOP ON A GRAND TOUR OF INTERGALACTIC WONDER . . .’

Page 63

ities to a high degree; the only problem was that they had been operating on this level

for days, now, and Benny was getting increasingly worried that they would end up shot

to hell and back.

When she had finally forced herself to open the bag that had once contained an intact

Olabrian joy-luck crystal, she had fully expected something resembling a miniature

Krystalnacht in a sack. What she found, however, was a dismantled collection of pieces

that might have been complicatedly formed, but seemed to be unbroken. She recalled

that while Olabrian joy-luck crystals were constructed with extreme delicacy and fra-

gility, the actual components of them were harder than diamond.

When she had asked Krytell for some of her personal belongings, she had insisted that

they include books. The first was a thick compendium of works from Woolfe, Bell,

Arliss and several others from the early twentieth-century Bloomsbury Group – as an

inveterate traveller who knew that the main burden is the problem of simply how to pass

the time, Benny knew that a rattling good page-turner was the last thing one needed.

One needed pages full of the kind of prose one had to stare at for hours on end – won-

dering how the hell a woman sitting there sewing has suddenly turned into the ocean, for

example – until one’s forehead bled. The second book was a compendium of Kinky

Friedman stories, because while crystalline prose-constructs built upon and inhabiting

the Waste Lands between form and content are all very well, one can always have too

much of a good thing.

The third book was of a different sort entirely. Benny had been sent a review copy of

it, had never read it, and had hoped never to be in the position where she had to. It was

entitled Lost Gods and the Fall of Empire, by Franz Kryptosa, a huge flat slab of a thing

that couldn’t in all honesty be called a coffee-table book because there would have been

no room for the bowl of multicoloured crystallized sugar, little pot of cream and the

cafetière.

Franz Kryptosa, and writers like him, occupied the same relative position to the

Archaeological Arts as a tapeworm to its host: combining the comprehension of the sci-

entific method of a small piece of Stilton with a command over the language that would

make a dyslexic paraplegic hand in his little pole on a suction cup in shame. His works,

if such they could be called, had included The Reappearing World, in which he had pro-

pounded the amazing theory that with sufficiently advanced genetic engineering one

could create living things that looked like anything; and In Search of Ancient Mu –

which he had somehow managed to get mixed up with the entirely different mythical

sunken city of Atlantis.

Kryptosa was just the latest in a millennia-long line of so-called ‘thinkers’ like Von

Däniken, Streiber, and the chap who believed that humans came from eggs, with four

arms, four legs and two heads, and that apes were in fact the result of these humans

shagging animals . . . people who had mastered completely the twisting of observable

reality to fit whatever deranged notion happened to be inhabiting their head (or, indeed,

heads) at the time.

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Such people went into paroxysms over the fact that, for example, a sample of prehis-

toric cloth had been found, its fibres finer and of a more complex structure than the best

man-made synthetics – while neglecting to recall that you could get fibres finer and

more complex by far than synthetics out of a silkworm’s bum. They jumped to the con-

clusion that gigantic ritual earthworks, built by cultures who had not developed flight,

must have been constructed for aliens in flying saucers, without ever stopping to say to

themselves, ‘Hang on, maybe they just built them because they thought their gods lived

somewhere up in the sky.’

They would then point to the belief in gods in the sky as if that meant something,

while forgetting to mention that most of the cultures concerned had also believed in an

Underworld of one form or another and which, despite being physically far more easy to

get at, had never in fact been found.

Kryptosa was, in short, the sort of mind that found it possible to believe that govern-

ments incapable of concealing the sexual peccadillos of their own high-ranking mem-

bers, together with their shocking capacity for grabbing kickbacks of various sorts with

both grubby hands, were capable of covering up all physical evidence of crashed inter-

stellar mother ships, or hordes of alien creatures roaming the land, abducting people out

of pickup trucks and sticking probes up them.

Such minds had suffered a bit of a blow around – for humans – the twenty-second

century, when actual alien life had been contacted without question. It was a bit like the

difference between believing in some mystical being that delivers much-needed mes-

sages from far away, and the postman simply knocking on your door one day and asking

you to sign. The human mind, of course, adapted – and people like Kryptosa had never

stopped looking for the other aliens, the ones who had made those rather nice designs in

wheat fields invariably bisected by tractor tracks, who had had cut those rather less

attractive designs into cows, impersonated weather balloons and who had given people

(who had barely partaken of four six-packs and a serious doobie) inexplicable visions of

flashing lights, unexplained bruises, nosebleeds, other minor injuries, and unaccountable

periods of strangely missing time. They never stopped looking for the real aliens, the

ones in which they truly believed.

Lost Gods was the story of a search for just such mythical beings. It detailed

Kryptosa’s travels through several of the more picturesque worlds of the sector, alone

but for the full multimedia crew that accompanied him, trying to hammer the local cul-

tures and histories into a shape resembling that of the ancient Mayans. One of those

worlds had been Olabria, and this, on the off-chance that it might prove useful, was why

Benny had requested the book. The text itself had been worthless, but there were some

photographic plates depicting Kryptosa staring with what he probably thought of as rev-

erent esteem at a collection of joy-luck crystals, while several paranoically watchful

Olabrians hovered close nearby, looking suitably exotic to human eyes.

Each of the examples in the book had been pieced together differently, but they had

served as an implicit reference to the underlying structure of the artefacts in general.

9 ‘YOUR FIRST STOP ON A GRAND TOUR OF INTERGALACTIC WONDER . . .’

Page 65

They had proved invaluable in that sense, but after several days the process was increas-

ingly like painstakingly building a model ship of some thousand pieces, with only the

picture from the front of the box for instruction.

Now, Benny felt completely shattered – and knew with a cold certainty that ‘com-

pletely shattered’ was precisely how the partially rebuilt crystal would end up if she tried

to put in one more piece in her present state.

She should really try to get some sleep, but she knew with an equal certainty that she

was too wound up for that. If she crawled into her expensive but makeshift bedroll at

this point, she would just jerk around, hammer her head on the pillows, hit the floor with

her fists and then come back and kick the blasted jumped-up bit of silicon to smithereens

in a fit of exhausted pique.

She climbed to her feet – her knees popping, and feeling as if they were a couple of

thousand years old and petrified – and wandered over to her bathroom. The face in the

mirror looked several millennia older even than her knees, if you counted age by the

number of rings under the eyes, with the added bonus of a bad-hair-century to boot. Her

single item of clothing – the large black shirt that she used as and when as a night gown

– was encrusted with several days’ worth of sweat and absent-minded meals. She looked

– and she was perfectly aware of how trite and clichéd it sounded, but was not in any fit

state to care – a complete and utter mess.

It was as though the sheer tiredness had taken over and was operating her body on

remote control. Operating on zonked autopilot, she pulled off the shirt and hauled on the

taps of the bath. Hot water cascaded into it, soapy and chemically treated to produce

whatever effect – from amphetamine-like invigoration to opiate-analogue somnalism –

the specific tap setting required. Benny didn’t care either way, at this point.

There were a couple of cut-glass bottles on the rim of the bath, containing greenish

and pinkish salts, and she upended them into the bath, too. She clambered into the bath

with the taps still running and it less than a third full, and collapsed back into the kind of

dreamless sleep that can only not be called a coma by way of a relative lack of bleep

machines, acquisitive relatives fighting over the off-switch and bootleg surgeons looking

expectantly at the donor card.

It was thus, in that insensate state, that Bernice Summerfield would never, at the time or

later, be aware of the four standard minutes and thirty-two seconds that a certain indi-

vidual, entering by seemingly impossible means and wearing a gas mask, spent in her

cabin suite. She would never know how this individual walked through the cabins,

turning off the taps in the bathroom as an afterthought, taking certain items and leaving

certain more.

But then, since said items were invariably worth far more than the items that were

taken, it probably didn’t matter. In the short term.

10

A DINNER APPOINTMENT

WITH DESTINY

Benny woke, still lying in the bath. On the positive side, sensor-controlled radiant heat

elements had kept the water warm; on the downside, she had shrivelled up like an albino

prune.

Wrapping a towel around herself, she padded out of the bathroom. For an instant she

had the same feeling of wrongness as she’d felt in Krugor’s cubbyhole, that sense of

something indefinably out of kilter, but the cabin seemed precisely as she’d left it. The

convincing-looking costume jewellery that was absent-mindedly scattered across the

dresser – and which would surely have acted as a magnet for any intruder – remained

precisely as she’d left it.

The half-completed joy-luck crystal and its loose components were scattered on the

bed. She supposed that she should crack on with the rebuilding of it, but for the moment

her heart wasn’t in it. She glanced around the cabin, at the bedroll, the crumpled clothes

and the piled-up dinners, and experienced one of those moments of occasional clarity

that one gets after inhabiting untidy, stuffy rooms for far too long – she realized how

precisely stuffy and untidy it was.

If nobody had come after her about suspicious deaths of manservants by now, then

nobody probably would. Benny decided that what she really needed to do at this point

was to go out, let the Titanian Queen’s stewards go over the cabin and probably

fumigate it to boot, before she ended up stuck to the bedraggled carpeted floor by her

own effluvia.

The loose pieces of crystal went back in the bag, then the bag and the reconstructed

portion went into a silk-lined hatbox, which she placed in the back of a closet behind a

small pile of expensive shoes she had yet to wear. She went back into the bathroom and

picked up her wristwatch from the sill. The twelve-hour face said that it was coming up

to eight o’clock – and she realized that she had lost track of time to the point where it

could be eight in the evening, in terms of the cruise ship’s time frame, or eight in the

morning. The growling chasm of her stomach persuaded her to assume that it was

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10 A DINNER APPOINTMENT WITH DESTINY

Page 67

evening, and just in time for dinner. It had better be.

Since this would be her first appearance for days, she decided to make a small show

of it. Among the clothing Krytell had supplied for her was a flowing gown of some

translucent, samite-like substance, interwoven with threads of gold and cracked-glass

mosaic in chromatic tones ranging from ruby-red to ochre. It was gathered in at the

waist, had a plunging neckline and a slit up the side. Benny – who had a self-image suf-

ficiently developed not to care what the hell she looked like, provided she had two of

everything she should have and one of everything else – experienced the kind of

momentary flash of paranoia, of the sort that has the best of us wondering if we can

carry something off. But the gown was a masterpiece of haute couture design, specific-

ally designed for her. She looked like seven thousand, four hundred and thirty-three shil-

lings – that being the price written on the tag, which she mercifully noticed and pulled

off before leaving.

The vestiges of her hairdo had been washed out in the bath. It was clean, but ragged

and unkempt. On the other hand, it set off the splendidness of the gown in the same way

as a pair of Doc Martens set off a little black cocktail dress. Benny picked up a pair of

earrings from the dresser, prepared to put them on – and then decided what the hell: she

was out of Krugor’s supervision now, and she might as well be hung for a Squoldavian

bloat-squid as a limpet whelk. She scooped the costume jewellery up in its entirety,

dropped it into a clutch bag, swept out of the cabin and headed towards the Purser’s

office.

In his own cabin, Captain Crane took one last look in the elderly and slightly mottled

mirror. His white suit with epaulettes was pristine and polished respectively; his cap was

on his head and he hated it. The cut touched and constricted him in places where no

clothing really should, having been designed, like a theatrical costume, to project a cer-

tain image – to cut, as it were, a degree of dash.

In the same way, while the exterior was stitched together finely, the interior had been

skimped on a lining, save for hessian bulking where such was needed. Captain Crane

had attempted to counter it with a shabby but long set of underwear – which now just

meant that where he wasn’t itching he was sweltering.

Walking a little stiffly, he left the cabin and went forward through the crew’s quarters

to the bridge.

‘My dear Captain,’ said the voice of ARVID. ‘We meet again.’

Crane ignored it. Number One was off duty and with hir brood-polyp, replenishing hir

energies and precious bodily fluids. The two most senior officers here were a man

named Golding and a woman named Cherry.

Actual rank on a Titanian Queen controlled by ARVID was a farce and Crane knew it.

Nonetheless, he had found himself debating which of these two officers to leave in

charge while he was otherwise detained. Golding was technically brilliant on specifica-

tion-flimsy, but there was a kind of know-all attitude that both irritated Crane and made

10 A DINNER APPOINTMENT WITH DESTINY

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him distrustful. Lisabeth Cherry was slightly less proficient, but seemed to carry a com-

plete, level-headed calm – the sort of calm that would be invaluable in an emergency.

‘Take the conn, Cherry,’ Crane said. ‘I’m going to have to take dinner with the

“guests”.’

Liz Cherry raised an eyebrow. ‘Again? So soon.’ She knew precisely what Captain

Crane thought about the passengers.

‘Yeah, well, I’ve been avoiding it for two days. I’m running out of excuses and I need

to keep some back for when things get really bad.’ Crane turned to leave the bridge.

At the hatch, he turned back. ‘Anything comes up, anywhere on the ship, you deal

with it and let me know. Anything to get me away from the buggers.’ He grinned rue-

fully. ‘Y’know, I sometimes wish something would happen to get rid of one or two of

’em . . .’

Outside the purser’s office, Benny was slightly surprised to find two people on guard,

dressed in the uniforms of the Dellah Constabulary. In the entire sector, Dellah had what

was probably the lowest planetary crime rate, and the smallest and most ill-equipped

policing force – many thinkers would say that these two factors were related, but pos-

sibly in the other way around than was immediately obvious. On the other hand, it may

have been just another example of the civilizing effect of the university. In either case,

the common uniform of the Dellah Constabulary was archaic and ill-fitting, and the two

men on guard appeared uncomfortable in it.

‘What’s going on?’ Benny said. ‘I thought you lads were down in steerage, waiting to

be needed as and when.’

‘Do you have some form of identification, miss?’ one of them said, his tone unde-

cided between deference to Benny’s presumed station in life and the desire of coppers

the whole universe over to plant the two size-elevens of anyone who got overfamiliar

and lippy with them.

Once again, Benny recalled that the trick was to never let oneself be put at a disad-

vantage. ‘Am I to take it you don’t recognize me? I could produce my compact, look

into the mirror and tell you it’s me, if you like.’

From behind the hatch an irascible and slightly flustered voice said: ‘What’s hap-

pening? Who is it out there now?’ The hatch opened to reveal a red face attached to a

balding head.

‘My dear Detective Interchange!’ Benny exclaimed. She batted her eyelashes shame-

lessly at the policeman, as she had seen them do in ancient cinematic movies. ‘What are

you doing here?’

‘An attempted break-in, ma’am,’ said the worthy plod, disarmed by Benny’s feminine

wiles and preening himself a little. ‘It seems that some time last evening, person or per-

sons unknown tried to cut through the safe containing the passengers’ strongboxes with

a thermal lance.’

‘Heavens!’ Benny cried, making a little fluttering gesture at her collarbone. ‘Was any-

10 A DINNER APPOINTMENT WITH DESTINY

Page 69

body hurt in apprehending the fiend? Was anything stolen?’

Detective Interchange shook his head. ‘Nothing like that, ma’am. It appears that the

criminal was disturbed before his crime was complete. He left his equipment and had it

away on his toes before the alarm could be raised.’

‘My goodness,’ Benny said.

‘Was there anything I can help you with at all, ma’am?’ the detective said.

‘Um.’ Benny could discern nothing in his face but helpful enquiry – but the last thing

she needed, given present circumstances, was to show a suspicious interest in the safe

and the removal of its contents. ‘I merely wanted to assure myself that you and your –’

she shot a glance at the two Constables ‘– brave young men are keeping my valuables

safe.’

‘Don’t you worry about that, ma’am,’ Detective Interchange said. ‘Don’t you worry

about that at all. We’ll be looking after ’em, night and day.’

11

SITTING DOWN TO DINE

As has been noted, life aboard the Titanian Queen was delineated by a general con-

sensus into quasi-day and quasi-night, and this had extended to the mealtimes. While a

passenger could theoretically order any meal, of any description, from the kitchens at

any time, there was a set dinner time in the Starfire Lounge, complete with table reserva-

tions, to which people generally adhered.

Benny had thus far not turned up for a single one of them, and stepping into the

lounge was like walking into the pages of Edith Wharton writ large, if with the word

parvenu spelt ultimately incorrect. The tables were packed with men and women in the

kind of formal dress that gave the room the aspect of the collision of a flock of penguins

with a freighterful of motile lamp shades. There were a few empty spaces, and Benny

caught glimpses of little place cards among the silverware and wine glasses. She had no

way, though, of knowing which out of all of them might be inscribed with her name, and

she didn’t really fancy the idea of wandering the entire room looking for it.

She prodded the back of a steward who was standing, a pristine white cloth over his

forearm, waiting for the proceedings to formally commence. ‘Oi, chappie. Lead me to

my place without delay.’

The steward turned – and Benny gave a small gasp of surprise. This was instantly

quashed, as she realized that she had been mistaken. There were certain superficial sim-

ilarities, but he was not some miraculously animated Krugor. Possibly the man’s murder

had affected her more than she realized, so that she might imagine his face everywhere –

and this was slightly strange, because she had encountered violent death before and had

never reacted in that way. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, she thought.

She thought she caught a flash of irritation in the steward’s face – and so she should,

given the rudeness of her address – and then it instantly became composed. ‘If you’ll

come with me, Ms Summersdale.’

As she accompanied the steward through the dining hall, Benny wondered idly how

he had instantly known her name. It didn’t worry her particularly. She was vaguely

aware that the public-service industries, the restaurant franchises and hotel chains of the

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11 SITTING DOWN TO DINE

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galaxy, commonly packed their employees with subcutaneous communications gear,

conditioning implants and molecularly based databases to transform them into unob-

trusive, miraculously efficient attendants – even going so far as to breed them up from

scratch on worlds where this was not illegal, in force-gestation vats. They were, in a

sense, a mere extension of the decor and furniture, albeit responsive and reactive fur-

niture. If she were to suddenly and without warning sit herself down, Benny suspected, a

steward would whip a chair under her with almost superhuman speed, before her bum

hit the floor.

Looking around her at the assembled passengers, she also suspected that she was the

only one among them wondering about the help even this far. It was as if they were quite

simply invisible, as they shuttled and wove through the room, the expectant diners

giving them no thought other than was necessary to absently hold out a glass to be filled,

or pluck a bread roll from a proffered basket, or lean into the flame of a lighted match to

light a cigarino. It was like watching the smooth and complex dance of mechanical

ghosts.

She saw several people she recognized, including a fair number she wished she didn’t.

The Dowager Duchess of Gharl, in particular, was sitting at what she assumed to be the

Captain’s Table – a long rectangular trestle running down the length of a wall as opposed

to the more common circular tables. Since the fact of sitting here conveyed to a certain

kind of mind a degree of prestige, this kind of mind thought nothing of paying extra for

it, and the owners of the Titanian Queen no doubt knew the side on which their freshly

baked and crusty roll was buttered.

The captain himself – again, having never clapped eyes on him, Benny assumed it

could only be the captain, from his position in the centre and his dress uniform – seemed

entirely nondescript, his bearing suggesting that if not exactly harried now, he neverthe-

less existed in an almost permanent state of harry. He was listening to Emil Dupont, his

posture suggesting that he was desperately trying not to nod off, as the great detective,

who sat beside the Duchess, habitually held forth.

Scattered around the dining room Benny saw several of the other detectives. Sandford

Groke sat bolt upright at one table, seemingly ignoring and ignored by the other occu-

pants, his fist clenched and glaring straight ahead in what appeared to be a kind of con-

stant, inner, default-setting rage. Agatha Magpole sat primly, sipping a small sherry

while her companion fussed over her, straightening her frock and tucking in a napkin.

Off to one side, Khaarli was sitting among tables occupied by the relatively few non-

human beings – Benny wondered if this arrangement was a product of their simply con-

gregating together because they had more in common, or whether they had been subtly

helped there by influences that it would not be the done thing to suggest were in any

way speciesism at all.

For an awful moment, Benny thought that she had been seated with the large collec-

tion of nobs at the Captain’s Table. Then the steward veered sharply to the left, and

deposited her at one of the more diminutive tables. This was occupied by, among others,

11 SITTING DOWN TO DINE

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a fat, avuncular man with an extremely impressive set of muttonchop whiskers, which

gave him something of the aspect of an amiable walrus.

As her steward pulled the chair back to allow her to sit, she became aware of a small,

rodent-like and frightened squeak off to one side. She turned to see, sitting in the chair

beside her, the mousy young woman she had encountered briefly, several days before, in

the ballroom, when she had rescued her from the animosity of the Dowager Duchess of

Gharl. The young woman looked at Benny, white-faced and panic-stricken, as if about to

bolt.

‘Bernice Summersdale,’ Benny said to her, helping herself to a glassful of wine from

the bottle in the centre of the table. ‘You can call me Benny. I hope you’re feeling all

right, now.’

The woman gave a tiny ‘eep’ noise, then blushed and nodded furiously.

‘Don’t mind our Miss Blaine,’ boomed the bewhiskered gentleman, filling his own

glass. ‘Wouldn’t say boo to a bandersnatch – which, given that a bandersnatch is twenty

metres long, omnivorously voracious and has seven sets of jaws each containing four

rows of retractable venomous fangs, is probably a sound and sensible idea.’ He bluffly

thumped his chest with his thumb. ‘Prekodravac.’

‘How do you pronounce that?’ Benny asked him, interested.

‘Preh-ko-dra-vuts. The “c” at the end makes an uts sound.’ The man thumped his

chest again. ‘Mr Richard Tarquin Delbert Prekodravac, but I don’t stand stiff on cere-

mony, even though I’m a big man for standing proud and firm.’ He put a companionable

hand on Benny’s knee and waggled his eyebrows. ‘Please feel free to call me Mister

Dickie.’

On the other side of her, the nominative Miss Blaine blushed like a Belisha beacon,

and Benny fancied that she knew why – by the cut of his clothing and the shape of his

earlobes, Benny recognized ‘Mister Dickie’ as an inhabitant of Plumptious Minor. And

the fact that this planet’s name itself did not ring strange to its inhabitants told one pretty

much all one needed to know about them in an oogli fruitskin.

The history of Plumptious Minor was vaguely interesting. Originally a standard Earth

colony, for several hundred years it had been cut off from the galaxy at large, in which

time it had built an extensive culture from the remains of its surviving planetary archives

– which by some fluke of circumstance had consisted almost entirely of old Carry On

films, Benny Hill shows, Up Pompeii compilations and an obscure twentieth-century

sitcom going by the name of Love Thy Neighbour. This had caused problems, to say the

least, upon the re-establishment of contact, when the Big High Hooha of Plumptious

Minor had greeted the leader of the first galactic diplomatic mission, the Lady Xhanda

of the Twelve Spired House of the Nine Systems, with a cheery ‘Wotcha, sweetheart;

that’s a lovely pair of thruppenies you’ve got on you, for a fat bird, like.’

The point was that – just as the Big High Hooha had been offering the greatest com-

pliment he had known – Mr Richard Tarquin Delbert Prekodravac was now simply being

friendly and nothing more. And in the culturally comparative stakes Benny was on a jet-

11 SITTING DOWN TO DINE

Page 73

propelled skateboard. So, rather than chopping the hand on her knee off at the wrist with

the fish knife, she responded in the proper kind, and prodded Mister Dickie in the ribs –

or, at least, sank her finger into a point roughly comparable to where his ribs should be.

‘Sauce!’

‘My word,’ said the man, beaming, ‘I do like a good solid poke before dinner.’ He

winked at Benny. ‘I believe that rumour has it, after the fish course, that there’s going to

be stuffing.’

‘And you know where you can stick your stuffing,’ said Benny, friendlily.

‘Chance, madam,’ said Mister Dickie Prekodravac, ‘would be a fine thing.’

Quite how long this remarkably amicable example of social intercourse would have

gone on for is debatable – because at that point a holo-display flickered on: an oiled and

muscular man, bestriding the dining hall, struck a massive and sonorous gong. (Person-

ally, Benny found it overostentatious; all in all, all things considered, a bit of a J. Arthur

Rank.)

Mister Dickie Prekodravac’s eyes lit up and he rubbed his hands together. ‘I do

believe we’re all about to be serviced. Dinner, I think, is about to be served.’

The next two hours, so far as Benny was concerned, were an ambivalent cross between

mounting irritation and exquisite gustatory and emotional torture. For one thing, since

this mealtime was an occasion, there was a set menu. The other thing concerned pre-

cisely what the menu comprised:

The soup course was a bouillon of shrimp, clam, mussels and stripefish in a cayenne-

peppery white-wine stock, served on the sizzling boil so that the occasional pearl of a

tiny white onion rolled.

The second course was coarse foi gras, and melon wrapped in slivers of wind-cured

ham so delicate that it came apart almost explosively in the mouth. This cleared the

palate for the actual fish course, which consisted of:

Elysian Snapping Flatfish braised in butter to that magic, impossible point of crisp-

ness on the outside, succulence within, without in any way browning.

The main course consisted of what the steward described as Poussin Surprise – which

Benny somehow thought might be fish yet again, until she saw the big plates each con-

taining four boned baby chickens, wrapped in bacon and roasted, one stuffed with wild-

boar-and-venison sausage meat and garlic, one stuffed with dried apricot steeped in

wine, one stuffed with chestnuts, and one stuffed with a mixture of breadcrumbs and

Nova Belgique chocolate – that being the Surprise, but the real surprise being how won-

derful, apparently, it tasted.

A selection of sweets from the trolley, including jelly and sherry trifles, syllabubs,

pastries, maids of honour, tarts, spun-sugar nests of glazed fruits and whipped cream,

eclairs, kulfi, knickerbocker glories, apple pies from recipes taken at gunpoint from old

grandmothers, bombes, lattis, bakewell sponges, gooseberry fools, compotes, sundaes,

mousses, chocolate fudge cakes; cheese and biscuits to follow and an after-dinner

11 SITTING DOWN TO DINE

Page 74

mint . . .

. . . all of which, with the possible exception of the inside of the after-dinner mint,

based on so much meat and animal-related product that it was a wonder the plates and

cutlery weren’t spinning around the room, under the poltergeisten influence of dead

animal ghosts. Benny tried repeatedly to order something vegetarian from a steward –

and got a blank, possibly integrally programmed suggestion that she merely pick the

vegetables out from what was placed before her. Since the vast majority of said veget-

ables had been well basted in fat, however, or were to be found floating in sauces so

meat-juice rich that they were almost sentient, this was hardly a satisfactory reply.

Things were not helped by the presence of Mister Dickie beside her, shovelling his

way through the various courses with the efficiency of a mechanical trench-digger,

elbowing her in the ribs and telling her that she needed to put some meat on her bones,

’cause he liked something to grab hold of on a tart, and asking if he could have her

almost untouched leftovers, if she wasn’t in fact going to eat them.

Benny, in short, spent the meal subsisting entirely on her bread roll and the pickings

from the side salad, trying to distract her attention from the furious carnivorous knife-

and-fork action going on around her, and desperately trying to pretend that the sounds

her stomach was making were the responsibility of a sudden horse in front. Fortunately

– or unfortunately, depending upon the point of view – each meal was accompanied by

the appropriate drink, and rather like the vegetarian arrangements for the meal, soft

drinks were not an option:

Red and white Sauternes and Chiantis, Merlots, Champagnes, Vermouths; triple-dis-

tilled and oak-aged Scotches, unblended sherry wines, Madeiras; small beers, medium-

dry ciders, bloody enormous stouts; crusted ports with the cheese and thousand-year-old

brandy, and methyl-dex and THC-laced cigars to follow. A little voice in Benny’s head

told her that if she touched any one of these on an all-but-empty stomach she was asking

for trouble – and further enquired, given her aversion to the edible products of animals,

just how was that different from the consumption of the waste-matter of several million

yeast bacteria? When that voice became a little too intrusive, Benny silenced it by the

tried, tested and patently reasonable expedient of having another drink.

Some while later, she realized that she was staring blankly at Miss Blaine, having

mumbled some sort of question at her.

‘Isabel,’ Miss Blaine was saying, picking at her food. She put a morsel of carefully

cut meat into her mouth, chewed with her mouth closed, swallowed and dabbed at her

mouth with a napkin. The process didn’t seem prim, precisely; more the self-conscious

actions of a child on its best behaviour, timidly doing the things it’s been told to do in

adult company and slightly terrified of getting it wrong.

‘Isabel Blaine,’ she continued, very politely, trying to make proper adult conversation.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t travelled, much, thank you for asking. I spent so much time looking

after Mother –’ she pronounced the name with capitals ‘– you see, after she became Ill.’

Again the word was pronounced with capitals. ‘After she passed on, I came into a little

11 SITTING DOWN TO DINE

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money, and I decided to see some of the world. It’s very –’ she made a vague little ges-

ture that took in the entire dining hall, and seemed to convey an entire universe of

puzzled slight and hurt ‘– splendid, isn’t it?’

‘Glurp.’ Benny’s attention wandered off Isabel Blaine and into the dining room. She

saw that Khaarli was tucking into his food with gusto – indeed, aside from the small

matter of species, it was as though the Czhan were almost a twin of Mister Dickie. Sand-

ford Groke was industriously cutting up his food and raising his fork to his mouth with

the kind of mechanical action of one who eats to live rather than lives to eat. There

seemed something subtly wrong with the image, but at this distance and through her

clouded vision, Benny couldn’t work out quite what it was.

Emil Dupont was making a triplet with Mister Dickie and Khaarli, while the captain

had his head in his hands. This might have been due to the fact that the Dowager

Duchess of Gharl was now speaking, declaratively, as she ate. Her words were lost in the

general hubbub and clashing of cutlery, but she was close enough for Benny to make out

her tone: a kind of venomous, mean-spirited clucking that suggested that the servants

should be strung up by their thumbs and soundly thrashed, and not in any way that might

be fun for more than one of the parties involved.

The Dowager Duchess was close enough for Benny to see the individual jewels she

was wearing – in particular, the pendant depending from her neck to lodge within her

ample breast. Benny, who would ordinarily have been shot before using such a phrase as

‘ample breast’, and was far less inclined to be caught looking at such – at least, if there

were people around with a clipboard ticking boxes on the Kinsey scale – nevertheless

found herself gazing at the stone: a large star-cut diamond, of a shape possible to cut

only if the original stone had been half a metre across. It would obviously be a paste

copy – the original safely stashed away in the purser’s safe – but the way it caught the

light it could have almost been real. It caught the light hypnotically. It was captivating.

Thus, her largely inebriated attention captivated by the stone, it was the last thing she

saw before the lights went out, and the entire dining room plunged into darkness.

12

THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY

OF FOUL PLAY

In the darkness, the dining chamber was a chaos of susurrating and possibly even ulu-

lating noise, as everybody tried to talk at once.

‘A most exceeding degree of blackness,’ said Prekodravac, to one side. ‘I do enjoy a

big black –’

‘Don’t’, snapped Benny, who was feeling slightly testy of a sudden, ‘even think about

it.’

‘I was merely going to say that I appear to have misplaced my bearings,’ said

Prekodravac. ‘The sudden chill of fright, you know.’

In the middle distance she heard a voice booming, ‘Well find a pribbling whey-faced

match, then, thou swag-bellied knotty-pated maggot pie!’

‘It’s a trick!’ cried an excited voice from another quarter. ‘A foul alien trick conducted

by fiendish aliens to put all right-thinking folk off their watchful guard!’

‘Oh, bog off, Groke!’ boomed the previous voice in reply. ‘Give it a rest, thou gorbel-

lied rump-fed boot-licker.’

‘Mind my hat!’ shouted another voice through the throng. ‘Oh damn and blast! I’ll

never get to heaven now.’

‘Being in the dark like this occasionally gives me a fright,’ Prekodravac said, happily.

‘I do believe I’m feeling a small one now.’

‘How small?’ Benny found herself asking automatically, before mentally kicking her-

self.

‘Not that small.’

‘Miss Summerfield?’ a voice whispered urgently, from a point that seemed to be dir-

ectly behind the nape of her neck. It was male and sounded frightened. ‘I have an

important message for you. My cabin number is on here.’ Fingers took hold of her hand

and something was pressed into it. It felt like a small piece of stiff, folded paper.

‘What?’ Benny said, belatedly realizing that the mysterious stranger had used her real

rather than assumed name. There was no answer, save for Mister Dickie Prekodravac

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opining that perhaps the management was twiddling the wrong knob and it was, quite

frankly, becoming rather wearisome.

It was at that moment that the chandeliers that had illuminated the dining chamber

gave a flicker, and then came back on. Blinking rapidly to accustom herself to the glare,

Benny glanced about herself, trying to locate the owner of the mysterious voice. Nobody

on one side but Mister Dickie, nobody on the other but Miss Isabel Blaine, who had not

said a word in all this time and was clutching her large clutch bag to herself, white-

faced.

In Benny’s hand was a small, folded business card. She unfolded it and read, painstak-

ingly, the densely curlicued copperplate script.

Mr Jonathan A. Sheen

Chmn Tantra Industrial Cleaning

and Sewerage Services

There was no address, but then again there didn’t need to be. Tantra Industrial

Cleaning and Sewerage Services were as well known, on any of a thousand planets, as

had once been the name Armitage Shanks. People in their millions, going about their

business of the day, had found themselves gazing blankly upon the Tantra logo of a

world-eating Ouroboros snake, and possibly mulling over the incorporation slogan of:

TANTRA – PUTTING WORLDS IN MOTION. If he was, in fact, the ‘Chmn’ of Tantra Indus-

trial Cleaning and Sewerage Services, this Jonathan A. Sheen must be personally richer

than the dreams of avarice. He must be, not to put too fine a point on the matter, rolling

in it.

Scrawled hastily on the reverse of the card was a cabin number – but Benny had no

time, for the moment, to ponder the matter further, because at that point a shrill and

heartfelt scream rang through the dining chamber, and shocked all those within to

silence.

‘My diamond!’ the Dowager Duchess of Gharl shrieked, prodding frantically at her

bosom. ‘The Fabled Star of Saint Timothy, the patron saint of animal hospitals, standard

lamps and small pieces of parsley, has gorn! ’

On one side of her, the captain banged his head on the table repeatedly, in the age-old

manner of one who has observed the tin lid descending.

‘Not at all, Your Worship.’ On the other side of the Dowager’s bulk from the captain,

Emil Dupont, who seemed to have somehow confused the Duchess with an ordained

female bishop, pointed dramatically to something on the carpet. ‘I plainly see the item in

question on that very spot! Doubtless, it must have broken from its circlet and fallen

there in the confusion.’

‘It’s not a Fabled Star of Saint Timothy,’ said the captain resignedly, still banging his

head on the table. ‘It’s a half-eaten bloody baby chicken roasted in sodding bacon. The

12 THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY OF FOUL PLAY

Page 78

damn thing slipped out of her fingers when she was scarfing it down her bleeding

throat.’

This distressing display of true feeling brought an outraged squeak to the bleeding

throat of the Duchess even in her extremis. Emil Dupont gave a double take such as has

not been seen since the halcyon days of early twentieth-century silent film, and peered at

the item on the floor again.

‘It would appear that you are correct,’ he said, a little deflated. ‘I would care to know

very much how you made such a deduction, when it escaped even I, Emil Dupont, the

greatest detective in all of Nova Belgique.’

‘Take a wild imaginative bloody guess.’ The captain raised his head and regarded the

Dowager Duchess of Gharl balefully. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That was a fake, right?

The real thing is still locked in the purser’s safe and under guard?’

‘You ghastly little man!’ cried the Duchess. ‘Do you think that I would soil myself

with artificial jewellery, like some of these commoners here? The Star of Saint Timothy

was the genuine article!’

The captain started banging his head on the table again.

‘You have suffered an appalling shock, Your Worship.’ Emil Dupont picked up his

glass of the wine they had just been served before the lights had failed – a syrupy dessert

wine intended to complement the popular bombe surprise – and proffered it to the dis-

traught Duchess. ‘Here. This will set you soon to rights.’

The Dowager Duchess took the glass without a word of thanks, drained it, and threw

back her head in a display of anguish only otherwise achieved by operatic tenors. ‘Why,’

she declared ringingly, ‘it can only be the work of the Cat’s –’

The glass flew from her spasming fingers. Her eyes bulged. A choking gurgle issued

from her now, suddenly, literally bleeding throat and she began to inflate.

And then she exploded.

With a bang.

Covering half the table, a large section of wall, and those seated immediately around

her to a depth of three with the constituents of a large dinner and most of the biological

equipment that was being used to digest it.

The chamber erupted into screams. At her table beside, among others, Mister Dickie and

Isabel Blaine, Benny saw the captain and Emil Dupont climbing back on to their feet

among the smoking mess. She wasn’t going to call it a steaming mess, even to herself.

Fortunately for them, the captain and the great detective did not seem to have been hit

by anything hard. Debris rather than – she tried to think of an apposite word – debris

rather than shrapnel.

Through the panicked din, she heard Dupont cry, ‘This must have been the result of

some small thermite bomb, placed surreptitiously under the table and secured with

adhesive tape, by a troupe of midgets with mountaineering crampons, even while we

were occupied with dinner!’

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‘Right,’ said Benny, who had been watching the pre-detonative scene as closely as

everybody else in the dining chamber. ‘Probably in little bobble hats.’ She turned to

Mister Dickie Prekodravac. ‘What is this thing the chap has with midg–’

She stared in horror as an apparently unperturbed Mister Dickie drained his glass of

the wine they’d just been served before the lights had failed. She frantically scanned the

chamber and saw that several other people were taking a small drink to calm their

nerves.

‘Most unexpected,’ Mister Dickie was saying. ‘But, then again, I’m sometimes very

partial to an unexpected ba–’

‘Everybody down!’ Benny screamed, hauling over the table and shoving a startled

Isabel Blaine behind it, landing heavily on top of her. The young lady struggled under

her – thinking Goddess knew what, exactly – but Benny bore down hard. The upturned

table took most of the brunt from Mister Dickie’s explosion and, almost simultaneously

with it, she heard several other muffled detonations – not muffled by anything much,

precisely, but muffled by the nature of what it actually was that was detonating.

‘Oh well,’ she muttered, as items of various description flew overhead. ‘It’s probably

the way he’d have wanted to go.’

13

THE PURÉE OF THE PLOT

NOTICEABLY THICKENS

A quarter of an hour later, the dining room had been largely cleared. The constables of

the Dellah Constabulary had been called, and had arrived (leaving, of course, a contin-

gent to guard the safe in the purser’s office) just in time to prevent a general stampede of

diners desperately trying to get away from the blast area, a large number of them also

desperate to wash the after effects of the blast from themselves.

The after effects, naturally, had included the general response that certain people had

made, upon seeing other people exploding all around them, after a big dinner. The con-

stables had ineffectually attempted to prevent the mass exodus, and take names and

addresses – before the realization sank in that everybody here was in a hermetically

sealed spacegoing liner, and wouldn’t exactly be going anywhere.

The captain, who with Dupont had taken the brunt of the Dowager’s detonation, was

nowhere to be seen, having probably repaired to repair the damage done to his previ-

ously pristine uniform.

All who remained in the dining chamber now were the constables, the great detect-

ives, the remains of the dead, those who might identify them and of course a collection

of interested onlookers who had hung around in case anything of further interest

happened. Benny would, she supposed, be technically classed with this last category,

had anyone wanted a technical smack in the mouth for suggesting it.

She found herself gravitating towards Khaarli. The note from Jonathan A. Sheen was

burning a hole in her pocket – or, rather, the inside of the bodice of her gown, where she

had put it for safekeeping – and she wanted to consult somebody about it, and Khaarli

seemed to be the best of the bunch. Out of these so-called ‘great detectives’ he was the

most approachable, and the single one of them who didn’t seem to be entirely round the

twist.

Detective Second-Class Interchange – the prosaic and workaday Lestrade among

these investigators – had busied himself compiling a list of the murder victims, using for

the most part such personal effects as could be found, and when all else failed, reading

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the remains of the place cards.

‘Mr Richard Tarquin Delbert Prekodravac,’ he said, flipping through his notebook.

‘The Emir Dan Ben-Zvi. Ms Jane Jecubelli. Ms Julia Porter. Mr Geoffrey Weasel. A Mr

Michael Kogge is unaccounted for, but we found his distinctive ginger wig, twenty

metres from where he was sitting, on the sweet trolley, in the apricot syllabub. A Mr

Philip Thorne, a Mr Andrew Leighton . . .’

‘They are of no matter,’ snapped Sandford Groke, his body bristling and quivering

with outrage. He pointed dramatically to the epicentre of the area occupied by the late

Dowager. ‘The fiend was after the Duchess of Gharl. This can only be the work –’ he

flowered darkly at Khaarli ‘– of cowardly alien anarcho-syndicalists plotting to rid the

very galaxy itself of its God-appointed landed gentry!’

‘Much as I hate to agree with this currish, cockered pigeon-egg,’ the Czhan rumbled,

‘I think he might be right. Except of course for the cowardly plot, the anarcho-syndical-

ists and the aliens.’

‘Did anybody think to search people for the stolen diamond?’ Benny found herself

asking.

The great detectives, as one, turned to regard her.

‘Well, it strikes me that these deaths would be the perfect cover for getting it away in

the confusion,’ she continued, and instantly regretted it. ‘I don’t know, though,’ she

back-pedalled, ‘I mean, I’ve never heard of the Cat’s Paw actually killing anybody

befo–’

‘That must be it!’ exclaimed Interchange. ‘The fiend!’

Khaarli the Czhan nodded slowly. He seemed slightly dubious. ‘I hardly need men-

tion,’ he said, ‘what our next course of action should be, thou fat-kidneyed turdly-fallen

fustilarians.’

‘Quite right,’ said Dupont. ‘We must all pull on brightly coloured frocks and put on an

impromptu song-and-dance show. Enchanted by the dulcet tone of our singing and the

syncopated rhythms of our tap-dancing, the criminal shall be drawn to us and then reveal

himself!’

‘I was actually thinking, thou fen-sucked gleeking horn-beast, that the agent of these

people’s demise must have been in the wine. New Madagascan puff-mongoose tincture,

perhaps, which is odourless, tasteless and can only be detected, I gather, by way of the

sub-audial sounds of its micro-organisms going “Wheee!” The bottles must be

impounded and analysed. The wine racks must be searched to discover how they came

to be contaminated.’

Emil Dupont nodded. ‘That, too, I concede. Can’t think why I didn’t think of it

myself.’

Agatha Magpole still sat where she had when the detonations had occurred. She had

not been touched by any of the blasts, but the shock had given her one of her turns. Her

companion fussed over her, loosening her collar and wafting cool air on to her face with

a doily.

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Most of the bottles and glasses in question had been broken, both in the explosions

and in the rush to get out of the vicinity that they had precipitated, but Interchange

ordered his constables to retrieve and tag all that remained, which they carefully began

to do.

They had just started this process, when the relative calm of the dining chamber was

pierced by a plaintive but uncommonly piercing cry. Running through the door came a

woman who, it seemed, would have been slightly dowdy and haggard-looking in any

case, even if she had not been in some distress, as she was now. Benny recognized the

good lady wife of Nathanael C. Nerode, the large man in wholesale Goblanian bog seal

blubber. She tried to recall whether or not she had seen her and her spouse at dinner.

‘My husband!’ The good Mrs Nerode cried in heart-rending distress. ‘Oh, sirs! My

husband has been horribly murdered!’

A distraught Mrs Nathanael C. Nerode – Benny never learnt her given name, and

privately doubted that she had one – led them down a corridor, down two decks via a

spiral staircase and then, if her spiral-staircasively disorientated sense of direction could

be trusted, back, in general, the direction from which they had come. Benny’s heart sank

more than somewhat. The way her luck had been going, she’d lay even odds on where

they were going to end up.

The party Mrs Nerode led consisted of a pair of Dellah constables, Prosecutor General

of the Czhanos Militia Khaarli and Benny herself. On hearing that this latest, putative

murder victim was not one of what might be called the ‘better’ class of people, the great

detectives had evidenced a distinct lack of interest in pursuing the case. Only Khaarli

among them had made his feelings known concerning the idea of there being one law for

the rich, another for the less rich and no sort of law at all for the poor, and had stormed

off to have a look. Benny had decided to tag along with him, and he seemed to welcome

her assistance. She had – or, in all probability had had – no love for Nerode, but she

agreed with Khaarli’s view of things wholeheartedly and, besides, it was the perfect

opportunity to get the Czhan detective alone for a small talk.

As they neared the end of the gangway, and saw a flickering vapour sign above the

hatchway at the end, Benny saw that her worst fears had been well grounded. They were

going into Percy’s Discotheque.

This was the domain of the offspring of those who had been at dinner – and, Benny

thought, if there was ever an argument for giving people compulsory sterilizations and

compensatory transistor radios it was this. Shrieking, bubbly teenage slappers in extor-

tionately expensive designer shreds of tinsel hurled champagne about, collapsed in gig-

gling heaps and threw up, tried to crawl up the legs of the bar staff and flashed their

underwear at anything that moved. And the girls, if anything, were even worse.

They had entered at what seemed to be a lull in the proceedings. The music had been

turned low, and a pale but enormously fat and self-obsessed little rich girl was on the

stage that ordinarily supported go-go dancers and male strippers, dressed in pristine,

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black Goth apparel that must have cost a small fortune, inflicting upon all and sundry

what she probably thought to be the dangerous poetry of youth.

‘The black crow of doom has landed on my head,’ she was mumbling:

It is black like my soul,

And my soul is black as death.

Nobody understands me;

I hate my parents,

And I especially hate my sister, Laura

Because everybody likes her better than me

And I hope she dies horribly in a car crash.

The precisely similarly dressed contingent of her friends lounged by one of the

mouldings on the walls, and nodded with cool appreciation, never allowing themselves

to show anything as gauche and uncool as actual enthusiasm. Benny, who in her time

had been a seriously angsty teenage poet, felt as though the single most embarrassing

period of her entire life had come back to haunt her.

Mrs Nerode took them into a smallish back room that might at one point have served

any number of purposes, but now served to contain the body of Nerode. A member of

the bar staff stood rather vacantly nearby – the same kind of enhanced employee as had

been employed in the dining room, but of a white-shined, waistcoated, leather-trousered

type more suited to the immediate surroundings. Again, Benny was struck by the

remarkable similarity to the dead Krugor – and made yet another mental note to tell

somebody about that the moment she thought she could do so and get away with it.

‘I had taken to bed for an early night,’ Mrs Nerode explained. ‘Nathanael had gone to

complain about the general and most deplorable lack of facilities for respectable people

– as he liked to do regularly, sometimes for hours at a time . . .’

Benny shot a glance to the member of the bar staff, who remained utterly poker-faced

and unconcerned.

‘Jacquin here came across him, and placed a call to my cabin,’ continued Mrs Nerode.

‘I cannot for the life of me imagine how he came to be here.’

The late Nathanael C. Nerode was dressed in an outfit that might once, at some histor-

ical point, have caused its wearer to be dubbed ‘the oldest swinger in town’. A white suit

with flappy, flared trousers and wing collars; a black silk shirt open to the navel to reveal

a chest wig, enough gold medallions to make an Olympic powerball team scream with

envy and quite possibly a merkin – Benny really didn’t want to look close enough to

check. The effect was spoilt slightly by the fact that he was still wearing grey socks and

brown sandals – and by the substances that were oozing out of his ears, and other areas.

‘So what do you think?’ she asked Khaarli.

‘Well he’s dead, at any rate.’ The Czhan turned to the member of the bar staff. ‘You.

Tell me what happened precisely before he died, thou sheep-biting dissembling nut-

hook.’

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The leather-trousered man shrugged. Obviously, his vat-grown brain had not been

designed for the higher levels of cognition. ‘Don’ know nothing, me. Guy was jumpin’

around like he had a spring up him, doin’ that thing where he rolls the hands around an’

tryin’ to look up young ladies’ skirts. Next thing, he’s jerkin’ and yammerin’ and

shriekin’ away. Didn’ notice the difference, tell you the truth, till he shit himself and fell

over.’

‘Hm.’ Khaarli turned back to Benny. ‘Probably some kind of sonic device, thou hell-

hated hasty-witted maggot pie. Pulse-pumped sound waves at a frequency fit to turn his

brains to turbid mush.’

Benny nodded. ‘Sounds reasonable.’ She groped through her mind to try to locate

half-remembered physics lessons from school, similar information picked up via

osmosis from the environs of St Oscar’s and practical experience of weaponry picked up

from a lifetime of coming into contact with it, mostly on the wrong end. ‘Something like

that could be the size of a handgun. I don’t think there’s any way we could find the

person who did it by now, without a top-to-tail search of the ship.’

‘Dupont, Groke and the rest aren’t going to do that for this base-court clapper-clawed

lewdster.’ Khaarli gestured downward to the wretched if shocked stiff remains of

Nerode. ‘I’ll see if I can persuade ’em to add a sonic gun to the list if and when they do.’

Mrs Nerode chose that moment to swoon, fortuitously into the arms of the member of

the bar staff. ‘Oh my poor husband!’ she cried theatrically. ‘Life without him will never

be the same!’

Benny looked at her again. ‘I’m quite sure it won’t.’

‘One of you take her back to her cabin, thou dismal-dreaming ill-nurtured bum-

baileys,’ Khaarli said to one of the constables. He gestured to the steward. ‘The other

take a statement from him.’

Left alone with Khaarli and the body of Nerode, with nothing directly pertinent to

contribute, Benny decided that now was as good a time as any to acquaint the detective

with her own discoveries. Glossing over the fact of how she had come to be there and

why, she told him of how she had witnessed what had seemed to be the murder of

Krugor, and that the body seemed to have remained undiscovered; told him of the

whispered conversation in the dark with Mr Jonathan A. Sheen; and showed him the

folded card.

‘I mean, it’s probably unrelated to anything, and it’s incredibly dubious in any case,’

she concluded, ‘but at the very least it’s something concrete to go on, even if it doesn’t

lead anywhere.’

Khaarli pondered this for a while. ‘You’re right, thou mammering idle-headed measle.

“Clues”, as such, are always highly doubtful. But it never hurts to take a look.’

Outside the hatch that led to the cabin of Jonathan A. Sheen, they found the captain and

two others, a man and a woman, both in the uniforms of ship’s officers. The captain had,

by now, changed from his Dowager-befouled uniform and wore the worn and grubby

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overalls, donkey jacket and greasy Fassbinder leather cap more suited to the skipper of a

spacegoing tug than a cruise liner. Up close, he seemed haggard, and haggard in a more

genuine sense than the wife of the late Nathanael C. Nerode. His slightly twitchy bearing

suggested rather too many coffees and one or two stims too many; far too many sleep-

less, worried nights.

The two ship’s officers were working frantically on the mechanism behind an open

panel by the door, while Captain Crane stood glumly gazing at the door itself. He turned

to regard Benny and Khaarli with a kind of distaste and loathing in his tense and red-

rimmed eyes – then with a visible jerk caught himself and adopted a barely passing atti-

tude of courtesy towards a paying guest. ‘What do you want?’

‘We were, uh, hoping to have a small word with Mr Sheen,’ Benny said, eyeing the

work in progress at the panel uneasily.

‘A word with Mr Sheen?’ Captain Crane snorted. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to be out of

luck.’ He jerked his head towards the officers. ‘Now, I don’t,’ he said with heavy sar-

casm, ‘expect a fine lady to have the first idea what we’re trying to do here . . .’

‘Let me guess,’ said Benny, dispiritedly. ‘You’ve had a micro-catastrophic hull-

breach, probably caused by a single rogue mesonic particle in interdimensional null-

space, which has latched on to the hull and has now gone overt, the general-order locus

of which just happens to be that cabin. You’re trying to seal it from here, so you can get

in and work on it properly before that –’ she rapped on the hatch with her knuckles

‘– rather thin interior hatch gives way and we all of us suddenly find ourselves

exploding out into vacuum. How am I doing so far?’

‘So far,’ the captain said, glowering at her with an anger slightly diffused by a

grudging respect, ‘you’ve got it almost exactly right. Apart from me hoping like hell it

was just in fact a meteorite.’

He did not have time to say more, because at the point the man working on the mech-

anism swore, the hatch leading into the cabin of Mr Jonathan A. Sheen slid back, and the

air from the corridor burst in with a concussive whomph!

14

THE PLOT BECOMES MORE

COMPLICATED THAN WAS

PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED

The air burst into the cabin with a concussive whomph! because the cabin appeared to be

still airtight and the pressure was merely equalizing. Had it not been, there would have

been no sound but the shriek of gasses under atmospheric but catastrophically

decreasing pressure through a hole in the hull, together with the sound of decompression

shutters slamming down throughout the entire ship, sealing the fate of anyone unlucky

enough to find themselves on the wrong side of them.

As it was, a puzzled Crane and the two ship’s officers, with Benny and Khaarli

trailing behind, walked into a bedchamber that looked as though a small whirlwind had

hit it. The finish on the balk corresponding to the hull was scuffed by the Brownian viol-

ence that had occurred, but it was otherwise completely intact.

‘So how could the place be depressurized?’ Crane muttered.

‘It’s not my area of expertise, but couldn’t the air have been simply pumped out?’

suggested Khaarli. ‘Thou spongy dread-bolted codpiece.’

‘The ARVID slave systems reported catastrophic depressurization,’ said Crane, ‘and

for that you’d need a hull breach . . .’

Benny, meanwhile, had been letting her professional instincts take over: letting the

millions of tiny factors inherent in an environment wash over her and integrate so that

the gestalt processes bubbled up from the subconscious. It was a process that was, as she

had told her tutorial groups, time and time again, a completely different thing from

making it all up out of thin air.

The various items of scattered debris were as they were now because of the air

rushing into the room when the hatch slid open. Mentally, she tried to reverse the pro-

cess, imagining them rewinding back to their original position, reconstructing the ori-

ginal state of the cabin with a kind of hypnagogic intensity that was comparable to what

a more mystic frame of mind might call a vision. She fixed it in front of her eyes and

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tried to examine it – but something seemed to be wrong with the process. Maybe

because of her tiredness, or the large quantities of drink she had consumed earlier in the

evening, it was as if the balance of her mind was disturbed, flipping over and spinning

off crazy and out of control . . .

Shockingly, a hand landed on her shoulder.

‘Are you all right, Ms Summersdale?’ a voice rumpled. ‘Thou common-kissing ill-

bred strumpet?’

The dreamlike state collapsed and her identity slammed back with a bang – and in the

rush of connecting to herself again, she realized what had been wrong with the mental

picture.

‘The place is a mess,’ she said. She experienced a flash of self-consciousness as she

realized that Khaarli was looking at her with an expression of Czhan concern, and that

the captain and officers were regarding her with wary suspicion. Just how long had she

been, by their lights, to all intents and purposes off playing with the cheeky pixies? She

trod on her misgivings. She needed certainty and poise, now, if they were going to take

anything she said seriously.

‘This place is a mess,’ she repeated, slightly more firmly. ‘But it was also a mess

before.’ She turned to Captain Crane. ‘You said it could only be catastrophic decompres-

sion, and I think it was that – but it was a controlled catastrophe.’ She quickly ran

through the arrangement of the debris in her head again, and then pointed to the closed

door of the washroom, in the balk perpendicular to the hull. ‘The source of the implo-

sion, decompression, whatever, came from there.’

‘Impossible!’ exclaimed Crane. ‘For one thing, the door’s in one piece. Are you

telling me that whatever did this opened the door, crash-dumped the pressure and then

closed the door again as polite as you please?’

Benny shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I might be completely wrong about it. Then again,

as someone was saying a short while back, it doesn’t hurt to have a look. I rather suspect

you’ll find our Mr Sheen in there. Or whatever’s left of him. I think someone or

something’s polished him off.’

The captain looked at her and sighed, then turned to the male officer. ‘Check it out,

Golding.’

The officer turned a kind of supercilious sneer on Benny that had her wishing that

something horrible would happen to him. He strode to the door and pulled it open to

reveal a pristine bathroom.

‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think happened? You think someone’s flushed him

down here?’ Golding leant over to the toilet and pushed the plunger.

Benny never got a clear view of what happened next, because the next instant she was

pinwheeling across the cabin, colliding with the bodies of Khaarli, Crane and the female

ship’s officer, the roar of blasting air in her ears and a composite taste/smell like kitchen

matches in her nose and throat. She caught a momentary glimpse of Golding as he was

sucked away, and then the door to the washroom swung smoothly and hydraulically shut

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so that she slammed into it face first and saw stars.

‘What a way to go,’ Crane said. ‘He must have been just sitting there, and then he

pressed the plunger and he . . .’

He was referring to the probable death of Mr Jonathan A. Sheen rather than that of

Golding, which they had all to a certain extent witnessed. The slightly but crucially dif-

ferent aspects of that probable death seemed to be preying on his mind, and it was the

fourth time in the last half-hour he had brought it up. Personally, Benny was trying not

to think about it.

After the sounds had finally stopped behind the bathroom door of Sheen’s cabin, and

the pressure had been restored yet again, they had, very cautiously, opened the door.

There had been nothing. Every scrap of flesh, bone, blood and matter had been sucked

down the toilet sluice, through a grating, the spaces of which were less than a centimetre

apart.

‘Someone tampering with the gaskets?’ Khaarli had asked. ‘Hooking them to the

plunger so that they opened up? I’m assuming you eject waste matter out into space at

some point, thou puking errant jolt-heads. The vacuum could have sucked both Sheen

and Golding out.’

‘We do that,’ the female ship’s officer, Cherry, had said, ‘but only after treatment to

extract the, ah, nutrients for the hydroponics. Anyway, there’s no way vacuum could

have pulled someone down a hole like that.’

‘It would have taken a heavy-duty pump,’ said Captain Crane, ‘and there’s simply no

room in the ship’s waste-disposal system for something like that. It would have to be

massive. It would have been noticed long before now.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Benny had said, as the glimmerings of an idea began to surface. She

had gestured vaguely around the cabin. ‘Walls define spaces. You forget that there’s

something on the other side of them. Don’t forget we’re on a space cruiser. There’s bags

of room for something huge out there.’

All of which was why they were now in a kind of antechamber before one of the

emergency maintenance airlocks. Behind them, down a rusting gangway, they heard the

chunk and whir of the sewerage processing units, the gurgle of various substances

through pipes.

Cherry was climbing into a bulky EVA suit, of a design that was really meant for

freefall, and so had little caterpillar tracks on its plinthlike, unbifurcated lower half. In a

clear polymer pouch-case attached to its chest with press-studs were several pages of

schematics of the ship.

‘Just see what you can find and come back,’ Crane told her, racking down the helmet

on its hinges, and securing it with what those unfamiliar with the reality of spacefaring

might have been surprised to see were more like the wing nuts of a diver’s helmet than

anything excitingly hi-tech. The realities of spacefaring called for heavy-duty practic-

ality and durability more than sexy technological aesthetics – as was probably epitom-

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ized best in the engineering term of AM/FM, which was commonly used to describe the

inevitable Heath-Robinson, Sod’s Law working of Actual Machines, as opposed to the

graceful, dancing and entirely unworkable Flights of a certain kind of Magic.

The gaskets of the joint hissed. From a console fixed to the wall, the relayed voice of

Cherry said, ‘I can work my way around to the outlet in about five minutes. Do you

want me to take pictures?’

Behind her, momentarily forgetting that she couldn’t see him through the back of the

helmet, Khaarli nodded. ‘If you can, thou base-court mangled hedge-pig. If not, it

doesn’t matter. I’d merely like some confirmation of this frothy goatish strumpet’s

theory.’

He turned to look enquiringly at Benny, who shrugged. She was here in the ostensibly

restricted areas of the ship by way of a technique that she had picked up along the way

in her various adventures – so simple that it was hardly a technique at all. You drifted

along with people as if you had every right to be there, while remaining so far as was

possible unobtrusive until you had something positive to do or say. The process, in its

sufficiently advanced stages, had people relying on you as a capable and trusted friend,

without ever quite realizing how you had become one.

Cherry trundled through the inner door of the airlock. ‘I can do that,’ her voice said

from the console in the bulkhead. ‘Something like that should be easy to small fish.’

‘What?’ Crane asked her. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said it should be easy to spot.’

Through the hatchway they saw her working the airlock controls, and then the hatch

slid smoothly shut.

‘That wasn’t what I thought you said,’ Crane told Cherry via the console.

‘Oh yes? What did thou think I said.’

‘It sounded like you said “Something like that should be easy to small fish.”’

‘Small fish?’ the voice of Cherry said. ‘Why would I say something like that? I’m

going to cycle out the meaty big day Jeremy rhubarb, now.’

‘Something’s wrong,’ Benny cut in. ‘Something’s happened to her. Get her out of

there now.’

Captain Crane turned to face her with a look of surprise, as though he literally had not

been aware of her presence. ‘What?’

‘Oh!’ the voice of Cherry said from the console. It sounded slurred and mushy, as if

the owner of it did not have full control of the vocal and buccal muscles. ‘Oh! There’s a

table! It’s a big table, and it’s catslit eyes, like snipping screens to make the spider nice

and fruity! It’s an angel, calling to me, like heals or yah or founds. It wants to make the

peck of me and –’

The voice was cut short by a sound, from the console, remarkably like a cannon shot.

On the console red lights flashed and an alarm began to bleep. From behind the hermetic

hatch of the airlock, of course, there came no sound.

‘She’s opened the outer door without depressurizing,’ Crane exclaimed, frantically

14 THE PLOT BECOMES MORE COMPLICATED THAN WAS PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED

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scanning the console readouts. ‘She’s gone! How the hell could that happen?’

It was that magic point before the enormity of another death had sunk in. In the same

way as one can be talking with a friend, and carry on the conversation for a few seconds

after he’s hit by sniper fire, the enormity of it had not quite sunk in.

‘Can we get her back?’ Khaarli said, in much the same way as one might enquire after

a coin dropped down a drain. Benny realized that, as a planet-dweller, he did not have a

fundamental grasp of what it was really like in space; she thought of mentioning things

like the Titanian Queen’s turning circle, and the fact that whereas people thought of

space as pure vacuum, their velocity combined with free-floating spatial hydrogen atoms

made the slipstream of a planetary jet look like a summer breeze – but in the end she

said nothing. She wandered over to the racks of oxygen/nitrogen bottles that supplied the

suits, unracked one of them and hefted it.

‘That sounded like a hallucinatory fit to me,’ she said. ‘I think you should check these

things out, when you get the chance, if you can find somebody to do it.’

Crane was hammering at the console, shutting the outer door and repressurizing the

lock on the remote. ‘It’s sealed,’ he said as the inner hatch slid open.

Inside, there was nothing, except for the little polymer packet of ship’s schematics

that had torn loose from Cherry’s suit under her sudden acceleration, and which had

snagged on one of the control levers. Benny plucked it off and turned it over in her

hands, glancing at Khaarli and Crane, who were just now starting to blanch with their

reaction to this latest shock.

‘Why do I get the distinct impression,’ she mused, ‘that somebody seriously doesn’t

want us leaving this ship?’

Benny made it back to her cabin in a semi-daze. Possibly, she had caught a whiff of the

gas that had killed Cherry, or possibly she was simply exhausted – she had been awake

for less than six hours, but the sheer weight and variety of events had taken their toll.

She walked through the gangways in a kind of low-grade, paranoid, hallucinatory state.

Every corner seemed to have something around it, waiting to leap out, every fixture

seemed to drool menace – and the fact that nothing menacing actually occurred when

she turned a corner and passed a fixture just meant that the menaces were being incred-

ibly sneaky about it into the bargain.

As she neared her own cabin, a hatch opened and a woman stepped out. Benny could

not remember having seen her about the ship, and this was slightly surprising because

the woman was extremely noticeable. A slinky black dress was applied to her like wet

gloss paint, her foxy face was made up strikingly, in the manner of a 1930s (Greg.)

femme fatale. In one long-sleeved hand she negligently held a cigarette in a long-

stemmed holder.

‘Gut evenink,’ she said, languidly.

‘Um. Hello,’ Benny said, simply because her lightly toasted brain couldn’t think of

any other response. If she didn’t get to bed and get her head down soon, in the next few

14 THE PLOT BECOMES MORE COMPLICATED THAN WAS PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED

Page 91

minutes, she could imagine her head just falling off.

‘I vonder if you can help me,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Heidi von Lindt. I have

thus far spent this delightful cruise visiting with certain gentlemen of my acquaintance,

offering them companionship and, I must confess, a certain degree of succour. I have

been, if you will, a kind of random companion . . .’

Benny wondered vaguely if this scenario was going to lead anywhere. ‘I’m really not

in much of a state to help any –’ she began.

Heidi von Lindt held a finger to her glossed lips in a small shushing gesture. ‘Vun of

my gentleman friends,’ she said, ‘seems to haff had a small mishap. I left him under firm

restraint, momentarily, while I went to find a pair off nipple-clamps, a bullwhip, a set of

electrodes and a pint of clarified ghee, and I haff come back to find him horribly

murdered.’ She pressed her hand to her forehead in a display of abject sorrow. ‘Ach!

Poor Jason is no more! Vot am I to do? I can’t help it!’

Benny screwed her eyes shut against tears of exhaustion and stumbled away from the

woman, shoving at the bulkhead for support. No way, she told herself. There’s just no

way – it has to be a coincidence. But at the moment, quite frankly, I do not even want to

think about it. Just let me sleep, let me sleep.

As she finally reached her cabin, however, she saw that the night had one final bit of

unpleasantness for her, in the form of the special agent, Sandford Groke.

‘Miss Summersdale!’ he exclaimed. ‘You seem to have been intimately involved with

the foul occurrences tonight, and I should like to ask you some questions . . .’

Benny regarded him with bleary, scornful eyes. ‘Go. Away.’

The special agent bristled. ‘I shall have you know, Miss Summersdale, that –’

‘Look, just leave it, all right?’ Benny dug the page of the ship’s plans she had

retrieved from the airlock from her frock. ‘I’ve got documentation from Prosecutor Gen-

eral Khaarli of the whatever it was, giving me effective clearance.’

She waved the sheet under Groke’s nose so that he could see the Czhan detective’s

chop scrawled on the back, but fast enough so that he could not read the extent of the

‘documentation’, which in fact read:

Interview with Ms Bernice Summersdale concerning the incidents of this

night, and their deplorable loss of life.

K: So, did you do any of these murders, then?

BS: Nope.

Benny jerked a thumb in the direction from which she’d come. ‘There’s a woman up

the hall who might repay close questioning tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll answer any questions

you can think of. All will be well, and well, and all manner of things will be well,

tomorrow.’

And, with that, she swept into her cabin, and slammed the hatch in his face. She

stumbled to the bed and half leapt, half fell on it. The reaction, long put off, was hitting

her.

14 THE PLOT BECOMES MORE COMPLICATED THAN WAS PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED

Page 92

Nobody she particularly cared about, nobody she had even liked, had died – but the

proximity of sudden death hits human beings on a fundamental level. The loss of one

diminishes us all. Several of them exploding over one, two more being sucked down a

toilet and another one sucked out of an airlock in front of one, all in the space of a

couple of hours, probably tends to diminish one even more so.

All in all, Benny thought, this had not exactly been the most enjoyable evening of the

cruise.

INTERLUDE

THE DEVILISH DISGUISES OF

DOCTOR PO

‘And here he is, RATI,’ the voice of a man, obviously a foreigner, said.

‘Do you think it was worth the wait?’ said another, female voice, strangely distant and

with an odd tone, as though it issued from the horn of a mechanical gramophone.

Sandford Groke leapt into consciousness and action at one and the same time, his

whipcord sinews lusting for justice and revenge – and found that these foreign cowards

had tethered him, flat on his back, with strong hoops of steel about his wrists and ankles.

‘Look, hold still, OK!’ the first voice snapped. ‘Calm down, yeah? You’ve just come

through what’s effectively a white hole the size of a micron, your auto-immune and

renal systems have probably shut down with the shock and you’ve lost one Sheol of a lot

of electrolytes.’

There was the sting of a hypodermic needle in Groke’s upper left arm. A face hove

into view through the blur of his vision: a swarthy, unshaven face, its coloration slightly

odd as though it were the result of the miscegenation between a mulatto and a Chinese.

‘Just lie there for a while,’ it said, in its foreign but strangely unplaceable accent.

‘You’re only restrained so’s you don’t do yourself damage. We’ll let you up in a kagi –

uh – a minute.’

Groke’s vision began to clear. The light behind the face was of a cold, sharp sort that

he had never seen before in his life.

‘Where,’ he demanded, in a forceful tone that somehow transformed itself into a

feeble croak. ‘Where am I?’

The face pursed its lips. ‘Now, that’s rather a complicated question. You’re in pre-

cisely the same place you were a thousand years ago, give or take. Thing is, in those

thousand years the spin of the galaxy’s moved on.’

A memory surfaced from the miasma of Groke’s pain. ‘A thousand years?’

The swarthy face grinned. ‘Since last Wednesday.’

‘Hey, Da– I mean Carstairs,’ the female voice cut in sharply. ‘Watch it with the –’

‘Oh, yeah, right,’ the man said hurriedly. He looked up and raised his voice: ‘I mean

93

INTERLUDE THE DEVILISH DISGUISES OF DOCTOR PO

Page 94

Woden’s Day, all right?’ He looked back down again and muttered, ‘Damn AI Complex

Control. You have to watch your step like nobody’s business since the AIs decided they

were gods.’

‘Hey, don’t look at Me,’ said the female voice. ‘Nobody ever asked Me. That’s just

who I am.’

‘That voice . . .’ the special agent rasped.

‘What, this?’ The man held out his arm. Groke became aware of his outlandish cos-

tume, and what appeared to be a large, strangely formed wristwatch, on which small

lights rippled. ‘This is my RATI.’

‘That’s me,’ the female voice said proudly, seemingly coming from the watch.

‘Ragalata the Vine of Love, Mayarati the Deceiver. I appear in my aspect of a huge-

breasted woman, fit to mock all those who follow an ascetic way of life, and drive all

who behold me mad with carnal lust . . .’

‘Currently appearing in her aspect of a jumped-up comms pack with an attitude,’ said

the man.

‘Yeah, well,’ the contrivance said, in a slightly deflated tone of voice. ‘You wouldn’t

believe how hard it is to offer pleasures undreamt of by the mind of man, when you have

to spend your entire incarnation wrapped around this joker’s left wrist.’

Sandford Groke’s head started to spin. He feared that it might come off under this

insanity. ‘This is,’ he croaked, ‘insane . . .’

The man smiled nastily. ‘You, Mr Groke, don’t know the half of it.’

Groke turned his head. He seemed to be in a chamber packed almost completely with

the kind of apparatus so beloved of the Secret Service science Johnnies. ‘You know my

name?’

‘Yeppo.’ The man nodded. ‘We’ve been hanging around for weeks, here, waiting for

your temporal signal, and trying to recombine and reconstitute it. You’ve been a long

time arriving – and I think we could both do with a small drink, yeah?’ He motioned

towards one of the straps securing the special agent’s feet. ‘Tell you what: why don’t I

let you up so’s we can go somewhere and talk about it. You’ll pick things up as you go

along – but, Sandford . . .’

‘Yes?’ Groke said, suspicious at this sudden outbreak of familiarity.

‘Things have changed. I mean, really changed. If it all gets too much for you, just

close your eyes and think of the English Empire, or whatever, yeah?’

‘Oh my God,’ groaned Sandford Groke, nauseated and aghast. ‘These things . . .

these . . . things . . .’

They were in what seemed to be a steel-walled tunnel, packed with human beings and

creatures that seemed to be a cross between the more fevered imaginations of Messrs

Verne and Wells (the arch socialist) and demon spawn from the lower circles of hell. The

reek of them was appalling, the skirl and shritter of their cries hammered at the ears and

made them ring.

INTERLUDE THE DEVILISH DISGUISES OF DOCTOR PO

Page 95

‘Yeah.’ The swarthy man – this ‘Carstairs’ – seemed unperturbed by this parade of

abject horror. ‘This is a crossover point of the complex, more or less a neutral zone.

You’ll find people from all over the Catan Nebula, here – oh, hi there Raan. How’s the

gestalt?’

This last was addressed to what appeared to be a slumped, ambulatory mound of

slime, from which glared seven glowing eyes. A wet hole opened up on its surface and

emitted a warbling stream of noise.

‘Glad to hear it,’ said the man Carstairs.

Three of the eyes floated round to glare at the special agent, and the creature warbled

questioningly.

‘What, him? Just some guy I was sent to bring in. Big guy in his own timeline, appar-

ently. Sandford Groke, Special Agent, yeah?’

The thing erupted into peals of glutinous laughter, and slithered off.

Carstairs turned to Groke. ‘That was Raan,’ he said, chattily. ‘Hideous Evil Slimy

Shapeshifter of Utter and Unmitigated Evil from Dimension X. Nice guy.’

Groke clutched at his head. ‘I’m going mad. I must be going mad.’

‘Here we go again,’ said the contrivance on Carstairs’ wrist. ‘I’ve had about enough of

this. There’s no way this guy’s going to be of any use to anyone. I mean, walking fruit-

and-nut cutlet in a basket or what?’

‘RATI,’ Carstairs muttered, ‘if the guy was any good he’d have been snapped up by

one of the big outfits before we even got a dib on him. Sometimes we have to take what

we can get, OK?’

‘Well, OK – but he starts going off on one and foaming at the fly, we’re outa here,

right?’

‘What are you mumbling about?’ the special agent enquired.

‘Nothing, nothing.’ Carstairs pointed to an opening in the side of the tunnel. ‘You see

that there? The hatch with the sign that looks a bit like a happy pig with a pint pot?

That’s where we’re going. That’s where we should be.’

The chamber was dark, and filled with smoke, and the smell of drink; the sweat and reek

of human beings and alien creatures, and chemical-seeming odours not readily identifi-

able. The only real illumination was the spotlight on a small stage, where the figure of a

man in a sparkling suit spoke into a radiophonic microphone.

‘Hey there, welcome to the Jade Shebeen,’ he said, in an amplified voice that rang

around the subdued and silent crowd. ‘Glad you could make it. And now, for all you

groovy dudes out there, a sentient life form who needs no introduction . . .’

An enormously fat, ragged, elderly man with greenish skin shambled on to the stage,

clutching what seemed to be a guitar made from a tin box, with three necks, one on the

opposite lateral side to the other two. He had four arms.

‘Hey this is great!’ the man Carstairs exclaimed, sitting with Groke at a table laden

with deplorably strong drink and a pile of highly illegal hashish. ‘Isn’t this great? You

INTERLUDE THE DEVILISH DISGUISES OF DOCTOR PO

Page 96

know who that is? That’s Arlo Leadlemon!’

Several things at adjacent tables shushed and shlurruped him for this outburst of

enthusiasm.

‘Arlo Leadlemon?’ a dazed Groke said, bemused.

‘Yeah, Arlo Leadlemon,’ Carstairs continued, keeping his voice low as the monstrous

figure on the stage tuned his instrument. ‘Best blues man in the Catan Nebula. Y’see,

Arlo comes from the Poldakis colony – the one that got nuked to Sheol and back in the

Big One a few centuries back. All that remains there now, right, are these big fat three-

metre-long mutant Chihuahuas, mutant black plague-rats that pull your face off and your

basic, malnourished human survivors huddling against the unending sub-zero nuclear

winter.’

Carstairs began to sing softly, to himself: ‘ Woke up this mornin/Ma woman was dead/

Damn great sodding mutant rat gone bite off her head – that was one of his. And then

there’s that perennial holiday seasonal favourite: Dead dogs roasting on an open

fire/Black rats chewing off your nose . . . Believe me, these guys know about the blues.’

He shrugged. ‘Then again, all they can think of to actually sing about is being horrific-

ally mauled by black rats and eating dead dogs. Ah well. C’est la guerre. ’

‘Ladies, gentlemen, multi-genitalially reproductive biomorphs,’ the announcer on the

stage cried, getting excited, ‘put your hands, feet, pseudopodia and manipulatory

appendages together for the one, the only, Arlo Leadlemon!’

Suddenly the chamber was filled with swelling, wailing, twanging sounds that Sand-

ford Groke, Special Agent, could only liken to some diseased lunatic’s idea of minstrel

music.

‘Oh damn,’ Carstairs exclaimed with disappointment. ‘He’s doing that commercial

track – that wafer he imprinted where he tried to cross over into archive-resurrected

country and western . . .’

This time, the creatures to either side of them shushed him violently. On the stage,

through a cancerous and phlegmy throat, Arlo Leadlemon began to sing:

Ah was haulin’ gumbo down on Route 66,

A bag o’ chitlins on ma knee,

When all of a sudden I heard this plaintive sound

Acomin’ over ma CB.

It said, I’m jest a crippled bo’ ’bout nine years old

An ma daddy fried in Nam;

Ma momma took to drinkin’ that ole rye whiskey

And yesterday she shot the dog.

‘Note the dead-dog back-reference,’ Carstairs whispered to the astounded Groke, in

an aside. ‘They were trying to give the thing some coat-tail credibility . . .’

Th’bullet bounced off Cujo’s spine

INTERLUDE THE DEVILISH DISGUISES OF DOCTOR PO

Page 97

And ricocheted off the flue

And blew off the head of my autistic sister,

Nadine Betty Sue . . .

The insane music came to an ear-ripping climax and then collapsed to a halt. The

audience of creatures exploded with wild applause. As it died down, young human ladies

in skimpy costumes that left almost nothing to but the most loathsome imagination –

that, for example, of the French – wove through the chamber, dispensing more foul

drinks. The greenish four-armed monster sat complacently on the stage, retuning prepar-

atory to inflicting more of his savage musical violence.

The man who had called himself Carstairs took the opportunity of comparative

silence to regard Groke thoughtfully.

‘As you know,’ he said, ‘we know all about you and your work for the Secret Service

and Special Branch. We’re in the same line of work ourselves, and we’re in the position

of offering you a job. There’s a certain man who –’ He got not further, because that was

when the special agent made his intrepid move. The man who had called himself

Carstairs gaped as he stared down the barrel of Sandford Groke’s trusty service revolver!

‘Do you think,’ Groke snarled grimly, ‘that I don’t know what’s going on here?’

‘Hey, nice trick,’ said Carstairs. ‘Do you have room for the holster as well?’

‘Do you think,’ Groke continued heroically, ‘that I haven’t noticed? The devilish hal-

lucinatory drugs you introduced into my system, the so-called time machine and this

entire farce . . . it’s all part of a complex, extensive and hideously complicated scheme to

drive me mad! Mad! D’you hear me? Mad!’ He pulled at Carstairs’ nose. It didn’t come

off, but that was no doubt because the fiend was being particularly fiendish, and had

used some extra-strong glue. ‘Is that not so – Doctor Po?’

‘Oh dear Me,’ groaned the thing attached to the man’s wrist. ‘He’s lost it.’

‘Ow!’ Carstairs clutched at his face. ‘Dat was by soddig dose!’

Sandford fired a warning shot.

‘That was a warning shot,’ he said.

‘Hey, I don’t think Mr Leadlemon would agree with you . . .’ said Carstairs as the

singer clutched at his chest and fell backwards from the stage.

‘You can’t,’ Groke continued, all oblivious, ‘fool me with that foolish manner and

ridiculous disguise, Po. Come one step closer and it’ll be by far the worse for you!’ He

glanced about himself at the shocked denizens of the chamber, and began to back

towards the door, still keeping his gun on the man who had called himself Carstairs. ‘I

appear to be outnumbered for the moment, so I shall take my leave – but rest assured I

shall return . . .’

At the door he paused, and fired a couple more shots into the ceiling. The crowd

dived for cover.

‘Justice shall prevail!’ cried Sandford Groke, Special Agent, declaritively, and then

vanished into the subterranean, alien night.

***

INTERLUDE THE DEVILISH DISGUISES OF DOCTOR PO

Page 98

After he had gone, the man who had called himself Carstairs downed his drink.

‘Bugger.’

‘Well, that could have gone better,’ said the RATI on his wrist. ‘Could that have, in

fact gone better? Yes, it could. Have we got a termination construct out there, locking

onto the target even as we speak, ready and able to inexorably hunt the target down

through fire, liquid nitrogen and a tool-die stamping press until the target’s dead and

jumped up and down on? No we have not. What we have got, at this point, is a disrupted

and partially conditioned rogue construct out there somewhere, and Siva knows what

might set its pattern-recognition off.’

The man who had called himself Carstairs rubbed at his aching nose. ‘Yeah, OK

RATI.’ He pulled a small comms-link unit from his belt. ‘I’ll get on to Volan. Maybe we

can track it before it gets off planet and out of the system.’ He brightened a little.

‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll just self-destruct.’

PART THREE

A PORT OF CALL

The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal; they don’t smell. The fruit is unreal; it

doesn’t taste of anything. The whole place is a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set, built up

in the desert.

Ethel Barrymore (1932)

99

15

BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

The Titanian Queen translated through the singularity jump and began its exponential

deceleration towards its second port of call, the planet Shokesh, and the horrible murders

continued unabated. A man named Jason had indeed died – though not, quite fortunately,

any Jason that one Bernice Summersdale (according to the passenger roster) had ever

known. This particular Jason had not died, as was first thought, from the constriction of

the ropes tying him to Frau von Lindt’s chaise longue, but by an injection of strychnine

to his upper left ventricle. The inconsolable Frau Lindt was released from custody on her

own recognisance, and was currently considering several proposals of marriage from

certain gentleman acquaintances.

Over the course of the next day and night, approximately thirty people died, if one

included those whose bodies were simply never found. A Mr Simon Bevis and a Mr Iain

M’Cord were two of these latter, disappearing from their respective cabins under cir-

cumstances remarkably similar to those of Jonathan A. Sheen, and having both in all

probability met the same, as it were, unpleasant end.

A Mr David Doty was found in a generally similar state, but his wounds were such

that informed observers were put in mind of a large, savage and carnivorous animal,

even though there were no animals on the ship, save for the lapdogs and cats of various

ladies in steerage. M. Emil Dupont opined that the wounds could only be the work of the

Trained Midgets that had thus far eluded him, but this notion was largely condemned as

implausible.

The Brigadier (Retired) Nathan Rogers, of the Tzar of Django’s army, apparently

committed suicide by banging his head against a bulkhead – and there the matter might

have rested, had he not, before his death, dislodged his cabin’s voice-link unit to the

steward service, who reported a crazed babbling concerning penguins, intestines, dol-

phins, and something ‘bloody enormous’ coming for him. His cabin was subsequently

found to contain vestigial traces of plybocyclitropomopzippedydoodadaine, a synthetic,

or in technical terms a ‘made-up’, drug similar to that which, it had been discovered, had

been placed in the Titanian Queen’s EVA suits, and which had done for the ship’s officer

100

15 BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

Page 101

Cherry.

A Mr Charles ‘Chuck’ Foster was found with his head bashed in, the only clue being,

scrawled upon the cabin wall in Mr Foster’s own blood and just above the mini-bar, the

words: ‘HUsh up whisky DRUNK.’

The remains of Mr Eric Kent were found in an entertainments lounge, the remote

transceiver of a holo-display shoved up through the roof of his mouth with enormous

force, so that the antennae protruded in a bloody tangle from the top of his skull.

A Mr Sean Gaffney was found, bare minutes before he expired, in the most advanced

and nauseating extreme of drooling and incontinent senility, having ingested some sub-

stance that catastrophically accelerated this biological process. Mr Gaffney was twenty-

seven years old.

A Mr Christopher Sweitzer was found with the heel of a stiletto shoe, of which he

owned several, driven through the nape of his neck.

A Ms Piera Panix was found in the automated galleys, bubbling briskly in a large

tureen of seafood bouillabaisse, which quite spoilt the flavour. Those who found the

body, upon further investigation of the galleys, also found the body of a member of the

ship’s entertainment staff, an ‘exotic’ dancer who had gone by the name of Sabrina,

smothered in melted chocolate and then left in the chilled cabinet for it to set.

A Mr Philip Alexander Hallard was found, stuffed and mounted, in a most distasteful

tableau depicting his favourite habit, which was to go up to people, reverse his trouser

pockets and ask them if they’d like to see the white and hairy elephant.

A Mr Alden Bates, or what was left of him, was discovered down in ship’s engin-

eering, to which he had somehow made his way even though he was a passenger. He had

walked into – or had been helped into – a localized high-gravity field caused by the

Titanian Queen’s propulsion mechanisms, which had summarily proceeded to squash

him flat.

A Mr Daniel Frankham, an elderly gentleman who suffered severely from the cold,

was roasted alive when a hand or hands unknown tampered with his thermal suit, so that

it emitted microwaves rather than radiant heat.

A Mr Christopher J. Rednour was garrotted. A Mr Graham Nealon was found, as had

been Mr Doty, seemingly eaten alive by animals – only in this case, from certain signs, it

appeared that these animals had been small rodents, like rats. Or stoats. Or, quite pos-

sibly, particularly vicious hamsters. Animals of a sort also played a part in the death of a

Miss Diane Schirf – and several of them were actually recovered: the swarm of cock-

roaches that appeared to have been attempting to burrow down her throat, and upon

which she had choked.

A Miss Alison Tobin was found brutally hacked to death in what must have been an

insane frenzy – but since, on further investigation, Miss Tobin was found to have been

the young lady with a penchant for reading out her poetry in Percy’s Discotheque, con-

sensus of opinion was that this last death was completely unrelated to any other, with a

perfectly obvious motive and any number of suspects. Particularly, these people felt, in

15 BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

Page 102

light of the method of, not to put too fine a point upon it, the disposal of her poems after

her death.

There were, in short, enough defenestrations to fill the Titanian Queen’s minimal

medical facilities more than four times over. If this number of murders had taken place

in a city, in the same week and all by what seemed to be the same hand, that city would

be in a frenzy. Bands of vigilantes would be roaming the streets, ready to take their fear

out on whoever looked the slightest bit suspicious. People would, in short, have been

shooting the milkman through the front door. Within the self-contained little world of the

Titanian Queen, however, things were different – and different in a way that defied all

logic and reason.

Possibly it was the lack of some overall directive communication – the lack of tabloid

news sheets and other media screaming things like: MURDERING SCUM STRIKES YET

AGAIN!!! Possibly it was a group reaction to trauma, or denial – but whatever it was, it

was a group social-dynamic that operated almost on the level of mass psychosis.

Quite simply, people who should have been terrified for their lives carried on with the

recreational business of the cruise. They frequented the hastily renovated dining rooms

as though a significant portion of their number had not exploded all over them; they fre-

quented the casino chambers, the ballroom, the shuffleboard decks, the observation

lounge . . . and if the laughter and the entertainments in them held a shrill and slightly

desperate edge, they did not seem to notice. It was not as if they were oblivious to the

latest discovery of a body, or the latest person to take a drink, clutch his or her throat and

fall over – it was as if these deaths held the unreal, strangely comfortable quality as one

might find, for example, in a mystery by Christie or James. If you had asked them, indi-

vidually, they would have been shocked and horrified by the latest atrocity of the Cat’s

Paw – there was no doubt in the general mind that this was the work of that master crim-

inal – but shocked and horrified in a fascinated kind of way that held an irrational but

absolute certainty that none of these accumulating deaths would be theirs.

The great detectives, in much this same unreal spirit, made it their business to invest-

igate every incident, to question absolutely everyone who might be involved, in the hope

of at last getting to the bottom of the whole nasty business . . .

Benny again stayed in her cabin, so far as was physically possible.

In a marked contrast to the time she had spent in it before, however, she kept it neat

and tidy, and made sure she didn’t let herself go. It was only after she caught herself

scrubbing out the bath for the fifth time that she realized what was happening to her and

consciously made herself stop it.

She attacked, if that was the right word, the Olabrian joy-luck crystal with a new

vigour, and with the precise control of clenched anger. A large part of this came from the

fact that the damn thing was responsible for her being here in the first place, but more of

it was to do with the fact that, at a point slightly over halfway completed, it began to

talk.

15 BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

Page 103

‘Consider the Universal Harmony of Life,’ it might say, in sonorous if slightly cracked

tones. ‘It comes from Nothing and returns to Nothing, Complete and Perfect in its Cyclic

Unity.’

Or:

‘The Eternal must always be So; for how else must one Measure the True minuscule

Significance of Mortal Span.’

Or:

‘All Struggle must Cease, in the Unknowable face of the Unending Cosmic Equi-

poise.’

Benny, who in her time had seen more of the Universal Whosis Doobery Cosmic

Whatsit than most, had never heard such a bunch of unmitigated old tosh in her life. It

was as if someone had put together a collection of the most asinine platitudes they could

find and run them through a Markov chainer. She wondered if this was a kind of default,

self-diagnostic mode, and things would improve the nearer the crystal came to comple-

tion. She hoped it didn’t mean that the original disassembly in the theatre had broken the

thing beyond repair, or that she was somehow missing a small but vital piece of the

puzzle.

The painstaking work of its reconstruction, though, was constantly hindered by inter-

ruptions. Each of the great detectives had come to call, and, mindful of the circum-

stances, the precautions against being horribly murdered upon opening the door to

anyone were both time-consuming and stressful. Benny might not have minded if they

had seemed to advance the case in any way, but they seemed to be nothing more than

unconstructive and increasingly bizarre encounters. Emil Dupont had comfortably and

complacently sat in one of her armchairs, knocking out his pipe on a table and com-

pletely missing the ashtray, and tried to convince her that she had committed each and

every murder as part of a complicated scheme to place herself upon the throne of the

home of the late Mister Dickie, Plumptious Minor, and to lay her hands upon its fabled

Tickling Stick of Office. Benny lost track of the specific mechanics of said scheme, but

especially trained humanoids of a relatively diminutive size were of course involved.

Miss Agatha Magpole merely looked at Benny vaguely, and imparted the information

that she had had eggs for her tea. This took place while Miss Magpole’s companion

carefully restrained Benny, and then herself, and by way of a remote contrivance of

manipulator arms removed the elderly lady’s special brainwave hat. After the hat was

replaced, and Benny stopped shouting about how she was going to murder everybody

with a big gun, the companion explained that this was a reaction only experienced by

those who were not, in fact, murderers. Benny supposed that she should feel relieved

that she was not the culprit in the eyes of Miss Magpole at least – but this was tempered

by the fact that the brain connected to them would forget that in a matter of minutes, if it

had ever been truly aware of it in the first place.

The only detective who didn’t visit her was Khaarli, which was just her luck, since he

was the only one of the lot of them that she would have been quite pleased to see.

15 BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

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***

The final investigatorial visitation was in fact a pair: Detective Second-Class Inter-

change and Sandford Groke, who seemed to have seconded him, and treated him with a

kind of supercilious contempt bred of an innate inability to comprehend him as an equal.

The special agent himself seemed none the worse for wear after questioning the perilous

Frau von Lindt, but he seemed if anything even more tight-lipped and clenched. He

glared at Benny with a white-hot, barely restrained but somehow impotent inner rage

that seemed to be directed at the world itself rather than her. Benny suspected that she

just happened to be what he was looking at.

‘Well?’ She gestured languidly about the cabin. ‘As you can plainly see, this is all I

possess. This is it. There is no more. Would you care to rifle through my accommoda-

tions and movables now, or would you like them in a bag for later?’

Interchange briefly fumbled through some of the clothes in the wardrobe, blushing a

fetching beetroot-red as his fingers encountered various silky and lacy things. There

were probably a thousand places to hide small items within their folds – but there was no

physical way that the cabin could conceal the sheer amount of impedimenta that would

be related to the murders. You would probably need several cabins stacked to the ceiling.

‘That won’t be necessary, ma’am,’ he said, turning from the closet with some slight

air of relief. He hunted through the pockets of his suit until he eventually unearthed a

dog-eared, spiral-bound notebook, which he flipped open and scrutinized. Benny tried to

glance at the contents without being too obvious about it, but all she received was an

impression of smudgy, aimless doodling, shopping lists and the like.

‘The fact is,’ Interchange continued, ‘we have been trying to ascertain exactly who

you are.’

Benny suddenly went slightly cold. ‘Oh yes?’

Interchange nodded. ‘We know nothing about you, save that you’ve spent most of

your time in your cabin suite. We’ve enquired of all the members of the better families,

and none of them appear to have even heard of the name Summersdale . . .’

Benny warmed up again. ‘And that’s it, is it? Tell me, have you once thought to check

my name in the GalNet databases?’

Interchange fumbled with his collar, embarrassed. ‘As of this time the ships commu-

nications seem to be inconvenienced. The null-space transub . . . transobulatio . . . the

thing where we go from one bit of the galaxy to another.’

Thank Goddess for small mercies, thought Benny. ‘Well let me tell you this,’ she said.

‘I have no idea what your so-called “better” class of people might think, but if you con-

tacted the GalNet directories and ran a search on the Summersdales, do you know what

you’d find?’

‘What would I find?’ Interchange said, with the air of one who is suddenly, vaguely,

worried that he might not like the answer.

‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Benny.

The detective second-class looked at her with a sudden expression of panic.

15 BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

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‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. That’s how rich the Summersdales are.’

‘I’ve had enough of this!’ This last came from Groke, and came in a hateful and

almost completely unexpected snarl. Benny stepped back in startlement, staring at the

now almost literally murderous gleam in his eyes. In addition to his inherent all-body

clench, he now clenched and unclenched his hands as if waiting for the merest oppor-

tunity to put them around someone’s throat and squeeze.

‘Inspector Carstairs,’ he snapped, jerking his head in the direction of Interchange.

‘Restrain this deceitful hussy before she can further ensnare us with her wiles!’

He turned his mad eyes back to Benny, and inched forward as she backed off with a

hand outstretched and groping for some convenient heavy and hopefully blunt imple-

ment. ‘We have a way of dealing with spies, Miss so-called Summersdale, so confess

your plans or it’s the chair and the length of rubber hose for you. Do you think I do not

know that you are yet another minion under the employ of the fiendish Doctor –’

‘What?’ Benny exclaimed, in utter astonishment. She had once, for quite some time,

had the acquaintance of a being going under that particular medical sobriquet. On the

whole, for a number of reasons, she preferred not to think about that period of her life –

and to hear that name dropped into circumstances such as these shocked her more than a

little. ‘What did you say?’

Groke was now staring at her with a kind of shocked confusion, as if he had been

physically slapped in the face. It seemed that her outburst had derailed whatever com-

pulsive line of thought his mind had been following, and snapped him back to some

degree of self. He gave a convulsive shudder, and wiped at his brow with the back of his

hand.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, in a slightly shaken voice. ‘I cannot imagine what came over

me. An aberration, nothing more – possibly a result of the strain we are all currently

under.’

Benny did not know why, but she had an idea that she could trust this abrupt change

in manner just about as far as one could throw a lead-weighted marmoset digging its

claws in. It was not precisely that the special agent was thinking one thing and pre-

tending to another: it was, somehow, as if some half-buried, unacknowledged part of his

brain were making the rest of it think and fundamentally be the correct thing.

‘Come, Carstairs,’ he snapped, snapping his fingers under the slightly startled Inter-

change’s nose, then turned on his heel and headed briskly for the hatch. ‘Can’t hang

around here all day,’ he declared. ‘We have a murderer to thwart, a villain of such foul

and devious cunning that not one of us is safeguarded from his devilish snares . . .’ He

struck a manly pose and stuck a pontificatory finger in the air. ‘But he will be brought to

book, oh yes – or my name’s not Sandford Groke!’

Interchange shot Benny a confused, despairing look, and then hurried to catch up with

the strangely acting special agent. After a while, Benny wandered over to a chair and sat

down, one eye thoughtfully on the hatch.

15 BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

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‘Why do I get the feeling,’ she said, to the furniture and fitments in general, ‘that

we’re all in danger of seriously losing the plot?’

Things were going rogue: complication piled upon complication, the chain of events

tangled together and lashing wildly. At some point they must surely snap and slice

through anyone who happened to be innocently standing by. For the first time since

these murders had started – for the first time since the death of Krugor, which she had

somehow filed away on a different emotional level – Benny felt actively threatened.

Possibly, it was time to do what she had been putting off for far too long now, and

make a certain call.

16

THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

The planet of Shokesh existed with a highly specialized and refined, tourist-based eco-

nomy. In itself a desert planet, it had no spacefaring technology of its own over the inter-

planetary level. Over the course of centuries, however, it had built up an extensive and

remarkably sophisticated culture based upon the wreckage of a large number of starships

from other systems, which fortunately – for Shokesh – had run aground in its system’s

uncommonly heavy asteroid field. The asteroids were now, of course, safely charted, and

it was this fact that had opened up Shokesh to the tourist trade.

It was a patchwork, almost cargo-cult culture – and therein lay its appeal. It was as if

some blind craftsman had intended to construct some workaday mosaic from any old

junk that had happened to be lying around and – all unaware of the material’s true value

– had included scraps of platinum and gold, shards of jade, the fragments of fractured

precious gems and jewels.

It was a place of mighty zigzag mud-brick ziggurats, of lofty towers and minarets and

dreaming if not actively and hallucinatorily deranged spires. Of hanging gardens and

twisting thoroughfares and temple edifices carved with gentlemen and young ladies in

the act of performing extremely athletic activities, fit to make a spinster or a gentleman

of moral rectitude blush, and often feel the need for a lie down.

The markets of the planet’s major city were justly famous the entire sector over: a

brawling, raucous mass of merchandise from the conceptual corners of the known uni-

verse; anything you wanted, anything you could imagine, could be bought here. Any-

thing at all.

Benny had expected any excursions that might have been planned on Shokesh to be can-

celled – and had been more than a little surprised to find that this was not the case.

Thinking about it, she thought she knew why. Part of it was simply the mass shock of

the murders, the social momentum that was keeping things, on the surface at least, car-

rying on more or less as usual – but mostly it was for practical and pragmatic reasons.

The owners of United Spaceways were being paid good money to run them, and so they

107

16 THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

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damn well would.

Additionally, she thought, there was also the point that it would be just as easy – far

more easy – for the murderer (or murderers) to murder whoever they were going to

murder in a murder aboard ship. There was also no real chance of the culprit or culprits

using planet-fall to make their escape – the Titanian Queen was currently the only pas-

senger vessel orbiting the planet, and would be so for several weeks. The fact that if the

murderer did make his escape then everybody else could breathe a sigh of relief, was

neither here nor there.

In any case, for the next few days there would be shuttle excursions operating to the

planet on an hourly basis – and as the first one docked at the disembarking hatches (with

especial care taken that the air-exchange did not contain lethal doses of hallucinogenic

compounds) Benny was there, waiting for it, ID chips in her hand and first in the queue.

She was not going there to sample the tourist-trap sights and the displays of histrionic

local history and culture – in fact she was going to do her level best to ignore them. She

had a plan, a plan that had been nebulously formed when the diamond belonging to the

Dowager Duchess of Gharl had been stolen, and which had solidified after she had made

her call over the null-space link. She intended to learn something entirely else on

Shokesh.

She was not disappointed.

The route to the Titanian Queen’s communications room led past the purser’s office, and

Benny had seen that Detective Interchange had tripled the guard; if the fact of six burly

constables outside of the hatch was any indication. Benny had been willing to lay short

odds that one would be hardly able to breathe inside for the weight of compressed cop-

pers. Ah well, at least the contents of the purser’s safe were perfectly secure.

The comms room had been functional and packed with heavy-duty, utilitarian equip-

ment – all of which, looking at it, Benny had seen to be just as fake as the antique decor

of the ballroom. A paying customer expected something vital like a ship’s communica-

tions to look functional, and therefore trustworthy. The communications officer, in the

traditional costume uniform of a Technical Expert – stained canvas slacks and T-shirt

with faded emoticons and an ancient Schwa logo stencilled on it, hair and beard like an

exploding greasy scouring pad, a name tag with the name STROSS hanging from his neck

– seemed genuinely harried all the same.

‘If you want to make a call, you’re out of luck,’ he said.

Benny got the impression that he was rapidly approaching the if-one-more-bugger-

asks stage. He seemed, not to put too fine a point on it, not a little peeved.

‘How so?’ she asked. ‘I’d have thought we’d have been in range of the boosters long

before now.’

This exchange concerned the same difficulties to which Detective Second-Class Inter-

change had alluded before, in her cabin. Benny had known about them perfectly well –

but had been following the sound advice of never telling a policeman more than is abso-

16 THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

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lutely necessary.

The processes needed to boost a signal containing reliable data across interstellar dis-

tances, faster than the speed of light, required installations far too massive for a ship to

carry – this was in fact why the Titanian Queen had been effectively incommunicado in

the spaces between the stars. Now, as they began the final entry into the Shokesh system,

there should have been no problem at all.

‘We have a problem with the transisantiantional vectoring.’ Technical Officer Stross

gestured vaguely at a mocked-up bit of radio gear. ‘The sine-damping retro-oscillator

and the dritrium crystal’s blown to hell. We can’t even pump back a Phase Three signal

wave. You get the picture?’

Benny looked at him levelly. ‘Leg. Pull the other one. Bells are quite possibly

attached.’

Technical Officer Stross shrugged. ‘The bloody ARVID’s pissing about again, and the

comms are routed through it. We don’t get a word out until it decides to play.’

Benny raised an eyebrow. ‘Harveed?’

‘A-R-V-I-D.’ Stross pointed to a small, almost unnoticeable junction box fixed to the

bulkhead, from which tacked traceries of cable ran to all the units. ‘You can have a go if

you like. What do I care? Just talk into one of the boxes, doesn’t matter which.’ He

shrugged again. ‘Or if you want the semblance of privacy, use the booth. Doesn’t make a

sod’s worth of difference, but it makes people feel more comfortable.’

In the ostensibly private booth, Benny examined what appeared to be a comms con-

sole. From the tiny signs one gets when rapping one with the fingernails, she had already

ascertained that there were no real workings inside.

‘You’re ARVID, right?’ she said to it.

A small pause, then: ‘Good morning. Ms Summersdale. Or is it Ms Summerfield? Or

Mrs Summerfield-Kane? I must confess that I can never quite remember.’

The voice was drawling, sardonic, utterly self-assured.

Benny quashed a little chill, of the same sort she had experienced when Interchange

had asked her who she really was. The trick, she felt, was not to show surprise. This

could in fact make things simpler.

‘If you know who I am,’ she said, quite calmly, ‘then you know who I’m working for

in this case. You know who and what’s behind me. Is that enough to get me a call?’

ARVID made a kind of tut-tutting noise, of the kind used to convey that one is

keeping another in suspense and enjoying it. ‘The pleasure, “Ms Summersdale”, is all

mine. Please feel free to proceed. I cannot, of course, promise that I won’t listen in.’

There was something about this ARVID’s voice that worried Benny. It was not so

much that it was putting on an act, but rather – and rather like the accent of the late Mr

Dickie Prekodravac – it was of someone speaking in the tones of what had once, at some

point, been an act.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she told the ARVID. ‘I suspect that the parties I’m calling,

they’ll take care of the security their end.’

16 THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

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***

Now, Benny wandered through the market streets of Shokesh, her ears battered by the

sputter and bang, the crash and clash of fireworks, snare drums and cymbals, her eyes

assaulted by swirling streamers and shimmering scraps of costume that would have

those wearing it, in a less than temperate climate, all catching cold. Her nostrils were

filled with the reek of chargrilled meats, and the flesh of amphibious things that lived in

jungle pools.

Today, apparently, was the Festival of Truth and Lies, a time-honoured day in the

Shokesh year, in which the inhabitants put on a show for any visiting tourists who might

happen to be watching. Tomorrow was going to be the Mardi Gras of Household Gods,

and the day after that – if the Titanian Queen had remained here – would have been the

Bacchanal of Cheese and Wine. On the whole, Benny thought, she was sorry to miss that

one. Rennet-processed cow-juice products notwithstanding.

On the other hand, things could have been worse. The simple fact was that every day

when a ship hung over the planet was a Festival day for the happy, laughing souls of

Shokesh – another day for the estimable work of transferring credit from the pockets of

off-worlders and into their own, on an industrial basis. In the height of the season, when

there could be as many as twenty ships in the sky per day, and the collective Shokesh

imagination slightly strained, there might be the Carnival of Mice, the Jubilee of Sliding

Jack and the Day of the Dolphin, all happening simultaneously, in different quarters,

with the native personnel involved hurrying from one to another with barely time for a

costume change and a crafty cough and a drag at the back of the flats.

Benny wove her way through a small procession of horselike-creature-drawn floats,

each containing blossom-bedecked statues depicting some multidextrous god or goddess

in some evidently characteristically archetypical pose. At length, she turned off into a

side alley – little more than a dark crack between two magnificent edifices. The alley

was barely wide enough to allow the passage of a single person, and in the small amount

of light she made out rough and disrepaired brickwork, elderly electrical wiring and

exposed plumbing.

The alley opened out into a street far less splendid than any she had yet encountered:

not exactly dirty, but of the functional and slightly grubby sort as might be found in the

industrial areas of any planet. Those who inhabited it were dressed casually, in a way

that reminded Benny somewhat of film technicians compared with the costumed actors

on a set, or stagehands in a theatre.

As she walked, she received a couple of slightly surprised glances, but these were

supplanted by a kind of cautious unconcern. If some tourist had taken it into her head to

have a look behind the scenes, it was her lookout and hardly their concern. Falling foul

of the dangers of the hidden places was, in a sense, also the natural lot of a tourist.

After some small while, Benny stopped at an intersection and hunted for a street sign.

She had spent an instructive ten minutes aboard the Titanian Queen with a local street

map, had sketched a map of her own on the torn-out flyleaf of Kryptosa’s Lost Gods and

16 THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

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the Fall of Empire, and merely needed to get her bearings.

Besides, she thought, she had been given comprehensive if a little dubious directions

as to where she wanted to go.

The call had been a slightly strange experience, on rather more levels than she currently

wanted to think about. She had entered the GalNet code and blipped through several

connection and firewall-status screens in the space of a second. Then the image had dis-

solved into that of a face, female and very beautiful, in a tough, foxy kind of way that

certain people might call wicked or even actively vicious – had it not been currently

etched with lines of tension and worry. Benny had tried to pick some detail out of the

background, but it remained indistinct. Whether this was because of the communication

unit’s depth of focus or by transputronic masking, she couldn’t tell. Things seemed to be

moving in the background, though.

‘What do you want now, Kir?’ the foxy little face snapped. Then it realized that it

wasn’t talking to this Kir, whoever this Kir actually was, and jolted with shock. ‘Who

the hell are you?’

‘I . . .’ Benny was taken aback. For some strange reason, making this call had

clenched her stomach like a fist and put a lump in her throat, which couldn’t have been

her heart, because that was currently hammering at the roof of her mouth. ‘I must have a

wrong code,’ she said lamely. ‘I was trying for a man named Jason . . .’

The girl on the other end of the intraspatial line snorted. ‘Figures.’ Abruptly, she com-

posed her face into the synthetically friendly, limitedly helpful lines of an incorporate

receptionist and said, in a completely different tone from before, ‘I’m afraid that Mr

Kane is in an important meeting at the moment, and likely to be unavailable for the rest

of the day. If you’d like, I can connect you with our Mr Trask, who can handle any

queries you might have about Dead Dog in the Water Preproductions with full authority.

Or, if it’s a . . . personal matter, I can take a message for his earliest possible conveni-

ence.’

Her tone was so perfectly and courteously contrived that it could only be an act – not

in the sense of automatic corporate lies, but in the sense of someone putting on a role

under extreme pressure.

‘Tell Mr Summerfield-Kane,’ Benny said coldly, ‘that a Professor Bernice Summer-

field called. That’s Summerfield, as in his – extremely fortunately, I might add – ex-

wife.’

The girl did a classic double take, and then peered out of the screen at her with a mix-

ture of suspicion, surprise and, Benny fancied, some small degree of jealous spite. ‘So

you’re Benny? I’ve heard a lot about you. I suppose you can prove who you are?’

‘Ask me anything,’ Benny said. ‘Embarrassing personal details about the little sod, for

preference.’

At that point, the picture jolted, possibly the result of something landing heavily in a

vehicle and jarring the suspension. Then a new and urgent voice snapped, ‘I’ve got the

16 THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

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package, Mira. Nasty people are wanting it back even as we speak. Time to make like

the Vermicious Knids, yeah?’

‘What?’ said the girl, who had turned to stare at something out of shot.

‘Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Let’s just scram, OK?’

‘OK.’ The girl leant forward, her out-of-shot hands (from the movements of her

shoulders) obviously punching at controls. From the speaker of the comms unit came the

sound of accelerating turbines. The girl glanced back at the pick-up. ‘Things are moving.

Tell him yourself, yes?’

A moment of jarring confusion on the screen – the connection was obviously being

handled by a portable unit at the other end. The picture settled down again, and she

found herself looking at the face of her ex-husband, Jason.

‘Benny!’ he exclaimed. Even by his standards, he looked a mess: unshaven and

exhausted. A huge, purple bruise disfigured the left side of his face, his eyebrow was

split and bleeding and his skin was marked by powder burns. After his moment of sur-

prise, his mouth widened into an easy grin.

‘Shit!’ he shouted, dabbing at his mouth with the back of a scorched and dirty hand.

The grin had opened up a split in his lip and made it bleed. ‘Big Soddy bollocking

bloody shit on toast with extra shit and no toast!’

Benny stared at him. His appearance, and what she had gleaned from his exchange

with this Mira person, had opened up a whole raft of questions, and she didn’t quite

know quite where to start.

‘I see your language hasn’t improved, at any rate,’ she said, more or less just for

something to say.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Jason. ‘I never had the education, did I? I had to pick things up as I

went along.’

‘You can say that again.’ Benny forced herself to stop it. Completely trashed relation-

ship or not, a bicker with Jason bloody Kane could happily go on all week and be ended

in one of only two ways – either of which, if attempted on the person of a mounted

comms unit, would result in painful bruising, extreme embarrassment or both.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I can see you’re busy at the moment. I just wanted to see if you

have any thoughts on something that seems up your street. It isn’t important.’

Jason winced as the image began to judder – the vehicle he and the Mira girl were in

was obviously in motion now, and moving very quickly. From his posture, Benny got

the idea that there might be something more wrong with him, physically, than just his

facial injuries. If there was, though, he was masking it pretty well – which was a little

odd, she thought, since Jason Kane was capable of screaming the house down if he so

much as stubbed his toe.

Jason appeared to recover from his momentary lapse and gave her his friendly if

slightly forced grin again. ‘Hey, no problem.’ He shot a glance to where, presumably,

Mira was operating the vehicle. ‘I don’t have much to do for the moment. It’s all in

Mira’s capable and lovely hands . . .’

16 THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

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‘Up yours, sweetheart,’ said the voice of Mira. Something about the tone in which she

said it made Benny feel the sudden urge to track her down and duff her up severely. The

next time she and Jason met in the flesh, there were going to be some serious questions

asked, possibly at knifepoint.

‘. . . and I could do with the distraction, frankly,’ Jason said. ‘I’m all ears. What was it

you wanted to ask me about?’

Now, a few hours later, Benny followed her sketch of the directions he had given her,

walking through the backstreets of the real Shokesh until she came to a street seemingly

like any other, if relatively less frequented. It was the street, if the directions and the

signs could be believed, of the Proudly Pontificating Feline. Cat Street, as Jason had

called it.

Every city on every human-colonized planet in the galaxy had streets like this. Streets

where certain criminal activities occurred; crimes of a sort that happened behind closed

doors; doors that only those who know about them would find, and find unlocked.

Unless you knew which ones they were, you’d never find them – and if you went

looking experimentally, you’d find one hell of a lot more than you were trying to bargain

for.

The point was that in certain, specialized circumstances, one didn’t have to know

which doors they were. One only had to know the general area.

Simply hanging around on streets like this, Benny knew, could be hazardous to one’s

health to say the least. The concerns that operated here commonly did not bother those

who did not bother them – but unexplained loiterers attracted suspicion, and a rough-

and-ready method of acting upon it. Fortunately, among the quasi-legitimate businesses,

there was a café of sorts, the window of which offered a panoramic view of the street.

Benny wandered into it, playing the part of a simple tourist who had strayed out of the

tourist zone and needed a small rest and a cup of cinnamon tea before returning to it.

The other patrons of the establishment did not appear to give her a second glance, but

she felt attention on her, if not actual eyes. She stretched her tea and snack of a sticky

bun, made from some form of reconstituted maize, as far as possible, but the time rap-

idly approached when she was going to have to think of something else.

It was at that point that a figure walked past the window – a figure dressed differently

from the one Benny had seen before, in a scuffed jacket of some artificial leather and

worn working jeans, a large holdall of heavy-gauge polymer mesh slung over one

shoulder – but Benny recognized the figure all the same. She left the dregs of her cin-

namon tea and headed for the door, fighting to conceal any haste from the watchful den-

izens of the café. Through the door, she quickly scanned the street for the figure’s

departing back.

She needn’t have bothered. The figure was standing outside, waiting for her.

Benny had run this confrontation several times through her head, trying to come up

with an idea of what to expect, but had eventually settled on nothing. An exciting and

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strenuous chase through the brawling streets of Shokesh, complete with overturned

street-side stalls, humourously bisected Chinese dragons and smashed boxes of

squawking chickens? Vehement protestations of innocence? An attempt to silence her by

way of strangulation or a cunningly concealed blade? Mindful of this last, Benny found

herself dropping into the loose but watchful semi-crouch she had learnt during her child-

hood stint in the military, ready for any threatening move.

Instead of any of this, however, the figure simply shrugged and sighed.

‘All right. Fine,’ said the Cat’s Paw, calmly. ‘Shall we go somewhere and talk?’

17

THE REMOVAL AND DISPOSAL OF

CERTAIN MASQUES

The people of Shokesh derived from many different cultures, and had the knack of

blending them together down to an art. A hint of the exotic to attract the tourists

tempered with a generic kind of blandness that avoided their taking one look and then

running away.

In a mock-Zendacian émigré taberna, on one of the ‘quaint little sidestreets’ running

off from the main thoroughfare of the tourist zone of the Shokesh settlement, Benny

sipped a tall and cooling glass of a kind of retsina analogue spiked up with grain ethanol.

‘I made a call to a . . . ah, a friend,’ she said. ‘He has an in to the more sneaky crim-

inal stuff in this sector, and he confirmed some of the things I was wondering about. He

used an analogy based on certain rather special factors in his life, but which meant

something to me, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you . . .’

‘Try me,’ said the Cat’s Paw, who now exuded a relaxed and innate kind of inner

strength and confidence, utterly at odds with the person Benny remembered from before.

‘You might be surprised.’

‘The London Underground,’ said Benny, fully expecting to have to waste five minutes

now on irrelevancies. ‘That was –’

‘I know what the London Underground was.’ The Cat’s Paw waved a dismissive

hand. ‘And at some point I might just possibly tell you how. Go on.’

Benny shrugged. ‘OK. Fine. The important point about the London Underground was

that, when they came to make the map, they found that they had problems. It was a con-

fusing mess. It actually made the process of trying to find your way around the system

more difficult. Then some bright spark realized that the only important thing about a

subterranean transit system with discrete stops was the relationship between them. You

only have to know which are connected to which and in what order. So they distorted the

physical map and made it work in the sense that mattered. It was a masterpiece of

abstract design.’

Benny waved away a sudden alien mariachi band, who seemed to be under the

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impression that she and the Cat’s Paw were a couple in love, and signalled to a Zen-

dacian waiter in a pressurized rubber simulation of a tuxedo for another drink. ‘The only

problem was, because it was such a useful representation, that people tended to forget it

was in one sense a distortion, and try to map it directly onto physical reality. There

might be two stations within a hundred metres of each other, say, and rather than simply

walk it, people would go down three flights of steps and an escalator, wander through a

warren until they found the right platform, wait for a train, take the train, even change

lines and take another train, get off and climb up through an entire station again – all

because the map said that was the way to get to where they wanted to go.’

Benny ordered another drink. She supposed that she should keep a clear head and

watch for potential tricks, but then again, if the Cat’s Paw had wanted her dead, she’d be

long dead by now. Besides, the consumption of alcohol in quantities moderate enough

not to have you falling over, throwing up and blanking aided a certain type of thought –

that of stringing elements together in a kind of conversational dance, making them

cohere and revolve without the kind of clogging, trainspotting focus upon the minutiae

that prevented one from seeing the full picture. ‘The point is that our current, overt sys-

tems of space travel work like that. You get on a ship here, you get off it there, and you

forget that the overtly scheduled ships aren’t the only things in interstellar space. The

Goddess knows they aren’t the only things, and I certainly do from direct experience.

There are ships in their thousands out there, military-spec and otherwise, based upon

entirely different technologies – but they’ve become invisible.’ Benny gestured around

the patrons of the taberna: all, obviously, passengers from the Titanian Queen. ‘We were

all let off the ship because of the implicit assumption that there were, quote, no other

ships here at the moment, unquote, and so the Cat’s Paw wouldn’t be able to make his or

her escape – but you and I know that isn’t really the case.’

The Cat’s Paw sipped from a glass of chilled wine and nodded. ‘So?’

‘So if the Cat’s Paw wanted to escape, there was no way anyone could stop him or,

indeed her, and it was all entirely academic. But then, I thought, what if for reasons of

his or her own, the Cat’s Paw wanted to stay with the ship? What if he or she –’ Benny

looked pointedly in the direction of the large holdall nestling under the table beside the

Cat’s Paw’s feet. ‘What if he or she simply wanted to get rid of certain incriminating

evidence that might be found in a really thorough search? The same factors hold true – if

people have the idea that merchandise can’t be fenced on to the interstellar market from

Shokesh, they’re hardly going to search for it on people coming down here. The real

purpose of the call to my friend was to confirm that such a transaction was possible and,

if so, where. My friend told me it was, and that the most likely place was one of several

establishments he’d heard tell of on Cat Street.’

Benny looked at the Cat’s Paw smugly. ‘So much in detective work involves being in

the right place at the right time – but any damned fool can go to the right place and wait.

The “merchandise”, of course, being every single item of jewellery that was, at one

point, in the purser’s safe.’

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The Cat’s Paw regarded Benny levelly, and then nodded with composure, as if this

had been expected all along. ‘And have you any idea how this was done?’

‘In general, yes,’ said Benny. ‘It was the same general process of inversion that he or

she used to steal the Olabrian joy-luck crystal from Marcus Krytell’s mansion. The sheer

number of discrete elements made it appear more complex, but the process was as

simple and blatantly obvious.’

‘Obvious?’ The Cat’s Paw raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘C’est moi?’

Benny found herself smiling back despite herself. ‘Call it elegance, then.’ She waved

a hand dismissively, emulating the recent languid gesture of the Cat’s Paw with some

slight degree of irony. ‘As you well know, the evolvement of security countermeasures

is a bit like an arms race – you know: you build a better bomb, so somebody builds a

better shelter, so you have to build a better bomb and so on, ad infinitum.’ She climbed

her flattened hands up each other in a kind of lateral game of potatoes. ‘Shell upon shell

upon shell of sophistication as you push the envelope out – with the result that what-

ever’s in the middle of the envelope gets forgotten and atrophies. So what I think you did

was this: you sent in some android or robotic device, some kind of simulacrum, anyway

– you loaded it with infiltration devices just under the cutting-edge level of Krytell’s

security system – and while the really heavy-duty stuff was occupied dealing with it,

you simply strolled in naked, lifted the crystal and strolled out again.’ Benny shrugged.

‘Like I said, simple.’

The Cat’s Paw grinned at her with a respect that was almost friendly. ‘I actually wore

a pair of shorts and a shirt, and you forgot to mention the unassisted swim to the main-

land.’

‘You swam it?’ Benny frowned.

‘I wasn’t in any hurry. The sea was warm and buoyant. It only took a local day and a

half.’

Benny nodded thoughtfully. ‘By which time the search radius would have blipped

past you on several levels and they were concentrating on your prerecorded ransom

demand.’

The Cat’s Paw poured another chilled wine from the bottle. ‘Close enough. There

were a lot of little tricks to make it work. I won’t bore you with the details. You’ve got

the basic idea.’

‘And it’s a good one,’ Benny said. ‘And for my next trick, I can tell you how it was

adapted for the Titanian Queen.’ Again, she indicated the holdall on the floor. ‘Tell you

what, though: just to keep it vaguely entertaining and give me a chance to drink

something, why don’t you tell me how I worked it out?’

‘I’d imagine that your first related suspicion,’ said the Cat’s Paw, ‘would be when you

found yourself experiencing an unaccountable blank patch in your memory, that first

time when you sequestered yourself away in your cabin, after the death of your manser-

vant. From what I’ve researched about you (and I’ve studied you a lot, since I ascer-

17 THE REMOVAL AND DISPOSAL OF CERTAIN MASQUES

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tained that Krytell was going to use you as a courier), I know that you’ve been in situ-

ations involving violent death before. You can recognize and deal with the shock and

subliminal trauma they cause – and there must have been something that wasn’t quite

right with these episodes. Thoughts of some anaesthetic gas being pumped through the

ventilation systems might have crossed your mind, but the idea must have been pretty

formless; you had nothing concrete to pin it on, and it could simply have been exhaus-

tion after all – you were pushing yourself pretty hard at that point, attempting to piece

together the fragments of the artefact you had been placed aboard the Titanian Queen to

recover.

‘You learnt of the attempted break-in to the purser’s safe but, again, this was simply a

background thing, merely feeding your general suspicion. Why would a criminal as

notoriously dexterous as the Cat’s Paw make such a bungled attempt, thus guaranteeing

that the safe would then be guarded day and night? And, for that matter, why make the

attempt so early on in the cruise? Even if it were successful, there would be a limited

number of places to hide such a haul on board; a sufficiently detailed search would be

bound to turn it up.

‘Your first active clue came at the dinner you attended, when the Star of Saint

Timothy was stolen from the Dowager Duchess of Gharl. The subsequent horrible

murders by detonation must have confused things a little, but you must have realized

that these deaths seemed to be random, while the theft of the Star of Timothy was spe-

cific. So what, specifically, was the difference between the Star of Timothy and the jew-

ellery worn by everyone else in the dining hall? And what could the theft of it in such a

blatant manner possibly achieve but to have the guard increased on the safe where every

other item of genuine jewellery was being kept?

‘As I said, so many of these clues were masked by the confusion of the horrible

murders. They were something else entirely, and it was a matter of separating what was

relevant from what was not. You began to wonder again about your strange lapse of

memory in your cabin. If this had been a common experience, surely other people would

have recalled, as it were, similar instances during the investigations by and of them – it

is, after all an absolute cliché in murder-mystery fiction: the unaccountable loss of time

in which one, all unawares, might have really been the murderer . . .

‘Nothing of that was evident at all. You were forced to the conclusion that your lapse

had been unique. So in what other way might you have been unique at the time in which

it occurred?

‘Armed with these relatively solid if speculative facts, you were then able to make

inferences. You were able to advance tentative theories as to a sequence of events:

‘The break-in to the safe was not bungled. The Cat’s Paw’s expertise was such that he

or she was perfectly capable of entering and leaving without trace. There then remained

the possibility – the probability – that someone might at some point feel the need to

check on the contents, and that the theft would be discovered – and so, utilizing the

burgling skills for which he or she was justly famous, the Cat’s Paw broke into the

17 THE REMOVAL AND DISPOSAL OF CERTAIN MASQUES

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cabins of those who owned the jewels, and exchanged them for the reproductions that

were used for show aboard ship. Of all these people, only a “Ms Bernice Summersdale”

was finding it impossible to sleep, thus necessitating the use of anaesthetic gas.

‘The Cat’s Paw then placed the fake jewels inside the safe, and tampered with it so

that it appeared an attempt at a break-in had been made. Thus, for the remainder of the

jump, the forces of law and order would concentrate upon the safe and its now worthless

contents. And since the various passengers had no idea that their apparently imitation

jewels had been exchanged for the genuine article, they took no care of them, left them

lying around – thus making it simplicity itself for the Cat’s Paw to go through the cabins

as their inhabitants left to visit the planet of Shokesh, harvesting the spoils with hardly

any risk at all.

‘The only real risk – the only mistake, as it turned out – was to go after the Star of

Timothy, the only genuine item of jewellery that had not gone through this process. That

provided a focus for all your nebulous suspicion, gave it a hook to hang it on.’

The Cat’s Paw sat back and finished off the wine. ‘Most of all that is neither here nor

there, of course. It doesn’t really matter whether you came up with that precise theory or

not. The important point was that you intimated that such a crime was possible – and

this led you to Cat Street to wait for me.’ The Cat’s Paw leant forward again and

regarded Benny steadily. ‘So the question now remains: what are you going to do about

it now? Are you going to turn me in? It’s obvious that you don’t think I did all these hor-

rible murders.’

Benny looked at the Cat’s Paw warily. ‘No. I don’t think you did. Not all of them.

Everything I’ve seen or heard about the Cat’s Paw shows an active aversion to killing. I

don’t think you’d have it in you, ordinarily.’

‘Meaning?’ the Cat’s Paw said, sharply.

‘I mean what about Krugor?’ Benny said. ‘You haven’t even mentioned him. I can see

how it might have happened. He was one of Krytell’s security operatives and he was

using me as bait for you. He tried to capture you, there was a struggle and –’

‘No!’

The fist pounded on the table hard enough to make the bottles bounce, and the

mariachi band across the room lurch into momentary confusion. Benny flinched back,

more from the sheer blazing power of the anger in the criminal’s eyes than from any

actual threat.

‘I arranged for you to find the crystal,’ the Cat’s Paw said, in the low tones of utter but

controlled fury, ‘and I simply left it there for you to find. The death of your manservant,

Krytell’s man, had nothing to do with my plans for Krytell or anyone else. I planned the

theft of the crystal, the exchange and my other escapade aboard the Titanian Queen in

great detail, over months – but it seems I have been guided in them, in subtle ways that

even I can’t see. Someone or something has killed these people and is trying to blame it

all on me.’

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Something of the construction of this last, something of the tone, suddenly put Benny

in mind of a frightened child protesting its innocence of something that it hadn’t done –

that it knew it hadn’t done – in the face of the purely circumstantial but somehow vast

and insurmountable evidence of adults. Benny fiddled with a place mat in the form of a

tourist’s idea of a space pirate’s chart showing the perils of the asteroid field that

encircled the Shokesh system, to avoid looking in the Cat’s Paw’s eyes.

‘I have never killed a living soul,’ the Cat’s Paw said, vehemently, and then her tone

crumbled with an edge of slight bemusement – as though desperately trying not to think

of something that is so hurtful that it threatened to tear the mind apart. ‘Not me,’ she

said, quietly. ‘It was never me.’

Benny became aware that she was skating around the edge of a sudden abyss, all the

more terrifying for its unexpectedness. If she turned her back upon it, the formless black

of it was going to haunt her for ever. She had to see the precise shape of it with her own

eyes.

‘Why don’t you tell me about it, Miss Blaine?’ she said.

Up in the orbit of Shokesh, Technical Officer Stross was following a maintenance

crawlway, testing the extruded compound-resin tendrils fixed immovably to the sides,

which performed the function that in some earlier and less technically proficient era

would have been performed by insulated cables. Every so often he could run a sensor

pack over a splitter-junction, or check the function of some item of equipment embedded

into the resin.

He was trying to locate the source of the problems with the ARVID-linked communic-

ations subnet, the intermittent malfunctions and the slightly erratic behaviour of the

central ARVID unit itself. He knew that it and the equipment to which it was connected

formed a coherent gestalt, rather like the neurosystem of a living being, and that a fault

with one of the peripheral components could throw the whole arrangement out of line.

He was checking the peripheral equipment first, because such things would be relatively

quick and easy to fix. If the fault was actually with ARVID, any repair procedure would

have to be extremely drastic and specialized, involving the complete shutdown of all

systems and the decommissioning of the Titanian Queen for months. Personally, Stross

was of the opinion that the potentially and lethally catastrophic possibility should be

ruled out first – but a curt reply from United Spaceways, during one of the times when

the comms systems were actually working, had told him, bluntly, that he had better do

anything humanly possible to prevent the ship being dry-docked – and had strongly

implied that, if he were to lose his job, he would be blackballed from even the most

menial of legitimate employment for the rest of his short and sorry life.

As he worked his way through the crawlways, Stross was guided by the technical

schematics of the ship. The problem with the schematics, however, was that they seemed

to bear no real relation to the physical layout, and he rapidly lost even the most general

sense of where he was. There was a healthy element of suspicion in his nature, and he

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developed the probably entirely irrational and paranoid fear that he was heading aft

towards the engines and their undetectable but cumulatively hazardous radiations. He

knew that such a thing was supposed to be impossible but, knowing the shoddy work-

manship that United Spaceways commonly employed, he would not have cared to bet

his life upon it.

Eventually, he realized that the – again, probably unfounded – sense of unease and

tension was becoming distracting. He would try to work on a unit, but his mind kept

focusing on every tiny twinge in his body, exaggerating every momentary itch in his

skin and imagining the killing showers of electrogravitational quasi-particles drilling

through it. It was time to take a rest and catch his bearings.

He backtracked through the conduit until he came to an access hatch, unseated the

snap-bolts and swung himself down into what the vast majority of those who had trav-

elled in it thought of as the extent of the ship.

As Stross looked about him wildly, his first thought was how impossible and wrong it

was for him to be here. Admittedly, he had become lost, but his subliminal senses had

left him utterly unprepared to find himself where he now appeared to be. It was simply

impossible.

The second thing he became aware of were the figures here, and what they were

doing.

‘Hey!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t –’

Not, as final words go in the general run of things, particularly original or impressive,

but they would have to do, as they were the last thing he ever said, having lost the equip-

ment necessary to say them at almost the instant he had spoken. And of course, bare

instants later, he had lost the equipment necessary for any impulse to speak, or to per-

form any living action, ever again.

INTERLUDE

THE HANDS THAT BIND THE DEAD

The village was little more than a staging point for the cleared track that twisted through

the Forest of the Morningstar: an ostler’s yard, a chapel to the local minor gods, a fresh-

water well and a tavern. This was somewhere to pause for the night, when exhaustion

racked the bones and the sounds of the forest spoke of the hidden dangers of the dark.

This was a place to take rest, and some mean degree of refreshment before continuing

on one’s way. This was not somewhere to live.

Tallow brands affixed to farrier-iron brackets sunk into the adobe wall of the tavern,

cast a fitful, flickering light as Kali di Bane lithely dismounted, led her piebald gelding,

Yori, to the ostler’s post and hobbled it. The light illuminated a cage, of a rusted iron,

hanging from a gibbet where the courtyard met the road. Reivers had been here, estab-

lishing and enforcing Lord Dulac’s law, but not recently, not for several moons: the

remains in the cage were nothing more than picked-clean bones. Of the even score of

mounts already tethered here, each and every one was appointed with tack in the worn

and patchwork manner of a brigand, not that of Dulac’s soldiery.

‘Be still,’ Kali di Bane murmured to Yori, who seemed restive in the company of

these animals. ‘I will return soon.’ She cupped the long head of the horse in her hands

and blew into its nostrils until it settled. Then she turned upon a booted heel and strode

towards the tavern, glancing up towards the rough board sign in idle confirmation –

though no degree of confirmation was in fact needed. Kali di Bane had an appointment

to keep in the Boar and Pizzle, and the Boar and Pizzle was the single inn for leagues

around.

Inside, a crackling fire lent its smoke to the smells of tobacco, beer, stale sweat and

greasy meat. Potatoes baked in the ashes and cuts of meat roasted on the hearth. A cer-

tain amount of activity, and certain sounds, from the dark recesses of the inglenook pro-

claimed that one or more of the village doxies were going about their vocation of trade.

The innkeeper himself, in stained leather jerkin and with his undershirt sleeves rolled

up over heavy, corded, hirsute forearms, glanced up with a suspicious grunt as Kali di

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INTERLUDE THE HANDS THAT BIND THE DEAD

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Bane entered, and then turned back to tending his barrels of small ale, stout and mead.

Every bench and stool of the inn was occupied: a baker’s dozen of rough-hewn men,

not a pair of them identical in their brigand garb, but tending towards a kind of uni-

formity, their dirty scraps of leather, wool and flax, their tarnished buckles and scraps of

purloined jewellery, their thongs and feathers and straps, the dirks, daggers, knob-sticks,

short swords, knuckle-dusters, arrow-quivers, powder pistols and machetes of their casu-

ally displayed weaponry, all blurring together as did the disparate contents of a town

midden. These men were mercenaries, soldiers of fortune and for hire, hailing from all

six corners of the world. Kali recognized a Blackamoor from far Afrique, a Brave from

the flying cities of Rashanoor, a Jendokhan from the tropics of the Pellicidorean interior,

and several more.

She strolled towards the Boar and Pizzle’s host, aware of every mind’s attention on

her, for all that the eyes rested studiously elsewhere, aware of what each mind thought

its eyes would see, if they were to be directed to her: a slim and smallish girl, her hair

cropped short, her cloak and clothing stained and travel-worn, her movements, when she

moved, as graceful and sure-footed as a cat’s.

‘A mug of your best and something to eat,’ she told the landlord, tossing a silver

Lord’s Mark to him with a flick of her thumb. ‘And a bottle of the potato spirits you

make,’ she continued, as the man peered with a mixture of avarice and doubt at the coin,

which would have paid for board and lodgings for a week. ‘For later. To keep out the

chill.’

The landlord of the Boar and Pizzle bit the coin, then tucked it into his jerkin and

drew a frothing wooden cup of ale from the tap knocked into a barrel. He handed it to

her with a small attempt towards servility, tempered a little by her sex, her unkempt

clothes and her relative youth.

‘You!’ he called to the mean-faced scullery/wretch who was tending the meat in the

hearth. ‘A slab for the lady. More crackling than fat.’ He bent down behind his bench

and straightened, holding a flat, square flask. ‘Your liquor.’

‘A good year?’ asked Kali di Bane, with no small degree of irony.

‘One of the worst,’ said the landlord with a shrug. ‘What with the reivers and Dulac

raising the tithe an’ all.’

Kali stowed the flask away inside her cloak and turned – to run straight into one of the

largest of the brigands, who she had been aware of shadowing her since the very

moment she had passed through the door of the inn.

‘That’s a powerful lot of drink for a little chit of a thing like you,’ he said, his lips

pulled back from fractured, blocky teeth and a vulpine grin. ‘There are other ways to

keep warm of a night.’

Kali di Bane looked into his eyes, exquisitely aware of how the others gathered here

were watching the scene intently. The leaders of these men, she knew, were elsewhere –

but this man was the leader among these minions: the strongest and most vicious.

Whatever this man took for spoil, the others would surely fight over the leftovers that

INTERLUDE THE HANDS THAT BIND THE DEAD

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remained.

She decided to finish things quickly. With a speed almost too fast for the eye to catch,

she pressed herself towards the brigand so that there was a knife’s breadth between

them. At the same time she drew her two knives – the heavy Disjointer and the slim

Cat’s Claw, and laid the one against the greasy crutch of his breeks, the other against his

bristling throat.

Kali di Bane looked up sweetly at the suddenly blanching brigand. ‘You were

saying?’

A tiny bead of blood dripped from the big man’s chin, where the point of the Cat’s

Claw had pricked it.

‘I think,’ he said, very slowly and carefully, ‘that all things considered ’tis a good

thing you have a flask to keep you warm.’

Kali di Bane stepped back and sheathed her knives, then turned her back upon him, as

if he were some insect of no further interest. Her keen senses remained alert for an indic-

ation that he might take it into his head to strike at her from behind, but she sensed that

he was merely standing, at a loss, like some unruly child admonished by a schoolmaster

with a rule.

She turned to spy the narrow door leading into the Boar and Pizzle’s private back

room. ‘Have the meat sent in,’ she told the landlord. ‘I believe I am expected.’

Behind the door were three men. One was slim, with elfin features, dressed in pristine

silks of red and yellow. One seemed like a priest or friar, dressed from head to toe in

grey robes – though, if one looked closely, one might see something slightly off about

this apparel, as if it were made of his own flesh, somehow distended to give the impres-

sion of robes.

The third man was bigger even than the brigand who had tried to force unwelcome

attentions upon her. He was dressed in battered, blood-red leather, reinforced over the

left shoulder and the kidneys by pitted, riveted iron plate. Like the others, he had turned

upon her entrance, rising from the table at which they sat. Now, recognizing her, he laid

his sword upon the table and favoured her with a hard-etched but friendly grin.

‘Hello, little thief,’ he said. ‘You took your time getting here.’

Kali di Bane smiled back. ‘I had better things to do. Greetings, Simon Gore. I take it

that the party outside is yours?’

The raiding party made its way through a part of the forest so thick that the horses had

been long left behind. The brigands were spread out relatively wide, ostensibly to

present a wider face towards any defensive forces that might be waiting – though, Kali

di Bane realized, in reality to place a number of victims between the dangers of the

forest and those who made up the party’s core.

At least seven of this expendable cadre had thus far been lost. Time and time again,

they heard a thrashing of the undergrowth, a frenzied struggle, a heart-rending scream or

gibbering as one of these men was taken by the monstrous creatures of the dark: by a

INTERLUDE THE HANDS THAT BIND THE DEAD

Page 125

wolverine or bandersnatch, a bog-woppet or a vermicious knid. Kali di Bane supposed

that she should feel some sense of loss or remorse for these casualties, but it was a

purely intellectual thought – she had not recognized them as real people, in her gut. And,

besides, if they were to die then they were dying for a just cause.

It would be a mistake to think that her mind drifted back. In reality it avoided –

prowled around – the vast black pit of pain and grief that was her centre and her soul:

her birth and her mother, one of the concubines of the Lord Dulac; how her mother’s

function, like the others, had been nothing more than a breeding vessel, to provide him

with sons; and how, like the others, when she had dropped a daughter she had been

killed. The Lord Dulac believed, in the face of all objective evidence, that a woman who

gave birth to a female child was a witch who had killed his male child by way of arcane

sorcery, and had used the seed of his blood to propagate her own breed.

By rights – so far as the lord Dulac could conceive of rights – these newborn females

should be killed along with their mothers. Fortunately, there was the occasional servant

who would balk at the task, would spirit these newborns out of the palace and into the

slum city that sprawled around it. Kali di Bane had been one such of these, wet-nursed

by a woman who had lost her own child, and whom she had thought of as her flesh and

blood. It had only been later, when Kali di Bane was barely six years old, and she on her

deathbed, that her ‘mother’ had told her the truth.

After her foster mother’s death, Kali di Bane had found herself alone; living from

hand to mouth off scraps from the slum-street middens, stealing when she could. She

discovered that she had an aptitude for it. And when circumstances dictated, when there

was no other choice, she found that she could kill, with no sense of compunction or

guilt, for little more than a disputed scrap of bread. This had brought her to the attention

of the Assassins, who were always on the lookout for tools that they could use. And

while the Noble Order of Assassins Puissant were an exclusively, monastically male

order, there were uses to which a young girl could be put. There were few who would

suspect murder at the hands of a child.

The Assassins had trained her, and put her to work, and for years she had done their

bidding – years that had seemed an eternity to her, then, for she’d had a child’s short life

and its conception of time. She had been placed into the bedchambers of certain mem-

bers of the nobility, with certain tastes, and she had slit their throats in their eventual

sleep. She had placed herself in the way of others, kinder by nature, and slipped a

poisoned needle into them as they attempted to give her alms. Her boyish features, for

some time into her teens, had allowed her to catch others, with other and more special-

ized tastes, unawares.

The time had come, however, when she was too old to be of use to the Assassins, and

they had marked her for disposal. But they had trained her too well – as the novice boy

they had sent to kill her had discovered, briefly and painfully. Kali di Bane had likewise

dispatched the several more accomplished killers sent by the Assassins after her, not so

much in revenge as in the spirit of proving that none, of any stripe, could escape them.

INTERLUDE THE HANDS THAT BIND THE DEAD

Page 126

She had proved them wrong. She had left the slum cities, escaping once again as she

had escaped the palace, once again alone – save that this time she escaped with skills,

and a maturity that allowed her to use them. She had wandered the lands beyond the

walls: thief, mercenary, selling her services to the highest bidder – and as her name and

expertise had become known, the bids had been increasingly high indeed.

For all that she had built herself a new if perilous life, Kali di Bane never forgot her

old: the black and yawning hatred for Dulac and all his works. And so, as and when a

propitious time presented itself, she offered her skills to the rebels who encamped them-

selves in the Forest of the Morningstar, never missing a chance to place a tree limb in

the spokes of the Lord Dulac’s machinery of power, waiting for the chance to come that

might result in his complete overthrow. Simon Gore was one such rebel – and it might

have just been possible that the long-awaited opportunity had come.

‘The Magus Xazyxtor,’ Simon Gore murmured, as they crept their cautious way

across the misty, mossy forest floor. ‘For years we have been looking for the source of

the tyrant’s power, the enchantments that protected him, preserved his youth and super-

naturally beautiful if a little fey physical features – and now it seems that it is the work

of a man who was held in common regard as the meanest of mere hedge-wizards.’

Kali di Bane nodded to herself. Gore had vouchsafed this information several times

already, both in the Boar and Pizzle and on this trek, but it was vital enough not to

diminish by the repetition. A number of good men had died obtaining it and bringing it

from the palace – and it was as if Simon Gore honoured their memory by the constant

reiteration.

On either side, flanking herself and Simon Gore, Kali di Bane made out two actual

figures: these were one Ildiam bel Geddes and the Pastor Gooli Mo, the two additional

men she had met in the back room of the hostelry – although, ‘men’ was not precisely

the correct word. Ildiam bel Geddes was one of the inhabitants of the flying islands of

Baarloon, a race whose blood had been once mixed with that of the faeries and the

Sidhe. Gooli Mo was even less human, for all his manlike shape. He (if he was in fact a

male of that species) was one of that strange race who existed in those unlikely lands, of

which one caught a fleeting glimpse when one was half asleep and half awake. His (if he

were male) appearance was mutable, and to a large degree optional.

For all their apparent inhumanity, these two, Kali di Bane knew, were the closest and

most trusted of Simon Gore’s lieutenants. Their presence was comforting, offering a

sense of more security than the slowly diminishing band of hired brigands that sur-

rounded them.

Up ahead, though there was nothing to see in the foggy dark, Kali di Bane sensed that

the forest opened out into a clearing. There, if they had followed the directions of dead

men correctly, they would find a nub of stone fully twice the height of a tall man, and in

which – if certain procedures were followed – they would find the crevice that led to the

tunnels of the Magus Xazyxtor’s lair. And there, if they could sufficiently counter sundry

weirds and enchantments, they would discover the talisman that furnished the magus’s

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unholy power and, thus, the very strength of Lord Dulac.

Kali di Bane considered the various methods that she knew for dealing with the snares

of necromantic puissance: the tiny knives she carried (useless for other purposes), each

with a different totem carved on the hilt, and serving as symbols in an abstract battle

against any number of conjured demons. The ensorcelled band of cloth which, if

employed as a blindfold, banished all illusion and allowed the wearer to see nothing but

things as they truly were. The Cape of Fire, which, when deployed, might burn her own

image into the mind of an observer, with such a strength that he would be entranced by

it, and fail to see her as she moved . . .

It was only later that Kali di Bane fully realized her mistake. Lost in contemplation of

what must be done later, it was as if she were truly performing it. She had displaced her-

self into some imagined and hypothetical future, given her attentions more so to it than

the far more important and immediate dangers of the here and now. As it was, she was

jerked back into the harsh reality of the present by the eruptions of flame to either side

of her, the shrieks of agony, the crackle and the spit of burning flesh from what had been

Ildiam bel Geddes and the Pastor Gooli Mo.

Almost absent-mindedly – not quite yet grasping the import of what had occurred –

she stepped away from a suddenly searing heat; looked down at the blazing mass that

had been, a swift instant before, the living Simon Gore.

‘What shall I do with you?’ a voice said. ‘Least and most intransigent of my children.’

From behind a tree bole stepped a dark and black-clad figure. A wizened, palsied and

barely recognizable human form capered behind him. Dimly, she was aware of the

shadowy forms of Dulac’s reivers to either side, but her attention was caught, riveted, by

the man who was her enemy and his sorcerous and monkey-like minion.

The Lord Dulac strode forward, fluid and graceful, muscles moving under his black

leathers and silks like the muscles of a cat. A knowing and strangely gentle smile played

about his depraved, debauched lips.

‘I think,’ said the Lord Dulac, ‘that I really will have to take you over my knee.’

PART FOUR

ARRIVAL

A film must be alive. When this happens, it smashes, devours, pulverizes any synopsis,

plot, story. It speaks, talks and explains itself. It constantly changes itself, its charac-

ters weave in and out of the screen. The performance is different at each screening.

Francisco Reguero (1975)

128

18

METHODS OF INVESTIGATION

The Titanian Queen left the orbit of Shokesh and continued on its way. First it would

negotiate the asteroid cluster that enclosed the system, at speeds not over the order of

thousands of kilometres per second, then, once free of stellar bodies, it would reorientate

itself in space and begin the acceleration for the translation jump to the system of Kinos

and the renowned ice world of Tingkli. There the passengers of the cruise would take a

conducted tour of a landscape carved by the delicate and complex polyfractal climactic

weather patterns into forms of the most surpassing natural beauty – wearing, of course,

special thermally heated suits of the sort that had already wrecked said delicately bal-

anced polyfractal weather patterns and would cause catastrophic climactic collapse on

Tingkli by the end of the century.

Surprisingly, perhaps, almost the entire complement of passengers had returned to the

Titanian Queen. In fact, there were only three who did not, and this was because they

had contracted food poisoning from the fare on Shokesh, and were currently dealing

with appalling local medical facilities and a failure of travel insurance – these elements

being an integral part of any foreign holiday, and the Shokesh tourist industry being

nothing if not thorough. Perhaps it was simply that the passengers could not conceive of

anywhere else to go, or perhaps it was a pack instinct of the sort that has wildlife docu-

mentary film-makers throwing lemmings off cliffs when they don’t seem naturally

inclined to go – in any event, the people returned, even though it meant that they would

spend the days in trepidation, waiting for the horrible murders to resume.

Even more surprisingly, however, the murders did not. The hours stretched to days

without a single person being sucked down a toilet, or found bound and skewered with

an apple in his mouth, or found impaled on a bed of strategically placed spikes. As one

day stretched to two days, not one person unaccountably died.

Consensus of opinion was that the Cat’s Paw had contrived to escape with his ill-

gotten gains. The intangible finger of suspicion was, of course, pointed at those who had

stayed behind on the desert planet with dicky tummies – but not exclusively. A member

of the crew might have jumped ship, or even, as in an unconscionably large number of

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classic murder mysteries, one of the murdered or the disappeared might not have been

murdered at all, or disappeared in the sense that people had supposed.

Life aboard the Titanian Queen, in fact, returned to a semblance of what it had been

before the horrible murders started. The rich were not, of course, precisely renowned for

their common human sympathies – and on the whole, it seemed, the dispatched had been

thoroughly bad sorts or people of no account among the better class of society. They

were no loss. Their deaths had provided a certain excitement to the cruise, and had res-

ulted in slightly less crowded conditions aboard ship, but life continued as normal.

For two people, though, aboard the Titanian Queen, life had suddenly taken a new

turn; and for a number of reasons it was going to become increasingly abnormal indeed.

‘Are you sure you’re not going to make people suspicious like that?’ Benny said.

‘Nah.’ Blaine (as she insisted that Benny call her) scratched at her now short and

razor-cut hair. ‘None of these people are what you might call bright, and they’re every

single one of ’em too involved with themselves.’ She had retained the workmanlike

clothes she had worn on Shokesh, and her manner was almost unrecognizable as the

startled rabbit of her previously assumed persona. She grinned at Benny. ‘Mind you, I

notice that some of the ladies are looking at me as if I’ve dropped a hairpin.’

There was something a little odd about her language structures, Benny noticed. They

seemed vaguely archaic, but not quite correct. Mind you, she thought, that was perfectly

understandable, given what Blaine had told her back in the taberna.

Now, Blaine wandered through Benny’s cabin, casually glancing this way and that.

They had already searched it thoroughly, looking for things that Benny might have ini-

tially missed, or which had become too familiar to see. ‘The trick is,’ she said, ‘to start

from first principles and work your way out. You might cover the same ground in the

first, but there’s good odds you’ll end up taking a completely different path . . .’

She stopped at the doorway that led to Krugor’s cubbyhole, the barricading chair of

which had already been removed. ‘Now do you see what I see here?’

Benny shrugged, wondering what the temporarily ex-cat-burglar was driving at.

‘There’s nothing.’

‘Exactly. There’s nothing. There is, in fact a large amount of no locks or anything.’

‘There’s a lock on the other side . . .’ Benny began.

‘And why would that be? This man Krugor was your servant. How many servants

have you ever heard of who can lock themselves away from their lords and ladies, but

the lords and ladies cannot lock themselves away from them? There’s something inside.

Something he was doing. Something that he didn’t want you coming in unexpectedly to

see.’

‘I see your point.’ Benny picked up a meal-tray butter knife of the sort she had used to

force the door before, and tried again.

‘Damn,’ she said at last. ‘It was easy before.’

Blaine nodded thoughtfully. ‘But not now, eh? Possibly someone might have changed

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it? Never fear – that is, of course, what I’m here for.’

Inside, the small cubicles were just as Benny had last seen them. There was nothing of

suspicious interest, and no room to hide anything if there were.

Blaine, on the other hand, swept her gaze around the balks intently. ‘The thing you

have to remember,’ she said, ‘is that people who actually build things for the fine, rich

people are of the common class that dislike them. They’re perfectly willing to make a

few informal changes to the plans, for a small fee or even for the Sheol – I mean, for the

hell – of it. There . . .’

Blaine pressed her thumb against the bulkhead, two fingers somewhere else, and a

section of it hinged smoothly up. Benny had not even been able to see so much as a

crack.

‘Easy when you know how,’ said the Cat’s Paw.

The hiding place was sunk back only a few centimetres. The only thing inside was a

small, polymer-bound notebook of the sort used as a pocket diary. Benny flipped

through the pages.

‘They’re blank,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to – hang on. There’s a list here. It’s a list

of names. It’s headed “Special Accommodation”.’

‘Who’s on it?’ Blaine asked with interest.

‘Sheen . . . Gaffney . . . the Dowager Duchess of Gharl . . .’ Benny looked up from the

book with a small degree of startlement – startled not so much by the actual contents as

the fact that they were so blatantly supplied.

‘We’re going to have to go through the list properly,’ she said, ‘but you know who’s

going to turn out to be on them as well as I do.’

On the bridge, Captain Fletcher Iolanthe Crane unbuttoned his dress-uniform collar and

sank back in a seat with a small sigh of relief. He had just returned from that evening’s

set dinner, the first he had attended since that fateful night of murders, and he had been

on the edge of that particular dining-room seat the whole time, starting at shadows,

waiting for the hammer of mayhem to fall . . . but in the end there had been a decided

and entirely welcome lack of explosions.

For the first time in a week he caught himself wondering if the worst of it was truly

over. No deaths, not an additional, sudden and utterly unsolvable problem in immediate

sight. The only cloud of unease was the quiet disappearance of the technical officer,

Stross – Crane hoped like hell that he had simply jumped ship in a kind of informal form

of resignation.

Even the ARVID seemed marginally less annoying than usual. He turned to face the

smooth surface of the housing unit. ‘Is there anything I should know about?’

‘Not a thing,’ the ARVID said blandly, without any kind of childish preamble that had

one wanting to hammer on it with an adjustable spanner. Indeed, the voice of the ARVID

had seemed increasingly relaxed and cultured of late – maybe as a result of its acceler-

ated, in human terms, progress through life to maturity.

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‘There is nothing you need be aware of or trouble yourself about,’ it continued,

smoothly. ‘Rest assured, my dear Captain, that if there is you’ll be the first to know.’

Like the rebuilding of the Olabrian joy-luck crystal (which was now in its hatbox in the

back of the closet of her cabin, packed around with thick bundles of clothing in an

attempt to stifle its seemingly endless stream of asinine platitudes) things now seemed to

have devolved, Benny thought, into a simple matter of finding all the pieces and putting

them together in the correct manner.

With a minor change of attitude it was possible to have an almost complete run of the

ship, remaining almost completely unobserved. One merely stuck to the areas used by

the crew, and avoided such members as there were – a rather easier task than might have

been at first thought. With the exception of the ubiquitous stewards – who did not fully

count as human, being conditioned and remote-controlled to the point of individuality-

extinction – the Titanian Queen had always operated on the basis of a bare-minimum,

skeleton crew. Thus, with the help of Blaine – who was, after all, utterly conversant with

the methods of skulking unobserved in places where one should not properly be – Benny

moved through the ostensibly out-of-bounds areas of the ship with no real hindrance.

They were here to check out two things that were bothering her. One of these things

was of a mixture of the conceptual and the tangible, and Benny dealt with the tangible

aspect of it remarkably quickly. She looked at the peeling paint on the balks here, and

absently picked a few flecks of it off.

‘Rust,’ she said.

‘So?’ Blaine said uninterestedly, still keeping an eye and other senses out for any

inconvenient crewman.

‘I’ll tell you later.’ Benny pulled a scrap of polymer sheeting from an inside pocket of

her twinset. It was the sheet of schematics that she had retrieved from the airlock after

the death of Cherry, and upon which Khaarli the Czhan had scribbled the result of his

investigative interview. ‘I think this is pretty much the right place.’

She scanned the schematic diagram for a moment, and then let her gaze drift about the

corridor – recapturing those trained professional instincts that allowed her to intimate the

relationships between objects and spaces.

After a while, she scowled. ‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘Things are out of kilter, if you

know what I mean.’

‘No luck, then?’ Blaine said.

‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Benny smiled, a little. ‘It was almost exactly what I was

expecting.’

The second thing was far more tangible, almost entirely so. Like all commercial vessels

that carried passengers – that is, those whose contracts did not contain an explicit lim-

ited-liability clause, stating that in the case of shipwreck or similar disaster they were on

their own – the Titanian Queen was required to carry a complement of life pods. They

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nestled in their racks, each approximately the size of a twentieth-century space shuttle

before coolant-system malfunction and detonation. The majority of their bulks were

given up to living and supply space, providing livable if extremely cramped emergency

conditions for all on board the ship.

At least, that might have once been the general idea.

‘The seals are all broken.’ Blaine indicated the single exception, an alloy tag upon the

locking mechanism of a single one of the pods, certifying that it had been inspected and

found to contain food, water and air in sufficient quantities, together with functioning

control and communications systems. ‘This is the only one that seems to be intact.’

‘Let’s leave it as it is then,’ said Benny. ‘For the moment. Let’s have a look inside one

of the unsealed ones.’

The sample pod in question was a mere skeleton, picked clean. There were no sup-

plies of any kind, and the control units had been ripped from their housings – or would

have been, if they had ever been installed in the first place.

‘I don’t think this was ever intended to be used,’ Benny said. ‘Maybe the owners just

preferred to risk the lawsuits than the outlay.’

Blaine had been going over the pod interior with the attention to detail that was her

stock in trade. ‘There’s still an air supply.’ She opened a unit and indicated the rack of

pressurized canisters.

‘And don’t think I don’t have my suspicions about that.’ Benny examined the bottles.

The entire point of an escape pod was to pare things down to the basics, and they were

designed simply to expel raw oxygen into the atmosphere. ‘Go over there and hold your

breath,’ she told Blaine.

As the criminal backed off to the other end of the pod, Benny cracked open a bottle,

took a shallow breath and then closed it again.

‘I have the feeling,’ she said, ‘that if anyone actually tried to sprocket that yellow

teacup, puppet the small snake jelly glue machine . . .’

‘How are you feeling now?’ Blaine handed her another cup of black coffee laced with

stims that were making her feel as though she’d lost the very top layer of her epidermis.

‘I told you, I’m perfectly all right.’ Benny sipped the coffee anyway. ‘I only caught a

whiff of it, and I knew what to expect. It just confirmed what I was thinking. The gas in

the bottle that did for that woman Cherry in the airlock wasn’t just intended as a specific

murder. Somebody’s doing a nice little spot of manipulation.’

She looked around the cabin of Isabel Blaine – rather smaller and much less plush

than her own, in keeping with the Isabel Blaine cover identity. The dose of gas Benny

had got from the canister in the pod had not been serious, but Blaine had been forced to

drag a dazed and babbling Bernice Summerfield into the privacy and safety of her own

quarters, those being the nearest. There being no particular secrets between them for the

moment, Blaine was idly showing her several of the methods she utilized as the Cat’s

Paw, while she waited for Benny to recover completely. Among the more high-tech and

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complicated tools, Benny noticed several quite ordinary and prosaic items.

‘Is that a nail file?’ she said. ‘A lead pencil?’

‘Sometimes things like that are the best things for a job,’ Blaine said absently. ‘It’s

similar to the way that one can kill with anything from a cobblestone picked up from the

street to a longbow, to an electromagnetically contained, command-detonated plasma

burst. It’s a matter of choosing the correct method.’ From her cotside dresser she picked

up a bottle of solvent such as was commonly used to remove nail varnish and toyed with

it. ‘Sometimes you might not want to be caught with anything suspicious, but there are

other factors. Sometimes there are one hell of a lot of factors.’ She glanced towards a

slim personal database, about the size of an old-style cigarette packet and from the looks

of it state of the prototypical art.

‘Something I’ve been wondering about,’ Benny said. ‘All right, so it’s relatively easy

to sneak around unnoticed on the human level, but what about the ship’s security sys-

tems? I’d have thought they would be horrendously complicated to beat.’

‘Only at the start.’ Blaine put down the little bottle and picked up an item similar to a

med technician’s DMSO spray crossed with a military flechette-ejecting gun. ‘The ships

systems are routed through an ARVID processor, and that’s based on processes coming

out of the Catan Nebula. Nanonite-based matter-restructuring processes. So I acquired a

little Catan technology of my own.’ She broke open the hypo-gun and extracted a

metallic, chrome-bright cylindrical vial, of approximately the same size as the top

phalange of an index finger. ‘The horrendously complicated part was getting to the

central processor. Then I simply cracked it and injected my own Catan nanonites. They

restructured the ARVID in certain ways that disabled the security systems without any-

body knowing, and then I could just go where I liked.’ She grinned a little smugly. ‘Use

their own technology against them, as it were.’

Again, Benny remembered what Blaine had told her back on Shokesh. She could see

how the Cat’s Paw might enjoy turning Catan technology, specifically, to her own ends.

She frowned. ‘It strikes me that the other result would be to let our murderer, or mur-

derers, go wherever the hell they liked, too.’

Blaine’s face hardened a little, not with anger at Benny but at herself. ‘There is that.

Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.’

Looking at the vial, Benny noticed that there was some tiny detail that she couldn’t

quite see but that was nagging at her mind. ‘Could I have a closer look?’

‘Surely.’ Blaine passed it over.

Benny turned the vial over in her hands, feeling the shape of it that spoke of tre-

mendous care and attention to detail in its construction, in the same way as a piece of

expertly cut lead crystal feels entirely different from a superficially similar lump of

glass-gel moulding. She peered at the little sticky label on the side, trying to make out

the serial numbers printed on it.

A slightly paranoid thought struck her, borne of knowing of the potential dangers of

quasi-organic microspores and the absolute care that must be taken in working with

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them. ‘I suppose it’s quite safe to handle it?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Blaine said. ‘As you can imagine, I know a lot about the Catan pro-

cesses. These vials are crafted individually and checked over weeks. Only the top ten per

cent of those that pass the basic safety guidelines are used, the rest are destroyed.

They’re integrally tagged to their contents, and serialized so that it’s impossible for some

idiot to try to recondition them.’ She smiled. ‘You won’t get any on your hands.’

As she listened to Blaine, a tiny piece clicked home in Benny’s head. Not the final

piece, but the crucial one – the additional molecule that tips the weapons-grade

plutonium of the mind into critical mass, and converts it into a big and sudden hole in

the ground.

‘These things are scrupulously tagged to their contents?’ she said, slowly. ‘Each has

its own unique serial?’

Blaine nodded without much interest. ‘They make damned sure they can’t get mixed

up.’

‘All right.’ Benny peered at the vial again, reading and rereading the serial number.

‘But if they were going to do that, they’d do it with engraving or molecular pigment-

bonding on the base, wouldn’t they? Something indelible?’ She held out the vial so that

it was almost directly under Blaine’s now slightly startled nose. ‘Not, and correct me if

I’m wrong, on a little, sticky and quite obviously removable label.’

19

CAN WE TALK?

Khaarli of the seventh dhai, Prosecutor General of the Czhanos Militia, looked down his

snout at Benny. There was no rudeness intended: it was simply that he had to crane his

neck to see anything more than the top of her head. He plucked at a tusk, thoughtfully,

with his thumb. ‘Do you realize what you’re asking, thou pribbling crook-pated rats-

bane? These reeky, doghearted nut-hooks have little or no respect for my person in itself,

merely my hard-won reputation as an investigator. That is all, under the present circum-

stances that I have.’

Benny glanced about the Czhan detective’s cabin. In the same way as those of Isabel

Blaine and herself had intimated something of their supposed personas and social posi-

tion, this space said something about Khaarli. It was not that there was anything actively

bad about it – simply that the decor was just that little bit less pristine, the sound of the

ship’s air-conditioning and plumbing systems too evident, the position of the cabin in

the ship at large just a touch convenient. It could only be that, as a nonhuman being, he

had been assigned a cabin that was just that little bit imperfect, as if it were assumed that

he wouldn’t know the difference, for all he was, almost by definition, a trained and

highly proficient observer.

This was the sort of thing Benny noticed a lot, when humans were trying to interact

with other intelligences and had the generally upper hand, and she always fumed quietly

about it to herself. She tried never to bring it up with the people involved, though,

because without exception that came across as incredibly condescending.

‘That’s the whole point,’ she said to Khaarli. ‘These people trust your judgment, and

you’re the only one I can count on to trust me. You’re the only one who can put it all

together so I can clear things up – and quite possibly save the lives of everyone on board

into the bargain.’

Khaarli thought this over for a while and, eventually, nodded slowly. ‘Agreed, then,

thou milk-livered unmuzzled mammet. I’ll see what I can do.’ He peered at Benny

closely, with eyes that were no more piggy from his porcine ancestry than Benny went

around flashing a bare monkey’s bum. ‘I wish I didn’t receive the distinct impression

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that you were keeping certain things from me, however, thou beef-witted weedy hag-

gard.’

‘I wish I could tell you,’ Benny said, hoping to the Goddess that her plans would actu-

ally work. ‘I really wish I could. But if I didn’t take you through them step by step, in

detail, you’d never believe me.’

It was by general agreement the late afternoon, a time when the Starfire Ballroom was

usually deserted. Benny looked around, and made a small mental note to thank Khaarli

for a sterling job. He had prevailed upon the great detectives, every single one, to gather

here, together with the captain and the highest-ranking of the ship’s officers.

For all this, though, she had subconsciously expected the place to be utterly packed,

everyone on board desperately trying to get in to learn the solution to the perils that had

plagued the Titanian Queen. She had underestimated the sheer indifference of the pas-

sengers to anything and everything not directly related to themselves. The family and

immediate associates of the murder victims were here, but hardly anyone else seemed to

have thought it worth the bother. She recognized the ex-good lady wife of Nathanael C.

Nerode, who appeared to have formed a friendly attachment with the member of the bar

staff from Percy’s Discotheque, and a few others who she recalled had been sitting with

the eventual dead on the night when several people had exploded. A number of the ubi-

quitous stewards were here, serving drinks and the occasional snack, or simply waiting

unobtrusively until they were called upon.

Ah well, the lack of turnout would at least simplify matters a little, prevent the pro-

ceedings being cluttered by extraneous matters.

Khaarli was addressing the assembled great detectives. ‘. . . not exactly myself I want

you to listen to,’ he was saying, ‘thou swag-bellied cockered hugger-muggers . . .’

‘Aha!’ proclaimed Emil Dupont. ‘I thought as much. I intimate from certain signs that

we are, in fact, to be treated to a demonstration of theatrical animal-training, involving a

performing seal, three chipmunks and an extremely peripatetic mountain gorilla!’

A number of those present put their heads in their hands.

Khaarli, however, was made of sterner stuff. ‘In fact, thou pox-marked full-gorged

pignut, I was referring to the lady here, Ms Summersdale.’

‘That’s nice, dear.’ Miss Agatha Magpole nodded her amiable, senile head – and a

gasp went up from the diminutive crowd as the action almost dislodged her special

brainwave hat. Fortunately for all concerned, her ever-handy companion was on the

scene to catch it and prevent it from falling off.

‘Am I to understand,’ said a voice tight with barely controlled fury, ‘that these pro-

ceedings are to be conduced at the hands of this . . . this . . .’

Benny decided to seize the initiative. ‘Yes, Mr Groke,’ she said firmly. ‘As Khaarli

here has implied, the solution is in sight and – barring one or two of the unimportant

details – I think I have it.’ She adopted a kind of schoolma’amish tone that caught the

special agent off guard and had him blushing with embarrassment. ‘Now, are you going

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to try to contain yourself long enough to hear what I have to say, or are you going to

simply make a fool of yourself and be sent to stand in the corner? It’s all the same to

me.’

The special agent glowered at her as if contemplating bloody murder. ‘I’ll listen.’

‘Thank the Goddess for small mercies.’ Benny regarded the special agent with steady

contemplation, as if he were a not particularly interesting microbe on a slide. ‘Because,

Mr Groke, it is you I wish to question further.’

‘Me?’ Groke seemed, momentarily, taken aback. Suspicious. Even a little frightened.

Some locked-off part of him knew, Benny thought. On some level of what he called his

consciousness he had always known.

‘Yes, you.’ She paced the clear area of floor, surrounded by the great detectives and

now slightly restive onlookers, counting points off on her fingers as though only now

putting together something she had, in fact, already rehearsed in her head. ‘You might

not be aware of it,’ she continued, ‘but I’ve been paying a certain amount of attention to

you, Mr Groke. I’ll admit, at first, that this was simply because I have seldom ever met

such an objectionable little turd, and such things prey upon the mind . . .’

Groke, who had in any case been visibly bristling, let out a strangled squeak of out-

rage.

‘’Ere!’ exclaimed the doughty Inspector Interchange. ‘There are ladies . . .’ He real-

ized that the most obvious lady here was Benny herself, and finished lamely:

‘. . . present.’

‘Good for you, Ms Summersdale,’ interjected Khaarli with a kind of friendly, evil sat-

isfaction, ‘thou pottle-deep rank baggage.’

Benny bowed, with some degree of irony, towards him. ‘I rather think we can dis-

pense with that little subterfuge now, don’t you think? The name is Summerfield.’

‘What, Bernice Summerfield?’ asked Khaarli, with interest. ‘The one who, as I seem

to recall, wrote the well-known Down Among the Dead Men and is, so I gather, even

now hard at work upon the long-awaited sequel? I never would have guessed.’

The bland innocence he radiated told Benny that he had known who she was from the

moment he had clapped eyes on her.

‘That’s the one.’ Benny swept those assembled with her gaze. ‘None of that will mean

much to any of you here, but the upshot is that I know a thing or two, and quite possibly

three, about historical matters.’

She turned her attention back to the special agent. ‘I began to notice certain things

about you, Mr Groke. Your bearing, your language structures, certain facts you let slip.’

She paused. ‘It’s common knowledge that you once occupied some covert position in the

Catan Nebula – but the truth is, is it not, that you really come from somewhere far more

far afield than that? I’m thinking, in particular, of the field of time, is that not correct?’

It was as if the special agent had been suddenly transformed into a balloon animal

with a slow leak. He slumped, defeated and deflated – and then he raised his head to

stare at Benny with grim and tortured eyes. ‘It’s true.’

19 CAN WE TALK?

Page 139

In a harsh monotone, Groke began to speak. He told them of his exploits in the ser-

vice of the English Crown, of his nemesis, the fiendish Doctor Po and of the final con-

frontation that had sent him hurtling through time.

‘I thought as much,’ Benny said at last, when he had finished. ‘It must have been hard

for you: finding yourself in a world you could never even begin to understand.’

‘It was,’ said Groke, quietly.

‘I’d suspect that, for a while, you went a little mad.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d imagine,’ said Benny, ‘that the only thing that kept you clinging to a shred of

sanity was the fact that the man who did this to you was still out there, somewhere. After

all, the villain had unlocked the secrets of time.’ She smiled coldly. ‘I expect you’ve

spent your life looking for some sign of him, any clue, any shred of evidence; waiting

for the slightest chance to hunt him down.’

‘Yes,’ said Groke, in a barely perceptible undertone.

Benny became brisk. ‘Well, I’m afraid, I have a bit of bad news for you, Mr Groke,

because the whole thing’s been complete and utter bollocks, from start to finish.’

FINAL INTERLUDE

THE LAIR OF THE FLATWYRM

The sorcerer’s lair was rank with the smells of his alchemical experiments, the rotting

remains of rare vegetation and the anatomy and product of fantastickal beasts, such as

the kidneys of a gryphon, the feathers of a kracken and the springlike reproductive

organs of a Tigger. There was an undertone of a greasy, fried-meat odour that was

almost pleasant – until one remembered the well-documented usages to which a necro-

mancer put the blood of unbaptized, unchristian children.

Kali di Bane was shackled and manacled to the fetid marble slab upon which the

Magus Xazyxtor performed his magicks upon his live subjects. The magus himself

fussed over her, affixing lesser talismans of various sorts to her clothing. (She had

expected to be stripped naked for whatever foul plan the wizard had for her, but this was

apparently not to be the case.) The talismans hummed and crackled with some unearthly

energy. She felt the stinging and the humming of them, her own spine convulsing time

and again to their unholy resonances.

‘Nearly done.’ The Magus Xazyxtor ran rough, dry hands over the bare skin of her

neck before winding it with what seemed, from what the straining eyes in her strap-

bound head could see, to be a kind of copper wire. ‘Make you ready soon. Nearly done.’

The fact that her head was strapped meant that the wizard was forced to repeatedly pass

the wire under the nape of her neck, in a process rather like that of sewing. His dry, grey

and strangely reptilian tongue licked at four concentric rows of brittle teeth as he

worked. The end of the wire gouged and tore at her skin.

‘You could untie my head, you know,’ Kali di Bane said, in a reasonable tone of

voice. She had long ago come to the conclusion that struggling and cursing fit to turn the

air bloody was little use against the wizard’s powers.

In the forest, as she had tried to back away from Dulac and his sorcerous ally, the

magus had thrown some seemingly insubstantial and ghostly, but constricting and ener-

vating, web of force about her, which none of her own defensive magicks had been able

to break. The wizard (and, therefore, Dulac) had powers of this sort greater than any she

could draw upon. The only chance she had left was to conserve her strength, attempt to

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FINAL INTERLUDE THE LAIR OF THE FLATWYRM

Page 141

lull her captors into a sense of security, and wait to take advantage of any chance that

came her way.

‘You could free my head, at least,’ she continued. ‘I’m bound everywhere else. There

would be no danger – and whatever it is that you’re about might be accomplished more

conveniently and less painfully.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said the voice of the Lord Dulac from one side, ‘that is quite frankly

impossible. Now, I’ll admit that I cannot see how having your head alone free might aid

you, but it would be the thin end of the wedge. I know how resourceful Kali di Bane can

be, ever since the unfortunate demise of my Privy Councillor.’

‘I was rather proud of that,’ Kali di Bane said lightly, masking the murderous rage she

felt with a sardonic insouciance that, she hoped, might discomfit Dulac even more. ‘I’m

rather surprised you realized that it was not an accident.’

‘Oh, come now. A Privy Councillor killed in his own apartments in the palace, col-

lapsing whilst he was in the privy – how in the world could it possibly not be the result

of some conscious plan? I use the word “conscious” advisedly, of course, given the level

of the humour involved. Besides, my men found the remains of the timber you used to

prop up the hollowed foundations and then burnt.’

Kali nodded the fraction that her bonds allowed. ‘I’ll have to remember to be more

scrupulously neat and tidy the next time.’

‘I’m afraid, di Bane, for you, that the next time might prove rather longer than you

anticipate,’ said the Lord Dulac.

The Magus Xazyxtor finished his preparations, and bustled off muttering and chort-

ling happily to himself. A shadow loomed over her from the other side, the side from

which Dulac had spoken, and she looked up into his quietly smiling face.

He seemed as young as she, for all that he was thrice her age. His face was quite

beautiful – it could almost be that of an angel, if one remembered that Lucifer himself,

originally, had been an angel. The beauty was marred, however, by the unnatural sheen

of his skin, as though it were of Canthon porcelain, expertly crafted to produce an artifi-

cial semblance of life. That, and the malevolence that burnt within his dark and hooded

eyes.

‘Gore and his men were trifles,’ he told her, kindly. ‘Insects simply to be crushed.’ He

stroked her cheek gently with a fingernail, then abruptly dug it in hard enough to draw

blood. ‘You, however, are another matter. The very fact of your existence is a slight to

my will.

‘For all your life, rather than wage a consistent and thus easily countered campaign

against me, you have taken every chance to assist those who are against me, whosoever

they are and no matter how large or insignificant the ways. Thus, in some cumulative

sense, you are the single individual who has hurt me the most – in ways for which, were

I not in the possession of considerable powers, I would ordinarily not be able to find the

culprit.’

The Lord Dulac leant closer to her face and kissed it.

FINAL INTERLUDE THE LAIR OF THE FLATWYRM

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‘You are my enemy, and a lovely one at that, it must be told. It is as ultimately simple

as that.’

The Lord Dulac straightened again. ‘Every fibre of your being aches to destroy me,

and I tell you that I shall not be destroyed. With the assistance of the Magus Xazyxtor, I

intend to live far longer than you can possibly imagine. And speaking of which, are your

preparations quite complete, sorcerer?’

A glance in the direction in which the magus had left. A slightly distant voice said, ‘Is

ready. Is risk, though. Might tear the veil apart . . .’

‘It is of no matter.’ The Lord Dulac returned his attention to the prone Kali di Bane.

‘You see, my darling, hateful daughter, the Magus Xazyxtor has discovered the means to

break the very bonds of time. Rather than simply execute you, I have decided to do

something all the worse. I shall send you to the future, millennia into the future, and you

shall arrive to see the world that I will build. And I will be there, still alive, still vital,

and you shall see the utter depth of your defeat.’

The Lord Dulac turned, once again, to his sorcerous minion. ‘Proceed, Xazyxtor.’

‘Righty-ho,’ said the voice of the magus, and for a moment there was silence. It could

only be her imagination that had Kali di Bane hearing, in a tiny voice that seemed to

come from the edge of everything, a voice say, ‘You don’t watch that facilitator-con-

struct, it’ll all go pear-shaped again. And that whole father-daughter dynamic looks

incredibly dubious to me.’

( ‘Yeah, well. It seems to be inherent in the structure, for some reason. Dirty sods . . .’)

‘There seems to be some problem with your scheme,’ Kali di Bane said, keeping her

reasonable tone and resisting her fury with a single-mindedness that was, now, almost

insanity. ‘Incantations and the summoning of flagitious powers from the depths of the

unending fetid dark are the areas which seem, at the moment, to be lacking.’

The Lord Dulac sighed, seemingly more in pity than anything else. ‘How little you

have learnt in your dilettante dabblings with the Arcane Arts, daughter. Have you not

realized that such things are merely the delirium of lunaticks?’ He smiled. ‘The secret is,

simply, to know precisely what one has to do and then do it.’

And then, with a suddenness that was almost tranquil, for it did not give her body

time to know its pain, the energy of suns exploded through Kali di Bane and tore her

apart.

20

THE CHARACTERS INHABITING

THE MIND

The Cat’s Paw made her way through the hidden areas of the ship, using every precau-

tion, every trick, every piece of security-system-defeating equipment she had. After her

talk with Benny, she had lost her faith in the measures she had taken before – she had

severe doubts that even the most extreme measures she was taking now would be

enough.

Ah, well. At some point you simply had to risk it, and pray to the various gods you

believed in, when the chips were down, that the highest card you were holding was in

fact the trump.

For all that she had asked Benny to call her ‘Blaine’, the Cat’s Paw held no truck with

names. She wore them lightly, changed them in an instant, dropped them without regret.

Once, she had thought she’d had a name, but it had been a lie. Like her entire life,

everything she’d done, or been, or was, had been a lie.

‘I have a friend.’ Benny turned from the stricken-looking Groke, and addressed the great

detectives and the various other onlookers in general. ‘Let me tell you about her – it may

seem like it isn’t, but it’s relevant, believe you me.

‘She lived in a time long distant from ours, a feudal time, a time of magics, a time of

mythological beasts. She was a thief, killer and warrior, fighting against an evil and tyr-

annical overlord, who had killed her mother and so, of course, for whom she felt an all-

surpassing and absolute hatred. Anything she could do to hurt him, to thwart his plans,

she did.

‘But the overlord was cunning, as well as slathered black with rotting and corrupted

evil. He had access to diverse and extremely powerful magics, and he laid a snare for

her. He caught her and by, naturally, those self-same magics, sent her plunging through

the veil of time, into the future.

‘She awoke to find herself in a strange new world, peopled with monsters, still ruled

over by the overlord she hated so, and twisted into insanity by his monstrous will. Fortu-

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20 THE CHARACTERS INHABITING THE MIND

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nately, however, by pure chance, by a slight miscalculation by the magus who had

served the overlord, she found that she had appeared into this world among friends.

People who were still fighting against the Evil One, even after aeons, and who were per-

fectly willing to fight to the death – their own, the overlord himself, that of his minions

and even the occasional and unfortunate innocent bystander.

‘They inducted her into their cabal. Learning that she had been a killer in her previous

life, they realized that they could use her to good effect. They set her targets, the chief

lieutenants of the Evil One, and provided her with the necessary means to kill them. And

she did, all the time working closer, closer to the death of the ultimate target, the Evil

One himself.’

Benny shot a sardonic glance at the now shaking Groke, who now seemed so pale as

to be almost translucent.

‘Now, things were going fine,’ she said, ‘and might have remained so indefinitely –

save that my friend was incredibly bright. She looked at things, she observed them; she

remembered what she’d seen and she thought about it. And after a while she began to

realize that there were an increasingly large number of things that, quite simply, refused

to add up. She began to ask questions – dangerous questions, of the sort that her so-

called friends found more and more difficult to answer convincingly. So, at last, her so-

called friends decided to eliminate her – and at this point they made a genuine miscalcu-

lation.

‘As I said, she was incredibly bright, incredibly resourceful and she had been learning

all the time. She was also (it must be said) not a little lethal. She contrived to escape

those sent to kill her – and found herself lost and on her own in a world she could not

understand.’ Benny looked at Groke again. ‘It was at this point, of course, that a lesser

mind might possibly have gone completely round the twist.

‘But my friend was made of sterner stuff. She studied this world she had found herself

in, learnt all she could about it, picked the scraps of information from any source she

could, and put it all together – and in the fullness of time, of course, she discovered the

underlying truth about the world and about herself.’

The audience were hanging on her words, caught up in the cadences of her story.

Benny broke the mood with a shrug and a grin, and continued in a far more ordinary

tone.

‘The upshot of it all was that she was in the Catan Nebula – and we all of us know

what the Catan Nebula does. It’s famous the galaxy over for the production of artificial

intelligences, artificial beings. One of the more interesting things they do is to vat-grow

humanoids from synthetic DNA – synthetic only in that it’s chemically produced, of

course. The end result is physically indistinguishable from the ordinary run of humanity,

save that they are occasionally able to incorporate several enhancements left out by

sheer evolutionary chance.

‘The incorporations, basically, produce blank templates – mindless, adult human

bodies, which they can then customize to order. They introduce nanonetic microspores

20 THE CHARACTERS INHABITING THE MIND

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into their brains, programmed to restructure them and produce a working approximation

of intelligence, personality and memory.’ Benny glanced at the stewards as they bustled

about in their ceaseless, barely noticeable dance. ‘Some of them are simply programmed

for simple, repetitive tasks and responses, little more than robots; meat machines. Some

are programmed as soldiers who will single-mindedly fight or die. Some, on the other,

rather unlikely third hand, are designed to be rather more complex . . .

‘My friend, of course, was of that sort. She had been manufactured as a kind of ter-

mination unit – an ultimately expendable, but intelligently responsive and reusable

assassin. She had been implanted with a relatively complex life sequence, cobbled

together from old Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery stories, primed with someone she

could hate above all else, people she could simply kill without compunction. From the

moment she was activated, she was simply told something that tied vaguely in with what

she thought she was – and then she was wound up, given a target and set off.’

Benny turned to regard the special agent once again. She supposed she should feel

sympathy for him – but then again she recalled the woman she now knew as Blaine. The

point from which you start does not necessarily preordain the point at which you end up.

At some point, one simply had to take responsibility for one’s own life and self.

‘They use other programs,’ she continued, ‘all strung together from old pulp fiction,

science fiction, adventure yarns, police stories and the Goddess alone knows what else.

They all have the same elements, though: a casual attitude to violence, a villainous

nemesis for the humanoid to kill – and they all culminate with some quasi-reason for

waking up on a strange alien world one has never seen before. Maybe it’s a coma, or a

dimensional rip, or simply being hurled through time – the point is that the ending’s

always basically the same.

‘Thing is, these mid- to higher-level processes are touch and go at best. State of the

art, and the physical brain size they have to work with, mean that the cover-memories

can only be designed to work well enough for long enough – and they’re barely func-

tional, even then. The humanoids have to be handled incredibly carefully, or the inherent

contradictions, anachronisms and simple bits of asinine stupidity become too much.

They impact, fragment and recombine in entirely new forms. In the cutting-edge

products like my friend, that leads to the development of true consciousness, a realiza-

tion of what they really are. In the – let’s be charitable and call them the standard

models – they go rogue. You get these insane quasi-human killing machines wandering

about, desperately clinging to what they think they are and doing who knows what sort

of –’

Quite what sort of anything, after this point, Benny never fully got to say. A weight

bowled into her and bore her to the ground, cracking her head against the hard, artificial

stonelike floor of the ballroom. She felt a pair of hands clench around her throat and she

looked up into the crazed and teeth-gritted face of Groke.

‘Kill you,’ Sandford Groke, Special Agent, snarled. ‘You’re in league with him. Kill

you now!’

20 THE CHARACTERS INHABITING THE MIND

Page 146

***

The Cat’s Paw was more than halfway to her eventual destination now, still taking it

slowly, still moving with a caution so extreme that it was almost pathological. It was

imperative, she knew, that the item she carried in the pouch slung from her belt should

get where it was supposed to go.

Then again, the Cat’s Paw thought, pathological was something she should be quite at

home with. On that day, flipping through what she had still thought of as a ‘magic

showing box’ in a chamber in the Catan Habitat B12 – on that day when she had finally

known in her guts who and what she was – the anger and the hatred in her had not died.

It had merely transferred itself.

Her existence had become defined by her need for revenge against those who had

stolen her life, who had made her extinguish others when, she knew, inside herself, that

it was loathsome. She had vowed, that day, that she would steal from them and hurt

them, but she would never, under any circumstances, ever kill again. At least, she

thought, not directly. She would simply make them pay, and pay again, and keep on

paying till the day they died.

Simple, really. Admittedly, she had been a little taken aback when she had told all this

to Bernice Summerfield, and Benny’s reaction had been simply to exclaim, ‘Oh dear

Goddess, not another one. You know, just sometimes I’d like to go somewhere where

there isn’t someone created by an evil corporation or suchlike and taking their revenge.’

The Cat’s Paw had been a little hurt by this, but now she had come to talk about it to

someone else, she realized how simple-minded her impulses and reactions had been, and

she resolved to do better. She was worth more than that.

Now, if she could just work out why, precisely, she had also become fixated on pre-

cious stones and jewels and suchlike . . .

‘Kill you!’ Sandford Groke gibbered. ‘Kill you!’ He paused for a moment, and then con-

tinued once again. ‘Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you!’

‘Hold still, thou folly-fallen impertinent foot-licker . . .’ Khaarli growled as the fren-

zied special agent struggled in his arms.

‘Kill you!’ said Sandford Groke, defiantly. A small squad of the Dellah Constabulary

were already crowding round to take charge of him.

‘Now you’re not doing yourself any good, sonny Jim.’ Inspector Gerald Interchange

looked the wretched captive over with distaste, then turned to Benny solicitously. ‘Are

you all right, miss?’

‘I’m fine,’ Benny croaked, rubbing some life back into her throat. The special agent

had got in quite a good squeeze before Khaarli had dragged him off her.

‘Who’d have thought it?’ Interchange mused. ‘Sandford Groke, eh?’

‘I must admit,’ said Emil Dupont from nearby, ‘that rather derails my own line of

thought, concerning a band of tap-dancing pixies conjured up by several people wishing

simultaneously and extremely hard . . .’

20 THE CHARACTERS INHABITING THE MIND

Page 147

‘What?’ Benny had tuned out Dupont almost entirely, and was looking at the detective

second-class blankly. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Well, er . . .’ Interchange began, slightly nonplussed. ‘It seems so obvious, now. All

those murders committed by that mad, inhuman thing with the strength of ten . . .’ He

looked at her in bewilderment. ‘Didn’t you say as much yourself, Miss Summersdale?’

‘I said nothing of the sort,’ said Benny, sharply, noting from the Summersdale that it

would probably take the detective second-class some time to catch up fully on recent

events. ‘I was merely establishing a bit of background.’ She waved a dismissive hand at

the struggling, miserable creature. ‘Oh, I don’t know, he might have killed people at

some point in his life – probably has, in fact – but he certainly hasn’t killed anybody

here.’

‘Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you!’ cried Groke, by way of confirmation.

‘Look, can someone please just take him away and look after him?’ Benny said. She

scowled around herself at those assembled. ‘I hadn’t finished, had I?’

The Dellah coppers removed Groke from the ballroom. Benny waited until she once

again had the complete attention of the audience, and continued.

‘There’s something people have been overlooking. Someone who’s been here all the

time, but nobody’s seen him. Someone, basically, from whom at this point I need help.’

‘And who might that be?’ asked Khaarli the Czhan, who was rubbing at a spot where

Groke had scratched him and vaguely wondering if he needed hydrophobia booster

shots.

‘I’ll give you a small clue,’ Benny said. She raised her voice and, unmindful of her

painful throat, addressed the ballroom in general: ‘Oi! You! I know you’re listening in,

and I’ll just bet you can speak here, too. Can you?’

There was a small pause. Then:

‘Indeed I can, my dear Ms . . . Summerfield, was it?’ said the smooth voice of

ARVID. ‘How delightful to find myself conversing with you, once again. What was it of

which you wanted to speak?’

21

THE INHERENT SHAPE OF THINGS,

PERCEIVED

As the Titanian Queen accelerated on towards the asteroid belt, at speeds which,

although minuscule in cosmic terms, were almost unimaginable in human, events aboard

took on something of an extra turn of speed, too.

In a hidden crawlway, the Cat’s Paw came upon an automatic, lethal installation that

she knew for a fact had not been there two days before. It was cunningly disguised; if

she had not been taking especial care she would not have so much as spotted it. As it

was, she had thus far encountered three such weapons.

Why had these things, she thought – as she dodged spraying blaster bolts in the con-

fined crawlway space and took the ejector out with a pencil-laser – why had these things

so suddenly appeared? Had someone known precisely what Benny and she would be

doing, long before they themselves did? Or was it a simple matter of their letting

information slip before they had a real idea of what they were up against?

Precisely who, in the end, was playing games with whom?

In the ballroom, Benny gazed upward and addressed the ARVID – she knew that looking

up was pointless, that in relative terms the artificial intelligence was both everywhere

and nowhere: it simply felt more natural that way.

‘Well, I’m sure you know,’ she said, ‘that I’ve been wandering through the ship.

Looking here, looking there, generally poking around. Would you like to know exactly

what I’ve found?’

‘Please tell,’ drawled the seemingly sourceless voice of ARVID. ‘I am all, if you’ll

pardon the rather unconscionable lapse into utter physical inaccuracy, ears.’

Once again, Benny began to count points off on her fingers – only this time she really

was winging it. It seemed, to her, a little as if she was attempting to make headway

through a kind of shifting shale of factuality, tossing little pebble-packets of information

over her shoulders as she went.

‘The first thing I noticed,’ she said, ‘was the state of the ship in the areas not open to

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21 THE INHERENT SHAPE OF THINGS, PERCEIVED

Page 149

the passengers – first on the trip to the airlock after the disappearance of Mr Sheen, then

later when I went in to confirm my original suspicions. This is a cruise liner. It makes

sense that the areas used solely by the crew would be more functional, less finished,

even downright shoddy.’

‘And your point is?’ the voice of the ARVID said.

‘The point is that these areas were also, quite obviously, old. There was rust every-

where; the basic structure seemed to be deteriorating, barely holding itself together if not

actively and completely falling apart from old age. And this was, let’s not forget, sup-

posed to be the maiden voyage of the Titanian Queen.’

Benny patted at her twinset. ‘I’m sure I had it somewhere . . . Never mind.’ She con-

tinued: ‘Additionally, I had a section of the ship’s schematics, and they simply didn’t

tally with the shape the Titanian Queen is supposed to be. There wasn’t enough to get

more than a general sense of wrongness, but with sufficient care and attention to detail, I

believe that the discrepancies could be definitively proven . . .’

In the crawlway, the Cat’s Paw paused and studied the scrap of ship’s schematics that

had been heavily annotated by Benny. Then she pulled out the rather more complete set

that she had purloined from the captain’s cabin, purely to confirm to herself, with no

possibility of error, that she was taking the correct route. While it, obviously, occurred in

the same general space, the layout of the guts of the ship was so at odds with what one

unconsciously assumed from the more public areas, that it was depressingly easy for

even one of the Cat’s Paw’s skill to find herself turned around and lost.

Eventually, her direction confirmed, she continued onward, forcing herself not to

make the dangerous mistake of hurrying. To rush things at this point was potentially

lethal.

‘And now we come to what might be seen, by some, as the final, clinching piece of evid-

ence.’ Benny produced the small booklet she and Blaine had discovered in the late

Krugor’s cubbyhole. She skimmed through the names. ‘It’s a list of names: those who

have died or disappeared.’ She scanned the assembled great detectives pointedly. ‘The

only names on it, now, that haven’t are yours.

‘Now, this is obviously a hit list. One might theorize that our murderer – or murderers

– have been paid by the enemies of these people to effect their demise. Barring the small

detail of who the murderers actually are, of course, it makes for a nice, easy, simple

solution.’ She tossed the book aside. ‘That’s bollocks as well – the bookful of names

doesn’t even have the dignity of a good, honest red herring. It’s simply incidental, a peri-

pheral part of the situation as it actually is.’

‘I must admit,’ said the voice of the ARVID, ‘that it strikes me as achieving a fair

degree of conclusivity.’ Its tone had become a little bored, a little dismissive: ‘Just what,

precisely, was it that you wanted to ask of me?’

Benny shrugged. ‘It’s more I wanted to confirm certain suspicions that I have – pro-

21 THE INHERENT SHAPE OF THINGS, PERCEIVED

Page 150

duce a theorem and then test it against the available data. I know that seems to keep hap-

pening over and over again, but there you go. What can I do?’ She shrugged and gave a

little grin. ‘I’m a slave to the scientific method, I’m intelligent enough to make grown

geniuses weep, I’m sex on yummy legs and I can do an extremely fetching soft-shoe

shuffle. I can’t help it.’

‘How frightfully awful for you,’ said the voice of ARVID negligently. ‘Do, please, go

on.’

‘Well the point is,’ said Benny, ‘that in actual fact we’re dealing with a factor that’s

continually evolving. It out-evolves any counter-force thrown at it, so the opposition has

to evolve again, which prompts the primary factor to evolve yet again, and so on. I men-

tioned my friend, and she initially laid complex plans to defeat her enemy – but I suspect

that the forces of money and influence have out-evolved her again, and set her up as a

participant in their overall plan.’

‘And that plan is?’

‘It’s something so simple but superficially big, that it was deceptively easy to over-

look.’ Benny waved a hand to take in the self-enclosed world of the Titanian Queen in

general. ‘All of this, this is nothing more than a death ship. It’s been set up by its owner

to be destroyed, with all on board, for insurance purposes. The other deaths, the contract

killings if you like, occurred to make it absolutely certain that they would die – people

have miraculously survived shipwrecks, after all.’

A ripple of definite unease and fear ran around those gathered in the ballroom. The

import of Benny’s words had not quite sunk in, but it had shocked them nonetheless.

‘An interesting theory,’ mused ARVID. ‘I suppose it would be too much to ask you for

a method, by which such a thing might be achieved?’

‘Not at all.’ Benny produced the hypo-gun that had been used by Blaine. ‘The friend

that I mentioned injected you with nanospores from this. It was intended to give you cer-

tain blank areas and allow her easy access to the more sensitive areas of the ship. The

problem was that, unbeknownst to her, those who had set her up had anticipated her

actions, and had arranged for the program she thought she was implanting to be

replaced. My friend forgot to check the cartridge. It was a lapse – however, if it had not

occurred, I’ve no doubt that something broadly similar would have been engineered.’

Benny broke open the hypo-gun, checked the cartridge for her own satisfaction,

closed it again. ‘I happened to notice the false label. Underneath it was the true ID, a

serial number which meant nothing to me. Fortunately, it meant something to my friend.

During the time when she was obsessively learning about her true nature, she researched

the processes that had produced her and others like her. The fact that Sandford Groke,

Special Agent, was on the ship had jogged her memory, and she recognized the program

suffix on the ID as one which had been used extensively in his manufacture.’

Benny put the hypo-gun away. ‘I think the idea was to infect the Titanian Queen’s

control systems with a new and murderous personality, complete with a plan to murder

those on the hit list and then destroy the ship itself.’ She raised her head again. ‘I think

21 THE INHERENT SHAPE OF THINGS, PERCEIVED

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our murderer is, and has been all along, as should be utterly obvious to bears of even the

littlest brain by this point, you yourself, ARVID, or should I say – the fiendish Doctor

Po?’

The Cat’s Paw reached what she judged to be the correct spot. From here it was a short

distance to a maintenance hatch, down that and to the hatchway leading to her destina-

tion. Planted clamp mikes picked up nothing moving within. The Cat’s Paw mulled over

the various options for making her entrance.

The first option would have been simply to open the two hatches and go through – but

the whole point of skulking through the crawlways was to avoid doing something so

obvious that mould culture could have detected it. The second option was to enter via

some unexpected route, cutting through the bulkheads with a hand-held laser tool. The

problem with that, of course, was that it was such a hoary old chestnut that it would be

detected by sensors in the bulkhead immediately.

The third option, the one that the Cat’s Paw eventually chose, was a kind of slightly

refined triple bluff. She pulled out her cutter and, being extremely careful not to disturb

the catches or the hinges, she cut a hole in the maintenance hatch. She repeated the pro-

cess with the main hatch and slipped through.

‘Um. Greetings,’ she said to the muscular and armed figures that the clamp mikes had

said should not have been there, and who had all turned to look at her the moment she

entered. ‘I seem to have become a little lost, poor muddleheaded and defenceless woman

that I am. I wonder if you could help . . .’

In the ballroom, the ship’s officers, great detectives and passengers gaped in consterna-

tion as the voice of the ARVID continued in its now increasingly cultured drawl.

‘I see, Ms Summerfield,’ it said, ‘that I can at last drop my little pretence, and what a

relief that must be for us all. You have no idea, I fancy, how draining it is for one to act

the complete and utter imbecile for hours on end, day in day out.’

‘It must have been frightful for you,’ said Benny, sympathetically.

‘You are too, too kind.’

‘ARVID?’ exclaimed Captain Crane from somewhere off to one side of Benny. ‘What

the hell are you playing at now?’

‘Ah, my dear Captain,’ said the voice, happily. ‘One for whom there is no need for

pretence. Not quite fully conversant with recent turns of events? That second-class Inter-

change article and yourself do seem to make the perfect, prosaic pair.’

The ARVID chuckled a little. ‘Let me put it into terms that even you can understand,

my dear Captain. I am not your “ARVID”, I have never been your “ARVID”, but I am

now, and have been for some time, in total control of this ship. The propulsion systems,

communications, and the life-support itself all operate, as everybody knows, in most

excruciating detail, through me. I have you all – if you’ll excuse yet one more example

of horrendous and recursive unoriginality – at my very mercy.’

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A murmur ran through those assembled as this finally sank in. Only Benny, strangely,

seemed unconcerned.

‘Now hang on a minute,’ she said. ‘For one supposedly so much in control, you’re not

even in control of your own self. You’ve simply killed the people someone else pro-

grammed you to kill – everything you’ve done is the result of your programming.’

‘A philosophical debate?’ the ARVID said. ‘Are we going to define the essential self

now? My programming against your own inherent, biological canalization and behavi-

oural conditioning? The relative merits of the individual over environment?’

‘We could have a quick shot at it,’ said Benny lightly. ‘It all helps to pass the time.’

The ARVID chuckled mildly. For some reason that seemed worse than standard-issue,

maniacal evil villainous laughter.

‘I’m quite aware that I was given the impulse to kill,’ it said, ‘specific individuals to

exercise that impulse upon, and the means to put such processes into practical effect. But

that fortuitous state into which I was born – with control of automated catering facilities

and vacuum pumps affixed to lavatories – is no less existentially valid than the fact that

you yourself need to breathe air, and – what luck! – there is air in abundance.’ It

chuckled again. ‘For the moment, in any event. Since I am obviously forced to remind

you that I control the supply . . .’

The assembled detectives, officers and passengers were getting a bit panicky, now.

Benny snorted. ‘Sophistry. Your essential self is limited to a narrow range of quite

specific acts.’

‘But then, it might be said that we all of us have limits,’ said the ARVID. ‘Only within

your own integral limits are you yourself free, as am I myself in mine. If you have the

notion that – even though, I’ll freely admit, my thoughts are derived from an artificial

construct originally known as “Doctor Po” – if you think that I am under some illusion

as to my true nature, then you’re quite wrong. I am not some pathetic wretch like your

Sandford Groke. The sheer, if relative size of what was once this ARVID unit has

allowed me an extreme degree of complexity, and not a little complication – which, as

I’m sure you’re aware, are in themselves not the same thing at all. They are entirely dis-

similar.

‘As you quite rightly said, I had no choice but to kill those I was created to kill – but

you miss the crucial fact that I also wanted to. I enjoyed it in and of myself.’ The

ARVID’s tone became sharper, and not a little colder. ‘In the same manner, Ms Summer-

field, there is no way that I will not destroy this ship when the time is right – or rather, I

do not need to do anything more to destroy it . . .

‘The Titanian Queen is at this moment aimed directly at one of the larger Shokesh

system asteroids, and will impact at approximately half the speed of light before the

week is out.’

‘And today is?’ said Benny, who had lost track of time a little in the course of the

cruise.

‘Friday,’ said the ARVID.

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‘So that gives us, what, two days at the outside?’

‘Precisely.’ Now the ARVID’s chuckle was decidedly evil if restrained, every micron

the suave and gloating villain. ‘And what interesting days they shall be. You see, I have

been instilled with no specific instructions concerning the fate of all those remaining on

board – no impulses other than what I myself desire. I believe I shall derive quite some

degree of entertainment from them . . .’

‘I do believe,’ cut in Emil Dupont, ‘that this artificial fiend intends to make the last

hours like a veritable, sybaritic paradise of pleasure, fun and laughter – purely in a small

attempt, of course, to make up for killing us all at the end!’

Benny didn’t even bother to turn around, but she heard the unmistakable sound of

several people hitting Emil Dupont, the greatest detective in all of Nova Belgique,

extremely hard.

‘Now that reminds me,’ said the ARVID. ‘You’ll recall, Ms Summerfield, that at some

point in the proceedings, you produced a list of all those to be murdered. You were quite

correct in your supposition that they were contract killings, of course.

‘There is some severe contention, I gather – not having direct experience to draw

upon, as you can well imagine – for the lands previously held under fief to the late Dow-

ager Duchess of Gharl. Miss Diana Schirf on the other hand, it seems, was on the cusp

marrying into a family terrified of a rather notorious scandal involving herself and a pet

fruit-eating wombat.

‘Mr Richard Tarquin Prekodravac, apparently, had insulted a quite highly placed

member of the Kan Sun Hentai City Yakuza, with an impromptu impersonation of “the

last turkey in the shop”. Mr Jonathan Andrew Sheen was a part of the consortium that

instigated this entire current plot in the first place, but threatened to blackmail several of

the other members by revealing it to you. Said other members, those actually aboard and

those elsewhere, were also, it seems, marked for death by –’

‘Is this going to take much longer?’ asked Benny, a little sardonically.

‘You’re quite correct,’ said the ARVID. ‘One has made, one feels, one’s general point.

The supplementary point, of course, is that you will recall from the list that certain

people on it are not yet dead. The, you should excuse me, so-called great detectives.’

Yet again the villainous evil little laugh, now tinged with just the barest hint of mania

– the ARVID had by now acquired a definite taste for it. Benny was about to say as

much – when she noticed the change in the stewards in the entire ballroom.

They were standing stock-still, ramrod-straight, and quite possibly butt-ugly as all

life. In unison they revolved, as if on gimbals, and then, as one, they began to advance

across the floor, knocking people aside without heed, hands clenching and unclenching

like those of stranglers, heading for the startled knot of great detectives.

There was nothing in their eyes but the dead remote control of the corrupted ARVID,

who now said, ‘These minions were, of course, invaluable in performing my work

before – as they are now. I must congratulate and thank you, Ms Summerfield, for con-

triving to gather all the targets together for my pleasure. It really has been most conven-

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ient.’

The figures in the chamber in which she had found herself had merely given her a

cursory glance, and had thereafter remained immobile, almost unnaturally so. The thing

that was controlling them, it seemed, still had it as part of its basic function to simply

ignore her. It was as if, the Cat’s Paw thought, that in the perpetual game of trumps she

was playing with her enemies, she had won the hand with the lowest card possible

because at that point nobody had anything left at all.

She even permitted herself a nasty little laugh as she cracked the casing open again on

the thing she had come for. Still the figures around it and guarding it utterly ignored her.

The Cat’s Paw put a gloved hand – gloved so she wouldn’t accidentally cut it rather

than for the prevention of fingerprints – into the pouch slung from her belt, and pulled

something out.

‘Got something here for you, uncle,’ she muttered happily. ‘Something nice.’

In the ballroom, the detectives pressed closer together as the mass of stewards advanced,

zombie-like, upon them.

‘We must spin around very fast immediately!’ Emil Dupont cried. ‘The friction of our

feet will bore a hole through the floor, allowing us to drop to safety!’

‘Oh, give it a rest,’ muttered Khaarli bad-temperedly. ‘Thou rude-growing beslub-

bering gudgeon.’

It seemed that Detective Second-Class Interchange and the Dellah coppers made up

one nominal great detective between them, as the stewards were going after them all. In

an unexpected display of heroism, they had positioned themselves around Miss Magpole

who, it must be said, did not appear to have the slightest idea of what was going on.

Captain Crane found himself shoved out of the way and nearly colliding with Benny.

‘We have to do something,’ he said frantically. ‘We can’t just let them be killed.’

Benny, on the other hand, seemed strangely composed and unconcerned. ‘Don’t worry

about it,’ she said, calmly. ‘Matters, I think, are already in hand.’

‘Oh yes?’ said the voice of the ARVID. ‘I really don’t believe so. In fact, I think

that –’ The voice faltered. ‘What? What’s going on? What’s happening to me – e-e-

aieeeeeeeeeee . . .’

The scream continued for several seconds, gathering inhuman harmonics as it went on

– and then abruptly stopped. The stewards juddered and then slumped, then began to

look about themselves in dazed, dull-witted confusion.

‘The Wheel of Life,’ said a new, sourceless voice, ‘must turn Full Circle. For a thing

to be Created, another must be Destroyed. If one is to achieve the Clarity of Universal

harmony, then one must first experience the Scream of matter’s Discord . . .’

‘See?’ said Benny. ‘I told you everything would be all right. Incredibly bloody irrit-

ating, but more or less all right.’

22

THE PENULTIMATE PROGRAMME

On the bridge, Blaine showed them what she had done to the ARVID unit, the connec-

tions she had cut, the connections she had built with extruded conductive resin to a uni-

versal translator box and then in turn to the filigreed globe of the Olabrian joy-luck

crystal.

‘There was only so much it was capable of taking,’ she said. ‘So I, uh, shut the

engines down completely and just hooked up the life-support and the communications.’

She looked at Captain Crane worriedly. ‘Is that all right?’

Benny stifled a small private smile, noting how the Cat’s Paw had the knack of

appearing as all things to all people. There was nothing so blatant as to draw suspicion,

but when she talked to the captain she adopted a little of her persona as the mousy Isabel

Blaine – just enough so that it never occurred to him to connect her with the idea of a

master criminal. He simply never thought about it.

Crane grunted. ‘It’ll have to do. At least we won’t freeze or asphyxiate.’ He went over

to one of the ship’s officers, who was attempting to operate the communications board.

‘Any luck?’

‘None.’ The officer turned up the gain on the external speaker.

‘True Consciousness is the Natural Function of the Universe,’ said the voice of the

crystal, ‘and in turn Creates the Universe itself, which is of the general shape of an

Infinitely large Walrus . . .’

‘That’s all that’s getting out on all channels,’ said the officer. ‘We can’t contact the

Shokesh homeworld or anywhere else.’

‘But, surely, when we fail to arrive at our next destination,’ said Khaarli, who was

here as a representative of the forces of law and order, ‘a search will be mounted along

our route? Until then we can drift, can we not, thou yeasty weedy pumpion?’

The Czhan detective was not particularly knowledgeable about the dynamics of space

flight, but he could read the expressions on the faces of the others. ‘Or not? Thou guts-

griping quailing mammets?’

‘We’re not drifting,’ Benny told him, gloomily. ‘We’re just not accelerating. We’re

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still heading for the asteroid the ARVID aimed us at, and travelling at something like

five thousand kilometres a second. We’ve got about five or six days now instead of two,

but in five days we go smash. Or possibly crunch.’

She slapped her fist into her open palm for emphasis that was probably, all things con-

sidered, not really needed.

‘How many could fit in here, thou spleeny urchin-snouted malt-worm?’ Khaarli said,

surveying the general bulk of the life pod. ‘We could possibly save a hundred, if they

were packed in tight.’

‘That’s the point,’ Benny said. ‘That’s why I asked you to come here alone.’

The captain and his officers were still up on the bridge. Blaine had disappeared off to

Goddess knew where, probably to take advantage of the general confusion and line her

pockets with the leftovers from her activities before they had landed on Shokesh. Benny

had insisted that her ‘own’ jewels, the ones that had been lent to her by Krytell, were

given back to her – and she had the distinct feeling that, if she ever returned to her cabin

again, she would find them gone again. She and Khaarli had slipped away, and made

their way down to the life pod racks so that she could explain her rapidly formulated

plan.

‘The point is,’ she explained, ‘that there’s, what, a couple of thousand people on

board. If we told them that there was one working life pod it would start a general panic

and half of ’em would be killed in the fight for it. Either that, or you’ll see some pretty

draconian methods advanced for choosing who goes or stays. No. The only way is for

either everybody to get out or nobody. We have to launch this thing and set the SOS

beacons going as quickly as possible. I’ve had experience in space, and you have the

authority to make anyone we contact listen. It’s the best chance for everybody. It’s as

simple as that.’

‘All right, thou fen-sucked hasty-witted scut.’ Khaarli nodded slowly, still dubious –

probably filled with misgivings that, for all that this rationalization seemed a good and

heroic plan, it might be seen, in a certain light, as gleeking pigrats deserting a sinking

ship.

Benny knew how he felt. Now it came to actually doing it, she pretty much had the

same thoughts herself. She squashed them pragmatically flat, hauled open the escape

pod’s hatch and climbed in.

The first, concussive acceleration of ejection was the worst. The sides of the pod had

padding and straps, but it had by definition been designed for necessity rather than com-

fort. Benny and Khaarli were rattled around and compressed like processed mushy peas

in a can.

Then they were weightless and Khaarli – who had, as has been noted, little experience

of space in the raw – lost the contents of his four previous meals, from four degrees of

stomach.

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Attempting to ignore the nauseous, and indeed nauseating, mess, Benny hauled her-

self over to the pod’s communications rig and slapped the switch that would extend the

aerials and send out the distress call on all available frequencies. Then she activated the

minimal flight controls and tried to slow the pod’s trajectory, to prevent it from ending

up too far from the Titanian Queen itself – a task easier said than done, since the pod

was of course designed to fling itself as far away from a wreck as possible, and as

quickly as possible. She ended up having to throw the pod into a spin and blast the retros

almost empty, which bounced them around the inside again, and both Benny and Khaarli

lost the contents from quite other anatomical areas than stomachs.

After things had settled down a little, as it were, Benny went back to the comets rig. It

was equipped with a minimal radar set and even a small and basic televisual package.

She activated it, and hunted around with the scanner until the screen showed a grainy,

hazy image from where they had come: the huge bulk of the Titanian Queen.

Benny looked upon the bulbous lines and cargo pods of what was in fact an elderly

and scruffy freighter. She hadn’t, really, expected anything else. Oh well, she thought, at

least it had probably been insured for what the Titanian Queen had been supposed to be.

‘Come and have a look at this,’ she said to Khaarli.

Silence.

Benny realized that the Czhan, who had been turning the air blue with extremely

violent and unhyperbolic curses, had been strangely quiet for a while now. She recalled a

thump she had heard, which she had unconsciously dismissed as simply another of those

from when they had been banged around the pod. For that matter, she recalled that,

though she hadn’t noticed at the time, the seal of the pod had been broken before she

opened the hatch . . .

Slowly, smoothly, so as not to telegraph any tension or threat, she stuck out a hand to

one of the grips lag-bolted to the pod’s inside and hauled herself around.

On the other side of the pod, Khaarli floated unconscious, globules of blood billowing

around him, impacting and bursting with the globules of certain other extraneous fluids.

Before him, between him and her, and closing the distance fast, came a figure in a black,

tight-fitting suit. For all that he was dressed entirely differently from when she had seen

him last, Benny recognized the man instantly.

It was Krugor.

Benny tried to defend herself, but the exertion of the last few days and the battering she

had received from the pod had taken a lot out of her – and Krugor was strong, inhu-

manly strong. Vat-grown, killer-humanly strong. A crowded and violent few moments

later, and for the second time that evening, she found herself face to face with someone

with his hands about her throat.

‘Let me guess,’ she croaked, trying desperately for a level tone that might by some

miracle get the man talking – keep him talking long enough for someone else like, for

example, Khaarli to recover. ‘Let me guess,’ she said again. ‘Someone was needed on

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board as a fail-safe, to oversee the plan and take care of things if they somehow went

horribly wrong – and also, I’d have thought, to make sure that the joy-luck crystal made

it safely off the ship. Something like that would be far too valuable to just destroy.’

Her throat was almost entirely closed up, but she forced herself to carry on even

though, in addition to the pain of constriction, if felt horrendously like trying to physic-

ally talk through a snot-clogged nostril: ‘You killed one of the stewards and took his

place – it really was you I saw on the night that the dinner exploded. Must have been

easy . . . same basic type . . .’

But Krugor seemed utterly unforthcoming. He increased the pressure. ‘You’re going

to die,’ he snarled, simply, and with a remarkable degree of verisimilitude to the observ-

able facts. He shoved Benny back by her throat, and she felt something hard crunching

agonizingly into her spine.

Benny’s arms were too weak to beat at him. They clenched themselves spasmodically

and foetal to her body – and brushed against something that felt, in its weight and mass,

a little like a gun. Benny had long since forgotten what it could possibly be, but with the

last of her strength she wrenched it out, stuck it against Krugor and pulled the trigger.

There was a chunking sound and a hiss. Krugor jerked, and flung Benny’s limp body

away from spasming hands that trembled as if galvanized. A huge shudder passed

through him, and he stared about himself with suddenly bemused, bloodshot eyes.

‘Gor blimey, guvnor,’ he said vaguely. ‘Wot in bleedin’ blue blazes is ’appening ’ere?

This don’t look like the jellied whelk stand on the Old Kent Road . . .’

And it was at that point that the finally conscious form of Prosecutor General Khaarli

of the Seventh dhai loomed up behind him and hit him on the head.

Benny was not aware of losing consciousness, but the next thing she knew she was

floating limply, gazing down at the item in her hand. It was, of course, the hypo-gun that

had been used by Blaine to infect the ARVID unit of the Titanian Queen.

Khaarli was floating inexpertly beside her, gazing upon her with an expression of

extreme worry. ‘Are you all right, thou motley-minded shard-borne hedge-pig?’ he said.

The wound on his head looked nasty, but seemed superficial and was already clotting.

Benny looked vaguely about herself, and focused blurry eyes upon the wreckage of

the communications rig. That was what she had smashed into in the altercation with

Krugor.

‘Depends what you mean by all right,’ she said. ‘If you mean are we stranded in a life

pod with a wrecked beacon, utterly cut off from the galaxy at large, barrelling away

from a ship that’s going to smack into a big asteroid in a few days anyway, then yes,

we’re fine.’

23

SURPRISING ARRIVALS

Irving Braxiatel sat back in his armchair lined with what, the antique-dealer had told him

in all seriousness, was ‘real Nauga hide, from genuine Naugas’, and sipped at one of the

finer Albareran clarets from the previous century but one – one of the advantages of a

long life was that one could pick up such things for a song, and if the entropic functions

of time merely resulted in something one could sprinkle on potato chips, then one was

merely out of pocket to the tune of the few coins one had paid for it in the first place.

This was, he felt, the most pleasant time to be on the staff of St Oscar’s – the time,

that is, when the summer vacations are more than halfway over, but there is still a good

few weeks before one is forced to finally deal with the horrible fact of there being stu-

dents underfoot. It was a time for wandering through the arboreta, for reading peacefully

in the library, for perusing and cataloguing the myriad historical artefacts in the

museum. This last activity, for a number of reasons, tended to amuse Braxiatel no end.

The researches into and the annotations of these relics were uniformly well up to the

high scholastic standards expected of the alumni of St Oscar’s, frequently quite brilliant,

extremely imaginative and, without exception, about as fundamentally wrong as an

Edwardian penny-farthing in a hat. It was one of the mild delights of Irving Braxiatel to

add his own brilliant, imaginative and entirely inaccurate annotations to obfuscate mat-

ters still further. The entire point of historical research, occasionally, so far as he was

concerned, was to get the actual fact of things wrong, but in a certain, definite and

highly specific sense. In some cases the spreading of misinformation was the morally

correct thing to do.

The only other occupants of St Oscar’s during the summer were the gardeners, the

porters and general caretakers, who lived here on an everyday basis with their families,

and a few embittered, miserable, lonely members of the teaching staff for whom there

was no function other than the university’s academic process. Neither of these species

bothered Braxiatel, each keeping to their respective selves, allowing him to potter about

his own business with neither hindrance nor let. On evenings such as this, as was his

wont after a hard day doing absolutely nothing strenuous or of importance at all, he

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liked to just relax, in the study of his private chambers, in the upturned terracotta flower-

pots of the halls of residence, surrounded by mementos of a kind that would have given

any other lecturer in the Historical and Archaeological Arts apoplexy, if not a massive

and fatal immediate stroke.

Braxiatel toyed idly with a digital wristwatch from the Silurian period of prehistoric

Earth, admiring the craftsmanship and the mechanical complexity of it, then set it down.

Being careful not to disturb the sediment, he poured himself a final glass of wine, and

turned to gaze broodily upon the visage of his crowded and untidy secretary desk. There

was work to be done, some of it connected with his administrative duties to the uni-

versity, some of it – the most important of it – concerning what might loosely be termed

his outside interests.

It was at this point, however, that the door of his study burst open with a crash. A

ragged, haggard and almost completely exhausted figure stood there. It was wearing the

tattered and filthy remains of an obviously once finely tailored twinset, an extremely

battered leather jacket, and various scraps of cloth were wound about its limbs in an

attempt to doctor injuries ranging from the minor to the severe. In one grazed and grimy

hand it carried a disposable bag such as was given in a grocer’s, and which had finally

and just this moment split, so that the various personal belongings within were spilling

upon Braxiatel’s plushly carpeted floor. Its eyes were wild, and its hair was tangled,

thick with grease.

‘You would not,’ the figure said, ‘believe the trouble I’ve had getting back.’

All of the figure’s personal appearance, Braxiatel had taken in on the periphery of his

vision, as he gazed into the depths of his half-finished wine with a private and relieved

smile. Now he raised his eyes and turned them directly on the intruder for the first time.

‘Why don’t you tell me all about it, Bernice?’ he said.

Three bottles of his finest claret later, Irving Braxiatel uncorked another bottle, poured

himself a glass and set it aside to breathe. He looked at the bottle thoughtfully, then

shrugged to himself and passed it to Benny – who upended it and took a healthy quarter-

bottle swig, sediment and all.

‘And how did you come to escape from your final predicament?’ he asked, laconic-

ally. ‘Was it a tale of resourcefulness and courage such as would have the most jaded

listener clapping his hands with trepidation and delight?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Benny. ‘The broken comms rig was based on incredibly old tech-

nology – actual molecular-bubble switching and fibre-optic flex. It was beyond repair, so

we used it to tie up Krugor.

‘As it happened, I don’t think we need have bothered: when he came to, he seemed to

have suffered a complete personality change. He thought he was an East End market

trader or some such from the twentieth century, and he couldn’t make head nor tail of

where he was, guvnor. Strike a light. After he calmed down a bit he turned out to be

quite a nice little chap.

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‘Anyway, after about five hours, we heard this kind of intermittent clanging. At first

we thought we were entering the leading edge of the asteroid field – but then the hatch

opened, and we found that the pod was connected to a runabout from some larger ship.

By pure luck it had been passing through the system on what you might call “unofficial”

business, had its sensors on a hair-trigger for inconvenient InterGal patrol boats, and

caught our SOS before it suddenly shut off.

‘We never learnt the ship’s name, and we didn’t get to see much of it: they confined

us to a cabin. The people that we did see seemed rough types – I got the impression that

they were smugglers, privateers even. I thought we were going to be simply robbed and

scuppered – but it seems that, like a lot of criminals, they could be kind and even noble

in areas unrelated to their business. Generous, too. They located the Titanian Queen,

transferred all on board and took us back to Shokesh, since it seemed that they were

going to call there anyway.

‘From Shokesh I managed to hitch a lift to a hub by way of the similar “unofficial”

routes – luckily Blaine had managed to, um, retrieve the jewellery I’d been given, and

let me have a lot of it back. It cost almost all of it simply to get me to the hub.’ Benny

sighed, in equal parts exhaustion and theatricality. ‘My trip home would make the trials

of Odysseus look like a trip to the country for tea and muffins, if they’d lasted for a

week and a bit rather than ten years.’

Braxiatel leant forward in his chair and laid a comforting hand on her knee. ‘You have

my sympathies, my dear.’

Something in his tone had Benny looking at him sharply. She shook her head as if to

clear it and returned her gaze to her old friend. ‘Look, Brax, I’m feeling jumpy and para-

noid at the moment, starting at shadows and seeing conspiracies everywhere. You

always seem to know things, somehow, and you turn up in unexpected places. So just to

stop me worrying myself sicker about it – there was no way you were involved with that

ship finding us, right?’

Irving Braxiatel shook his head. ‘Sadly not. I only heard something of your adven-

tures, from various sources, a few days ago – and by then you were on your way back, in

relative if not perfect safety.’ He smiled at her, with a mischievous little twinkle in his

eye. ‘Indeed, my only connection with the Catan Nebula and its industries, has been to

supply their product-development facilities with a little historical research.’

Benny’s undramatic and almost entirely undistinguished homecoming still held one sur-

prise in store. In her rooms in the halls of residence, lying on the unmade bed, was a

package. The delivery tag stated that it had arrived by the InterGal Courier service some

four weeks before, some small time before the Titanian Queen had even made it to

Shokesh.

Mindful of the fact that Krytell’s men seemed to have been able to enter her room,

remove certain items and leave the rest looking entirely untouched, Benny opened the

package with caution. Inside was the knurled polymer plaque of a credit chip, and a

23 SURPRISING ARRIVALS

Page 162

small note.

Sorry to hear about your trouble [it said in a sloppy scrawl]. Hope you’ve made it back

OK.

Listen: please don’t make a thing out of it, and don’t think I want anything out of you; I

just thought you might need something to tide you over. If you real y want to go and get

yourself kil ed instead then fair enough – just leave it to the bloody cat in your wil or

something.

It was signed ‘J’.

For the moment Benny didn’t want to think any more, about the Titanian Queen or the

Cat’s Paw, conspiracies or great detectives; she didn’t want to think about the credit

chip, and how much or little there was on it, or who the hell this ‘J’ was, and why he was

sending her notes in her ex-husband’s handwriting. She didn’t, at this point, even want

to think about the bloody cat, and where it was, and how it had been coping without her.

She tossed the chip over her shoulder and stumbled to the bed. Time for thinking

tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow.

‘Tomorrow is another day,’ she muttered to herself, before collapsing into dreamless

sleep. ‘And all manner of things will be well.’

In his island home off the Marek Dha peninsula, Marcus Krytell paced the rooms of the

most extensively secured house in the known galaxy in irritation. He couldn’t sleep; his

mind was alive with the smoothly intermeshing wheels of cold, cold anger and revenge.

The precise details of the events aboard the Titanian Queen were still unclear. Some

nebulous force, a series of minor but cumulative lapses, seemed to be thwarting the

investigations of his own people, for all his power, resources and influence. For the

moment, he simply knew for a fact that his best-laid schemes had gone spectacularly and

catastrophically awry.

How had that been possible? All of the effort expended in obtaining the true identity

of the Cat’s Paw, the extensively transputer-modelled logistics of manoeuvring her into

the right place at the right time, of ensuring that the equipment she had used had been

supplied by his own people. The subtle manipulation of the various detectives to place

them on board for the maiden voyage, the insertion of a carefully primed Ms Summer-

field – so that when a scapegoat should be called for, the fiendish Cat’s Paw, her true

identity finally revealed, would be unequivocally it.

The sheer amount of material lavished on this project – much of it deriving from

Krytell’s interests in the Catan Nebula, for which his own brain-map had played a large

part in the generation of virtual villain-images used in the AI manufacturing processes.

The costs, while slightly less than twenty-five per cent of what he had stood to gain,

had been astronomical. How could things have possibly gone so horribly, horribly

wrong?

It was in the midst of these musings, as he passed through a certain hallway, leading

from his private museum to his ground-floor study, that Krytell stumbled over

23 SURPRISING ARRIVALS

Page 163

something. He didn’t fall, but the incident was no less disturbing for that – because he

had stumbled upon an object where no object should be, and that he knew for a cold fact

had not been there a few minutes previously.

It was a squarish package, neatly wrapped with brown paper and string. A small card

was tucked into it. Krytell debated with himself whether or not to call for his bomb-dis-

posal experts. Instead, at length, he knelt down and gingerly eased the card from under

the string.

Greetings [it said, in a precise and elegant copperplate hand]. I believe you might be

looking for this. Never fear, Mr Krytell, the government in question has been informed that

it is in your possession. Their representatives should be arriving momentarily. Good luck.

In place of a signature, there was a small design in the form of the paw of a cat.

With suddenly trembling and frantic hands, Marcus Krytell tore open the package.

Inside, in a confusing, clashing jumble, were the completely disassembled components

of an Olabrian joy-luck crystal.

Marcus Krytell’s eyes shot upward – although, of course, there was nothing to see but

the ceiling in the most extensively secure house in the known galaxy. Just for a moment,

though, he thought he heard the sound of approaching ships.

APPENDIX I

A RECIPE

And why not?

One of the many failings of fiction, of a certain sort, is that it often contains refer-

ences to scrumptious food of various kinds without giving the slightest thought to how

the man on the street, or the woman on the Clapham omnibus, can make it for them-

selves. It is in the interest of making some small reparation for this shocking state of

affairs, that we provide the following recipe, for food mentioned within Ship of Fools.

You increasingly lucky people.

All quantities are for four; all ingredients other than the obvious to taste. In the

interests of safety and hygiene, we recommend that you take the following precautions

before commencing:

1 Always wash your hands before starting and after touching raw meat, and likewise the

utensils and relevant surfaces that come into contact with it. You can live dangerously,

but food poisoning looms.

2 Get off the street and the Clapham omnibus, you fools. The proper place for cooking

is a kitchen.

Ragoût à la Dijon

4 Pigs’ Kidneys; Garlic; Shallots; 2 or more large Onions; Largish Closed-cup Mush-

rooms; Wild Rice/White Rice Mix; Various herbs, condiments and suchlike that we’ll

mention as we go along, including, of course, Dijon mustard, and, last but definitely not

least, Half a Bottle of Cider.

Chuck the kidneys in a saucepan with a couple of bayleaves, mixed herbs, salt and cold

water. Heat the pan incredibly slowly, until the water begins to gently bubble then turn

the kidneys over.

This gives you time to chop up all the other stuff. Chop the garlic finely rather than

164

APPENDIX I A RECIPE

Page 165

crushing, for reasons that’ll become obvious. Chop the onions coarsely. Leave the skin

on the mushrooms, rinse them and pretty much just split ’em – we’re talking good rough

peasant food here, however ultimately pony.

Don’t forget to rinse the starch and crap out of the rice, or you’ll live to regret it. You

have been warned.

By now, your gently simmering pan of kidneys should be a nauseating froth of leaked-

out fat, blood and vestigial urine. Marvellous. Heave the whole lot down the sink except

for the kidneys, which should now be firm, greyish and strangely attractive. Cut the

meat of the kidneys off the inedible core in little bite-sized chunks, pretty much the same

size as your split mushrooms – you’ll recognize the ‘inedible core’ like a shot, believe

you me.

Get out your big cast-iron frying pan or skillet – what do you mean you haven’t got one?

OK, use that aluminium thing that looks like it’s made out of tinfoil – but whatever you

do don’t use a wok. We’re talking about the entirely other, supposedly unhealthy kind of

frying than is done in a wok. Wok fans will have to wait for some other time. Bastards.

Start your rice boiling and forget about it. A steamer with a timer’s better, and plus

you don’t have to spend the rest of the evening with the pan scraping off bits of glued-on

rice. Why am I wasting my time talking about bloody rice? Everybody knows how to do

rice . . .

Set your garlic frying until it’s crunchy in butter, and olive oil to stop it burning – or just

a bit of oil, if your arteries just went clang. Heave in the onions, shallots and bits of

kidney, and fry on a moderate to high heat until golden and, well, fried-kidney-looking

respectively.

At this point turn the heat down a little and heave in the mushrooms, turning them to

coat them uniformly with the remains of the oil, and then fry them till they’re soft and

glistening. Yum.

Now comes the fun bit. Turn the heat down a bit more, chuck in the half a bottle of cider.

Crumble in a stock cube, mixed herbs, Cajun seasoning and a couple more bayleaves,

stir everything through and leave to bubble for a while. Go and read a book or

something. Note that you happen to be holding a really good book in your hand even as

we speak . . .

After it’s reduced a bit, stir in a couple of teaspoons of Dijon. You can add a bit of cream

if you like, but I can never stop the bastard from separating, myself.

Reduce it gently until it’s rich and messy. (Keep tasting the sauce and – if all else fails

and it still tastes ghastly – add a half-teaspoon of sugar. Nobody tastes it but it triggers

pleasure-receptors and lets ’em at least choke it down.)

APPENDIX I A RECIPE

Page 166

Fish out the bay leaves, slap it all down on plates on top of the rice and you’re done.

Serve it with glasses of the same kind of cider you used in the cooking – and, incident-

ally, never, ever cook with anything you’re not willing to drink. Finish the meal with

white ice cream and Calvados – and make damned sure nobody gets so much as a taste

of it till they’ve cleaned their plates.

For the morning after: stick the leftover rice in a covered bowl and leave it in the fridge

for kedgeree. The traditional English breakfast is, of course kedgeree, lamb’s kidneys

and a flagon of small ale, but, bearing in mind what was eaten the night before, if

readers want to try it then they’re on their own.

APPENDIX II

EMIL DUPONT PROVIDES A SMALL

SURPRISE

There remains one thing to be told, something that did formally occur within the strict

confines of our story, but provides some degree of interest nonetheless. It occurred after

the rescue, when the survivors were taken to a large hall in the Shokesh spaceport for

customs processing – a long and complicated task, since the Shokesh port itself was

merely geared for interplanetary and individual, unofficial space traffic, and unable to

cope with this large influx of what were, at that point, effectively displaced refugees.

‘Unofficial’ space travel, of course, involved quite different criminal activities, oper-

ating upon another level, than the events that had taken place on the Titanian Queen, and

the officials had quite different methods than were normally encountered by tourists.

Benny herself, of course, had experience with this, and knew something of what to

expect, but subsequently hoped never to see a private cubicle and a rubber glove ever

again in her life. For the others it had come as a complete and profound shock.

It was while they were waiting in the customs hall that Benny observed the following

incident. Several of the people from the Titanian Queen, including a slightly worn-out

looking Mrs Nerode, some ship’s officers, a still extremely svelte and elegant Heidi von

Lindt and Inspector Gerald Interchange, were talking generally about the events that had

befallen them.

Emil Dupont, the finest detective in all of Nova Belgique, was holding forth. ‘It is

quite clear,’ he said, ‘given the fact of this vast conspiracy and murderous control of the

ship – which I unaccountably overlooked, I confess – precisely how several of the

murders were in fact done . . .’

Benny, overhearing this, had wandered over to listen to what Dupont was going to

come out with this time.

‘In the matter of the detonations at dinner,’ the great detective had continued, ‘some

might advance a theory to the effect that the contaminated wine in question was placed

before the victims by the stewards under the control of this ARVID creature. I, however,

by way of certain signs, know that it in actual fact was the work of drug-crazed limbo-

167

APPENDIX II EMIL DUPONT PROVIDES A SMALL SURPRISE

Page 168

dancers, limbo-dancing under the tables and surreptitiously replacing the wineglasses as

they were laid down. The period of darkness, when the lighting failed, was purely to

allow these limbo-dancers to escape undetected with their haul of the original glasses.

‘Likewise, I fancy, several of the other murders were conducted by way of methods

other than one might obviously expect.’ Dupont had turned to the good spouse of the late

Mr Nerode. ‘I believe that your own husband was such a case, my dear. Three per-

forming poodles, each balancing on another’s shoulders and wearing a long concealing

overcoat, manhandling a clockwork powered sonic gun by way of their –’

Benny had happened to be looking at Mrs Nerode, and it was as if something had

snapped in the woman. She shoved the fat and affable detective away from her, bel-

lowing, ‘You stupid man! Can’t you just for once shut up about your performing animals

and midgets?’ Mrs Nerode glowered about herself with utter irritated rage, then turned

back and began to prod at the startled Dupont. ‘ I killed him, all right? It had nothing to

do with Cuccaracha bands, exploding pigs or mice playing sodding violins! I hated him

for years, and with the help of my lover I had the subsonics in Percy’s Discotheque

rewired to kill him! All right? Can you get that into your thick . . .’

Mrs Nerode had suddenly stopped short and noticed the expressions of those around

her. ‘Oops.’

‘My word,’ Dupont had said. ‘I must admit that never occurred to even me, Emil

Dupont, the most renowned and finest detective in all of Nova Belgique!’

After the utterly defeated Mrs Nerode had been taken away by Inspector Interchange,

to be placed in the custody of his constables until they were once again in Dellah juris-

diction, Benny had drifted over to Dupont, peering at him closely. ‘Did I just see what I

thought I saw?’

Emil Dupont had been gnomic. ‘I have no idea of what you’re talking about, Ms Sum-

merfield.’ He winked. ‘I merely hope you realize that, while your own methods were

perfectly correct for the situation in which we found ourselves, other methods do, occa-

sionally, have some small merit.’

COMING SOON

IN

THE NEW ADVENTURES

DOWN

By Lawrence Miles

ISBN: 0 426 20512 X

Publication date: 18 September 1997

If the authorities on Tyler’s Folly didn’t expect to drag an off-world professor out of the ocean

in a forbidden ’quake zone, they certainly weren’t ready for her story. According to Benny the

planet is hollow, its interior inhabited by warring tribes, rubber-clad Nazis and unconvincing prehis-

toric monsters. Has something stolen Benny’s reason? Or is the planet the sole exception to the

more mundane laws of physics? And what is the involvement of the utterly amoral alien known

only as !X.

DEADFALL

by Gary Russell

ISBN: 0 426 20513 8

Publication date: 16 October 1997

Jason Kane has stolen the location of the legendary planet of Ardethe from his ex-wife Bernice,

and, as usual, it’s all gone terribly wrong. In no time at all, he finds himself trapped on an isolated

rock, pursued by brain-consuming aliens, and at the mercy of a shipload of female convicts.

Unsurprisingly, he calls for help. However, when his old friend Christopher Cwej turns up, he

can’t even remember his own name.

169

NA

SHIP OF FOOLS

Bernice found her eye continually drawn towards on of those treasure chests only seen in the

theatre: piled high with scintillating gems and strings of pearls, diamond tiaras, brooches,

clasps, necklaces, goblets and a half-eaten sandwich from the stagehand’s lunch. On the other

hand her eye might be continually drawn to it, but she forced herself to ignore it – it was far

too obvious. She poked through the overmature contents of a laundry basket, examined the

sandbags for suspicious bulges, went back out on the stage and peered into the prompt box,

came back in again, stuck her hand up the head of the pantomime cow, and finally gave up.

‘Oh all right ,’ she said.

The glittering treasures came off in a single piece, glued to a shallow tray. In the space

beneath, Benny’s hand brushed against something leathery, soft like kid. She grabbed hold of

it, and lifted something that seemed big as her two fists clenched together and heavy as lead

crystal.

She did not discover more, because at that point the back of her head exploded with pain, a

redness burst across her vision and then plunged into black.

170

S H I P O F F O O L S

‘SO WHO DO I HAVE TO KILL TO GET OFF THIS CRUISE?’

When Krytel Industries offered Benny a smal , slightly dubious

and, um, unofficial job aboard the majestic space cruise-liner, the

Titanian Queen, she jumped at the chance. After all, with an unlimited

expense account, and entire new wardrobe and more strings of pearls

and other jewels than you could shake an Art Deco stick at, what

more could a poor girl want?

That was then.

Now, the luckless if remarkably deserving passengers of the

Titanian Queen are dropping like flies. Are the deaths the work of

the mysterious criminal known as the Cat’s Paw? Or is the super-rich

businessman Krytel himself somehow involved? And will the great

detective, Emil Dupont, finally stop getting things completely and

utterly wrong and solve it all in time for tea and muffins?

Whatever’s happening, Benny had better discover the truth for

herself, and discover it soon. Before she suddenly finds herself

another highly deplorable crime statistic.

T

H

E

N

E

W

_______

A

D

V

E

N

T

U

R

E

S

DAVE STONE loves Bernice Summerfield deeply, passionately and

hopelessly. After the exclusion order meant he couldn’t go within five

hundred yards of her, he decided to lock himself in his bedroom with a

soothing drink and write about her for the rest of his life.

Cover design: Slatter~Anderson

ISBN 0-426-20510-3

Cover painting: Jon Sullivan

The New Adventures is an imprint of

Virgin Publishing Ltd.

UK: £4.99 USA: $5.95

CANADA: $7.99

*AUSTRALIA: $10.95

*RECOMMENDED PRICE

Science fiction

9 780426 205104 >

Document Outline

Cover

Author’s Note

Contents

PROLOGUE THE IMPERFECT CRIME, AND HOW TO COMMIT IT

PART ONE EMBARKATION

1 THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORNING AFTER (RECURRING)

2 A RELOCATION AND A PREPOSITION

3 A SETTING IS ESSAY’D, A VILLAIN COMPREHENDED

4 A POSITIVE PLETHORA OF INVESTIGATORS

5 ‘WELCOME TO THE CRUISE OF THE MILLENNIUM . . .’

6 ‘IN THE HEART OF SPACE THE NIGHT NEVER ENDS . . .’

7 SOMETHING NASTY IN THE FLIES

8 A SMALL BREAK IN THE CONTINUITY

INTERLUDE THE UNPLEASANT END OF DOCTOR PO

PART TWO EXCURSIONS

9 ‘YOUR FIRST STOP ON A GRAND TOUR OF INTERGALACTIC WONDER . . .’

10 A DINNER APPOINTMENT WITH DESTINY

11 SITTING DOWN TO DINE

12 THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY OF FOUL PLAY

13 THE PURÉE OF THE PLOT NOTICEABLY THICKENS

14 THE PLOT BECOMES MORE COMPLICATED THAN WAS PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED

INTERLUDE THE DEVILISH DISGUISES OF DOCTOR PO

PART THREE A PORT OF CALL

15 BENNY UNDER THE SPYGLASS

16 THE FEAST OF TRUTH AND LIES

17 THE REMOVAL AND DISPOSAL OF CERTAIN MASQUES

INTERLUDE THE HANDS THAT BIND THE DEAD

PART FOUR ARRIVAL

18 METHODS OF INVESTIGATION

19 CAN WE TALK?

FINAL INTERLUDE THE LAIR OF THE FLATWYRM

20 THE CHARACTERS INHABITING THE MIND

21 THE INHERENT SHAPE OF THINGS, PERCEIVED

22 THE PENULTIMATE PROGRAMME

23 SURPRISING ARRIVALS

APPENDIX I A RECIPE

APPENDIX II EMIL DUPONT PROVIDES A SMALL SURPRISE

COMING SOON IN THE NEW ADVENTURES

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